Feminist is a dirty word but it doesn’t have to be. We Should All be Feminists should be required reading for middle school, the book is so short no one has a good reason not to read it. Seriously, it didn’t even take half my lunch break to read so I went through it twice. “Some people ask: “Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?” Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, […]
I am a man. I am uncomfortable. I now know why, and embarrassed it’s taken this long.
I’ve probably qualified enough of my reviews with this statement, at this point, to make my continued use of it superfluous, but old habits die hard: I am a white male. And though I think of myself as fairly progressive, I find myself disagreeing with liberals almost as much as I do conservatives. So, for whatever that’s worth, this is where I’m coming from. I’ve always had an uneasy association with feminism. The immediate consequence of this tends to fall somewhere in the vicinity of […]
Happy African Feminist
I have been meaning to read We Should All Be Feminists for some time and then finally, today, on International Women’s Day of all days, my sister lent me her copy. And, because it’s only 52 pages including the Introduction and the About the Author section, I read it with my morning granola. And it is brilliant. I will say that one of the personal reasons it appealed to me is that my fiancé is African. Not from Nigeria, but from a small, West African […]
We should.
This would make a nice gift to a lot of people in all our lives. It’s not radical, it’s not even that transgressive, but it is clear and succinct. This essay, which I listened to the author read, is a perfect distillation of the goals and tenets of feminism, while even addressing the hangups so many people have with the word itself. It’s not a perfect text, but it is a well-reasoned and carefully argued text that has layers of argument embedded within it. If […]