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Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists

Courtney E. Martin (Editor),

J. Courtney Sullivan (Editor)

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Apr 11, 2025 JaNel rated it really liked it

Shelves: feminism, aaa

So many identifiable moments and illuminating POVs and cool ways of expressing this common experience. A new edition of this book should be written every ten years. It would be interesting to see how much things stay the same even as they change.
It would be nice to not need another one. To only read these as insights into the past. Alas.

P. 196
I began to see that the members of our family, my mother, most of all, victims of a culture that values caretaking in the home well, at the same time fet So many identifiable moments and illuminating POVs and cool ways of expressing this common experience. A new edition of this book should be written every ten years. It would be interesting to see how much things stay the same even as they change.
It would be nice to not need another one. To only read these as insights into the past. Alas.

P. 196
I began to see that the members of our family, my mother, most of all, victims of a culture that values caretaking in the home well, at the same time fetishsizing it, making domesticity synonymous with love. Allowing women to make inroads, professionally but punishing them if they cannot have it all. Those other mothers in my neighborhood, with their brownies and their wreath making and their long days in the house, were no doubt victims of this too. That same patriarchal culture benefited every time, a razorsharp, ambitious, incredible woman, like my mother decided she wasn’t a feminist because that decision left her isolated and disenfranchised, instead of empowered, connected, and pissed off.

P. 197

Sometime we don’t know what we are or what’s possible. I didn’t identify as feminist; we only know the world we are in. And if inequality is just part of the everyday more, how do we even name it? I certainly felt my head explode when my mom told me I had to clean my brother’s pee off the wall because I was the daughter. But I didn’t know then that it was feminism. I went through years after that thinking I didn’t need feminism because I wasn’t going to get married early or let society tell me what I could do. I didn’t realize that I was living feminism. Sometimes someone else must name our own experience to us until we have the perspective to see it for ourselves. I didn’t recognize I was and had been a feminist my whole life until I watched Thelma and Louise and realized that feminism is fighting against the fact of society makes it hard to be a woman.

P. 205

I thought about how much I love this unknown author named Katie Roife. I thought about how bad she made girls feel; I thought about how the transparency of her desire to speak directly to the men who would gladly take permission to continue to treat women as provocative flirt, who owe them sex. I thought about the fact that she had gotten famous for selling out women, for making them hate themselves more than they already did, for making them punish themselves for having pain or fear to begin with

P. 207 Janet Tsai’s chapter, an engineering approach to feminism, is so good, and states so many things about being a minority and being an 18-year-old so well.

P. 211
I started to consider how deep did this question every equation or law we were learning in class had a man’s name attached to it… Growing up I had been reassured by the unbiased nature of math and science, yeah in my college education, all I could see were male names getting all the glory. Was this also an indication that somehow men were naturally better at making scientific discoveries, or was it just like the smartest, or these men just better at publicizing their knowledge?
… anything that happened twice statistically in these independent populations was likely to happen again, and again, unless significant changes were made to convince women that they really were equal, despite the smart list and stupid rumors of preferential treatment. ...more

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