Best of
Feminism

1

Lessons in Chemistry


Bonnie GarmusBonnie Garmus
    Maisel, this blockbuster debut set in 1960s California features the singular voice of Elizabeth Zott, a scientist whose career takes a detour when she becomes the star of a beloved TV cooking show. Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with--of all things--her mind. True chemistry results.But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking ("combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride") proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn't just teaching women to cook. She's daring them to change the status quo.Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters, Lessons in Chemistry is as original and vibrant as its protagonist.

Linea Nigra


Jazmina Barrera
    Drawing from a wide range of inspirations and traditions, from Louise Bourgeois to Ursula K. Le Guin to the influential indigenous Nahua model Luz Jiménez, Barrera’s treatise is as philosophical as it is candid. It is a book that clarifies motherhood, but also celebrates the mysteries of the body—like the linea nigra, the black line, itself.Writing over the course of her first pregnancy, birthing, breastfeeding, and young motherhood, Barrera embraces her subject fully. She intersperses notes from her reading life, making lucid connections between maternity and earthquakes, lunar eclipses, plants, and animals. She sends out an impassioned call for a great proliferation of pregnancy books: for more writing by the expectant; for a canon and a counter-canon of motherhood prose—each of them a shrine and generous guide to all of these radical acts.

The Inseparables: The newly discovered novel from Simone de Beauvoir


Simone de Beauvoir
    Andrée is small for her age, but walks with the confidence of an adult. Secretly Sylvie believes that Andrée is a prodigy about whom books will be written. The girls talk for hours about equality, justice, war and religion; they lose respect for their teachers; they build a world of their own. But they can't stay like this forever.Written in 1954, five years after The Second Sex, the novel was never published in Simone de Beauvoir's lifetime.TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN - INTRODUCED BY DEBORAH LEVY

Love Without Emergency: I Want This but I Feel Like I'm Going to Die: Writings on Trauma, Attachment, and Polyamory


Clementine Morrigan
    For the first time, I have collected all my writing on the subject in one place. The pieces in this zine were written between 2014 and 2019; including my early writing on polyamory as well as my more recent work. This zine moves away from simple (and often judgmental/shaming) frameworks around managing jealousy, and toward a recognition of the distress traumatized and attachment injured people can feel when trying to navigate polyamory. Understanding distress as an embodied, nervous system experience, rather than simply a cognitive one, this collection of writing is trauma and attachment informed. Normalizing and validating distress while exploring the experience of earning secure attachment and developing nervous system regulation, this zine draws on both my personal experience as an anxiously attached polyamorous person living with c-ptsd, and my experience as a facilitator teaching my Trauma Informed Polyamory workshop. It’s a thick zine with fourteen pieces of writing covering topics such as non-hierarchical polyamory, queer platonic love, shame, anxious preoccupied attachment, avoidant attachment, desiring polyamory, and nervous system regulation. With a bright pink risograph cover, this zine celebrates trauma survivors and the hard work and great courage we put into love.

Rebel Girls Climate Warriors: 25 Tales of Women Who Protect the Earth


Rebel Girls
    Meet conservationists, activists, water protectors, philanthropists, authors, and other women from all over the world who have stood up to polluters and used their amazing talents to protect the planet. Climate Warriors is part of the award-winning Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls series.Join Greta Thunberg for a climate strike. Plant a tree with Wangari Maathai. Stand with water protector Autumn Peltier. And turn trash into profits and independence with Isatou Ceesay. Rebel Girls Climate Warriors tells the stories of the ingenuity and commitment of these women and more, including Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei, Indigenous Ecuadorian leader Nemonte Nenquimo, and Thai landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom. This collection of 25 stories follows in the footsteps of the New York Times best-selling series Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. It is illustrated by female and nonbinary artists from around the world.

