Housekeepers Versus Harvard: Feminism for the Age of Trump
A feminism for the 99 percent has been forged by working-class immigrant women who confronted Harvard’s first female president and Sheryl Sandberg.
Sarah Leonard
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Populist Momentum
DOWNWARDLY MOBILE Americans had a choice between the Republicans and Democrats: two parties passionately opposed to each other, especially on issues of race and nationalism, but both dominated by a set of business interests that ensured that neither represented the working class. The year was 1875. Then as now, anger roiled rural communities, which felt their few privileges—ownership of land, financial independence—slipping away. As monetary policy drove farmers' prices down and cast many into poverty, economic suffering was compounded by humiliation. Duke historian Lawrence Goodwyn's The
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Technically, a Utopia
"Feminism," Shulamith Firestone wrote, “is the inevitable female response to the development of a technology capable of freeing women from the tyranny of their sexual-reproductive roles.” This meant not just that technology could eradicate social inequalities by rendering physical ones unimportant, but that it could allow us to imagine the possibility of equality in the first place. In her 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone argued that, pace Marx and Engels, sex oppression is the oldest form of oppression: Since the dark ages, women had been rendered physically weaker thanks to their
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Get Rich or Die Tryin’
In Young Money, Kevin Roose investigates why young people still seek jobs on Wall Street even after the crash of 2008 revealed it to be a seeping moral gutter. Roose, a writer for New York magazine, is something of a specialist in reporting on publicity-averse subcultures. In 2009, he published an undercover account of student life at Liberty University—the sprawling evangelical college that the late Jerry Falwell founded in Lynchburg, Virginia—after attending the school for a semester. Here, he employs a similar technique—but instead of enlisting for Wall Street duty himself, he reports on
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Sew It Up and Start Again
Flipping through the imposing art book that accompanies the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, which explores punk rock’s influence on fashion, is like hearing your favorite Screamers song played in a mall. First, you feel bad—it’s more proof that everything gets sold out. Then you suspect that it’s some kind of dada trick. How else to explain sentences like this: “In punk’s spirit of revolution, Moda Operandi is the first online luxury retailer to offer unprecedented access to runway collections from the world’s top designers.” In punk’s spirit of
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OWS and the Downfall of the Smartest Guys in the Room
The problem with Occupy Wall Street, an investment banker wrote to me, is that financial mechanisms are very complicated, and the protesters don’t understand them. On the day that the New York occupation of Zuccotti Park spread to Washington Square, another visitor from the finance world looked out over the milling malcontents: “Things went wrong, but you have to understand how the system works. Looking at these signs doesn’t give me a lot of confidence.” [More . . . ]
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OWS and the Downfall of the Smartest Guys in the Room
The problem with Occupy Wall Street, an investment banker wrote to me, is that financial mechanisms are very complicated, and the protesters don’t understand them. On the day that the New York occupation of Zuccotti Park spread to Washington Square, another visitor from finance looked out over the milling malcontents: “Things definitely went wrong, but you have to understand how the system works. Looking at these signs doesn’t give me a lot of confidence.”
And it was certainly true that, by themselves, the signs bobbing through the crowd urged a panoply of measures: Abolish the Fed! Tax
