The Trouble with White Women Quotes

“confronting Sanger’s white feminism enables us to move away from the reproductive choice movement, of which she is the founder and remains its leading hero, and toward the reproductive justice movement.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“Sexism is so fully interwoven within structures of domination that the single-axis fight to support women is itself a delusion: patriarchy threads through all forms of inequality. Eradicating sexism requires unravelling the entire system.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“White feminism is theft disguised as liberation.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“White feminism wins more rights and opportunities for white women through further dispossessing the most marginalized. It seeks to install women at the helm of the systems that have brought the planet to the brink of ecological collapse and to declare the battle won, cleansed by their tears.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“White feminist politics produces a fantasy of a common, even uniform, identity of Woman, a morally upright creature whose full participation in the capitalist, white supremacist status quo will allegedly absolve it of its sins.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“A person cannot be intersectional—only a politics can be intersectional. The experiences of marginalized people expose the true workings of power in all its forms. Identity forms a key piece of intersectionality, but it provides the lens, not the target.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“Today, intersectionality as a theory and movement risks being co-opted and degraded into a buzzword. But in their rendering, intersectionality becomes merely an account of the multiplicity of identity—the acknowledgment that we all have a race, gender, class, and sexuality. This account does do some important work: it demolishes the mythical singular category of moral, virtuous, Women that white feminism historically enshrined, insisting instead that multiple dimensions of power shape our life chances.

But, at the same time, this appropriated version of intersectionality reproduces white feminist politics into the future. In this “inclusive’ version of white feminism, white women may no longer be the harbingers of morality—it throws that burden onto women of color. Those women and nonbinary people with the most marginalized identities become white feminism’s most valuable assets. Intersectionality, especially as promoted within institutions like corporations and universities, attempts to capture the magic of marginalized “intersectional” people and harness them to their cause.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“And though the white supremacist patriarchy seems to work for white men, especially if they are rich, it is itself a gilt cage, often bereft of friendship and care and rife with competition and violence.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“Black Women Will Save Us fails to recognize how the rallying cry itself isolates Black women from the rest of the nation and even of humanity while saddling them with the burden of doing all the work.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“My heart is with that poor people whose cause in words I have tried to plead,” Stowe explained to her brother Charles, “and who now, ignorant and docile, are just in that formative stage in which whoever seizes has them.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“They had just released the third edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an illustrated, 450-page book more lavish than any they had undertaken before, and their coffers were empty. Thayer and Eldridge defaulted on all their contracts and hauled in their sidewalk shingle. Unfortunately, the debut of the Calamus poems, one of the most explicit gay works to be published in the United States for the next half century, had prevented the appearance of the country’s first self-authored female slave narrative.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“Child accepted the project and offered her editing services to Jacobs, primarily in rearranging the order of sentences, paragraphs, and chapters for continuity and dramatic tension. Remarkably, given Jacobs’s utter lack of formal education, Child changed fewer than fifty words of the prose itself. The searing writing of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the work of Jacobs alone.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“individual power as consumers to choose not to become cogs in the machinery of bondage by boycotting clothing made from cotton that enslaved people had picked. “This fabric is too light to bear / The weight of bondsmen’s tears / I shall not in its texture trace / The agony of years,” she wrote of free labor cotton, which freed the customer of wrapping themselves in the very anguish of the cotton fields.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“Privilege doesn’t necessarily result in myopic self-interest, just as marginalization doesn’t directly lead to a more ethical or radical politics. Instead, her white feminist politics resulted from the choices she made to exploit enslavement as a sensational analogy to dramatize her own condition.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“Solidarity and social change manifest through the daily practice of fundamentally redistributing power and resources, not through the balms of awareness and attention.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“Jacobs’s invention of Black women’s autobiography to articulate her own subjectivity, Zitkala-Ša’s defense of Indigenous children’s right to remain among their tribes, and Dr. Ferebee’s insistence that poor Black women need birth control alongside a wide range of healthcare access for them and their children all persist, animating what feminist justice can look like today.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“Consistently, white feminism wins more rights and opportunities for white women through further dispossessing the most marginalized.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

“Yet from the nineteenth century to the present, white feminists have broken through appalling barriers for themselves by reinforcing the barriers faced by others.”
― Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism