Reviews for Black Lenses, Black Voices

The average rating for Black Lenses, Black Voices based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-09 00:00:00 Kevin Lansing I'm a passionate feminist and an avid reader of feminist texts. I'll give almost anything a chance, even if I disagree with it. But this is actually the first feminist book that I have given up on. Gerda Lerner starts the book off with some shaky, incoherent historiography. Her analysis of just about everything is so lazy and superficial that one has to wonder how she ever became a historian in the first place. For example, she assumes that if women are working in a particular field at some point in history, that that's automatically a good thing, and proves that women's status is high at the time. She avoids just about all of the important questions, like: What kinds of work are women actually doing? Are those female-dominated fields actually contributing something important to the economy, or are women just doing auxiliary work, while men do all of the real work that keeps the economy running? Are women being paid fair wages? Are their working conditions decent? Do women actually have reasonable alternatives in terms of choosing their field of work, or are they indirectly forced, via poverty / capitalism and sex-class segregation, into shitty fields? Do they have recourse for dealing with sexual harassment, if and when it occurs? Although Lerner often mentions working-class women and women of colour and pays lip service to their needs, her analysis remains very much steeped in the worldview of a middle-class white woman, who assumes that all women throughout the world have as much freedom and choice as she does. There is very little recognition on her part that maybe, just maybe, capitalist patriarchy limits women's choices in more way than one. In the next section, she begins to talk about the radical feminist movement of the 1960's and 70's in the US, and that's when the shit really hits the fan. After much analysis and deliberation, Lerner's erudite, well-thought out criticism of radical feminists is that we're... wait for it... "man haters". I kid you not. Tons and tons of intricate, nuanced criticisms of masculinity (as a gender role) and male chauvinism is dismissed - by someone who calls herself a "feminist"! - as simply being hatred for men. It was at that point that I closed the book for good. I've read her other, more famous book, "The Creation of Patriarchy", and was very disappointed with her incoherent analysis there, as well. I bought this book in the hope that she would shed some more light on feminist historiography in general; needless to say, that didn't happen. Gerda Lerner should be exiled from the academic community and forced to plant as many trees as it takes for her to make up for all of the trees that were needlessly murdered to print and publish her stupid books. I'm serious. I may never get back the time I wasted reading them, but for goddesses' sake, won't somebody please think of the trees?

Review # 2 was written on 2014-05-20 00:00:00 Nicholas Thompson delicious excellent gerda has done it again!