Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered by: Joan Kennedy Taylor | 1992
Reviewed by: Cathy Reisenwitz
It’s been 31 years since the libertarian feminist GOAT Joan Kennedy Taylor published Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered. And it is my deep displeasure to report that the mainstream has not, in fact, been reclaimed for libertarian feminism nor—as Taylor prefers to put it throughout the book—individualist feminism.
This book is, among other things, the book version of the protest sign that says “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit.” But instead of “protest,” it’s fight about this shit. It’s amazing, truly, how many fights—from abortion to worker protections to the nuclear family—2023 feminists are still waging amongst ourselves and the wider culture.
Another thing Reclaiming the Mainstream demonstrates is that there is not, nor has there ever been, one feminism. Taylor does an amazing job briskly summarizing her clearly very deep research on the history of the various and warring feminisms from the days before the word was in common parlance until the time of her writing.
As Walter Olson—a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies and a friend of the late Taylor’s—adeptly pointed out during a recent Feminists For Liberty panel, Taylor writes with a stunning fairness. She could easily have written a polemic on why everyone should adopt an individualist feminism. And indeed that may have raised her profile, as people love polemics.
But instead she wrote an evenhanded, inclusive, short history of feminism which simply demonstrates through copious examples the ways individualist feminists made their mark on the debates of the day.
In so doing, she demonstrates to 2023 feminists how to apply the principles of individualism to the debates we are still having, and the debates yet to come.