Identitti


Mithu M. Sanyal
    Identitti), a well-known blogger and doctoral student is, in awe of her supervisor--superstar postcolonial and race studies professor Saraswati. But her life and sense of self are turned upside down when it emerges that Saraswati is actually white. Nivedita's praise of Saraswati during a radio interview just hours before the news breaks--and before she learns the truth--calls into question her own reputation as a young activist.Following the uproar, Nivedita is forced to reflect on the key moments in her life, when she doubted her identity and her place in the world. As debates on the scandal rage on social media, blogs, and among her closest friends, Nivedita's assumptions are called into question as she reconsiders the lessons she learned from her adored professor.In her thought-provoking, genre-bending debut, Mithu Sanyal enlisted the contributions and commentary of real life public intellectuals as if Saraswati were a real person. A darkly comedic tour de force, Identitti showcases the outsized power of social media in the current debates about identity politics and the power of claiming your own voice.

Theatre of the Imagination, Volume One


Clarissa Pinkola Estés
    Approx. 7 Hours.

Against the Madness of Manu: B.R. Ambedkar's Writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy


B.R. Ambedkar
    A Brahman Congress leader suggests that a Dalit chief minister be raped and paid compensation. In his 1916 paper Castes in India , the 25-year-old Ambedkar offered the insight that the caste system thrives by its control of women, and that caste is a product of sustained endogamy. Since then, till the time he piloted the Hindu Code Bill, seeking to radicalise women s rights in the 1950s, Ambedkar deployed a range of arguments to make his case against Brahmanism and its twin, patriarchy. While Ambedkar s original insights have been neglected by sociologists, political theorists and even feminists, they have been kept alive, celebrated and memorialised by Dalit musical troupes and booklets in Maharashtra. Sharmila Rege, in this compelling selection of Ambedkar s writings on the theme of Brahmanical patriarchy, illuminates for us his unprecedented sociological observations. Rege demonstrates how and why Ambedkar laid the base for what was, properly speaking, a feminist take on caste.

Skinned


NOT A BOOK
    It tells the story of Ejem, a young woman uncovered at the age of fifteen yet 'unclaimed' in adulthood, and her attempts to negotiate a rigidly stratified society following the breakdown of a protective friendship with the married Chidinma. With a wit, prescience, and a wicked imagination, 'Skinned' is a bold and unsettling tale of bodily autonomy and womanhood, and the fault lines along which solidarities are formed and broken.-allafrica.com

Did I Say That Out Loud?: Notes on the Chuff of Life


Fi Glover
    Their book promises to take mid-life by its elasticated waist and give it a brisk going over with a stiff brush. At a time of constant uncertainty, what we all need is the wisdom and experience of two women who haven't got a clue what's happening either.

Educated / Normal People


Tara Westover
    She hadn't been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she'd never set foot in a classroom, and no medical records because her father didn't believe in hospitals. Normal People: Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation - awkward but electrifying - something life-changing begins.

Dear Woman


Michael E. Reid
    This is a book of quotes, letters, short stories, and poems written to provide education, motivation, encouragement, and a little tough love to women of all ages. Dear Woman is a journey through womanhood that visits some of the deepest and darkest corners of women's lives, with hopes of shedding a little light and love. This book is written from the perspective of a man who wants nothing more than for you to be the best woman possible, regardless of circumstance. It is one man's gift to the world, with hopes that no matter how the world may treat a woman, you should not stop being a woman in it.

The Tree at the Center


Kathryn Knight Sonntag
    She reveals the sacred feminine as spiritual survival. In feminist eco-fashion she sees invisible connections between animate and inanimate, the miraculous within mundane. She accepts the challenge of Mormon theology, to translate spirit from materia, as living soul. Her images are aflame, impossible to ignore, arresting attention to awakening the self, body and soul. In the gaps between our molecules she sees electrons marry form and energy, architecture and theology. She finds "the axis of absolute reality" in every moment, by walking an inner landscape to the "cosmic odeum" in the center of our own being. Her facile grasp of poetic technique woos truth from words. Read at your own risk: you will be consumed by the alchemy catalyzed within these pages. --Maxine Hanks, editor of Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism

