Laura Tanenbaum is professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York.
Amia Srinivasan’s new essay collection, The Right to Sex, is less a manifesto than an attempt to think through the concerns of contemporary feminism. Where the book succeeds, it offers the intellectual heft to power a reinvigorated movement to transform the world.
Liberal feminism’s laser-like focus on winning formal equality between the sexes has distracted us from what should be feminism’s true aim: winning a world where everyone has their basic needs met and everyone can flourish.
Early-twentieth-century American socialist Rose Pastor Stokes became a media celebrity after she married a wealthy heir. But her political life was much more interesting: she was one of the Socialist Party’s most effective speakers, inspiring the era’s striking workers with rousing orations.
Carceral solutions to sexual violence won’t deliver justice. We need investments in public services that will actually reduce sexual violence.
Communist Party members are often stereotyped as mindless zombies that blindly took orders from Moscow. But for many in the CPUSA, the party allowed them to recognize their own capacity to change the world.
James Baldwin was many things: a brilliant writer, a trenchant social critic, a dogged activist. He was also an unapologetic radical.
Ann Snitow was at the heart of the radical feminist movement in the 1960s and ’70s. She spent the next several decades working for a feminism that never shied away from robust debate — but always demands liberation.
Reading Andrea Dworkin today is still bracing. But her pessimistic, dystopian vision of a world dominated by male violence only gained currency when the utopian power of the feminist movement receded.
Philip Roth’s work could only have been written by someone who came of age during the peak of postwar liberalism.
Second-wave feminist Kate Millett wrote with a sweeping ambition that matched the political ferment of the times. We need the same today.
Mad Men succeeded in showing how social change seeps into otherwise unremarkable lives.
Has the New York Times ever disavowed its condescending editorials on the Civil Rights Movement?
Mad Men brilliantly shows the everyday cruelties of the old order, but insists that those who challenged them were fools.
I didn’t realize the only way to serve the public was to be a consigliere.
Brooklyn nostalgia has done more than sell hot dogs and baseball memorabilia.
There’s no need for excessive complexity — some people are worth hating.
Without radical change, disquiet finds other outlets. Dystopic visions have replaced Shulamith Firestone and Adrienne Rich’s utopian ones.