The Subjection of Women


John Stuart Mill - 1869
    Mill Thought that men simply don't know what women are capable of, because we have never let them try - nobody can not make a statement without evidence. We can't stop women from trying things because they might not be able to do them. An argument based on speculative physiology is just that, speculation..."

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective


Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor - 2012
    In this collection, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.

The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921


Mary E. Jones Parrish - 2021
    Parrish’s daughter, Florence Mary, called the young journalist and teacher to the window. “Mother,” she said, “I see men with guns.”The two eventually fled into the night under a hail of bullets and unwittingly became eyewitnesses to one of the greatest race tragedies in American history.Spurred by word that a young Black man was about to be lynched for stepping on a white woman’s foot, a three-day riot erupted that saw the death of hundreds of Black Oklahomans and the destruction of the Greenwood district, a prosperous, primarily Black area known nationally as Black Wall Street. The murdered were buried in mass graves, thousands were left homeless, and millions of dollars worth of Black-owned property was burned to the ground. The incident, which was hidden from history for decades, is now recognized as one of the worst episodes of racial violence in the United States.

Crushed: An Amazing True Story of Determination and Survival


Kathryn Mann - 2013
    Crushed and left with broken ribs, a punctured lung, and compression fractures in his chest, spine, and pelvis, Bob pushed his arms forward, dug his fingers into the freezing mud and dragged his mostly paralyzed body forward. Saturated to the skin in freezing rain, far from help, and with the night fast approaching, Bob refused to give up.This includes photographs, documentation, and inspirational verses.This amazing true story was featured on the It's a Miracle series hosted by Richard Thomas. It aired on PAX Television as Chain Reaction in 1999.

When We Are Called to Part: Hope and Heartbreak in the Vanishing World of the Kalaupapa Leprosy Settlement


Brooke Jarvis - 2013
    Once it had been a forbidding place of exile, inhabited by thousands of the disease’s victims who had been removed from their families and confined against their will, far away from a society that feared and misunderstood their condition. When Brooke Jarvis came across a posting for a job in Kalaupapa, tending to the needs of the handful of remaining patients, it seemed like an impossibly exotic opportunity for a college student. But what she found there was both more remarkable and more familiar than what she had imagined. When We Are Called to Part is the absorbing, affecting, and often funny story of life in the last years of a rapidly vanishing community. “Even a prison,” she would learn, “eventually becomes a home, becomes something you mourn.”

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story


Nikole Hannah-JonesNikole Hannah-Jones - 2019
    In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story builds on The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project,” which reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This book substantially expands on the original "1619 Project, "weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This legacy can be seen in the way we tell stories, the way we teach our children, and the way we remember. Together, the elements of the book reveal a new origin story for the United States, one that helps explain not only the persistence of anti-Black racism and inequality in American life today, but also the roots of what makes the country unique. The book also features an elaboration of the original project’s Pulitzer Prize–winning lead essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones on how the struggles of Black Americans have expanded democracy for all Americans, as well as two original pieces from Hannah-Jones, one of which makes a case for reparative solutions to this legacy of injustice.

From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies


Molly Haskell - 1974
    It is a valuable contribution not just of film criticism but to a society in which the vital role of women is just beginning to emerge."—Christian Science Monitor"Haskell is interested in women—how they are used in movies, how they use movies, and how the parts they play function as projections and verifications of our myths about women's lot and woman's psyche and even, lately, women's lib."—Jane Kramer, Village Voice"In examining the goddesses worshipped by an entire nation, Molly Haskell reveals a good deal about our national character and our most cherished sexual myths. . . . Concerned with the deeply ingrained belief of women's inferiority, she analyzes movies as a social product as well as a social arbiter, and she effectively demonstrates how women are encouraged to impose limitations on themselves by fashioning those selves after flickering shadows in a darkened auditorium—sexual creatures who possess neither ability nor ambition beyond their bodies. . . . Both as an examination of film and as sociology, From Reverence to Rape is excellent."—Harriet Kriegel, The Nation

Selma, Lord, Selma: Girlhood Memories of the Civil Rights Days


Sheyann Webb - 1980
    Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Selma, Alabama, on January 2, 1965. He came to organize non-violent demonstrations against discriminatory voting laws. Selma, Lord, Selma is their firsthand account of the events from that turbulent winter of 1965--events that changed not only the lives of these two little girls but the lives of all Alabamians and all Americans. From 1975 to 1979, award-winning journalist Frank Sikora conducted interviews with Webb and West, weaving their recollections into this luminous story of fear and courage, struggle and redemption that readers will discover is Selma, Lord, Selma.

