Interview by Geneva Williams, May 30, 2025

Geneva Williams: Can you share a little about your educational background and what made you decide to become a professor of Women and Gender Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis?

Breanne Fahs: Yeah, so I have always had a background in both psychology and women’s studies from my time during undergrad at Occidental College. I double majored in those and my PhD is both in Psychology and Women’s studies. I have always been interested in the intrapsychic and macroanalysis of the feminist movement and Women’s studies. Both of these have been really important to me. And you know, my full time teaching position for maybe the past 20 years has been in Women’s Studies which has this affiliation with a greater umbrella called Social and Cultural Analysis. We do a lot of thinking about feminism and critical race and all the combinations of social identities, power, and those analyses. 

Williams: I have been fascinated with your book Firebrand Feminism. Can you share a story or two about what you learned while writing this book?

Fahs: I think that one of the bigger stories, one of the ones I always think about, is that small acts of activism led to these quite large changes. I think a lot of time with activism people tend to think that tiny changes don’t matter, like me as an individual can’t matter. But, it does seem like everything, as I was writing this book, points to a seemingly small group of women who produced these kinds of huge seismic changes, or at least agitated to produce them. I think that that is one of the big lessons that I always think about. I also think about how a lot of their activist efforts were coming from a quite serious analysis, whether those were critiques of marriage or social class or racist politics at universities. But they also had a fun and sort of comedic element to them. I am think about when the group which rats on Wall Street or Flo Kennedy leading a group of women for a pee-in at Harvard, where they were upset about the lack of access to women’s restrooms in the women’s library. The administration kept delaying, delaying, delaying, and so they thought “ok! Well until you do it we will just pee on the lawn.” These moments aren’t inherently funny, but they have these moments of theatricality and performativity and groundedness to it. Like protesting the Women’s Home Journal that was mentioned in my book. I mean, just thinking about yourself as an agent of changes was a story from that book in every way. I also think about the famous Miss America Protest, which is more of a famous well known one. It often gets distorted as burning bras when it was really throwing bras into trash cans. So this is also why we need what you guys are doing because these mythological stories get created when there is really a version of them that is true. In a bigger picture type of sense of what Firebrand kind of showed me was that the centrality of abortion activism being so foundational and spawning so much of the second wave feminist movement. People know how important reproductive rights was, but it was so, so, so important as the catalyst for the emotional aspects for second wave feminism. These things weren’t just about enacting physical changes but they also came from a space of watching women die from back alley abortions and people’s desperation at not having access to abortions. I think that story is also woven throughout the book. We also see coalitions of women and people in general that are far more diverse than we like to think about when we think about the feminist movement. There are so many crosses of social classes and races to form interesting alliances between all sorts of people coming together that often get distorted as second wave feminism being solely white. It wasn’t really. Especially in its more radical iterations there are a lot of cross movement building between the women’s movement and the civil rights movement. The split between liberal and radical feminism is a really important story that gets buried a lot when we think of U.S. Women’s History, but I think that story really deserves more attention. I mean, what is the difference between liberal and radical feminism theoretically, philosophically, and in terms of activism and broader goals? Liberal feminism worked within system change to change laws and provide more representation in places of power. Radical feminism is more interested in looking into the root causes of systems of oppression that are related to each other. There is a distortion that radical means extreme. Radical does not mean extreme. Radical means going towards the root of a problem at its most fundamental nature. It means thinking broadly or deeply about something. We owe the versions of feminism that did that within the second wave a great debt because they laid a lot of the groundwork for how we think about fundamental balances of power that exist among identities. 

Williams: Is there a story of women that you have discovered in your line of work that would be important to include in our WAPUSH curriculum?

