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She appears to be uncompromising in laying bare the awfulness which has threaded its way through the more privileged and horrid corners of feminism across the centuries.

The level of honesty is refreshing.

My main complaint about the book, so far, is that I'm not a fan of her writing style. She leans more toward a rapid fire, snarky editorialist's style, briefly touching on key moments of history with commentary but leaving out a bit too much detail?

I find too many of the books' passages to be somewhat opaque if one does not have a previous familiarity with some of the history she discusses.

I think the book is an important one but I wish someone with a flare for writing and recounting historical narrative in an accessible way had penned this book.

Although, I imagine a book of that nature would be 600+ pages instead of 300+ pages.

Also, and this is not uncommon with feminist authors' writing, some of the language leans toward the academic and that also adds to the opacity of the book in places.

So, the book gets good marks for its honesty and unflinching presentation of unflattering events in great number but gets a middling grade for its accessibility and readability.

That could just be my personal tastes revealing themselves but that's my sense of the book so far.

I'm continuing reading "Enemy Feminisms" by Sophie Lewis. As I've gotten further into the book, she has found better footing in providing a coherent narrative in her presentation of historical events and is doing less rapid-fire switching from event to event.

My gods, the amount of wholesale racist, xenophobic, eugenicist, elitist bullshit that she is revealing regarding white feminism, circa 1800s - early 1900s is quite something. She's doing an excellent job of relating and tying it to current reactionary threads in modern day feminism.

She uses the term "bourgeois feminism" rather than "white feminism" but she means essentially the same thing. The book is filtered through an anarchist/Marxist lens. Hence, the different terminology.

I learned about parts of this history in a women's history course I had in college with Robyn Muncy in the early 1990s but that course did not reveal the level of sheer bigoted fuckery that was taking place under the surface of white feminism during that time frame.

(It was still a really great course and I'm I glad I took it but yeah, it lacked details about some of the more unsavory events that are covered in this book.)

Today, I learned feminism had a KKK branch in the early 1900s.

That is so many levels of fucked up.

But it certainly puts TERFs into perspective.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.

@helianthropy RIGHT? There are SO many things in that chapter that I didn't need to learn about. I feel sad.

@helianthropy I assume you are reading the book, too?