Hi Julie,
I'm not sure I can entirely buy your point: Does gender bias really inoculate female writers against political criticism? Take the cases of Gabriella Mistral and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, both of them groundbreaking feminists of their time and important writers.
Mistral was so racist against African-descended Latin Americans that she thought it best if they be eliminated from society. However, she thought that they would die out naturally because she found them so unattractive she assumed no one would wish to mate with them.
Gilman was a white supremacist and a proponent of eugenics who thought that African Americans were less evolved than Caucasians (as Stephen Jay Gould has shown in The Mismeasure of Man, there was a strong thread of racist 19th century science that tried to adapt Darwinism to race so as to support first slavery and later segregation).
Neither one has escaped pretty scathing criticism in the critical community over the past several decades.
Perhaps I'm arguing by example and these are exceptions that prove the rule. Perhaps also these writers came in for criticism because each of them were prominent feminists and so their racist ideas go against their message of social justice. I'm certainly not arguing that gender bias doesn't exist widely, merely that I'm not sure that it silences criticism of racism and other ethical failures. I would tend to argue the opposite: that critics with gender bias would be more inclined to level critiques that undermine the moral authority of figures such as Gilman and Mistral, but what do I know? People are complicated and motivations are hidden.
All Best,
Tony
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