Fahs: I do think that all the stories of early second wave feminism are so important. Especially with this upcoming younger cohort, I think I assume that the entirety of the work of second wave feminists were trans exclusionary and the whole thing should be thrown out. That feels very important to determine what is a radical feminist and what is trans-exclusionary. In fact, the work of self-declared trans-exclusive radical feminists are neither radical nor feminist actually. That is a very important story to rewrite right now. How do we think about TERFS and how do their work not align with the goals of feminists or radicals? I also really think that the story about how the National Organization for Women [NOW] came to be and how it fragmented around liberal and radical feminism is a really interesting story. The National Organization for Women came to be in the late 1960s and it pretty quickly fragmented between liberal and radical camps, mostly around the story about Valerie Solanas shooting Andy Warhol. The main reason for that was because when Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol there was a lot of disagreement about it being an act of violence. In this case, a woman shooting a man not for a form of passion or relationship gone wrong but for justice over publication rights and access to her writing had been sort of lost or stolen. There was a group of women within NOW who claimed that violence had no place within the feminist movement and refused to look at this as a feminist case being they needed to focus on reforms and getting bills passed. There was another camp that said the shooting of Andy Warhol was representative of all this rage that women had been feeling for so long and that encouraged feminists to think of this as a feminist action. So there is this huge divide that really ruptured the National Organization for Women into these two camps. Many radical feminist groups splintered off from NOW from that particular case of Valerie Solanas. She is this very marginal figure of the feminist movement who is often pushed out or forgotten or distorted. The way that we think about women’s violence towards men has been largely erased from how we think about the history of women. In that sense, I also think that figures like Lucy Parsons who were advocating for violence are being deleted and we don’t want them to be erased. When we think about history that features men, there is so much violence all the time that we just think about routinely. But we get really nervous when we think about women’s violence and what it means. I don’t think there are easy answers as to what it means and I don’t think the answer is to celebrate Valerie Solanas as a heroine for shooting Warhol. Even later, I think that she realized all that did was make her saddled to Andy Warhol in the archive of history forever. Now she will always be known as the woman who shot Andy Warhol instead of the woman who wrote the Scum Manifesto. Stories of violence or even fantasies of violence feel crucial when thinking about these kinds of big moments. I also think that resuscitating more stories about Flo Kennedy, who served as a very concrete bridge between the civil rights movement and the radical feminist movement. She really does not get enough attention and play for how magical she is. She was hilarious, theatrical, and incredibly effective! Everyone you talk to about Flo Kennedy will say that she knew how to tell people where to go and what to do and had a million phone lines in her house. She really knew how to both organize and advocate. She was also a very famous lawyer within the civil rights movement. She advocated on behalf of many of the Panthers and stuff. Every time I’ve come across stories of Flo Kennedy, I just think “yes!” More people need to have these stories! Along with those of Valerie Solanas.

Williams: The next question I have for you is who would be your top three lesser known yet influential women in history that we should include in our curriculum? I know you kind of touched on this with Valerie Solanas and Flo Kennedy, but is there anyone else you feel would be crucial to mention?

Fahs: For the reasons that I just stated, I think that Valerie Solanas is just crucial and people have very big feelings about her. She is a big constant troubling figure in just the best ways. Again, thinking about the violence, madness, the ways in which she helped to unwittingly fracture liberal and radical feminism in terms of NOW. She was a famous manifestoist. I also hope that feminist manifestos play a big role in your course curriculum and there are so many that serve the role of important historic documents for US American Women’s History. Again, Flo Kennedy who I just mentioned. I mean, she was the bridge between the civil rights and women’s movements. And was the fusion between activism and being a lawyer who had a sense that these movements act on each other and speak to each other. Again, the story of how these women have done that has been largely deleted to appear more contained than it really was. I didn’t really begin and end within the framework in which we are told so. The story of Flo Kennedy and the story of how abortion politics was another bridge there too. Rewinding back much earlier towards Lucy Parsons. I rarely come across any of my undergrads who know who Lucy Parsons was and she was super important in the history of the Wobblies. She was married to Albert Parsons and had this really interesting story of marriage between racial identities. There are just so many reasons why. Again, a very radical figure but influential and important. And there is just no one like her! I can’t think of anyone else who could be like Lucy Parsons! She is singular in so many ways. I also spent a lot of time interviewing Ti-Grace Atkinson for Firebrand Feminism, and I think that she does not get enough play for just how truly significant she was. She was the president of the National Organization for Women for a time. She was famously punched in the face during one of her speeches at a Catholic University. So that is also a very famous case of speech and action kind of coming together, alongside violence. She was just so foundational in what think about what radical feminism could mean. She was questioning these big fundamental things like marriage and love. So few people tackle that one! I mean how do we have a radical analysis of love or sex? Fast forward to now, another figure who I think is super interesting in terms of activism is Leonore Tiefer. She did a lot of work surrounding anti-genital surgery activism, in terms of plastic surgery and things like that. She has been totally great at targeting and studying all the ways that women are taught to see their sexual functioning as pathological when it’s not. She did a lot of work tracking the invention of female viagra, which of course crashed and burned for many fascinating reasons. She had fascinating activist tactics and very spot on analysis of the body. I don’t think she gets enough attention.

