Why Feminism? - Gender, Psychology, Politics (Hardcover)

This book explores the peculiar place of feminism in contemporary culture. For some, feminism is the favorite scapegoat for multiple social ills; for others, the greatest success story of the closing century. The Janus face of feminism in the media reflects competing images of women's lives today. In one picture, feminism has changed our cultural landscape and empowered masses of women. In another, deepening global inequalities, assaults on welfare, and renewed paternalistic and "workfare" rhetorics have successfully undermined precisely those goals for which the women's movement in the 1970s fought so vigorously.

Feminists themselves hold sharply opposing views on the success or failure of three decades of women's activism. "Why Feminism? "looks at the shifts in feminist thinking from the brash emergence of Women's Liberation at the close of the 1960s, to the diverse and discordant feminisms of recent decades. Outlining the rise of feminist scholarship inside the academy, with its often ambiguous relations to women's activism, it asks whether and how feminism might still inspire a broadly transformative and progressive politics. Looking, in particular, at feminism's troubled relations with psychology and psychoanalysis, it examines the rise of new evolutionary theory, the impact of queer theorizing on gender categories, controversies over memory and trauma, and increasing anxieties about men and masculinity.

"Why Feminism?" illustrates the continuing provocation and significance of feminist inquiry, laying out its potentialities and pitfalls for the century ahead.