Debutante: Race, Resistance, & Girl Power


Nakkiah Lui
    and they’re black. The debs’ ball is a controversial colonial export but can it be empowering too? Australia’s most celebrated young playwright Nakkiah Lui and actress Miranda Tapsell put on their hats and gloves to find out.Nakkiah and Miranda are angry, young, vocal, Aboriginal and very, very funny. Join them on their journey, starting with a lesson on teatime etiquette in London where it all began, as they follow the debutante trail and discover that First Nations women across the globe have made this tradition their own. Nakkiah and Miranda ask: can beauty, poise and politeness actually empower them? Or is it better to get angry and start shouting?

The Seawomen


Chloe Timms
    Raised by her grandmother, after a fire claimed her parents and scarred her face, she's instructed to piety, to deference, and acquiescence by a religious society that will not suffer anything else. Cut off from the moral iniquity of the mainland, the island believes it can stay free of the Seawomen - creatures from the water that came upon land to corrupt God's creation and Man. The inhabitants fear the water and believe the only way to remain virtuous is to never enter it, and for the women to conceive within 12 months of their appointed motheryear.If they do not conceive, they're cast back into the ocean as a sacrifice in an act called the Untethering. Esta witnesses such an act as a child. Her childhood growing up on the island is fraught with tension as she comes to the terms with the prohibitive malaise of the culture she finds herself in. Before long, she gets a taste of freedom and the potential of the world that is much larger than Eden's Isle. But she is bound, like many women before her, when she is married off and her motheryear is finally declared. Will she conceive a child in her loveless arranged marriage, or suffer the same fate of many women before her, and be Untethered?The Seawomen is a debut novel crackling with imagination and love. It's about the choices we make and challenging the myths and ties that bind us.

Appetite: sex, touch and desire in women with anorexia nervosa


Melissa A. Fabello
    Even better? Taking a social justice perspective, real women's personal narratives take center stage.

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race / We Should All Be Feminists / Dear Ijeawele


Reni Eddo-Lodge
    Exploring everything from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is the essential handbook for anyone who wants to understand race relations in Britain today.We Should All Be Feminists A personal and powerful essay from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americana and Half of a Yellow Sun.I would like to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie's letter of response. Here are fifteen invaluable suggestions–compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive–for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and sexuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can "allow" women to have full careers, Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century. It will start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.

The Secret Life of Sofonisba Anguissola


Melissa Muldoon
    In a world where women painters had little to no acknowledgment, she was singled out by Michelangelo and Vasari who recognized and praised her talent. Gaining the Milanese elite’s acclaim, she went on to become court painter to Spanish King Phillip II and taught his queen to paint. One can’t live such an extraordinary life without having stories to tell, and tell them Sofonisba does to Sir Anthony Van Dyke, who comes to visit her toward the end of her life. During their meeting, she agrees to reveal her secrets but first challenges the younger painter to find the one lie hidden in her tale. In a saga filled with intrigue, jealousy, buried treasure, unrequited love, espionage, and murder, Sofonisba’s story is played out against the backdrop of Italy, Spain, and Sicily. Throughout her life, she encounters talented artists, authoritative dukes, mad princes, religious kings, spying queens, vivacious viscounts, and dashing sea captains—even a Barbary pirate. But of all the people who fell in love with Sofonisba, only one captured her heart. The painter may have many secrets but the truth of her life is crystal clear from the beginning. Always a strong, passionate woman with a dream, she was an intelligent artist who knew her self-worth and in the end, as Michelangelo had done for her, Sofonisba passed her brush to a new generation.

Generations of Women from the Moon


Jillian Banks
    

Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance


bell hooks
    

Living Chicana Theory


Carla Trujillo
    They address the secrets, inequities, and issues they all confront in their daily negotiations with a system that often seeks to subvert their very existence. They have to struggle daily not only with the racism that pervades our lives, but also with the overwhelming male domination of the "macho" Chicano and Mexican culture.

