We’re launching a book club! First up: Joan Kennedy Taylor’s Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminist Rediscovered. Sign up on the Bookclubs platform to participate. Our first (virtual) meeting will be March 5th.
Taylor is definitely a feminist hero of ours. She was the national coordinator of the Association of Libertarian Feminists for many years, and a founding member of Feminists for Free Expression. She is also the author of What to Do When You Don’t Want to Call the Cops: or A Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment.
Reclaiming the Mainstream, published in 1992, is a classic of 20th Century libertarian feminism and we’re so excited to read and discuss it with new audiences. Taylor delves into what libertarian feminism — or “individualist feminism,” as she calls it— means and how it’s been a major force in American feminism since American feminism was a thing. What’s more, the periods when individualist feminism was more mainstream than socialist (or “collectivist” feminism) were the periods when the movement was most ascendant and effective.
“Each time feminism came on the scene, it was the message of individualism that captured the imagination of women,” writes Taylor. Yet while “the appeal of non-coercive, non-governmental feminism has always reached a wider audience than collectivism has, it is often collectivism that gets media attention. And various feminist theorists (and attackers of feminism) have been happy to say that such collectivists speak for the only true feminism.”
(For a little bit more about the book, check out this Libertarianism.org essay.)
The first meeting of the Reclaiming the Mainstream book club will take place on Sunday, March 5th, via Zoom. Subsequent meetings will take place on March 19, April 2, and April 16. (One need not be able to attend all four meeting in order to participate).
We’ll post a basic agenda on the Bookclubs platform soon. (Sign up now so you don’t miss it!)
Meetings will be relaxed and informal. Grab a glass of wine or a cup tea before you sign on. And prepare to talk about feminism, old and new, in an open and non-judgemental atmosphere.
COMING UP
Reclaiming the Mainstream is one of three books we plan to discuss this year.
In our second book club, which launches in May, we’ll be talking about Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.
The subject of of our third book club, which will launch in the afll, is still TBD.
Each book club will consist of four private virtual meetings, spread out over the course of two months, followed by a public panel focused on the book and its themes.
Hope you can join us!
