Throw Away the Rule Book: Irene Tencinger Reviews Lauren McKeon’s No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, and Why It’s Time to Stop Playing by the Rules.

What Matters Now

What do you do when the game is rigged? Why not create a different game and forget about the old rules? When it comes to addressing sexism in society, wouldn’t it be better to create new rules with equality and inclusivity in mind from the beginning?

Lauren McKeon. No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, and Why It’s Time to Stop Playing by the Rules. House of Anansi Press. $22.95. 356 pp., ISBN 9781487006440

These are the guiding questions of Lauren McKeon’s latest book (her F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism was published in 2017). McKeon is a journalist who has dedicated a substantial portion of her professional career to investigating how women negotiate and resist societal expectations and structures that shape and limit women’s experiences. She opens No More Nice Girls by identifying the election of Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss, as a wake-up call indicating women have not progressed as far as we may have believed in our struggle for equality. McKeon provides ample statistical sources to clearly demonstrate that women are underrepresented in politics and the upper levels of the corporate world. Even more discouragingly, McKeon provides evidence that if you are a woman who plays by the rules and you manage to reach those highest levels, it does not get better for you; in fact, sexism often gets worse. 

McKeon uses the SNC-Lavalin scandal to illustrate these trends. The attack on Jody Wilson-Raybould after defying the prime minister’s demands reveals the deep-seated expectation that women, no matter their official authority, will play ball when instructed. If you are a defiant woman, it is not likely to end well for you, especially if you’ve climbed to the top.  

However, McKeon’s analysis of the SNC-Lavalin scandal is not sufficiently sensitive to the unique position of JWR as an Indigenous woman. McKeon mentions the negative stereotypes that adversely affect Indigenous women, but doesn’t go beyond mentioning that these stereotypes were employed by members of the Liberal Party to discredit Wilson-Raybould, and that Trudeau responded to these tactics in an indirect, delayed manner. There is no significant critical engagement with racist and sexist stereotypes in the context of Canadian colonialism. Furthermore, McKeon makes no reference to articles written by Indigenous women that pushed back against the sexist racism during the SNC-Lavalin affair. There is also no mention of how inappropriate it was for Trudeau to offer an Indigenous woman the Indigenous Services portfolio before transferring JWR to Veteran Affairs. Is McKeon not aware of how much Indigenous women have been harmed by the Indian Act? If Wilson-Raybould accepted that portfolio, she would have had responsibility for enforcing this law. 

This brings us to the long, troubled history of feminism not being inclusive of all women, which McKeon addresses in the introduction. Yet even when McKeon tries to be inclusive in her book, the attempt to recognize the experiences of many different women is sometimes problematic. There are times when McKeon’s acknowledgement of experiences beyond that of cisgender, able-bodied, middle class (or higher) white women comes across as tokenistic. Too often it is limited to a few words broadly granting that if the deck is stacked against women with more privilege, it must disadvantage other women that much more. McKeon does recognize how hard it is to properly engage with a lived experience that is not your own. In view of this challenge, it would have been better if McKeon had set clear boundaries for her book and explained the rationale for those boundaries. It is far better to recognize the limits of your knowledge than to attempt to take on perspectives that you aren’t able to properly represent.

McKeon is at her best in the chapters that focus on exploring alternative pathways to power for women. She asks: “What if we could redefine not just women’s path to power but the very concept of power itself?” An excellent example of a different source of power is provided by social movements like #MeToo. (This power is evident in other movements McKeon acknowledges, such as Black Lives Matter; however, it’s disappointing that there isn’t even a passing reference to the #IdleNoMore movement, which started with Indigenous women.) 

McKeon explores what power looks like in these alternative contexts, political spaces existing outside of, and that challenge traditional social and political institutions. For example, power in the context of #MeToo is not about triumphing over someone else, but rather about laying claim to an experience and making it matter. This act is also about having power over personal healing for harms done to you. 

Regrettably, even though McKeon expresses interest in alternative forms of power and leadership, the bulk of the book does not move beyond critiquing existing social structures, particularly within the context of the corporate and political arena. McKeon is clearly frustrated with being excluded from the game that is already in play. One almost gets the sense that she does not want to create something new and radically different as much as she longs to be able to play the game that already exists, but on more equitable terms.

Stepping outside of the system and creating a different possibility may be an exciting new idea for a white woman, but it is a strategy of resistance and activism well known to Indigenous women. Mainstream society, including mainstream feminism, could learn much about different ways of conceptualizing leadership and social justice from Indigenous peoples. Indigenous activism and resistance efforts are increasingly becoming more focused on revitalizing and creating a resurgence in Indigenous ways of knowing, cultural and political traditions. Indigenous worldviews could provide a genuinely different approach to living equitably and sustainably for modern Western society that is far more radical than anything McKeon’s book offers.

Irene Tencinger is the Social and Environmental Justice and Indigenous Studies librarian at Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford campus.