About Kyla Schuller
Kyla Schuller is an award-winning feminist scholar who uncovers new intersections between race, gender, sexuality, and the sciences in U.S. culture.
Praised as “a gifted storyteller” in the New York Times Book Review, she lectures throughout North America and Europe and has published two books: The Trouble with White Women (2021) and The Biopolitics of Feeling (2018).
Her essays and interviews have appeared in outlets including Slate, the Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and Avidly. She is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and is the recipient of fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the ACLS, and other national competitions.
Where to find Kyla Schuller
The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism
An incisive history of self-serving white feminists and the inspiring women who’ve continually defied them
Women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Sheryl Sandberg are commonly celebrated as leaders of feminism. Yet they have fought for the few, not the many. As award-winning scholar Kyla Schuller argues, their white feminist politics dispossess the most marginalized to liberate themselves.
In The Trouble with White Women, Schuller brings to life the two-hundred-year counter history of Black, Indigenous, Latina, poor, queer, and trans women pushing back against white feminists and uniting to dismantle systemic injustice. These feminist heroes such as Frances Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Pauli Murray have created an anti-racist feminism for all. But we don’t speak their names and we don’t know their legacies. Unaware of these intersectional leaders, feminists have been led down the same dead-end alleys generation after generation, often working within the structures of racism, capitalism, homophobia, and transphobia rather than against them.
Building a more just feminist politics for today requires a reawakening, a return to the movement’s genuine vanguards and visionaries. Their compelling stories, campaigns, and conflicts reveal the true potential of feminist liberation. The Trouble with White Women gives feminists today the tools to fight for the flourishing of all.
To fully grasp the significance of Kyla Schuller’s new book, “The Trouble With White Women,” it helps to understand the feminist climate in which it arrives. Here are two salient touchstones: Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election, significantly abetted by the approximately 50 percent of white women who cast their ballots for Donald Trump; and the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal, in September, to block the Texas law that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Sixty-five percent of white women in Texas voted for Gov. Greg Abbott, and 60 percent for Senator Ted Cruz, both vocal supporters of that law. After both incidents, Black feminists found our timelines and inboxes flooded with a deluge of white feminist shock and tears accompanied by a familiar, exhausting ask: How could we have let this happen?
It’s the “we” in this equation that is particularly chafing. Embedded in it is an implicit, repeated demand for Black women’s emotional and intellectual labor, a demand that conveniently ignores the centuries-long history of white women, some of them self-declared feminists, colluding with patriarchal white supremacy in an attempt to secure their own rights above those of Black people of any gender. Black feminism has meticulously mapped this history, from the Black suffragists of the 1870s to the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 theory of intersectionality. The failures of white feminism are inarguably every woman’s problem, but the burden of their solution is, at least from a Black feminist perspective, white feminists’ to bear. Put plainly: Gather your sistren and do the work.
Schuller, a white historian and feminist scholar at Rutgers University, clearly understands the political import of this transfer of labor. From the start, she lays bare how white feminism, rooted in binary, dated understandings of womanhood, “is a political position, not an identity,” and has no interest in disrupting the status quo, or in a reallocation of power. Instead, she writes, “it approaches the lives of Black and Indigenous people, other people of color, and the poor as raw resources that can fuel women’s rise in status.”
The most adept historian is one who can transform carefully mined nuggets of archival material into compelling, if not piquant, prose. Schuller is a gifted storyteller, her counterhistory equal parts writer craft and scholarly diligence. Each chapter pairs a popularly idolized white feminist with a Black, Native American, Latinx, transgender or lesbian feminist, many of whom are lesser-known. The suffragist icon Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom Schuller credits with having ignobly “invented white feminism,” appears alongside the poet, novelist, and early Black feminist theorist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Schuller places in conversation the abolitionist writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs, the birth control activists Margaret Sanger and Dr. Dorothy Ferebee, Betty Friedan, and the civil rights leader Pauli Murray, Sheryl Sandberg and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But Schuller’s mission is not merely diversity and inclusion: “The trouble with white feminist politics is not what it fails to address and whom it leaves out,” she writes, but “what it does and whom it suppresses.” Schuller’s writing is strongest when locating the precise historical moments in which these feminist figures intersected. Each transgender, lesbian and nonwhite feminist provided mainstream white feminism with an opportunity to choose a more equitable, moral path, and Schuller elucidates the very real consequences of each white feminist’s refusal.
Schuller takes care to render these women not as heroes and villains, but as studies in complexity, contradiction, and nuance. Sometimes, though, the balance between the two subjects can feel off. For example, despite Schuller’s acknowledgment of the Yankton Sioux organizer Zitkala-Sa’s “literary talents” in “prestigious” journals like The Atlantic and Harper’s, without enough of her own written prose in the text, her perspective feels far more ephemeral than that of Alice C. Fletcher, a white advocate for Indigenous women and families.
And Schuller fails to adequately support her charged assertion that Ferebee’s birth control advocacy “incorporated eugenics,” noting only that she was less of a eugenicist than Sanger was.
However, when Schuller does strike the right balance, as she does between the anti-trans feminist Janice Raymond and the trans theorist Sandy Stone, the result is mesmerizing. “The Trouble With White Women” is a welcome addition to the feminist canon. Undertaking the kind of critical labor necessary for engendering truly liberatory feminism, Kyla Schuller is doing the work.