Jessica's Reviews > Think Like a Feminist: The Philosophy Behind the Revolution

Today the word "feminist" can mean something different to 100 different people. In Think Like a Feminist Carol Hay attempts to boil down over two hundred years of feminist thought into one book. The first two chapters give an overall history, as well as, the stereotypes of feminism and give four metaphors for understanding oppression. These two chapters are AMAZING - they are very readable and really break down the various waves of feminism and explain what was achieved (or not) in each wave. The next two chapters focus on the social construction of gender and sex. In my opinion these two chapters were a little more academic and not as easily readable for someone not super interested in this topic. There is also a chapter on sexual violence and then just when you're feeling like all hope is lost, the last chapter focuses on things you can do every day to try to continue to move the feminism movement forward.

I felt like the author did a great job overall with explaining different aspects of feminism and also being honest about how some factions of feminists work against each other or don't include all women (often women of color). The only reason I didn't rate it higher was because I felt like a lot of readers would get bogged down in chapters 3 & 4 and quit reading or get overwhelmed. But, if you're new to this issue or trying to have easy ways to explain some of the ideas to someone else this book is a great resource.

Here are some quotes I liked:

"Having spent a very long time playing Whac-A-Mole with people's misconceptions of feminism - in the classroom, on social media, at the Thanksgiving dinner table - I've ended up with a whole bag full o' tricks to get the skeptics' guard down and get them to listen to what feminism is really about. This book is the collection of this hard-won repertoire." (p. xvi)

"Honestly, if you were to ask ten feminists to define feminism you'd probably get eleven different answers. There are a few core things that we do agree about, though. First, feminists agree that women have been, and continue to be, disadvantaged relative to men...Second, feminists agree that these disadvantages are bad things that can and should be changed. And third, we agree that these disadvantages are interrelated, that they're the result of mutually supporting systems of privilege and deprivation that are structurally embedded in virtually every aspect of society and that systematically function to screw women over." (p. 1-2)

"'Many women,' speculates the radical feminist activist Andrea Dworkin, 'resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.'" (p. 17)

"As we'll see, de Beauvoir and those in her wake are almost always less interested in passing judgement on what individual women choose to do with their lives than in taking on the social structures that constrain women's options in the first place. But skeptics fasten onto the image of the Angry Feminist as a sanctimonious shrew who should mind her own business because it's less unsettling to muster outrage over her ungrounded right to criticize what you've done with the hand you've been dealt than it is to sit with the possibility that she might be right when she claims that the deck's been stacked." (p. 19)

"This kinder, gentler [Girl Power] feminism talks the talk of championing women's empowement, but it does so without ruffling feathers, reassuring everyone that the status quo won't be interrupted in any significant way. It's no coincidence that the statue that faced down the bull on Wall Street is a Fearless Girl, not a Fearless Grown Woman. Strength in girls is unthreatening precisely because they're still too little to actually do anything with it; strength in women is off-putting as hell." (p. 25-26)

"Most of the time, oppression's structures chug along in the background, subtly constraining what's possible for people without most of us even noticing what's going on. This means that oppression has a tendency to fly beneath our collective radar." (p. 43)

"Let these words sink in: the mind shapes itself to the body. The concern here isn't just that the beauty and frivolity and femininity required of girls and women is a waste of time, or that it's not as lofty as the pursuits open to boys and men. The worry is that what's permissible or required for girls and women to do with and to their bodies determines what's possible for them to do with their minds." (p. 51)

"The explanation for this bizarre response, Catharine MacKinnon suggests, is that we don't want to believe the empirical facts about what it's like to be a woman, despite the clear statistical evidence, because we're clinging to the collective belief that men and women really are equal. 'This,' she says, 'is equality for us': a world in which 1 in 6 women will experience rape or attempted rape in their lifetime. The statistics for men are strikingly different: 1 in 33 men will experience rape or attempted rape in their lifetime. Hardly equality. Rape is no less tragic for male victims than it is for female victims, obviously, but we shouldn't pretend that the risks are the same for both sexes. They're not." (p. 132-33)