186. Kyla Schuller with Dr. Sophie Lewis—The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series

Elizabeth Cady Stanton is a famous suffragette who demanded a woman’s right to vote. Margaret Sanger was a sex educator who popularized the term “birth control” and helped establish the precursor of Planned Parenthood. Sheryl Sandberg is the COO of Facebook and has told women to pursue their dreams by leaning in. They’re all celebrated feminists. However, they fought for the few, not the many.

In The Trouble with White Women, author Kyla Schuller argued that white feminist politics dispossess the most marginalized people to liberate themselves. Schuller proposed that the only way to have true feminism is through intersectionality. To achieve true feminism, the fight for it has to be in tandem with racial, economic, sexual, and disability justice. Schuller profiles lesser-known Black, Indigenous, Latina, and trans activists who are addressing these issues through a different lens. The shortcomings are many and the goals have yet to be reached.

Kyla Schuller is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Faculty Director of the Women’s Global Health Leadership Certificate Program at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the author of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (2018), and her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Post Road.

Dr. Sophie Lewis is a visiting scholar at The Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the teaching faculty of the Philadelphia branch of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019). Her non-academic writing has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Nation, and many others.

Buy the Book: The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism (Hardcover) from Third Place Books

Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here.