Strong Female Lead: Lessons from Women in Power


Arwa Mahdawi
    But as the financial, environmental, and social systems crumble, isn't it time we had a different plan?The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen financial collapse, a global pandemic, the devastation of our environment and the disintegration of democracies. But while some at the top are telling us 'it is what is it', there's a new generation of leaders showing the world how to be better. They're building trust, investing wisely and acting decisively. And they've got one thing in common.In Strong Female Lead, Arwa Mahdawi investigates the qualities demonstrated by female leaders who show us how it's done, including original research and interviews with Madeleine Albright, Mary Robinson, Alicia Garza and many others. Above all, she asks the question: What can women in power teach all of us about leadership?

Orphan Black: Helsinki #5 (of 5)


Graeme Manson
    Spoken in hushed tones, the word means almost certain death for the clones of Project Leda. But find out here what it means to a very special clone named Veera. Learn the dark secrets of this codename in this special event miniseries by co-creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett.

Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism


Joanne Limburg
    Eager to discover other women who had been misunderstood in their time, she writes a series of wide-ranging letters to four 'weird sisters' from history, addressing topics including autistic parenting, social isolation, feminism, the movement for disability rights and the appalling punishments that have been meted out over centuries to those deemed to fall short of the norm. This heartfelt, deeply compassionate and wholly original work humanises women who have so often been dismissed for their differences, and will be celebrated by 'weird sisters' everywhere.

A Year of Saying Yes: How to Dance it Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person


Shonda Rhimes
    

The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier


April White
    On the American frontier, the new state offered a tempting freedom often difficult to obtain elsewhere: divorce.With the laxest divorce laws in the country, five railroad lines, and the finest hotel for hundreds of miles, the small city became the unexpected headquarters for unhappy spouses—infamous around the world as The Divorce Colony. These society divorcees put Sioux Falls at the center of a heated national debate over the future of American marriage. As clashes mounted in the country's gossip columns, church halls, courtrooms and even the White House, the women caught in the crosshairs in Sioux Falls geared up for a fight they didn't go looking for, a fight that was the only path to their freedom.In The Divorce Colony, writer and historian April White unveils the incredible social, political, and personal dramas that unfolded in Sioux Falls and reverberated around the country through the stories of four very different women: Maggie De Stuers, a descendent of the influential New York Astors whose divorce captivated the world; Mary Nevins Blaine, a daughter-in-law to a presidential hopeful with a vendetta against her meddling mother-in-law; Blanche Molineux, an aspiring actress escaping a husband she believed to be a murderer; and Flora Bigelow Dodge, a vivacious woman determined, against all odds, to obtain a "dignified" divorce.Entertaining, enlightening, and utterly feminist, The Divorce Colony is a rich, deeply researched tapestry of social history and human drama that reads like a novel. Amidst salacious newspaper headlines, juicy court documents, and high-profile cameos from the era's most well-known players, this story lays bare the journey of the turn-of-the-century socialites who took their lives into their own hands and reshaped the country's attitudes about marriage and divorce.

She Who: A Graphic Book of Poems with 54 Images of Women


Judy Grahn
    

Daughters of Silt and Cedar


Rebecca Mix
    

The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex


Gayle S. Rubin
    She asserts that these writers fail to adequately explain women's subjugation; therefore, Rubin offers a reinterpretation of their ideas. Rubin addresses Marxist thought by identifying women's role within a capitalist society. She argues that the reproduction of labor power depends upon women's housework to transform commodities into sustenance for the worker. A capitalistic system cannot generate surplus without women, yet society does not grant women access to the resulting capital.

Women as Revolutionary Agents of Change: The Hite Reports, 1972-1993


Shere Hite
    To read this outstanding distillation of Hite's writings is to see the continuing impact of her prodigious work over two decades, to hear her views on the issues facing women as agents of social change, and to be taken to the cutting edge of current debates on sexual politics.

