Showing titles in Women's Studies

"The five marriages that Carmela Ciuraru explores in Lives of the Wives provide such delightfully gossipy pleasure that we have to remind ourselves that these were real people whose often stormy relationships must surely have been less fun to experience than they are for us to read about...

Edited and with an introduction by Roxane Gay, the New York Times best-selling and deeply beloved author of Bad Feminist and Hunger, this anthology of first-person essays read by all 30 contributors, including Gabrielle Union, Ally Sheedy and Lyz Lenz, tackles rape, assault and harassment head-on.

The term killjoy has been used to dismiss feminism by claiming that it causes misery. But by naming ourselves feminist killjoys, we recover a feminist history, turning it into a source of strength as well as an inspiration. Drawing on her own stories and those of others, especially Black and brown feminists and queer thinkers, Sara Ahmed combines depth of thought with honesty and intimacy. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook unpicks the lies our culture tells us and provides a form of solidarity and companionship that can be returned to over a lifetime.

Britain's best known classicist, Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. In Women & Power she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women, using examples ranging from the classical world to the modern day. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that "We must also do away with the conception that the treatment of the body is the affair of every individual." It was a direct slap at the feminist movement of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, an influential force for, among other things, divorce, contraception, and abortion; in short, for a woman's right to control her own body.

Brought to you by Penguin. Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving, alone, to the depths of the countryside, her overbearing relatives are horrified. But Lolly has a greater, far darker calling...

The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity? The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. 

Run a Google search for “black girls” - what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls”, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities.

Beginning with a brief overview of the various goals and phases of feminism from the early 19th century onward, writer and feminist theorist Jennifer Baumgardner takes you on a tour of a tumultuous decade full of complex issues and contradictions through the lens of the feminist movement and the ways it shaped - and was shaped by - the closing years of the 20th century. From abortion rights to ‘zines, Feminism in the 1990s explores the ways third-wave feminism reacted to popular culture while simultaneously being co-opted by it.

This is a manifesto for the 99 percent. Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, inadequate healthcare, border policing, climate change - these are not what you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But aren't they the biggest issues for the vast majority of women around the globe? This manifesto makes a simple but powerful case: feminism shouldn't start, or stop, with the drive to have women represented at the top of their professions. It must focus on those at the bottom and fight for the world they deserve. Feminism must be anti-capitalist, eco-socialist, and anti-racist.

NPR Great Read of 2016 Author and Guardian US columnist Jessica Valenti has been leading the national conversation on gender and politics for over a decade. Now, in a darkly funny and bracing memoir, Valenti explores the toll that sexism takes from the every day to the existential. Sex Object...

There is an obesity epidemic in this country, and poor Black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health-care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat Black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than 200 years ago. 

For centuries, a hidden current has run through the world’s wisdom traditions—a dark, positive, feminine energy represented by such striking symbolic figures as the Tibetan Buddhist Tara, the Black Madonna of Catholicism, and the Hindu Kali. On The Power of the Dark Feminine, award-winning...

“A powerful illustration of the obstacles our society continues to throw up in the paths of ambitious young women.” —The New York Times Book Review “Important . . . empowering.” —Gayle King, CBS This Morning "That [Fowler] became a whistle-blower and a pioneer of a social...

"Have You Forgotten? I Am Your Mother. You Are Under My Protection." "There is a promise Holy Mother makes to us," explains Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, "that any soul needing comfort, vision, guidance, or strength can cry out to her, flee to her protection, and Blessed Mother will immediately...

A New York Times Bestseller Instagram. Whisper. YouTube. Kik. Ask.fm. Tinder. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media. What it is doing to an entire generation of young women is the subject of award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales’s...

How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor Adrienne Maree Brown finds the answer in something she calls “pleasure activism,” a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism.

Brought to you by Penguin. From the initial spark of attraction when your eyes first meet, to spontaneously dancing together in the kitchen and falling asleep side by side - how do we create those intimate moments of connection? How we see sex and intimacy portrayed on screen has profound...

The Subjection of Women is an 1869 essay by the English philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill, based on ideas he developed jointly with his wife Harriet Taylor Mill. At the time of its publication, the essay's argument for equality between the sexes was an affront to conventional norms regarding the status of men and women. Mill contended that the emancipation and education of women would have positive benefits for all people; the companionship of equally educated persons would result in the greater intellectual development of all.

1913 - Suffragette throws herself under the King's horse. 1969 - Feminists storm Miss World. Now - Caitlin Moran rewrites "The Female Eunuch" from a bar stool and demands to know why pants are getting smaller. There's never been a better time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill, and we haven't been burnt as witches since 1727. However, a few nagging questions do remain.... Why are we supposed to get Brazilians? Should you get Botox? Do men secretly hate us? What should you call your vagina?