Michaele L. Ferguson

The title “W Stands for Women” comes from a slogan of the 2004 Bush/Cheney presidential campaign and refers (ironically – notice the subtitle) to the neo-conservative attempt to appropriate the vocabulary of feminism in order to promote a set of social policies that diminished the rights of women while trumpeting their successes.

The ten essays collected in this book were written to forestall that project. It's now (August 2012) eight years since that campaign and so much of the material in the essays is dated – and maybe the project was so successful that we have some difficulty seeing the point.

The essays are uneven, but some are good and four are very good, and if you skip the dated and the weak ones you can get a decent background briefing on feminist themes that are relevant but avoided during the 2012 campaign – the feminization of the American people via the imposition of the security state, for instance, or the weakness of compassion as a basis for women's rights.

I don't know that I'd recommend the entire book except to someone interested in that particular historical period, but I certainly do recommend the four essays I found most valuable, to anyone who, like me, is interested in understanding why feminist voices seem to have disappeared from the American political scene.

Here are the four essays I found most valuable:

Iris Marion Young, “The Logic of Masculinist Protection”;
Mary Hawkesworth, “Feminists versus Feminization”;
Lori J. Marso, “Feminism and the Complications of Freeing the Women of Afghanistan and Iraq”;
Michaele L. Ferguson, “Feminism and Security Rhetoric”;… (altro)