Pantsuit Nation—the secret Facebook group for first hopeful, then grieving, Hillary fan girls—has inspired an upcoming book based on members’ stories. However, when founder Libby Chamberlain excitedly broke the literary news, it sparked immediate division in the feminist camp.
In October 2016, Chamberlain’s “vision of an army of pantsuited warriors going to the polls” gave her an idea. She wanted to create a space for progressive women to meet in solidarity and share their thoughts and experiences, so she created the Pantsuit Nation page and invited 30 friends to join. Within the next few months, group membership had skyrocketed to several million followers.
But following Chamberlain’s announcement of a “permanent, beautiful, holdable, snuggle-in-bed-able, dogear-able, shareable, tearstainable book” to be composed from a collection of the members’ stories, many feminists criticized the move.
Some group members scathingly accused Chamberlain of trying to profit from the stories of vulnerable women who had shared with no intention of their words being publicized. (Chamberlain has confirmed she will request permission to publish, but the distribution of profits from the anthology’s sales remains unclear.)
Several journalists also opined that the book promoted a sense of warm and fuzzy sisterhood without making any great intersectional feminist impact.
“Rolled my eyes so hard at the pantsuit nation book news I think I pulled some muscles in my neck,” tweeted Daily Beast editor Erin Gloria Ryan, who also wrote an op ed about the situation.
Deriding Pantsuit Nation as “slactivism’s latest darling,” she slammed the Facebook group for its devolution into a “space for white people to pat each other on the head for acting in a manner most woke.”
And now the book, she argued, actually embodied what was wrong with the 2016 presidential election. “People privileged enough to take real action against Donald Trump don’t need to be high-fived right now,” she huffed. “They’re the ones who screwed up.”
“Pantsuit Nation is a sham,” agreed contributor Harry Lewis in an op ed for The Huffington Post. “It is now another apolitical neoliberal project, more interested in selling feel-good passivity than making concrete sociopolitical change.”
According to both Ryan and Lewis, some women (especially minorities who raised issues about the new book by commenting on the Facebook page) were shot down or their concerns answered through “whitesplaining.”
Yet, despite the brouhaha, some could not contain their joy. Refinery29’s Elizabeth Kiefer saw the anthology as 2016’s version of Chicken Soup for the Soul. “Rejoice,” she wrote, “for Pantsuit Nation just got a brand new book deal.”
It seems the nationwide division extends even to the sisterhood.
