A More Perfect Union

There are two libraries of books about the American republic right now. One worries about democracy in general: polarization, institutional decay, the cracking civic floor. The other worries about feminism: the body, the workplace, the algorithm, the family. Both libraries are missing the same point.

Feminism is not a subject inside democracy. Feminism is a way of doing democracy. It is the country's longest-running argument about who counts as a full member of the union - and that argument has never been settled.

A More Perfect Union reads American history as a slow, contested expansion of full citizenship, and reads feminism as the civic tradition that has, over and over, named the next level the country had not yet reached. Across thirteen essays, J.J. Ramos walks the long argument: the founding compromise that left women outside the document; the half-citizenship of coverture and the long fight for the vote; the Declaration of Sentiments of 1848 read as a constitutional argument; the 19th Amendment and the women it did not actually reach; Ruth Bader Ginsburg's careful courtroom strategy in the 1970s as a civic-membership strategy; the unfinished ERA; the post-Dobbs patchwork of full and partial citizenship; the labor that holds the polity together and is never counted; and the school-board meetings, mutual-aid networks, and city-council comment periods where civic repair has been quietly maintained for two centuries by women the country has not photographed.

The book is not a manifesto. It is patriotic in the older sense of the word - it loves the country enough to argue with it - and it is built to be portable across the political center, usable by readers of The Sum of Us, Our Declaration, These Truths, and Hood Feminism alike. By the final pages, the reader has a working frame for what citizenship all the way down would require, and a clearer picture of why the feminist tradition is the natural home for that argument.

A More Perfect Union is the ninth book under the J.J. Ramos name, following The Next Wave, After Patriarchy, What We Owe Our Daughters, Womanhood, Rewired, Synthetic Sisters, Code, Body, Power, She Will Be, and Reclaiming the F-Word.