Christen Bryson, Anne Légier and Amélie Ribieras, eds., Womanhoods and Equality in the United States, 20th-21st Century Perspectives
Christen Bryson, Anne Légier and Amélie Ribieras, eds., Womanhoods and Equality in the United States, 20th-21st Century Perspectives. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2024, 242 p. ISBN: 9781032545431, 39 €
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1At the heart of this book is a much-needed deconstruction of the somewhat outdated word “womanhood”, which the editors define as “the condition of being a woman or a person’s journey to creating their identity as a woman” and understand as “socially and culturally constructed rather than biologically assigned” (3). Moving away from the essentialized overtone of the term and deliberately using it in the plural, the editors seek to expose the falsely monolithic character of womanhood and instead shed light on the multiple experiences, positionalities and intersectional identities that women have. The well-written introduction explains how womanhoods relate to the equally multifaceted concept of equality, whose plural nature could have been more clearly highlighted by the editors. However, they invoke the concept of equity, which contemporary feminists have favored as a tool that can be used to uproot gender injustices from the law. Despite legal victories advancing gender equality—the 19th amendment, the 1963 Equal Pay Act, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title IX of the Educational Amendments to the Civil Rights Act….—actual gender equality has not been achieved yet, as current issues in the US daily press remind us. The loss of federal protection regarding abortion rights and the unfinished ratification of the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) are but two examples of these persisting inequalities.
2Drawing on Lucy Delap’s metaphor of “mosaic feminism,” the book proposes “a series of contextual vignettes that delineate womanhood and the relationship of some women to equality” (5), a somewhat arguable statement that will be discussed further down in more detail. The eight chapters in the work are enriched by a transnational perspective and shaped by a variety of methodological approaches and disciplines, including media and visual studies, sociology, women’s studies, American studies, African American studies, history, and law.
3The book is divided into three thematic parts entitled “Fashioning and Refashioning Womanhoods,” “Violence and Womanhood,” and “Womanhood: Sites of Debate and Negotiations.” The first part explores how women adopt or resist normative images of womanhood and corporal expectations. The first three chapters thus show how black and white women have deployed strategies to confront the gender expectations (de)constructed in various sites, such as women’s magazines, the radio, and the beauty industry. Anaïs Lefèbvre-Berthelot proposes an original reflection on the way women’s voices in the early 20th century had to adapt to the man-made radio industry. Her study of radio archives, which combines sociological and media studies approaches, shows that, beyond the metaphorical significance of women’s voices being heard in public, the very materiality of these voices as well as the technical constraints were important issues. Although some women (mainly white and educated ones) managed to make themselves heard on the air, sexist prejudices and technical constraints erased the distinctive characters of each voice and generally tended to lower their register. Moving to the field of print culture, Alice Morin’s analysis of women’s magazines solidly demonstrates that they can be interpreted as sites that construct as much as they deconstruct womanhood. Her focus on the reception of this type of printed press also highlights the readers’ agency in adopting, adapting, rejecting or reappropriating these norms. Particularly interesting is the article by Néfertiti Ngoupande-Nah dealing with Annie Malone’s efforts to combat stereotyped images of black womanhood in the 1920s by refashioning black women’s hair and exalting black beauty.
4The second part focuses on violence targeting—or produced by—women. Karissa Haugeberg’s study of conservative women’s violence, especially in the anti-abortion movement, is an illuminating piece exploring the subtle connections between violence and the cult of beauty as well as the impact of (mainly) cisgender white women on the passage of anti-abortion laws. Cléa Fortuné examines the forms of violence inflicted on cisgender and transgender women migrants stuck at the US /Mexico border and explores how border art and the formation of migrant caravans contribute to increasing their visibility and reducing sexual assaults. The chapter by Soukayna Mniaï analyzes sexual violence in the context of US college campuses where feminist activists have reinterpreted Title IX of the Education Amendments Act to define sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination in higher education. The chapter convincingly argues that this strategy has led to increased protection and investigations on campuses as well as a conservative backlash supported by men’s rights groups and conservative women who have engaged in culture wars that still resoundingly exist nowadays.
5The two chapters that make up the final part of the book look into domesticity and scientific expertise as two paradigmatic frames where women’s identities, work and reproductive rights are (de)constructed and negotiated. Christen Bryson’s bright piece analyzes how second wave feminists and Women’s Liberationists have denounced the home as a site of women’s oppression through discourses that basically took into account the white middle-class experience of womanhood and failed to properly assess the importance of domestic and care work. As a response, conservative actors have forcefully rehabilitated the model of the housewife as a morally and religiously worthy symbol of womanhood, a push felt in the 1980s but also today, as the success of the current tradwife movement illustrates. Another site of negotiation is explored by Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer who examines the place and role that scientific expertise plays in the debates over abortion rights. He clearly demonstrates that the increased medicalization of the abortion debate is in part the result of legal frames (for example the trimester framework established by Roe v. Wade and the notion of viability contained in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services). Using the concept of “expert capital,” Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer examines how pro-life and pro-choice camps develop discourses that carry the legitimacy of scientific rigor and how this has enabled anti-abortion groups, in particular, to strengthen their movement. Ultimately, it is important to bear in mind that these medical frames “shape the production of science itself” (197).
6All in all, the book offers a collection of excellent chapters solidly grounded in cutting-edge research and usefully illuminating the multiple experiences of various women at various times, confronted with constraining gender (and racial) norms and expectations, as well as different forms of violence. Thus, the main criticism that could be made does not concern the quality of the contributions, which are excellent, but rather their failure (for most of them) to clearly articulate their connection to the central theme of equality. Indeed, besides the fine foreword which deals with the Equal Rights Amendment, and perhaps chapter 6 focusing on the interpretation of Title IX, the other articles mainly deal with questions of agency, economic or aesthetic empowerment, and collective or individual strategies, but they do so without explicitly stating how these issues relate to equality, assuming perhaps that the various forms of fights and resistance at stake automatically result in some higher degree of gender equality. Yet the relations between agency, empowerment, strategy building and equality are far from obvious. Another point concerns the absence of a chapter dealing with the burning issue of transwomen. Such a contribution would have been welcome to further illustrate the plurality of womanhoods and shed light on the anti-trans discourses and policies currently deployed by the Trump administration, that only recognizes “biological women.”
7Notwithstanding these remarks, Womanhoods and Equality in the United States is a rich contribution to our understanding of the infinitely nuanced landscape of gender inequalities, then and now, and it certainly stands as a must-read not only for experts in the field but also for students and a public interested in women’s history, contemporary feminism, and gender studies more generally.
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Claire SORIN-DELPUECH, « Christen Bryson, Anne Légier and Amélie Ribieras, eds., Womanhoods and Equality in the United States, 20th-21st Century Perspectives », e-Rea [En ligne], 23.1 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 18 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/20710 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15cj4
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