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The feminist book thread


Lady Sybil Vimes

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Lady Sybil Vimes

What’s your favourite (or least favourite) feminist books? What would you recommend other people read?


Mine is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I read it when I was a teenager and it was like my mind opened up. All the things I’d seen or felt about why women were treated differently and what I was expected to become suddenly became clear to me. I love it. As a companion to it, Deirdre Bair’s biography of Beauvoir is brilliant. She had an extraordinary life.


I’m also going to recommend Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, a collection of journalism about “raunch culture”. Levy is a great writer and she’s interested in the merging of choice feminism and capitalism.


The book I want to read next is Difficult Women by Helen Lewis

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Lucrezia Borgia

The Second Sex for me too, and A Room Of Ones Own.


when i was around 12 or 13 my mum did a course on feminist literature at Macquarie University - one of the books she had to read was Anne Summers Damned Whores and Gods Police - i remember being intrigued by the swearing in the title so i read it on the sly (i don’t think mum would have minded me reading it, if i asked) - so that was probably my earliest introduction to feminist literature.


recently a novel that - while I’m not sure the author intended it to be a feminist novel, it read that way for me, in the end - Fleishman Is in Trouble, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

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I’ve not read many feminist texts. I’m a bit daunted, if I’m honest. But I shall follow this thread with interest.


My contribution:


A Lab Of Ones Own, Rita Colwell PhD

A memoir of her career. And about sexism in science. It’s very good.

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Lady Sybil Vimes

The Women’s Room is so good. Really entertaining read and a great insight into women’s lives as the second wave was starting. There was a tv adaptation of it that I’d love to see again.


I remember loving The Beauty Myth but I haven’t read it for a long time. I’m not sure if I’d feel the same way about it now. I remember going to a talk by Naomi Wolf at the time it came out and she spent a lot of time complaining she was tired. I was very surprised to find she’s now a Chem-trails conspiracy theorist. Her Twitter is full of photos of clouds with comments about government interference and the clouds being different now. Odd.


I thought of another book I liked growing up - Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Very of it’s time but a great insight into the expectations for post-war, middle-class American women.

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The Feminine Mystique by Betty Frieden was a set text for Yr. 11 English back in early 70s for me.

It was mind blowing for me. I had so many feelings and some anger for what school and society expected from and for me.

The Female Eunuch was also a recommended read.


You can imagine the class discussions in a working class high school with a male teacher.


Later Intercourse by Dworkin and The Beauty Myth (although Wolf has completely gone off the rails)


Looking at a list just now I remember Sexual Politics by Miller as well.

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Lady Sybil Vimes

A Lab of Ones Own and Counting for Nothing both look great, haven't heard of them before. I'm going to add them to my list.


I've never read any Andrea Dworkin. Is Intercourse the best book to start with?

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I really liked 'Female Chauvinist Pigs' by Ariel Levy too.


For the history... title is a but blah, but it has lots of good stuff in it 'Feminism and the Family in England 1830 - 1939' by Carol Dyhouse . I I can't help rereading Antonia Fraser's "The Weaker Vessel'. All around excellent.


I do still have a soft spot for Anne Summers 'Damned Whores and Gods Police'.


The Feminine Mystique and the Women's Room are both so important.


I have also read and liked Naomi Wolf's 'The Beauty Myth'. 'Fire with Fire; was another book of hers that I found interesting.... but now she has gone loopy.

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A Lab of Ones Own and Counting for Nothing both look great, haven't heard of them before. I'm going to add them to my list.


I've never read any Andrea Dworkin. Is Intercourse the best book to start with?

Intercourse was pretty controversial.

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I'm now reading Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall, most of which I'm muttering "fuck yeah" along to given the actual time and space given to the working classes.

 

Me too. A broader more contemporary update to Audrey Lorde's Sister Outsider. I'm going to re-read that next to see how it's dated.


I probably initially came to feminist ideas more via fiction.In that the ideas were formed thinking about issues fiction got me thinking about in relation to my own life, then later I came across most of the foundational works like Friedan, Dworkin, etc.


As a little girl, Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking. An independent girl who could fend for herself, go on rollicking adventures and strong enough to casually sling a pony above her head. I experienced the character a bit like a kid's version of Jeanette Winterson's Dog Woman in Sexing the Cherry.


Then as a teen I had a similar experience as Jane Jetson but with the high school English curriculum.Books that made me angry. First we had the Bronte sisters with Jane Eyre and far far worse, Wuthering Heights. Any wonder girls got trained to go for bad boys for fucks sake. Then the book that utterly traumatised 16 year old me. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Úrbervilles. Bloody. Hell. Then we had Shakespeare whose ideas of female characters are not exactly flattering, are they?


Then at uni a few books made a big impression in a postive way. First up Jeanette Winterson. In particular, I loved both The Passion and Art and Lies. Sexing the Cherry is okay but I find it a bit unsubtle. I found The Passion's Villanelle and Art and Lies' Picasso incredibly relatable. I think they both do the juxtaposition of female versus male voice, myth and perspective really really well. I have such an intellectual crush.