Williams: You touched upon this in your response, but if you could expand on this that would be wonderful. What emerging feminist scholarship do you admire or whose work you currently enjoy reading?

Fahs: A lot of people are just so wonderful. I really love Jessa Crispin, I don’t know if you know her but she would be a really great person to interview for this. In part because she is not an academic so that she has this really wonderful critique of academia analysis while also being this wonderful, incredibly insightful feminist writer. She has this book Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto and the Dead Ladies Project. She has a really great substack and blog. She has a really great feminist analysis that is not coming from inside of the academy. I cite her all the time to my students and I really, really love her work. I also have been really into critical fat studies and critical disability work. I have been reading a lot of Aubrey Gordon, Kimberley Dark, and Charlotte Cooper in terms of fat studies work. And in critical disability studies Leah Lakschmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Allison Kafer. I feel like disability studies and all of that is really emerging as this very important field in tandem with critical fat studies. I like this overlap in conversations in those spaces. I also really like Sarah Jaffe. I recently bought her book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone which is wonderful and scathing. She has this brand new book that I got that I have not read yet called From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire which is about the politics of grief and how we think about it in the post-Covid era. She is just one of those feminists and thinkers and writers who can jump across huge topics and do it so well. Also she is just so grounded and amazing in class politics, which is rare because I feel like so many feminists just don’t deal with writing about that so well. I am also always keeping an eye out for feminist manifestos. I have published a collection of them called Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution. 

Williams: The last question I have for you is do you support the creation of an AP U.S. Women’s History course? If so, can you share why you think this course would be beneficial for high school students?

Fahs: Absolutely! I am so excited about it. I love that it kind of coincides with the hopefully emergence of the Smithsonian Museum that is coming out. That is such a nice pairing to think about. There will be so much more visibility surrounding women’s history and women’s American history. If you go and ask high school students about famous women from history they will mostly name first ladies and pop stars, which is not great. This is a way to really expand that drastically, otherwise we might be stuck with first ladies and pop stars. I love Michelle Obama too, but there is so much more! So much more than just Michelle Obama and Taylor Swift! I also think it also helps encounter these highly militaristic and masculinist narratives that dominate history. So much of what we think of as US History is populated by men’s military history and very masculinist stories about the great man. And of course that is dominated by white, wealthy men. This is great especially in this moment, where the histories of any person lower on the system of power hierarchy is being discarded. I also think that it is crucial that high school students have a sense about the edges of feminism because feminism tends to get homogenized in this sort of bland way. When that happens, we lose those on the margins who are activists, who are troublesome, and who are unpopular. A class like this can help maintain the idea that we can have figures that exist on the margins of a movement that we don’t have to disregard or throw out because they are imperfect or mad. That excites me too! Yes, I am super excited about it and I hope it succeeds! I am a big fan of this project!

Williams: Thank you so much for the opportunity to interview you!