Something that needs nothing


Miranda July
    

No Name Woman


Maxine Hong Kingston
    Ironically, the first thing we read is Kingston's mother's warning Kingston, "You must not tell anyone . . . what I am about to tell you."

Does My Body Offend You?


Mayra Cuevas
    A collaboration between two gifted authors writing from alternating perspectives, this compelling novel shines with authenticity, courage, and humor. Malena Rosario is starting to believe that catastrophes come in threes. First, Hurricane Mar�a destroyed her home, taking her unbreakable spirit with it. Second, she and her mother are now stuck in Florida, which is nothing like her beloved Puerto Rico. And third, when she goes to school bra-less after a bad sunburn and is humiliated by the school administration into covering up, she feels like she has no choice but to comply.Ruby McAllister has a reputation as her school's outspoken feminist rebel. But back in Seattle, she lived under her sister's shadow. Now her sister is teaching in underprivileged communities, and she's in a Florida high school, unsure of what to do with her future, or if she's even capable making a difference in the world. So when Ruby notices the new girl is being forced to cover up her chest, she is not willing to keep quiet about it.Neither Malena nor Ruby expected to be the leaders of the school's dress code rebellion. But the girls will have to face their own insecurities, biases, and privileges, and the ups and downs in their newfound friendship, if they want to stand up for their ideals and--ultimately--for themselves.

Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage


Rachel E. Gross
    The fallopian tubes are named for a man. Named, claimed, and shamed: Welcome to the story of the female body, as penned by men.Today, a new generation of (mostly) women scientists is finally redrawing the map. With modern tools and fresh perspectives, they’re looking at the organs traditionally bound up in reproduction—the uterus, ovaries, vagina—and seeing within them a new biology of change and resilience. Through their eyes, journalist Rachel E. Gross takes readers on an anatomical odyssey to the center of this new world—a world where the uterus regrows itself, ovaries pump out fresh eggs, and the clitoris pulses beneath the surface like a shimmering pyramid of nerves. Full of wit and wonder, Vagina Obscura is a celebratory testament to how the landscape of knowledge can be rewritten to better serve everyone.

Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color & Trans People of Color: A Critical Intersection of Gender Violence & State Violence


Incite! Women of Color Against Violence
    It includes fact sheets, ideas for organizing, and sample tools created by other organizations.

The Virgin Chronicles: A Memoir


Marina DelVecchioMarina DelVecchio
    At home, her adoptive mother’s eyes investigate her body for evidence of sexual promiscuity and, despite her protests, she is called a putana—a whore—for her perceived sexual debauchery. At work, meanwhile, she is sexually harassed by male managers who slap her butt, tell her they want Greek for lunch (wink, wink), and fill out recommendation forms about her sexy qualities. A young girl on the cusp of womanhood, she encounters a version of herself as men experience her: hypersexualized and objectified.As if this is not enough, Kathy enters the dating scene in search of love only to find herself fending off young men who want her just for sex. In each relationship, Kathy uncovers her own strength and conviction as she fights for the kind of sex she wants instead of the kind of empty sex boys seem to require of girls. The more demands they make, the more determined she is to hold out for love—even if it means losing a guy or going home single and alone. Raw and empowering, The Virgin Chronicles sends the message that love is worth waiting for and sex is better when it’s paired with self-actualization.

Women Don't Owe You Pretty / Girl Woman Other / Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race


Florence Given
    

Invisible Women / Do it Like a Woman


Caroline Criado Pérez
    Description:- Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you're a woman.Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives. Do it Like a Woman: ... and Change the World Doing anything 'like a woman' used to be an insult. Now, as the women in this book show, it means being brave, speaking out, and taking risks, changing the world one step at a time. Here, campaigner and journalist Caroline Criado-Perez introduces us to a host of pioneers, including a female fighter pilot in Afghanistan; a Chilean revolutionary; the Russian punks who rocked against Putin; and the Iranian journalist who uncovered her hair.

