The Geek Feminist Revolution


Kameron Hurley - 2016
    The Geek Feminist Revolution also features several entirely new essays written specifically for this volume.Unapologetically outspoken, Hurley has contributed essays to The Atlantic, Locus, Tor.com, and elsewhere on the rise of women in genre, her passion for science fiction and fantasy, and the diversification of publishing.

Legendary Ladies: 50 Goddesses to Empower and Inspire You


Ann Shen - 2018
    Aphrodite, the Greek goddess whose love overcame mortality. Mazu, the Chinese deity who safely guides travelers home. Lakshmi, the Hindu provider of fortune and prosperity. These powerful deities and many more are celebrated in gorgeous artwork and enlightening essays that explore the feminine divine and encourage readers to empower themselves. Ann Shen's signature watercolors make Legendary Ladies a unique, gift-worthy homage to the mighty women within.

Ask Elizabeth: Real Answers to Everything You Secretly Wanted to Ask About Love, Friends, Your Body... and Life in General


Elizabeth Berkley - 2011
    Ask Elizabeth the book utilizes her accrued wisdom to dispense supportive counsel on topics including, but not limited to, self-esteem, menstruation, peer pressure, adjusting to new situations, and hanging out with boys.

History vs Women: The Defiant Lives that They Don't Want You to Know


Anita Sarkeesian - 2018
    From Mongolian princesses to Chinese pirates, Native American ballerinas to Egyptian scientists, Japanese novelists to British Prime Ministers, History vs Women will reframe the history that you thought you knew.Featuring beautiful full-color illustrations of each woman and a bold graphic design, this standout nonfiction title is the perfect read for teens (or adults!) who want the true stories of phenomenal women from around the world and insight into how their lives and accomplishments impacted both their societies and our own.

Red: The Next Generation of American Writers--Teenage Girls--On What Fires Up Their Lives Today


Amy Goldwasser - 2007
    It's how you conduct your friendships and present yourself to the world. Every day, you're creating a formidable body of personal written work. This generation's unprecedented comfort level with the written word has led to a fearless new American literature. These collected essays, at last, offer a key to understanding the inscrutable teenage girl-one of the most mislabeled and underestimated members of society, argues editor and writer Amy Goldwasser, whose work has appeared in Seventeen, Vogue, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. And while psychologists and other experts have tried to explain the teen girl in recent years, no book since Ophelia Speaks has given her the opportunity to speak for herself-until now. In this eye-opening collection, nearly sixty teenage girls from across the country speak out, writing about everything from post-Katrina New Orleans to Johnny Depp; from learning to rock climb to starting a rock band; from the loneliness of losing a best friend to the loathing or pride they feel about their bodies. Ranging in age from 13 to 19, and hailing from Park Avenue to rural Nevada, Georgia to Hawaii, the girls in RED-whose essays were selected from more than 800 contributions-represent a diverse spectrum of socioeconomic, political, racial, and religious backgrounds, creating a rich portrait of life as a teen girl in America today. Revealing the complicated inner lives, humor, hopes, struggles, thrills, and obsessions of this generation, RED ultimately provides today's teen girl with much-needed community, perspective, and validation-and helps the rest of us to better understand her.

Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence


Rosalind Wiseman - 2002
    Wiseman showed how girls of every background are profoundly influenced by their interactions with one another. Now, Wiseman has revised and updated her groundbreaking book for a new generation of girls and explores:•How girls’ experiences before adolescence impact their teen years, future relationships, and overall success•The different roles girls play in and outside of cliques as Queen Bees, Targets, and Bystanders, and how this defines how they and others are treated•Girls’ power plays–from fake apologies to fights over IM and text messages •Where boys fit into the equation of girl conflicts and how you can help your daughter better hold her own with the opposite sex•Checking your baggage–recognizing how your experiences impact the way you parent, and how to be sanely involved in your daughter’s difficult, yet common social conflictsPacked with insights about technology’s impact on Girl World and enlivened with the experiences of girls, boys, and parents, the book that inspired the hit movie Mean Girls offers concrete strategies to help you empower your daughter to be socially competent and treat herself with dignity.

