“Back in 2017, I made a ton of pussyhats,” Catherine Paul told me. “I just knitted pink hats like there was no tomorrow.” At the time, Paul appreciated “the way that craft could be part of a demonstration of affiliation and belief,” the artist, writer, and longtime knitter told me. Soon the pussyhat became a symbol of something else: a brand of feminism attuned to the concerns of a subset of middle-class, mostly white American women, and nobody else. By 2024, the hats, and the 2017 Women’s March at which many demonstrators wore them, were being held up as examples...