Feminism is not the story of my life

In this startling and provocative new book, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, the founder of the Institute for Women's Studies at Emory University and the author of the controversial Feminism Without Illusions, says out loud what many women have only whispered: "Feminism is not the story of my life." In pursuing issues that primarily concern upscale career women, the leaders of the national feminist movement have lost sight of the reality of most women's lives.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in extensive interviews and conversations with women from diverse backgrounds, uncovers the issues that the feminist elite has missed.

Here are working-class women and professionals, single and married mothers, whites, Latinas, and African-Americans - all struggling to live independently and to have families. For these women, traditional feminism, with its dismissal of marriage and motherhood as oppressive and limiting, excludes them. Listening to their stories, teasing out attitudes and information from polls and trends, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese spells out a new kind of feminism, a "family feminism" based on the facts of women's lives.

It is a feminism that draws women together based on the things they have in common, that promotes their rights while taking into account their responsibilities, that trusts women to set their own priorities rather than try to live up to an unattainable ideal.