Climate Justice: A Man-Made Problem With a Feminist Solution


Mary Robinson
    

Spare Rib Reader


Marsha Rowe
    

A Woman's Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?


Susan Sontag
    In arguing agains the dangerous and limiting ideals to which women have subjected themselves (and been subjected by men), Sontag brings to bear a brisk analysis of Greek and Christian perspectives, implicating both in their consequences for contemporary women’s obsessive and compulsive efforts to make themselves beautiful. Unlike many contemporary essays, Sontag’s essays lack a strong autobiographical impulse. One might expect such a personal strain in an essay on women’s beauty—it certainly would not be out of place—but Sontag assiduously avoids the personal note. But Sontag is less concerned either with her own experiences of beauty or with past perspectives on beauty in and of themselves. She is far more interested in how the past can help us understand the present, and how past perspectives affect modern women’s fascination with and desire for personal beauty.

Women Who Run With The Wolves / If Women Rose Rooted / Wild Power


Clarissa Pinkola Estés
    Description:- Women Who Run With The Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman In the classic Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells us about the 'wild woman', the wise and ageless presence in the female psyche that gives women their creativity, energy and power. For centuries, the 'wild woman' has been repressed by a male-orientated value system which trivialises women's emotions. Using a combination of time-honoured stories and contemporary casework, Estes reveals that the 'wild woman' in us is innately healthy, passionate and wise. If Women Rose Rooted : A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging A life-changing journey from the wasteland of modern society to a place of nourishment and connection.If Women Rose Rooted has been described as both transformative and essential. Sharon Blackie leads the reader on a quest to find their place in the world, drawing inspiration from the wise and powerful females in native mythology, and guidance from contemporary women who have re-rooted themselves in land and community and taken responsibility for shaping the future. Wild Power: Discover the Magic of Your Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power The menstrual cycle is a vital and vitalizing system in the female body, yet our understanding of and respect for this process is both limited and distorted. Few women really know about the physiology of their cycle, and many do not see it as an integral part of their health and wellbeing, let alone as a potential guide to emotional and spiritual empowerment.

The Bitch Manifesto


Jo Freeman
    

The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others


Donna J. Haraway
    

Women Of India


Vivekananda
    Swamiji also referred to the stature and glory of Indian women on a number of other occasions that are presented in this book.The ideas contained in this book are highly relevant to us today that will enable India to successfully lead the comity of nation once again.

The Red Zone: A Love Story


Chloe CaldwellChloe Caldwell
    Spurred by the intensity and seriousness of her new relationship, she soon realizes that her outbursts of anxiety and rage match her hormonal cycle. Compelled to understand the truth of what's happening to her every month, Chloe documents attitudes toward menstruation among her peers and family, reads Reddit threads about PMS, goes on antidepressants, goes off antidepressants, goes on antidepressants again, attends a conference called Break the Cycle, and learns about premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMDD, which helps her name what she’s been going through. For Chloe, healing isn’t just about finding the right diagnosis or a single cure. It means reflecting on other underlying patterns in her life: her feelings about her queer identity and writing persona in the context of a heterosexual relationship; how her parents’ divorce contributed to her issues with trust; and what it means to be a stepmother. The Red Zone is a funny, intimate, and revelatory memoir for anyone grappling with controversial medical diagnoses and labels of all kinds. It’s about coming to terms with the fact that, along with proper treatment, self-acceptance, self-compassion, and transcending shame are the ultimate keys to relief. It’s also about love: how challenging it can be, how it reveals your weaknesses and wounds, and how, if you allow it, it will push you to grow and change.

Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements


Courtney Desiree Morris
    

The Heroine with 1,001 Faces


Maria Tatar
    Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women’s work—spinning, mending, and weaving—is carried out.Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, Campbell’s archetypical hero has dominated more than the box office.In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their “mischief making” evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard’s wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a “hero’s journey,” but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care.“By turns dazzling and chilling” (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.

