When not provoking Bernie Sanders’s base into donating and phone-banking for him even more — thank you, Hillary! — the former Secretary of State, with her daughter, has been pursuing a sideline common to many has-beens: writing books.

At first glance, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s new book, The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience, isn’t as bad as it could be. The mother-and-daughter pair don’t limit themselves to respectable Western role models or those who conform to their usual centrist ideology; Rigoberta Menchú, for example, fought on the opposite side of Guatemala’s civil war against a CIA-backed right-wing government (just the kind of government Secretary of State Hillary would have loved). While the book sometimes reads like an elementary school textbook, the portraits are accurate and go beyond sanitized caricature: the Clintons’ Helen Keller is a socialist and their Harriet Tubman is armed.

Here’s the problem, though: like liberal feminism in general, the text depends on the shameless appropriation of other people’s labor — mostly that of other women.