Too Pretty to be Good


Lindsay Byron - 2021
    

She: Understanding Feminine Psychology


Robert A. Johnson - 1976
    Johnson explores these questions in this new edition of She, updated to reflect the growth of his thinking on these subjects.Many writers and scholars have long considered that the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche is really the story of a woman's task of becoming whole, complete, and individuated. Here, examining this ancient story in depth and lightening up the details, Johnson has produced an arresting and perceptive exploration of what it means to become a woman. You will not read these pages without understanding the important women in your life and a good deal more about yourself as a woman.

America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation


Elaine Tyler May - 2010
    But as renowned historian Elaine Tyler May reveals in America and the Pill, it was women who embraced it and created change. They used the pill to challenge the authority of doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and lawmakers. They demonstrated that the pill was about much more than family planning—it offered women control over their bodies and their lives. From little-known accounts of the early years to personal testimonies from young women today, May illuminates what the pill did and did not achieve during its half century on the market.

The Seed: Infertility Is a Feminist Issue (Exploded Views)


Alexandra Kimball - 2019
    This book traverses the chilly landscape of miscarriage, and the particular grief that accompanies the longing to make a family. Framed by her own desire for a child, journalist Alexandra Kimball brilliantly reveals the pain and loneliness of infertility, especially as a lifelong feminist. Her experience of online infertility support groups -- where women gather in forums to discuss IVF, surrogacy, and isolation -- leaves her longing for a real life community of women working to break down the stigma of infertility.In the tradition of Eula Biss's On Immunity and Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided, Kimball marries perceptive analysis with deep reportage -- her findings show the lie behind the prevailing, and at times paradoxical, cultural attitudes regarding women's right to actively choose to have children. Braiding together feminist history, memoir, and reporting from the front lines of the battle for reproductive rights and technology, The Seed plants in readers the desire for a world where no woman is made to feel that her biology is her destiny.

50 Things You Need To Know About Periods: Know Your Flow


Claire Baker - 2020
    Society doesn’t celebrate the menstrual cycle. Instead we say it’s ‘that time of the month’ when ‘Aunt Flo is visiting’ and we’ve ‘got the painters in’. But the truth is that it can be bloody hard living in a body that bleeds once a month. Have you ever stuffed a tampon up your sleeve on your way to the office bathroom? Avoided eye contact with the cashier as you paid for your sanitary pads? Felt overwhelmed, exhausted and annoyed by your hormones? Well, you are not alone. It’s time we started speaking up about our menstrual cycles, and now everyone’s friendly neighbourhood period coach, Claire Baker, is here to start the conversation! Taking you through her 50 best pieces of advice, Claire explains the ‘four seasons’ of our menstrual cycle and how they vary hormonally to affect everything from mood, motivation and memory, to energy levels, confidence, focus and stress. You’ll learn how to chart your cycle to identify your unique superpowers in each hormonal phase, the tools you need to work with your body rather than pushing against it, and that you’re not crazy: it’s completely natural to feel different from week-to-week. Join the menstruation conversation and see ‘the curse’ as the superpower it can be! #AdoreYourCycle

The Madams


Zukiswa Wanner - 2007
    She loves her cute son Hintsa, her witty husband Mandla, her comfortably challenging work with the tourism board, and her best friends Nosizwe and Lauren. But she has to admit – its tough being Superwoman in South Africa today. Try being the perfect traditional wife and African mother at home, the perfect promotable black woman at work, and the perfect foil for her Benetton friends one black and Xhosa, one white and English! Thandi admits defeat and decides she needs that great South African bourgeois accessory: a maid. And since she doesnt have the heart to boss about a sister in her own home, she decides it must be a white maid. Marita joining the household seems to disrupt the comfortable space Thandi, Siz and Lauren have settled into. The secrets of the three womens lives are dramatically exposed and they are forced to confront their assumptions about relationships, history and each other.

We Should All Be Feminists: The Desk Diary 2021


NILL - 2020
    ‘We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.’‘Not one day longer.’ This year, with some words of wisdom to inspire you, you will walk tall. Make 2021 your biggest year yet, with this beautifully designed hardback diary filled with some of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s most inspirational quotes.From her award-winning novels like Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, to her stirring calls to arms We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, from her countless magazine covers, her work with Beyoncé and sharing the stage with Michelle Obama, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most defining and stirring voices of our time – a truly modern icon. Now, each day, Adichie will inspire you to stand up and be heard.Start your year off on the right foot and be inspired to be exactly who you want to be in 2021. After all, as Chimamanda says: ‘It’s not your job to be likeable. It’s your job to be yourself.’

Rescued by a Feminist: An Indian tale of equality and other myths


Saloni Chopra - 2020
    If nothing else, at least you’ll find out why society has an upset stomach these days.Raw, relatable, powerful, often times uncomfortable, Rescued By A Feminist will make you question your prejudices and shatter your preconceived notions.“In a parallel universe where Cinderella was an independent and outspoken woman, who neither came home before midnight nor needed a fairy godmother... maybe Prince Charming was Rescued By A Feminist.”

