Two Very Short Introductions

I love the Oxford Very Short Introduction series. All the books I’ve read so far were great. They are short, yes, but not superficial. They don’t try to dumb down or oversimplify the topics they’re about. And if you want to read more, they point you in the right direction. Feminism: A Very Short Introduction by Margaret Walters and Racism: A Very Short Introduction by Ali Rattansi were fortunately no exception.

I picked up Margaret Walters’ book because even though I care about the feminist issues, I don't know all that much about its history. I knew this book wasn’t going to tell me everything, but it was a start. (And I saw Ali Rattansi’s book right next to it at the library, so I thought “why not?”)

Feminism: A Very Short Introduction is a historical overview of women’s fight for equality from the Middle Ages to our time. In the introduction, Walters says:

But how often, still, do we hear women anxiously asserting ‘I’m not a feminist but . . .’ as they go on to make claims that depend upon, and would be impossible without, a feminist groundwork? The American feminist Estelle Freedman argues that right from its origins, the word has carried negative connotations; that surprisingly few politically engaged women have styled themselves feminists.

This is indeed something I hear often. In fact, it's something I’d often say myself in my teens. The reason why I did was because I misunderstood what feminism actually was, as so many people, men and women alike, still do. The fact that the negative connotation of the word has been there all along can be seen, for example, in Virginia Woolf’s rejection of the term, even though much of her work deals with feminist issues.

Throughout the book, Margaret Walters writes several women who fought for equality in different ways. Some, like Mary Astell, Marion Reid or Anna Wheeler, were new to me, and I’d love to read more about them. Others I was already familiar with, but I enjoyed reading the sections about them anyway. These included Marjorie Kemp, Aphra Benn, and of course, Mary Wollstonecraft. I did learn something new about Marjorie Kemp, though. I knew she was one of the earliest known female writers in English, but not that she had survived fourteen life-threatening pregnancies, and eventually made a deal with her husband: she would pay all his debts if he stopped demanding sex. The unusual thing, of course, is not that she was pregnant that many times, but that, unlike the majority of women at the time and for centuries after that, she actually survived.

Feminism: A Very Short Introduction is focused on the history of feminism in England, so if you’re looking for a book on contemporary feminist ideas, this isn’t it. There is, however, a chapter called “Feminists across the word”, which deals with the challenges women still have to face nowadays, as well as with the intersection of sexism with class and race issues. Also, I liked that it included all sorts of problems, from female genital mutilation and stoning to issues western women face, like domestic and sexual violence and the gender pay gap.

Unlike Walters’ book, Racism: A Very Short Introduction by Ali Rattansi is more concerned with racism today than with its history. There's still history, of course, but there is also an extensive analysis of contemporary racism, mainly in the UK and the US, but also in other parts of the world.

Large sections of the book are also devoted to trying to define “race” and “racism”. Rattansi suggests that part of the difficulty is that there are no simple ways to define these terms. About racism, he says:

It is my view that public and academic debates should move away from simplistic attempts to divide racism from non-racism and racists from non-racists. At the risk of exaggeration, I would suggest that one of the main impediments to progress in understanding racism has been the willingness of all involved to propose short, supposedly water-tight definitions of racism and to identify quickly and with more or less complete certainty who is really racist and who is not.

He also suggests that the common sense definitions of race as a biological concept and of ethnicity as a cultural one don't really hold. In biological terms, the concept of rare has been long discarded, as research shows that there is much more variation among a single human population than between different ones.

There is, however, danger in the idea that the modern world has moved from biological to “cultural” racism, because very often the original concept of race is still at stake if you look under the surface. As Rattansi says, if you are attributing intrinsic and permanent negative traits to a group, it doesn’t much matter if the justification is biological or cultural. Saying “Members of group x are naturally lazy/violent/uncivilized” or “members of group x are lazy/violent/uncivilized because their culture makes them so” boils down to pretty much the same:

In practice, though, cultural demarcations are often drawn and used in a form that naturalizes them by implying that they are more or less immutable. Thus the supposed avariciousness of Jews, the alleged aggressiveness of Africans and African Americans, the criminality of Afro-Caribbeans or the slyness of ‘Orientals’ become traits that are invariably attached to these groups over extremely long periods of time. The descriptions may then be drawn upon as part of a common-sense vocabulary of stereotypes that blur any strict distinction between culture and biology.

Racism: A Very Short Introduction, then, defines racism widely enough to include the Holocaust or hostility towards the Irish, for example. Racism is a theme I’ve always been interested in, and so this is not my first time reading about it. Even though a lot of the facts in the historical sections were already familiar to me, this book still gave me completely new things to think about. It looks at race and racism in a complex and serious way, and I highly recommend it.