Fire with Fire

This book by Naomi Wolf is a powerfully optimistic perspective on the rising tide of female power toward the end of the 20th-century, envisioning how this trend can be held onto & grown into the 21st.*

   The text is split into five parts: firstly, an examination of what she calls the "genderquake" and the declining hegemony of masculine power, with a concomitant shift in female consciousness; secondly, considerations of where feminism may be falling short of its potential in recent years as it becomes co-opted by middle-class consumer models alien to its radical roots; fourthly, a dissection of the feminine fear of power & the need for a new psychology to emerge to overcome this; fifthly & finally recommendations for where to go from where the book concludes.

   I neglected to mention the third part above as that forms the longest chunk of the book, and is most central to Wolf's whole gist with it. Here she outlines two competing traditions within feminism as she sees it: "power feminism", which is all about maximally fighting for & holding onto equality without shame or doubt; and "victim feminism", which is more about emphasising the difference between men & women then highlighting the ways in which the former harm & suppress the latter all in an impotent hand-wringing sort of way. Wolf makes it very clear that she vehemently feels victim feminism has run up against number of cultural & socio-political impasses, and is now largely holding the wider movement back. There are implications in these chapters to be found of relevance to modern marginalised communities - those protesting their rights on the streets versus those who would rather simply retreat into a demarked safe space. In my opinion Wolf goes a little too harshly in her critique, and though her principles are in the right place she can't expect everybody to have the circumstances or disposition necessary to join her at the same exact spice level of her own activism. Another critique I would make is that her discussion of feminism in general is far from satisfyingly intersectional, though given the age of this book I suppose that's to be expected.

   While outdated in many places, I still found this a compelling and interesting perspective on the promise & potential of feminism, and though the basic points are almost certainly better said more relevantly to the 2020's by more recent authors, I guess this would be worth a read if you're interested in the evolution of contemporary feminist thought.

* So much & yet so little has changed since this was published over thirty years ago - one has to wonder how much of this book's core theses would still be held by Wolf today, as well as how many extra chapters she would need to add to discuss the tectonic shifts in feminism generally in those intervening decades.