From a local perspective I also got into Thea Astley. Some of her books carry women's voices forward across time in a way I really liked. A particular favourite is It's Raining in Mango, where she traces her family roots through far north Queensland through the voices of the women over the generations.


Then the pulp fiction that I now have to have mixed feelings about :cry: . Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Again, a retelling of the Arthurian legend which centered women's voices really well. I just wish I didn't know what I now know because it ruins it for me.

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Then the pulp fiction that I now have to have mixed feelings about :cry: . Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Again, a retelling of the Arthurian legend which centered women's voices really well. I just wish I didn't know what I now know because it ruins it for me.



That's perfectly understandable, I read some of the story you're alluding to recently after not thinking about the book for decades and I suspect that I won't be giving it to my daughters to read when they are older, even though I loved it a a teenager.


I also enjoyed reading The Beauty Myth and Female Chauvinist Pigs, though it feels like forever ago now.

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Same feelings re Mists of Avalon, loved it as a younger me but its legacy is tarnished now.


I love Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber.

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I'm more hard scifi but my husband introduced me to MZB when I met him.He enjoys fantasy scifi.


I won't ever be reading her work again.


Nor will I be reading Orson Scott Card again.

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A Lab of Ones Own and Counting for Nothing both look great, haven't heard of them before. I'm going to add them to my list.


I've never read any Andrea Dworkin. Is Intercourse the best book to start with?

Intercourse was pretty controversial.

 

Also, if memory serves, quite hard to read.


I remember trying when I was in my late teens and really struggling to understand what she was getting at, maybe I'll try again when I get to 40 and see if it's any more relatable.

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Then the pulp fiction that I now have to have mixed feelings about :cry: . Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Again, a retelling of the Arthurian legend which centered women's voices really well. I just wish I didn't know what I now know because it ruins it for me.

 

That's perfectly understandable, I read some of the story you're alluding to recently after not thinking about the book for decades and I suspect that I won't be giving it to my daughters to read when they are older, even though I loved it a a teenager.


I also enjoyed reading The Beauty Myth and Female Chauvinist Pigs, though it feels like forever ago now.




Oh dear, what do we know now? I've got the greatest memories of Mists of Avalon, and was going to give it to my dds when they are older?



If you google 'The Guardian Moira Greyland' you will get the full story.


Marion Zimmer Bradley died in 1999, Moira is her daughter.

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Lady Sybil Vimes

MZB's children have said that she physically and sexually abused them and enabled their father's paedophilia. Apparently Bradley even tried to adopt a child that her husband was sexually interested in. It's so dreadful.

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The woman’s room, the beauty myth were starters for me. Jane Caro’s Accidental Feminists was the one that got me most riled up recently.

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Same feelings re Mists of Avalon, loved it as a younger me but its legacy is tarnished now.


I love Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber.

 

Yes, I loved the stories in The Bloody Chamber, I remember what a thrill it was to have those familiar stories subverted.


I had my Virago edition, what a great imprint that was, so many fabulous female writers.


I think that’s where I first came across Sylvia Townsend Warner, who was writing in the 20s and 30s, her first book was Lolly Willowes about an unwanted spinster sister who moves to the country to get away from her family and joins the local coven. And then there was Summer Will Show, about an Englishwoman who sets off for Paris in 1848 to find her unfaithful husband and shacks up with his mistress instead.


Willa Cather was another great writer who was published a lot by Virago. She wrote such great female characters.


My mother was Women’s Libber in the 70s so all those feminist books were around, The Female Eunuch, The Women’s Room, etc. But the one that really resonated with me was Joan Smith’s book Misogynies in the 80s. And she’s just written another one called Home Grown : how domestic violence turns men into terrorists.


http://politicalblonde.com/


What an interesting thread, thanks to the person who mentioned Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism looks great.

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Just saw on Twitter that Spinifex Press has published Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy by Susan Hawthorne

https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/


I also remember reading feminist perspectives in archaeology and prehistory that were enlightening, but I can’t remember any particular books at the moment.

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Hon Lady Monteagle

The first book that properly enraged me was "Backlash" by Susan Faludi. The way she so mercilessly and comprehensively exposed the various hypocrisies (sp?) and ironies was breathtaking.

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The first book that properly enraged me was "Backlash" by Susan Faludi. The way she so mercilessly and comprehensively exposed the various hypocrisies (sp?) and ironies was breathtaking.

 

I’d forgotten about Faludi’s Backlash, great book, thanks for the reminder.


A new feminist magazine has just been launched called Radical Notion, obviously named from the quote from the 70s or 80s, feminism is the radical notion that women are people.


This is the link to their website where you can read a couple of sample essays from the first one, and subscribe.

It’s based in the UK, but has contributors from around the world.


https://theradicalnotion.org/

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