On October 12, 2020, Amy Coney Barrett, a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, was sworn in for her testimony before the Republican-majority Senate Judiciary Committee. If you were a Democrat and a feminist, it was a galling moment for so many reasons. First, the United States was on the brink of an election, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—who had denied Merrick Garland a hearing in the final year of the Obama administration—had contradicted himself, handing President Donald Trump his third Supreme Court nomination, one that would bend the Court to the right for decades.
But it was also galling because it was our seat—one occupied by Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a pioneer of feminist jurisprudence, and a woman who had carved a narrow path of rights for women in the 1970s by building case law around the idea of gender discrimination. So many women like me had careers and economic security because of Ginsberg and others like her—in fact, Ginsberg became a law professor and then a civil rights litigator at the ACLU because, despite her stellar credentials from Cornell, Harvard, and Columbia, she couldn’t get a job at a law firm.
Amy Coney Barrett was where she was because of Ginsberg—but also because, like Ginsberg, she had a husband, Jesse, who supported her career.
Barrett then went on to say a few sentences about each of her seven children. It established her credentials as a mother. But she failed to mention that she, as part of a power couple, clearly had lots of household help. Instead, she attributed her success to her strong belief, inculcated by her father, that girls and boys were intellectual equals.
Confirmed to the Court, Amy Coney Barrett then voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, stripping the right to reproductive freedom from millions of working-class women—many of whom are doing care work for the children and parents of other white women, conservative and liberal.
Because let’s get real: The vast majority of women who are held up as exemplars of the feminist meritocracy, from the executive who works down the hall from you to Sheryl Sandberg, have squads of well-paid, moderately paid, and poorly paid people caring for their homes, children, and elderly parents. Door Dashers shop for them. Amazon warehouse workers stuff clothes, toys, and nutritional supplements into boxes to be shipped to them. Grubhubbers deliver dinner made by line cooks.
What does girl boss feminism has to say about this? Not much. And now that Donald Trump is back in power, we’ve got more White conservative women telling us that women are full members of the meritocracy—and Republicans have Barrett, Ivanka Trump, and Pam Bondi to prove it. That’s why I wanted to talk to feminist philosopher Serene Khader, the author of Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (Beacon Press: 2024). Khader wants us to revisit the question of which women succeed, and which ones are forever invisible, what feminism is—and what it could be, if weren’t so very white.
Show notes:
- Serene mentions an earlier publication Claire wrote, a blog called Tenured Radical. The archive lives on at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
- Claire mentions her upcoming biography of Susan Brownmiller, a radical feminist who was a radical feminist journalist, anti-rape activist, and anti-pornography activist. Until the book comes out, you can read about her here.
- Black feminists began to theorize their own position early on: Listeners may wish to read Toni Cade Bambara ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology (New American Library, 1970).
- Claire mentions Joan Wallach Scott’s important book about Muslim women in France, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton University Press, 2010).
- For conservative feminism, Claire points to Faye Ginsburg’s book about women who oppose abortion, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (University of California, 1998).
- The clip where Donald Trump vows to protect women is from an October, 2024 campaign stop in Wisconsin.
- A critical text for Serene’s work is Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review (1991).