90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality


Allison Yarrow - 2018
    However, the iconic women of the 1990s—such as Hillary Clinton, Courtney Love, Roseanne Barr, Marcia Clark, and Anita Hill—earned their places in history not as trailblazers, but as whipping girls of the media. During this decade, American society grew increasingly hostile to women who dared to speak up, challenge power, or defy rigid expectations for female behavior.Deeply researched yet thoroughly engaging, 90s Bitch untangles the complex history of women in the 1990s, exploring how they were maligned by the media, vilified by popular culture, and objectified in the marketplace. In an age where even a presidential nominee can be derided as a “nasty woman,” it’s clear that the epidemic of casting women as bitches persists. To understand why we must take a long, hard look back at the 1990s—a decade in which female empowerment was twisted into bitchification and exploitation.Yarrow’s thoughtful, clear-eyed, and timely examination is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand gender politics and how we might end the “bitch epidemic” for the next generation.

100 Years of Lynchings


Ralph Ginzburg - 1962
    Ginzburg compiles vivid newspaper accounts from 1886 to 1960 to provide insight and understanding of the history of racial violence.

In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics


Victoria F. Nourse - 2008
    Believing that criminality and mental illness were inherited, state legislatures passed laws calling for the sterilization of “habitual criminals” and the “feebleminded.” But in 1936, inmates at Oklahoma’s McAlester prison refused to cooperate; a man named Jack Skinner was the first to come to trial. A colorful and heroic cast of characters—from the inmates themselves to their devoted, self-taught lawyer—would fight the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Only after Americans learned the extent of another large-scale eugenics project—in Nazi Germany—would the inmates triumph.Combining engrossing narrative with sharp legal analysis, Victoria F. Nourse explains the consequences of this landmark decision, still vital today—and reveals the stories of these forgotten men and women who fought for human dignity and the basic right to have a family.

Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild


Deborah Siegel - 2007
    From feminist blogging to the popularity of the WNBA, girl culture is on the rise. A lively and compelling look back at the framing of one of the most contentious social movements of our time, Sisterhood, Interrupted exposes the key issues still at stake, outlining how a twenty-first century feminist can reconcile the personal with the political and combat long-standing inequalities that continue today.

Why Marriage: The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality


George Chauncey - 2004
    Why has marriage suddenly emerged as the most explosive issue in the gay struggle for equality? At times it seems to have come out of nowhere-but in fact it has a history. George Chauncey offers an electrifying analysis of the history of the shifting attitudes of heterosexual Americans toward gay people, from the dramatic growth in acceptance to the many campaigns against gay rights that form the background to today's demand for a constitutional amendment. Chauncey illuminates what's at stake for both sides of this contentious debate in this essential book for gay and straight readers alike.

Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy


Kevin Bales - 1999
    Kevin Bales's disturbing story of contemporary slavery reaches from Pakistan's brick kilns and Thailand's brothels to various multinational corporations. His investigations reveal how the tragic emergence of a "new slavery" is inextricably linked to the global economy. This completely revised edition includes a new preface.All of the author's royalties from this book go to fund antislavery projects around the world.

Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why


Sady Doyle - 2016
     She’s Britney Spears shaving her head, Whitney Houston saying, “crack is whack,” and Amy Winehouse, dying in front of millions. But the trainwreck is also as old (and as meaningful) as feminism itself. From Mary Wollstonecraft—who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—to Charlotte Brontë, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians alike, and when women are pushing harder than ever against the boundaries of what it means to “behave.” Where did these women come from? What are their crimes? And what does it mean for the rest of us? For an age when any form of self-expression can be the one that ends you, Sady Doyle’s book is as fierce and intelligent as it is funny and compassionate—an essential, timely, feminist anatomy of the female trainwreck.