Description
Book SynopsisCollecting almost four decades of writings by feminist activist Ann Snitow,
Feminism of Uncertainty includes well-known essays, such as "A Gender Diary," along with pieces appearing here for the first time.
Trade Review“Snitow’s work has always been very readable. Her prose has that luminous fluency that comes only after a writer has been steeped in decades of rigorous reading, writing and activism. These essays repeatedly emphasise how important her students are to her. … For third- and fourth-wave feminist readers,
The Feminism of Uncertainty will be both an introduction to Snitow’s philosophy and a valuable reminder not to reinvent the feminist wheel.” -- Emma Rees * Times Higher Education *
"Ann Snitow is a hero of late twentieth-century radicalism, in its many guises. . . . [A] valuable resource for the ambitious future scholar/activist digging into feminism’s past. . . .
The Feminism of Uncertainty shines brightest when Snitow’s uncertainty politics clash with the realities of action (and for Snitow, thinking, reading, and speaking are all actions)."
-- Paula Rabinowitz * Women's Review of Books *
"At a time when the field is cleaved with irreconcilable differences between earlier epistemologies of feminisms and emergent perspectives, this book fills a major gap as it cuts across divides and speaks across eras and ideologies." -- Basuli Deb * Socialism and Democracy *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Feminism of Uncertainty: I 1
Part I. Continuing a Gender Diary
1. A Gender Diary 21
2. Critiquing a Gender Diary 59
Part II. Mothers/Lovers
3. Introduction to Mothers/Lovers 71
4. Dorothy Dinnerstein: Creative Unknowing 80
5. From the Gender Diary: Living with Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923–1992) 93
6. Changing Our Minds about Motherhood: 1963–1990 97
7. The Sex Wars in Feminism: Retrenchment versus Transformation 123
8. The Poet of Bad Girls: Angela Carter (1940–1992) 139
9. Inside the Circus Tent: Excerpts from an Interview with Angela Carter, 1988 148
10. The Beast Within:
Lady into Fox and
A Man in the Zoo, by David Garnett 153
Part III. The Feminist Picaresque
11. Introduction to The Feminist Picaresque 159
12. Occupying Greenham Common 163
13. Feminist Futures in the Former East Bloc 191
14. Feminism Travels: Cautionary Tales 204
15. Who are the Polish Feminists? (Slawka) 216
16. “Should I Marry Him?” Questions from Students 228
17. The Peripatetic Feminist Activist/Professor Spends One Day in a Small City in Albania 238
18. Certainty and Doubt in the Classroom: Teaching Film in Prison 241
Part IV. Refugees from Utopia
19. Introduction to Refugees from Utopia 273
20. Remembering, Forgetting, and the Making of
The Feminist Memoir Project 275
21. The Politics of Passion: Ellen Willis (1941–2006) 293
22. Returning to the Well: Revisiting Shulamith Firestone’s
The Dialectic of Sex 297
Part V. The Feminism of Uncertainty
23. Introduction to The Feminism of Uncertainty 307
24. Life Sentence: My Uncertainty Principle 310
25. Doubt’s Visionary: Doris Lessing 316
26. Utopia, Downsized: A Farrago 328
27. The Feminism of Uncertainty: II 330
Appendix: Publication History 335
Bibliography 339
Index 355
