Your mother’s feminism, sent back to the front lines with refurbished weapons.
A feminist scholar rallies the troops in the battle against injustices to older women.
Douglas (Communication Studies/Univ. of Michigan; Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work Is Done, 2010, etc.) melds history, advocacy, and media criticism as she calls for a counteroffensive against America’s “war on older women.” With alternately insightful and overfamiliar arguments, the author makes the case for a new wave of feminist activism to challenge the “gendered ageism” that sidelines women of her boomer cohort or implies that they’re all “supposed to go plant peonies and play peekaboo” with grandchildren. In the book’s best sections, Douglas smartly analyzes portrayals of older women in popular culture, including movies and TV shows like Book Club and The Golden Girls. While images have diversified, the media often depict older women only to exploit them as sales targets or foster what marketers call “aspirational aging.” Even AARP magazine has been “moving down the age chain” and once featured then-49-year-old Brad Pitt saying, “Personally, I like aging.” As the author notes, “come back to me in thirty years, buster. And as a woman, with no health insurance.” Douglas also lands well-placed jabs at “anti-aging” cosmetics and diseasemongering pharmaceutical ads built on the “infantilizing strategy of using cartoons.” Unfortunately, the author gives too little attention, too late in the book, to the issue that polls repeatedly have identified as the No. 1 concern of older women—health care—and claims as feminist issues some concerns that don’t affect women exclusively, such as Medicare. Elsewhere, she offers a to-do list with timeworn tasks such as forming discussion groups, “kind of an update on [1970s] consciousness-raising,” and holds up, as a model of engagement, the late Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn, who in her 70s successfully lobbied Congress against the mandatory retirement age of 65. Women of any age can learn from trailblazers like Kuhn, but those seeking a fresher and more urgent battle cry will find it in books like Jennifer Block’s recent Everything Below the Waist (2019).
Your mother’s feminism, sent back to the front lines with refurbished weapons.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-393-65255-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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