Lynn S. Chancer's After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism: Taking Back a Revolution

Abstract

The result of the U.S. presidential elections 2020 included a feminist victory, also from an intersectional point of view: for the first time in the country's history the elected vice-president was a woman, and a woman with an Indian-Jamaican family history. For anybody who thinks Kamala Harris might in her new position help start a new chapter in American women's rights, Lynn S. Chancer's book After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism offers an interesting perspective, both critical and positive.Being a 1960s child, Harris (who also as a schoolchild participated in Berkeley's comprehensive desegregation plan) actually is approximately as old as the "second and third waves" of the American feminist movement, the topic of Chancer's book. Harris' rise from a middle-class academic background to the top of the political system of the United States may also be read as the rise of American feminism -without the "stall" Chancer is also interested in. The agenda of her book is to find reasons for only partial successes of feminism in the United States, and even provide some ideas for ways to get beyond contemporary dilemmas of the feminist movement. The latter solutions, one could claim, may to some extent apply to feminism globally.Chancer has written her analysis and critique in the context of Donald Trump's presidential term, and the major offences against American women's and minority rights that political period of time made possible. Nevertheless, this period marked also an era of remarkable resistance, including feminist mass demonstrations around the time of Trump's inauguration and the #MeToo campaign, which again can be seen as one of the impacts American feminism has made globally.Throughout the book Chancer focuses on both the success of the feminist movement and the "tapering off, plateauing, or political pausing" (especially in this millennium) that has taken place since the 1970s. The