Her Own Hero comes out as Americans are showing renewed interest in learning the art of self-defense. In the current political moment, similar concerns are manifesting with the rise of white supremacy and white nationalist movements. Jujitsu challenged preconceived ideas about the dominance of Western martial arts, such as boxing and wrestling, so it was exoticized and appropriated to reassert American imperialism. She argues that the women’s self-defense movement largely rose out of “racialized and gendered concerns about the future of the Anglo race and indeed the future of the nation.” For instance, Americans showed an increasing interest in learning jujitsu around the time of World War II, when hysteria about Japan as a world power and fear of “yellow peril” was rising. Rouse explores boxing, jujitsu, street harassment, the suffrage movement, and domestic violence to provide historical context to the 20th-century women’s movement. Rouse’s class analysis of women’s self-defense is one of the book’s strongest aspects for this reason. Learning self-defense enabled white women to work outside the home because it “shatter preconceptions about feminine fragility,” but it also allowed those same women to teach working-class and immigrant women the tactics in a white savior–esque fashion.

“Women’s self-defense figuratively and literally disrupted the existing power structure,” she writes, but white middle- and upper-class women often used self-defense training to reinforce existing hierarchies. Rouse examines the self-defense movement through an intersectional feminist lens. In Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement, Wendy L. This article appears in our 2017 Fall issue, Facts. Subscribe today!

Her Own Hero by Wendy L. Rouse