apolitical, who transformed themselves into confident, resourceful leaders and who then joined with
others to change society.
Today many disavow the term “feminist,” but often what is being rejected is a narrow and distorted
version of feminism that bears little resemblance to the rich and varied feminist philosophies of the past.
Many who do not use and even reject the term “feminism” have nevertheless been feminists—that is, they
have been part of the long struggle for women’s rights.
People often assume that women’s rights somehow accrued gradually through an inevitable process of
modernization. These rights are now part of the air we all breathe. Everyone benefits from these changes
—women and men, feminists and anti-feminists. The fact that people today take these feminist gains for
granted is something feminists can be proud of. But to assume that these gains just “happened” is
problematic. Inattention to this history—to the range of discriminations women faced and to their
collective efforts to transform the world around them—has consequences. It leads not only to minimizing
how crucial past social movements were in shaping today’s world, and not only to dishonoring the many
activists who sacrificed much for our benefit, but also to obscuring how necessary feminism and feminist
movements remain for confronting the injustices and discriminations of the present day. That is why we
hope to inspire readers to learn about and to honor those who constructed the new opportunities. That is
why we wrote this book.
THE CHALLENGES THIS book offers are directed in particular to several popular assumptions about
U.S. women’s movements, assumptions that in our view are more myth than reality. One, already
mentioned, is the myth that feminism was and is a predominantly upper-middle-class white women’s
concern. In this book, readers will see the activism of all categories of women, and as a result encounter a
different understanding of feminism.
Closely related is another myth that must be discarded: the idea that one can generalize about women,
as if women are all the same. Women are as diverse as men and, like men, have individual needs and
priorities. Yet no individual is only a woman; each of us has many identities and allegiances. Every
individual might be not only male or female but also a member of a family, a nation, a social class, a
racial or ethnic group, a sexual orientation, or many other groups or communities we could name. Identity
is a complex construct, created by all the social groups we are part of. So no one can have only gendered
interests, and no one can have allegiance only to gendered interests. Today in many college courses this
recognition of the complexity of identity is called “intersectionality,” a new name for what many think is a
new concept. But it has been recognized and acted upon by feminists for over a century. That many
consider it a new principle is a result of the historical amnesia that we hope to correct.
Feminists have been just as diverse as are women in general. Some were Democrats, some were
Republicans; some were religious, some were adamantly anti-religious; some pushed for civil rights,
others did not; some endorsed marriage, others rejected it; some concentrated on creating equal
opportunity for mothers’ employment, others on creating the conditions that allow mothers to devote
themselves full-time to children. Some feminists tended toward androgynous values (that is, toward
eradicating gender difference), while others celebrated women’s differences from men. Trying to
reconcile women’s differing needs and to form movement priorities has been a persistent problem for
women’s movements. Most troubling, women from groups that are in other ways privileged—for
example, white elite women—have at times been unwilling to recognize the concerns of other less
privileged women as feminist and have defined feminism narrowly, with their own needs predominant.
Yet another myth is that women’s progress has been steadily upward. On the contrary, there have been