Chapter Introduction : Feeling Like a Feminist, by Example

Abstract

Examining the lives and work of feminist thinkers throughout history, this book explores their struggles with politics, intellectual work, and material and existential conditions of femininity. A new introduction to this second edition resituates these themes in contemporary feminist literature and theory. Feminist autobiographical accounts exploring multiple lives and loves, encounters with political comrades and enemies, and frustrations with social expectations about feminine respectability, offer tastes of feminist lives across history and situation. But the stories are not always inspirational or exemplary. How do feminists survive and thrive in situations marked by intersecting harms of sexism, racism, and colonial and capitalist extraction? Thinking beyond representation and empathy as ways to connect, this book features disorienting and disruptive examples from feminist experiments in living and explores the uncomfortable feelings they invite in readers. Insisting that feminists should read the autobiographies and memoirs of feminist actors alongside their theoretical contributions, the volume features the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Emma Goldman, Ida B. Wells, Audre Lorde, Azar Nafisi, Ana Castillo, Carolyn Kay Steedman, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and more. Written for students and scholars of Women’s History, and everyone who “feels like a feminist,” this book embodies and electrifies the feminist insight that the personal is political.