Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy's Resurgence and Feminist Resistance Paperback – Big Book, 10 September 2020

Beginning in the 1970s, Carol Gilligan was an early pioneer of articulating women's ways of thinking and feeling and their vital but neglected role in our culture. Darkness Now Visible is one of a spate of books intended to help us make sense of the incomprehensible (to many of us): Donald Trump's being elected president and, most bewilderingly, supported by many women. This book was written in 2018, four years before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. The darkness is now blindingly illuminated. Men should not be put off by this feminist perspective; as Gilligan has argued for decades, we all would be better off adopting values and ways of thinking and feeling that are by no means confined to women but have been best developed--and now articulated--by women in their venerable practice of care. We are all under assault, and we need the voices of women (and like-minded men, including Gilligan's co-author, David Richards) to have a clear-sighted vision of the alternatives.

Contains wonderful insights into the origins of the current US democratic problems as pat of an ongoing research agenda into patriarchy and feminism. Recommended.

Those who found In Another Voice persuasive and those who had reservations alike will find Carol Gilligan's Darkness Now Visible (with David AJ Richards) valuable in its analysis of 'why Donald Trump' and 'why the resurgence of patriarchy'. Donald Trump's disputed election in 2016, and the cataclysmic impact of the wrongness of Hillary Clinton's defeat, provide a basis for Gilligan and Richards' discussions in a class on justice at New York University. The devastation visited upon students in the course is evidenced by the essays they write about the meaning of justice and its importance in their own lives and in the polity. There is much here that is insightful, whilst simultaneously easily read and readily absorbed. The conclusion that democracy can prevail in the true strength of its meaning only when its proponents recognise the intrinsic importance of feminism as fundamental to its make up is irresistible. Possibly or even probably Americans do not know how profoundly the rest of the world has been affected by the brutality and misogyny, racism, megalomania and overthrow of the rule of law embodied in the Trump presidency. Although written before the hope of the Biden-Harris White House came upon the horizon, Darkness Now Visible provides some guidelines for advancing into the third decade of the 21st century. One would hope it were compulsory reading not only for the incoming President and Vice President but for everyone in the new administration. Democracy has almost been defeated by the Trump White House. It will not be reinstated even in its imperfected form without a huge struggle. To attain its reality in the terms explained by Gillian and Richards will require far more time and far more work. The more who read Darkness Now Visible the more possible this will be.

Interesting take on patriarchy and how it threatens democracy