The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order [Paperback]

Rene Denfeld (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1996

The author shows that feminism in the 1990s is anti-men and obsessed with date rape, pornography, and goddess religions, and today's young women have rejected it by the thousands. The author, a working woman and an amateur boxer, pulls no punches about who's at fault and why. The author after dozens of interviews shows how the feminist leaders of the 90s - with their victim-mentality and anti-male stance - are the new Victorians, sexually repressive and self-righteous while insisting they are morally superior to men. The gauntlet has been thrown before the women's movement.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Arguing that contemporary feminism has bogged down in an often repressive extremism, Denfeld contends that her generation needs to reframe the movement along more tolerant lines.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Books in which young women bash the feminism of their mothers' generation have become something of a growth industry of late: Katie Roiphe's The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (LJ 9/15/93) and Christina Hoff Summers's Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women (LJ 6/15/94) come immediately to mind. This latest contribution to the genre, by a freelance writer and amateur boxer, argues that while many under-30s women believe in (and desperately need) feminist causes, they have been alienated by the radical goddess-worshipping wierdos who (she maintains) now dominate the women's movement. The thesis that feminism is in danger of dissipating its once-vital energies in a neosocial purity campaign has been much elaborated on elsewhere, but here it is undermined by a host of contradictions, a reliance on pop-culture sources such as Glamour magazine, and an unfortunate tendency to generalize from carefully selected tidbits of evidence. There is a place for this sort of thing, but it is only in large popular collections, where there is certain to be some demand.
--Beverly Miller, Boise State Univ. Lib., Id.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (November 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446672394
• ISBN-13: 978-0446672399
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,542,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reminding Us All of the Real Feminism, August 26, 2000

By 

Rick (Hong Kong, China) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order (Paperback)

Denfeld is dead on target in her scathing but articulate attack on the new feminism. Contrary to what some reviewers have claimed, her writing is lucid and direct--so much so that my EFL graduate students here in Beijing have found it easy to digest and highly compelling reading. Now they have begun to understand what prompted the patronizing antics of so many so-called feminist leaders who spoke at the women's conference here five years ago.

I applaud Denfeld's daring, although as an amateur boxer, she'd probably shrug her shoulders and say, "aw, it was no big deal to write this stuff." Still, it is bold to put your publishing career on the PC chopping block.

As for the book's arguments, she documents her sources well and manages to deftly demystify the often jargon- laden writings of many of the new feminists she so roundly criticizes. I was especially glad to see the even-handed manner with which she treated Gloria Watkins, aka bell hooks. Earlier in the book she credits this feminist critic but takes the latter to task in subsequent references. In contrast, Denfeld's regard for Friedan is sensitive, even poignant.

The book maintains a motif: that a kind of neo-Victorian disposition dominates the new feminists. Although the motif is indeed at times strained, it holds up well overall.

This book should be required reading in womens studies courses which purport to offer divergent feminist points of view but, in fact, assign mostly the radical fringe while conveniently and hypocritically ignoring the emerging mainstream thought (or was it always there beneath the turgid surface?) The sad irony, communicated well in this work, is that the new feminists have marginalized the very women they claim to defend.

I look forward to reading her new, co-authored work on related issues.

14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars halfway there, May 23, 2002

By 

"janelw" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order (Paperback)

Rene Denfeld's critique of feminism is right on. Her analysis of Diana Russell and Mary Koss's inflated rape statistics is solid, she offers a strong libertarian argument against the censorship of pornography championed by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and she condemns the goddess worship of Mary Daly as irrelevant to the political movement and alienating to women. However, while she's done her homework on the feminists, she neglected to study the Victorian era thoroughly, and offers only a superficial comparison, which is unfortunate because her explanation of the failure of feminism is so good. She should have left out the Victorian element entirely if she was unwilling to explore it. Also, Denfeld takes a lot of cheap shots at conservatives, calling them "archconservatives" and "right-wingers" and never explaining, as she does meticuously with the feminists, the actions that have caused them to earn her disgust. She need not like republicans or Christians, but it crowds her work to potray them as the enemy when her focus should be the feminists and (possibly) the victorians. In addition, she makes some suggestions at the end of the book, some of which are laughable, such as creating government-sponsored childcare (a chapter earlier she said taxes were too high, does she understand the system?), and make abortion "simply another medical procedure" (not going to happen, hon). She made some excellent points, but the book has some serious flaws.

18 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A refreshing oasis from Faludi and idiots, June 12, 2000

By 

Tim Lieder "Founder of Dybbuk Press" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The New Victorians: A Young Woman's Challenge to the Old Feminist Order (Paperback)

This book is amazing in that it doesn't pull punches against the people who have spent the last two decades turning feminism into a joke. From Faludi's paranoia and victim mentality (and according to her latest book men are victims too. Isn't it nice when everyone's a victim?) to the exaggerated rape statistics to the flaky ramblings of Daly, Starhawk and Gloria Steinem's inner child, no one is spared. ALthough Dworkin and MacKinnon's anti-porn crusades are dead, the rotting corpses still live on in Women's Studies classes. There is a contigent of feminism that believes that lesbianism is the only politically honest response to the patriarchy (and all the poor lesbians who get stuck with these Women Studies major jerks could start a support group and it would rival AA) and there is a great deal of puritanical zeal running through feminism.

Denfeld's main point is that women are not victims in need of being saved by feminism but real people with real concerns who would benefit from feminism if it addressed the issues (child care, reproductive rights, equal opportunities) instead of flaking out. A must read for all feminists who are getting sick of what passes for feminism.