NPR American Chronicles: Women's Equality


National Public Radio - 2012
    Profiles of Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony provide insights into the origins of the movement, while reflections from Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Geraldine Ferraro, and others reveal the passion and dedication required to maintain progress in the continuing struggle for women’s equality. © 2012 HighBridge Audio

Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society


Holly Wardlow - 2006
    Focusing on Huli “passenger women,” (women who accept money for sex) Wayward Women explores the socio-economic factors that push women into the practice of transactional sex, and asks how these transactions might be an expression of resistance, or even revenge. Challenging conventional understandings of “prostitution” and “sex work,” Holly Wardlow contextualizes the actions and intentions of passenger women in a rich analysis of kinship, bridewealth, marriage, and exchange, revealing the ways in which these robust social institutions are transformed by an encompassing capitalist economy. Many passenger women assert that they have been treated “olsem maket” (like market goods) by their husbands and natal kin, and they respond by fleeing home and defiantly appropriating their sexuality for their own purposes. Experiences of rape, violence, and the failure of kin to redress such wrongs figure prominently in their own stories about becoming “wayward.” Drawing on village court cases, hospital records, and women’s own raw, caustic , and darkly funny narratives, Wayward Women provides a riveting portrait of the way modernity engages with gender to produce new and contested subjectivities.

The Joy of Doing Things Badly: A Girl's Guide to Love, Life and Foolish Bravery


Veronica Chambers - 2006
    From belting out off-key renditions of torch songs while washing the dishes to seeing even the most unlikely career opportunity as a chance to spread one’s wings, Chambers shows that a willingness to fall flat on one’s face heightens the joys of everyday life and opens a new, wonderfully liberating perspective on work, motherhood, aging, friendship, failure, and success. With a winning combination of lighthearted anecdotes and heartfelt musings, Chambers encourages readers to follow her example and do the things that tickle their fancies and fire their imaginations—no matter what other people (and that little voice inside) may say. Like Chambers herself, they’ll discover that “what we consider our failures have a surprising ability to charm . . . we are loved for our imperfections—for our funny faces and walks and dances and songs.”

To The Women: words to live by


Donna Ashworth - 2020
    

The Boundaries of Her Body: A Shocking History of Women's Rights in America


Debran Rowland - 2003
    From time immemorial, women were perceived as having the singular mission of bearing and raising children, says Rowland, who documents the consequences of this view: until the late 19th century, women's rights derived from husbands, fathers and sons. It was believed that their biology made women incapable of thinking rationally—hence they could not own property, vote or work as many hours or for as much pay as men. Nor could they have sex not aimed at procreation without social and legal opprobrium. Rowland documents how a legal "zone of privacy" granted men as far back as the 1620s didn't accrue to women until 1965, when the Supreme Court legalized contraception. Drawing on legal and historical sources as well as the Bible, the journals of Meriwether Lewis and Lolita, Rowland covers every imaginable aspect of women's legal lives, up to the present day. This massive and remarkable history is well written in smart yet accessible language and is thus the perfect book for the classroom as well as the family room. (From Publishers Weekly. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The Rape of Nanking


James Yin - 1996
    The Rape of Nanking, or Nanking Massacre, in which at least 369,366 people were slaughtered and 80,000 women were raped by Japanese invasion troops, has become little more than a historical footnote in the West. The horror began on the morning of December 13, 1937, when the Japanese Imperial Army captured Nanking (Nanjing), which was then China's capital. Soldiers went through the streets indiscriminately killing Chinese men, women, and children without apparent provocation or excuse until in places the streets and alleys were littered with the bodies of their victims. Thousands of women were raped by Japanese soldiers; death was frequently the penalty for the slightest resistance by a victim or members of her family. Even large numbers of young girls and old women were raped throughout the city, and many cases of abnormal and sadistic behavior in connection with these rapes were reported. Many women were killed after the act and their bodies mutilated. For the next six weeks, while horrific rape continued, wholesale murder of male civilians was conducted with the apparent sanction of the Japanese high command. Hundreds of thousands of civilians and disarmed ex-soldiers were arrayed in formation, their hands bound behind their backs, and marched outside the city wall where, in groups, they were beheaded, or buried alive, or bayoneted, or raked with machine-gun fire, or doused with gasoline and burned. This book, using more than 400 historical photographs, many of which were taken by Japanese soldiers themselves, is published to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Rape of Nanking, to remind the world of the forgotten holocaust of WWII, and to honor history and answer any attempt to deny or change it.

Walking Out on the Boys


Frances K. Conley - 1998
    Conley, the first female tenured professor of neurosurgery in the country, made headline news when she resigned from Stanford University to protest the medical school's unabashed gender discrimination. In this controversial, forthright memoir, Conley portrays the world of academic medicine in which women are still considered inferior; she also explains why, as a consequence, the research and treatment of women's health problems lag far behind those of men. In assessing why women's careers and psyches are suffering, Conley provides a first-person look into what it is like to be an accomplished woman within this restrictive medical world, offering invaluable advice to patients and future doctors alike.