Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action by Penny A. Weiss

Abstract

Reviewed by: Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action by Penny A. Weiss Anna Mae Duane Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action. By Penny A. Weiss. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021. 310 pp. $110.50 cloth/$34.95 paper and e-book. Penny A. Weiss's new book Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action is an ambitious text that pulls from thinkers including John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Ahmed, and the author's own friends and family. Weiss cites women writers ranging from novelists to celebrated academics to argue that we need to apply feminist principles to the work of raising, educating and generally engaging children. Her argument leans heavily on feminist traditions that emphasize voice and agency. Extrapolating from feminist critiques of patriarchal exclusion, Weiss argues that children, like women, deserve the capacity to speak up at school and at home and to have their voices respected. Weiss intersperses her scholarly engagement with everyone from Mary Shelley to Paul Bloom with glimpses into her own life, including her childhood, her own work with young people, and her experiences as a mother of three [End Page 117] children. The anonymous interludes that capture conversations with parents and caretakers in Weiss's life provide a sense of conversation between the scholarly world and the everyday concerns of children and caretakers in the twenty-first century. In departing from what might be deemed traditional scholarly writing practices, this text harkens back to some of the modalities of twentieth-century feminism, particularly the investment in agency, voice, and, most strikingly, the argument that "the personal is political." This sense of personal exploration continues throughout the text, as Weiss refers to her own reactions to the texts she reads, letting the reader into her own thinking process. Perhaps the text might best be characterized as a scholarly memoir, tracing Weiss's eclectic reading practices and offering her ruminations on how feminist principles might be applied to childhood. Such eclecticism and warmth offer the sense of an intellectual buffet, with the author inviting us to sample thinkers ranging from Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman to Octavia Butler. The chapters are brief, often moving quickly from one thinker to another, from one discipline to another, and from one century to another. This breadth, however, comes at the expense of deep engagement with both the current conversations taking place in feminist scholarship and, even more strikingly, the rich and vibrant field of childhood studies scholarship, which is largely absent from Weiss's work. For much of the book Weiss paints feminism—and antifeminism—with a broad brush; for example, she begins by suggesting that the general public views feminists as people guilty of "hating men, being lesbians, and equating heterosexual sex with rape" (20). No doubt one could find such reductive and stereotypical portrayals of feminism in the public sphere, but they do not represent approaches to feminism within the academic circles that constitute the audiences for monographs published by university presses. Weiss laments, "Many people, women included, think that feminists hate children because they 'enslave' you" (21). Having established such binary opposition, Weiss seeks to redeem feminism from such criticism by illustrating a long history in which feminist writers do in fact evince care for children and child rearing. By setting up an opposition between "feminists" and misogynistic "nonfeminists," Weiss eludes the complications of twenty-first-century feminism itself, a complex and sometimes contradictory intellectual movement, with internal criticism emerging over questions of trans identity, racial equity, and political advocacy. In short, there is no one voice of feminist thought, as many of the most salient critiques of feminism come from within the movement itself. Throughout the text, feminist approaches to childhood are represented primarily by female authors across a wide range of chronology [End Page 118] and ideology, even when those authors do not explicitly engage childhood as a separate identity category. Weiss deploys another binary contrast between feminist and nonfeminist approaches to studying children in the first chapter by pairing as its epigraphs strikingly similar quotations from the twenty-first-century psychologist Paul Bloom and the nineteenth-century fiction writer...