Circle of Light: The Autobiography of Kiranjit Ahluwalia


Kiranjit Ahluwalia
    

Out Here: An Anthology of Takatapui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa


Emma Barnes
    We became teenagers in the nineties when New Zealand felt a lot less cool about queerness and gender felt much more rigid. We knew instinctively that hiding was the safest strategy. But how to find your community if you’re hidden? Aotearoa is a land of extraordinary queer writers, many of whom have contributed to our rich literary history. But you wouldn’t know it. Decades of erasure and homophobia have rendered some of our most powerful writing invisible. Out Here will change that. This landmark book brings together and celebrates queer New Zealand writers from across the gender and LGBTQIA+ spectrum with a generous selection of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and much, much more. From established names to electrifying newcomers, the cacophony of voices brought together in Out Here sing out loud and proud, ensuring that future generations of queers are afforded the space to tell their stories and be themselves without fear of retribution or harm.

Such a Pretty Girl


T. Greenwood
    Greenwood explores the often-flickering line between woman and girl in this vividly lyrical drama alternating between an West Village artists community in 1970s New York and present day, as a former child actress is forced to confront the darkest secrets of her youth when a controversial photo taken of her as a preteen on the night of the 1977 blackout ignites a media firestorm.Living peacefully in Vermont, Ryan Flannigan is shocked when a text from her oldest friend alerts her to a devastating news item. A controversial photo of her as a pre-teen has been found in the possession of a wealthy investor recently revealed as a pedophile and a sex trafficker—with an inscription to him from Ryan’s mother on the back. Memories crowd in, providing their own distinctive pictures of her mother Fiona, an aspiring actress, and their move to the West Village in 1976. Amid the city’s gritty kaleidoscope of wealth and poverty, high art, and sleazy strip clubs, Ryan is discovered and thrust into the spotlight as a promising young actress with a woman’s face and a child’s body. Suddenly, the safety and comfort Ryan longs for is replaced by auditions, paparazzi, and the hungry eyes of men of all ages. Forced to reexamine her childhood, Ryan begins to untangle her young fears and her mother’s ambitions, and the role each played in the fraught blackout summer of 1977. Even with her movie career long behind her, Ryan and Fiona are suddenly the object of uncomfortable speculation—and Fiona demands Ryan’s support. To put the past to rest, Ryan will need to face the painful truth of their relationship, and the night when everything changed.

A Young Woman's Survival Guide


Health Initiatives For Youth
    Chapters include: Relationships & Sexuality; Anatomy & Menstruation; STDs, HIV & Hepatitis; Birth Control, Safer Sex & Abortion; Young Women , Pregnancy & Good Health; Nutrition, Sports & Fitness; Abuse & Self-Defense; Alcohol, Drugs & Cigarettes; How To Be Your Own Advocate; and a massive resources guide--this is the real deal. Start dealing with it, and buy it for those who aren't. Now in a new, updated, revised, and expanded second edition.

Labour of Love: Women in the "Second Sexual Revolution"


Thea Cacchioni
    

The Politics of Reproduction


Mary O'Brien
    

Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000


Alice WalkerAlice Walker
    She intimately explores her thoughts and feelings as a woman, a writer, an African-American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world. In an unvarnished and singular voice, she explores an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, defying laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the Women’s Movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, sometimes in equal measure, for her work and her activism; and burying her mother. A powerful blend of Walker’s personal life with political events, this revealing collection offers rare insight into a literary legend.

Bodies on the Line: At the Front Lines of the Fight to Protect Abortion in America


Lauren Rankin
    Clinic escorts— everyday volunteers—are prepared to stand up and protect abortion access, as they have for decades, even in the face of terrorism and violence. They have lived, and sometimes died, to ensure that abortion remains not only accessible but also a basic human right. Clinic escorts have fought the “abortion wars” on the front lines, and it is clinic escorts who will win it, by replacing hostility with humanity. Collecting the stories of these brave volunteers from around the country—including the author’s own—interviews with clinic staff and patients, and research and input from abortion rights experts, Bodies on the Line makes a clear case for the right to an abortion as a fundamental part of human dignity, and the stakes facing us all if it ends. Bodies on the Line is a celebration of the crucial, often unsung heroes of abortion access and an inspiring call to defend this basic health care before it’s too late.

