The new books in this week’s book club feature women who began as outsiders, but have ascended the ranks and are trying to change misogynist, racist, and capitalist systems from the inside. No matter how established their names have become, they’re still radicals to the fossilizing status quo.
<em>Elizabeth Warren: Her Fight. Her Work. Her Life.</em>
The words “Nevertheless, she persisted” have become something of a mantra for feminists, revolutionaries, and Elizabeth Warren supporters. They were hurled as an accusation against Warren when she was silenced for reading Coretta Scott King’s 1986 letter, detailing concerns about Jeff Sessions’ history of racist judgments, during his Attorney General confirmation debate. Now, they are seen instead as an accolade, a mark of pride at how much Warren has been able to get under the political establishment’s skin. In her new biography of the first female senator elected in Massachusetts, Antonia Felix argues for Warren’s legacy beyond that phrase — which in itself has a more complex background than its current use, having started in a debate about race.
<em>Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America</em>
“I stood at the entrance of the U.S. consulate in Calcutta in 1982. In 1965, American immigration laws had been rewritten to allow for a greater number of non-Europeans to enter the country. Not only were Indians and other Asians considered unwanted newcomers before 1965, even naturalization-the process by which a foreign-born immigrant becomes a U.S. citizen-was disallowed for most who were not white until the 1950s. I knew little of this history when I entered the consulate with my parents. I did not even know I had something called race. Race as a category had not been part of the Indian census since 1951. I was about to move to a nation where nearly every official form had a section in which I would be offered an array of racial categories and expected to pick one.”
<em>A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors and Wonder Women</em>
Phyllis Chesler was a major player in Second Wave Feminism. Daughter of a working-poor Orthodox Jewish immigrant and his American wife from a Polish family, Chesler grew up a rebel. Now an emerita Professor of Psychology at the College of Staten Island (CUNY), she taught one of the very first college courses in women’s studies, eventually turning it into a minor and a major, and co-founded the Association for Women in Psychology. Writer of influential works from 1972’s Women and Madness, about the double standards that plague gendered mental health care, to 2005’s The Death of Feminism and 2011’s Mothers On Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody, her consultations have been integral to several landmark legal cases.