Catfight
Catfight: Women and Competition is Leora Tanenbaum's dissection of the gender war waged among women. Tanenbaum meticulously analyzes the roots of destructive competitiveness among women, asserting that catfights thrive because, despite women's many gains, American women are conditioned to regard each other as adversaries rather than allies. She investigates the arenas from diets to dating, from the boardroom to the delivery room in which American women are apt to compare their lives with the lives of others in a tacit contest over who is the better woman, a contest in which no one wins. In a hopeful conclusion, Tanenbaum also finds two instances, one historical and one contemporary, in which women have successfully cooperated to achieve legal and social change: suffrage and sports.
Throughout Catfight, Leora Tanenbaum puts her own life experiences under the lens of scrutiny. As a writer, a friend, a mother, a wife, and a daughter, she analyzes her own insecurities and socialization, and how they influence her relations with other women. With the sociologist's perspective of a Barbara Ehrenreich and the feminist's outrage of a Gloria Steinem, Tanenbaum demythologizes the age-old catfight.
Catfight Review 1:
Although Tanenbaum provides the latest in academic research, she also includes an entertaining mix of examples from pop culture, newspaper and magazine articles and original fieldwork. She makes the subject personal....The book's accessible approach...is sure to attract even more attention for this fast-rising social critic
Catfight Review 2:
Tanenbaum's haphazard approach makes for an erratic read, veering from the convincingly sociological to the cringingly subjective....Cramming every indication of female division into [her] conceit of 'competition,' Catfight overlooks signs of individuality (or individual neuroses, as the case may be), and sees instead a societal problem. Thus she offers concrete political solutions to the particular predicament of working mothers (better and more affordable child care), while her resolutions for the beauty and dating divides remain facile and downright embarrassing...
Catfight Review 3:
Leora is one of the most astute and thoughtful of the new generation of catfight writers, bringing both a rare warmth and a courageous conviction to all her work. Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation and Bitch
Catfight Review 4:
Tanenbaum's prose is provocative....This book is an excellent history on the evolution of the socialization of women in modern culture....But she refuses to recognize how competition can make us not only better women but also better people, and how this is a necessary element to succeeding in a male-dominated society that is competition-based....Despite her plentiful research, her suggestions for alleviating the 'problem' of catfighting among women seem trite and ineffectual - Karen Solomon, The Bay Guardian (San Francisco)
Catfight Review 5:
Catfight relates her own experiences and interviews a variety of women and psychologists to explore the seemingly eternal adversarial relationships that exist among women despite many recent feminist gains - Vanessa Bush, Booklist
Here is a link to a catfight site, just in case you don't really know what catfight looks like.
Catfight Synopsis 1:
Is the myth of the catfight real? Do women really resort to pettiness and backstabbing when in conflict with each other? Has it always been this way? With a sociologist?s eye and a feminist?s passion, Catfight examines what happens when women compete. She discovers that the stereotype does have a basis in fact. Whether in the classroom, the boardroom, or the delivery room, there is a kind of brutal competition between women that does not exist between men. She examines the reasons for this and discusses who really gains when women are locked in catfight with each other. She also shows there is an alternative. catfight presents two major examples of women successfully working together to bring about social change: the women?s suffrage movement and the battle for Title IX, which led to the rise of women?
Catfight Synopsis 2:
An examination of competitive behavior between women considers its unique factors, the reasons and benefits of female competition, and the converse possibilities that can occur when women unite. One of them of course is the catfight.
