Jo Freeman Reviews Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality

 

This book is a good introductory overview of US women’s accomplishments and activism over the last hundred years, in only 500 pages.  Despite the subtitle, the book is not about feminists.  It is about formidable women, many of whom would not think of calling themselves feminists.  Eleanor Roosevelt disdained feminism, but, as her chapter documents, she worked hard to improve women’s lives.  Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman get a couple paragraphs.  Betty Crocker gets several honorable mentions. Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge doesn’t get any. There’s a lot about politicians and the laws they passed, as well as sports figures and entertainers.

 

The author makes a special effort to be racially correct, to the point of not using parallel construction.  Women are Black or white, if they aren’t Asian or Indigenous.  She included Black women everywhere she could squeeze them in, as well as racist statements made by suffragists, feminists and others without concern for context.

 

She regularly refers to “privileged women,” without telling us what she means by that term.  It’s used negatively for white women, though surely Eleanor Roosevelt would fit that description. The author appears unaware that the feminists she calls “libbers” consider that term to be a slur and is very critical of Betty Friedan.  As one of those early “libbers,” I remember debating with others whether Jackie Kennedy was a sister or just another privileged woman.  Over a period of weeks, we concluded that one woman’s privilege is another woman’s prison.  The bird in the gilded cage, fed every day, is still behind bars, not flying free while foraging for food.

 

The ten chapters in chronological order cover periods.  For example, “From Rosie to Rosa Parks” goes from 1945 to 1959 and “Pillboxes & Protests” goes from 1960 to 1972.  These are not the years of the civil rights movement (where women were very active but seldom acknowledged) or what’s often called Second-Wave Feminism.  They were the years where “protest became … a privileged pastime.”

 

In an Epilogue she sums up how far women have come in the last century, as well as some of the walls they have run into.  She touts many firsts but omits the fact that women are now president of both the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

 

The book could have used a better copy editor.  For example,  the section on The Southern Christian Leadership Council should have said Conference.  Highlander sometimes appears as Highland.  There is an Index, which too many books don’t have these days.  Endnotes and a select Bibliography open the door to further reading.  

 

If you know little or nothing about women’s history in the United States this book is a good place to start.   When you are finished, pick up a good book on feminist history.  There is so much more to the story of the fight for equality — which is not yet over.  

 

Copyright © 2022 Jo Freeman