Me, My Hair, and I: Twenty-seven Women Untangle an Obsession


Elizabeth Benedict - 2015
    Ask a whole bunch of women about their hair, and you could get a history of the world. Surprising, insightful, frequently funny, and always forthright, the essays in Me, My Hair, and I are reflections and revelations about every aspect of women’s lives from family, race, religion, and motherhood to culture, health, politics, and sexuality. They take place in African American kitchens, at Hindu Bengali weddings, and inside Hasidic Jewish homes. The conversation is intimate and global at once. Layered into these reminiscences are tributes to influences throughout history: Jackie Kennedy, Lena Horne, Farrah Fawcett, the Grateful Dead, and Botticelli’s Venus. The long and the short of it is that our hair is our glory—and our nemesis, our history, our self-esteem, our joy, our mortality. Every woman knows that many things in life matter more than hair, but few bring as much pleasure as a really great hairdo.

The Girls' Book Of Glamour: A Guide To Being A Goddess


Sally Jeffrie - 2007
    Be gorgeous. Be glamourous. The tips and tricks in this book will help reveal the goddess inside you. Every girl deserves to live a life of glamour.Provides tips on how to host a spa-style party, how to design a signature perfume, how to stop biting nails, and how to jazz up a boring ponytail. This book also provides tips on how to get out of a limo, how to emphasise eye colour, how to make a bedroom skin-friendly, and how to get super-soft hands and feet while you sleep.

Love Your Body


Jessica Sanders - 2019
    It introduces the language of self-love and self-care to help build resilience, while representing and celebrating diverse bodies, encouraging girls to appreciate their uniqueness. This book was written for every girl, regardless of whether or not they are exhibiting signs of negative body image. All girls deserve to be equipped with the tools to navigate an image-obsessed world.

The Secret Lives of Men and Women: A PostSecret Book


Frank Warren - 2007
    For The Secret Lives of Men and Women, Warren has selected a never-before-seen collection of postcards bearing the explosive confessions and captivating revelations of men and women everywhere. Created using photographs, collages, illustrations, and more, the handmade cards offer a compelling dialogue on some of today’s most provocative topics—from marriage and infidelity, to parenting, office politics, repressed fantasies, and even abortion—daring us to consider how well we really know our friends, family, even ourselves.

I'm Telling the Truth, but I'm Lying: Essays


Bassey Ikpi - 2019
    Four years later, she and her mother joined her father in Stillwater, Oklahoma —a move that would be anxiety ridden for any child, but especially for Bassey. Her early years in America would come to be defined by tension: an assimilation further complicated by bipolar II and anxiety that would go undiagnosed for decades.By the time she was in her early twenties, Bassey was a spoken word artist and traveling with HBO's Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam, channeling her experiences into art. But something wasn’t right—beneath the façade of the confident performer, Bassey’s mental health was in a precipitous decline, culminating in a breakdown that resulted in hospitalization and a diagnosis of Bipolar II.Determined to learn from her experiences—and share them with others—Bassey became a mental health advocate and has spent the fourteen years since her diagnosis examining the ways mental health is inextricably intertwined with every facet of ourselves and our lives. Viscerally raw and honest, the result is an exploration of the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of who we are—and the ways, as honest as we try to be, each of these stories can also be a lie.

