Contending that the anti-feminist backlash in the academy is part of the broader "politically correct" rhetoric, this collection of writers, academics and activists is a much-needed response to the assault on feminist thinkers and critics in the academy today.

Contending that the anti-feminist backlash in the academy is part of the broader "politically correct" rhetoric, this collection of writers, academics and activists is a much-needed response to the assault on feminist thinkers and critics in the academy today.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Antagonizing White Feminism: Intersectionality’s Critique of Women’s Studies and the Academy pushes back against the exclusive scholarship and discourse coming out of women-centered spaces and projects, which throw up barriers by narrowly defining who can participate. Vehement resistance to using inclusive language and renaming scholarly spaces like Women’s Studies and Critical Feminism expresses itself in concerns that women are still oppressed and thus women-only spaces must be maintained. But who is a woman? What are the characteristics of a woman’s lived experience? Do affinity and a history of oppression justify exclusion? This book shows how intersectional feminism is often underperformed and appropriated as a “woke” vocabulary by elite women who are unwilling to do the necessary emotional work around their privilege. As Trans Women, Femmes, Women of Color, Queer Women, Gender Variant, and Gender Non-Conforming scholars emerge, the heteronormative, cisgender, colonial idea of women and the feminine is rapidly under attack. The contributors believe that to engage in the necessary conversations about the oppressed performing oppression is to disrupt the exclusionary basis of monolithic understandings of the feminine. Only then can we advance the coalition needed to forge a multiracial, multicultural, queer-led, anti-imperialist feminism.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD In 1960, Harvard’s sister college, Radcliffe, announced the founding of an Institute for Independent Study, a “messy experiment” in women’s education that offered paid fellowships to those with a PhD or “the equivalent” in artistic achievement. Five of the women who received fellowships—poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Marianna Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen—quickly formed deep bonds with one another that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work. They called themselves “the Equivalents.” Drawing from notebooks, letters, recordings, journals, poetry, and prose, Maggie Doherty weaves a moving narrative of friendship and ambition, art and activism, love and heartbreak, and shows how the institute spoke to the condition of women on the cusp of liberation. “Rich and powerful. . . . A love story about art and female friendship.” —Harper’s Magazine “Reads like a novel, and an intense one at that. . . . The Equivalents is an observant, thoughtful and energetic account.” —Margaret Atwood, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Reviewers of this book have praised Christina Hoff Sommer's well-reasoned argument against many feminists' reliance on misleading, politically motivated 'facts' about how women are victimised.

The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women's Social Movement Activism provides a comprehensive examination of scholarly research and knowledge on a variety of aspects of women's collective activism in the United States, tracing both continuities and critical changes over time.