NSFW


Isabel KaplanIsabel Kaplan
    She has landed an entry-level position at a leading TV network that thousands of college grads would kill for. And sure, she has much to learn. The daughter of a prominent feminist attorney, she grew up outside the industry, better versed in gender dynamics than box office hits. But she’s resourceful and hardworking―what could go wrong?At first, the high adrenaline work environment motivates her. Yet as she climbs the ranks, she confronts the reality of creating change from the inside. Her points only get attention when echoed by male colleagues; she hears whispers of abuse and sexual misconduct. Her mother says to keep her head down until she’s the one in charge―a scenario that seems idealistic at best, morally questionable at worst.When her personal and professional lives collide, threatening both the network and her future, she must finally decide what to protect: the career she’s given everything for or the empowered woman she claims to be.

To Deliver Me Of My Dreams


Elizabeth Carlson
    

Sister Girl: Reflections on Tiddaism, Identity and Reconciliation


Jackie Huggins
    These essays, speeches, and interviews combine both the public and the personal in a bold trajectory tracing one Murri woman’s journey towards self-discovery and human understanding. As a widely respected cultural educator and analyst, Huggins offers an Aboriginal view of the history, values, and struggles of Indigenous people. Sister Girl reflects on many important and timely topics, including identity, activism, leadership, and reconciliation. It challenges accepted notions of the appropriateness of mainstream feminism in Aboriginal society and of white historians writing Indigenous history. Jackie Huggins’ words, then and now, offer wisdom, urgency and hope.

Priya's Shakti (Issues) (2 Book Series)


Ram Devineni
    Received the Tribeca Film Institute New Media Fund from the Ford Foundation. An interactive and augmented reality comic book.

In on the Joke: The Original Queens of Standup Comedy


Shawn Levy
    They make headlines, fill arenas, spawn blockbuster movies. But before Amy Schumer slayed, Tiffany Haddish killed, and Ali Wong drew roars, the very idea of a female comedian seemed, to most of America, like a punch line. And it took a special sort of woman--indeed, a parade of them--to break and remake the mold.In on the Joke is the story of a group of unforgettable women who knocked down the doors of stand-up comedy so other women could get a shot. It spans decades, from Moms Mabley's rise in Black vaudeville between the world wars, to the roadhouse ribaldry of Belle Barth and Rusty Warren in the 1950s and '60s, to Elaine May's co-invention of improv comedy, to Joan Rivers's and Phyllis Diller's ferocious ascent to mainstream stardom. These women refused to be defined by type and tradition, facing down indifference, puzzlement, nay-saying, and unvarnished hostility. They were discouraged by agents, managers, audiences, critics, fellow performers--even their families. And yet they persevered against the tired notion that women couldn't be funny, making space not only for themselves, but for the women who followed them.Meticulously researched and irresistibly drawn, Shawn Levy's group portrait forms a new pantheon of comedy excellence. In on the Joke shows how women broke into the boys' club, offered new ideas of womanhood, and had some laughs along the way.

Many Moons 2017: Volume 2. July-December


Modern Woman
    (New, Waxing, Full, Waning, & Dark)This book begins in July and focuses on the last half of the year: July- December.This book contains recipes, spell working suggestions and advice, manifestation musings, Tarot Talk, and self-help and development prompts to aid you in your evolution, healing, and to get your momentum and desires moving and flowing. In this workbook, questions are asked and exercises are suggested to help you with your own self-empowerment. These workbooks imagine a world where witches, women, femmes, and weirdos make their dreams come true, help others and the greater collective in service of their higher self and of spirit.

The Untold Story Of The Iroquois Influence On Early Feminists: Essays By Sally Roesch Wagner


Sally Roesch Wagner