A History of the Wife


Marilyn Yalom - 2001
    The work is engaging, filled with interesting anecdotes and stories, and is an incredibly lively read on a thoroughly interesting subject much in need of a closer look. In breadth, the book ranges from biblical times to the present, and in sheer scale it attempts to present a unified series of images of the Western wife over the course of some 2,000 years. In doing so, Professor Yalom has presented us an interesting grid, well conceived and wonderfully written, with which we can begin to examine this cultural phenomenon.One of the main strengths of the work is its method: Yalom draws heavily on diaries, newspapers, journals, and personal letters, and she interweaves these with citations from the laws, general customs of the times, religious rites, and civic procedure. By moving in a very fluid way from the abstract to the particular, what we see emerging, in each era, is a lively picture of how the general affected the individual. The book makes it real, makes us wonder, and helps to recover for us so many of the lost voices of women over the centuries, silenced by the overshadowing "great men" approach to history. These are not so much the stories of "great women" as they are the telling of everyday life. In reading them we get a fuller sense of what the time and place may have been like for the women whose voices we are listening to. It is the dignity of these everyday voices that holds us, intrigues us, and invites us to read further. A History of the Wife links the ancient, the medieval, the Victorian, and the modern, and makes a strong historical and narrative case for its subject.Along the way, we are treated to many interesting insights, observations, and historical facts: Nero was officially married five times -- three times to women, twice to boys; until the Middle Ages, marriages in Catholic Europe often did not involve any ceremony at all, and "church weddings" do not appear on the scene until well into the evolution of Christian Europe. The role of women changes slowly in the West, and the role of religion, from the biblical period through early Christianity to the changes brought by the Reformation and the voyages to the New World, are mapped for us in a sweeping overview.A particularly strong section of the book is the documentation of the last 50 years of the cultural institution of marriage, and the vast changes brought by World War II and the cultural ferment of the '60s. This is made more impressive because of the compelling histories that the work recounts for us in the 2,000 years before our own era.An old adage maintained that "everyone needs a wife"; this lively book tells us who followed that adage, why and how they did so, and how we got to where we are now.

A Velocity of Being: Letters to A Young Reader


Maria Popova - 2018
    On the page facing each letter, an illustration by a celebrated illustrator or graphic artist presents that artist's visual response.Among the diverse contributions are letters from Jane Goodall, Neil Gaiman, Jerome Bruner, Shonda Rhimes, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yo-Yo Ma, Judy Blume, Lena Dunham, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Jacqueline Woodson, as well as a ninety-eight-year-old Holocaust survivor, a pioneering oceanographer, and Italy’s first woman in space. Some of the illustrators, cartoonists, and graphic designers involved are Marianne Dubuc, Sean Qualls, Oliver Jeffers, Maira Kalman, Mo Willems, Isabelle Arsenault, Chris Ware, Liniers, Shaun Tan, Tomi Ungerer, and Art Spiegelman.  This project is woven entirely of goodwill, generosity of spirit, and a shared love of books. Everyone involved has donated their time, and all profits will go to the New York Public Library systems.Preface by David Remnick, editor, The New Yorker; Edited and introduced by Maria Popova, who has been writing since 2006 about what she reads on Brain Pickings (brainpickings.org), which is now included in the Library of Congress archive of culturally valuable materials; Edited by Claudia Bedrick, publisher, editorial and art director of Enchanted Lion Books.

Heroes for My Daughter


Brad Meltzer - 2012
    Heroes for My Daughter is Meltzer’s collection of inspirational, real-life figures for his daughter, and yours, to learn how to lead a powerful, motivated, fulfilling life.

Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity


Emily Matchar - 2013
    A generation of smart, highly educated young people are spending their time knitting, canning jam, baking cupcakes, gardening, and more (and blogging about it, of course), embracing the labor-intensive domestic tasks their mothers and grandmothers eagerly shrugged off. They’re questioning whether regular jobs are truly fulfilling and whether it’s okay to turn away from the ambitions of their parents’ generation.How did this happen? And what does it all mean? In Homeward Bound, acclaimed journalist Emily Matchar takes a long, hard look at both the inspiring appeal and the potential dangers of this trend she calls the New Domesticity, exploring how it could be reshaping the role of women in society and what the consequences may be for all of us.This groundbreaking reporting on the New Domesticity is guaranteed to transform our notions of women in today’s society and add a new layer to the ongoing discussion of whether women can—or should—have it all.