We Were Feminists Once by Andi Zeisler

We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement by Andi Zeisler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a great collection of examples of the corporate co-opting of feminism for decidedly unfeminist goals. I enjoyed reading it and zipped through it very quickly.

The problem is, who is this book for exactly? She talks at length about how the younger generation does not understand the complexities of feminism. This is very true, I'm only recently starting to grapple with and understand all the issues related to feminism and I still don't have much of a complete picture. I can't really recommend this book to my many friends that are clueless about feminism. On the other hand, if you're already deep into the feminist weeds, the stuff in this book is probably fairly obvious to you? So I also can't really recommend this book to my friends that have been grappling with feminism for years now. I'm as close to the target audience as possible I suppose in that it provides just one small piece of the puzzle for me even though I still lack a foundational understanding.

Zeisler also doesn't provide a lot of direction in terms of what we can do to de-corporatize feminism or utilize the co-opting as a weapon, or even any other feminist action to take. By comparison, Gloria Steinem's essay collections discuss community organizing at some length.

View all my reviews