Get Your Smart On
20 self-help books paired with revolutionary theory books you could be reading instead.
The modern self-help movement emerged in the late 60’s and early 70’s as a part of the feminist movement. Activists like Audre Lorde framed self-care as political resistence, essential to survival in the face of systemic oppression. Feminist self-help groups developed practical health knowledge in a vacuum of knowledge about women’s bodies — the most famous case being Our Bodies, Ourselves. As the political fever of the era died down, that energy was moved into cultish groups like EST, which used much of the language of self-help to convince people that if they could not improve the whole world, they could at least improve themselves instead. Seeking power turned into self-empowerment, as the focus turned inward and individual.
By the 1980’s and 90’s, publishes and wellness entrepreneurs emerged and transformed what were politically radical practices of self-care, developed by people of color and feminists, into a mass-market industry. Even today, there is a new emergence of cults with charismatic leaders where the language of empowerment is a tool for supplicant manipulation. When we think we think we are above self-help or self-care, denigrated as being for-women and then stolen, remember this history.
All that said, here are twenty solid revolutionary books you can read instead of self-help mass-market titles. Let’s take back the power of radical care for ourselves and others, and the necessary intertwining of our survival and well-being.
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All of the Bookshop.org books are browsable on this booklist: https://bookshop.org/lists/we-are-now-reading-revolutionary-theory-not-self-help .