Book picks similar to
Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship by Elizabeth MaierGioconda Espina
feminism
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non-fiction
books-about-sexual-abuse
Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
Kristen R. Ghodsee - 2018
The response was tremendous — clearly she articulated something many women had sensed for years: the problem is with capitalism, not with us.Ghodsee, an acclaimed ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies, spent years researching what happened to women in countries that transitioned from state socialism to capitalism. She argues here that unregulated capitalism disproportionately harms women, and that we should learn from the past. By rejecting the bad and salvaging the good, we can adapt some socialist ideas to the 21st century and improve our lives.She tackles all aspects of a woman's life - work, parenting, sex and relationships, citizenship, and leadership. In a chapter called "Women: Like Men, But Cheaper," she talks about women in the workplace, discussing everything from the wage gap to harassment and discrimination. In "What To Expect When You're Expecting Exploitation," she addresses motherhood and how "having it all" is impossible under capitalism.Women are standing up for themselves like never before, from the increase in the number of women running for office to the women's march to the long-overdue public outcry against sexual harassment. Interest in socialism is also on the rise -- whether it's the popularity of Bernie Sanders or the skyrocketing membership numbers of the Democratic Socialists of America. It's become increasingly clear to women that capitalism isn't working for us, and Ghodsee is the informed, lively guide who can show us the way forward.
Gender Failure
Ivan E. Coyote - 2014
Coyote and Rae Spoon are accomplished, award-winning writers, musicians, and performers; they are also both admitted "gender failures." In their first collaborative book, Ivan and Rae explore and expose their failed attempts at fitting into the gender binary, and how ultimately our expectations and assumptions around traditional gender roles fail us all.Based on their acclaimed 2012 live show that toured across the United States and in Europe, Gender Failure is a poignant collection of autobiographical essays, lyrics, and images documenting Ivan and Rae's personal journeys from gender failure to gender enlightenment. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, it's a book that will touch LGBTQ readers and others, revealing, with candor and insight, that gender comes in more than two sizes.Ivan E. Coyote is the author of six story collections and the award-winning novel Bow Grip, and is co-editor of Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. Ivan frequently performs at high schools, universities, and festivals across North America.Rae Spoon is a transgender indie musician whose most recent CD is My Prairie Home, which is also the title of a new National Film Board of Canada documentary about them. Rae's first book, First Spring Grass Fire, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2013.
Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto
Jessa Crispin - 2017
. . or so the feminists keep insisting. But somewhere along the way, the movement for female liberation sacrificed meaning for acceptance, and left us with a banal, polite, ineffectual pose that barely challenges the status quo. In this bracing, fiercely intelligent manifesto, Jessa Crispin demands more.Why I Am Not A Feminist is a radical, fearless call for revolution. It accuses the feminist movement of obliviousness, irrelevance, and cowardice—and demands nothing less than the total dismantling of a system of oppression.
Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice
Jack Holland - 2006
Misogyny encompasses the Church, witch hunts, sexual theory, Nazism, pro-life campaigners, and finally, today's developing world, where women are increasingly and disproportionately at risk because of radicalized religious beliefs, famine, war, and disease. Extensively researched, highly readable and provocative, this book chronicles an ancient, pervasive and enduring injustice. The questions it poses deal with the fundamentals of human existence — sex, love, violence — that have shaped the lives of humans throughout history, and ultimately limn an abuse of human rights on a nearly unthinkable scale.
Is Gender Fluid?
Sally Hines - 2018
But why is it that some people experience dissonance between their biological sex and their personal identity? Is gender something we are, or something we do? Is our expression of gender a product of biology, or does it develop based on our environment? Are the traditional binary male and female gender roles relevant in an increasingly fluid and flexible world? Sally Hines, whose work on transgender issues draws on the intersections and disconnections of gender, sexuality, and their biological embodiment, is an ideally well-informed author to explore these questions. Supplementing this text are numerous illustrations that provide an accessible and informative visual component to the book.This intelligent volume in the Big Idea series considers the relations between gender, psychology, culture, and sexuality, examining the evolution of individual and social attitudes over the centuries and throughout the world.
What We Talk About When We Talk about Rape
Sohaila Abdulali - 2018
Indignant at the silence on the issue in India, she wrote an article for an Indian women’s magazine questioning how we perceive rape and rape victims. Thirty years later her story went viral in the wake of the 2012 fatal gang rape in Delhi and the global outcry that followed. In 2013, Abdulali published an op-ed in the New York Times called “After Being Raped, I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t” that was widely circulated. Now, as the #metoo and #timesup movements blow open the topic of sexual assault and rape, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is a brilliant and entirely original contribution to our understanding.Drawing on her own experience, her research, her work with hundreds of survivors as the head of a rape crisis center in Boston, and three decades of grappling with the issue as a feminist intellectual and writer, Abdulali examines the contemporary discourse about rape and rape culture, questioning our assumptions and asking how we want to raise the next generation. She interviews survivors whose moving personal stories of hard-won strength, humor, and wisdom collectively tell the larger story of how societies may begin to heal.Abdulali also explores what we don’t say. Is rape always a life-defining event? Does rape always symbolize something? Is rape worse than death? Is rape related to desire? Who gets raped? Is rape inevitable? Is one rape worse than another? How does one recover a sense of safety and joy? How do we raise sons? Is a world without rape possible? Both deeply personal and meticulously researched, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is a rallying cry and required reading for us all.
Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life
Bret Lott - 2005
Delving deep into the creative process, Bret Lott reveals truths we scarcely realized we needed to know but without which we as writers will soon lose our way. In ten intimate essays based on his own experiences and on the seasoned wisdom of writers including Eudora Welty, E. B. White, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, and John Gardner, Lott explores such topics as• why write? why keep writing?• the importance of simple words• the finer points of character detail• narrative and the passage of time• the pitfalls of technique• making a plan–and letting it go• risking failure–and reaping the benefits• Accepting rejectionWriters travel alone, but Bret Lott’s book makes the journey less lonely and infinitely more rewarding. Before We Get Started will help you make your work as good as it can be: “Pay attention recklessly. Strain to see through the window of your own artistic consciousness in the exhilarating knowledge that there is no path to the waterfall, and there are a million paths to the waterfall, and there is, too, only one path: yours.”
There Will Be Blood
Maisie Hill - 2019
The blob. Shark week. Whatever you call it, menstruation affects everyone. We all encounter periods to some extent in our lives, so it’s high time we talked about it.There Will Be Blood does just that – it’s a chat show about periods. Whether menstruation is a mystery to you or you’ve come through the menopause, there will be something to learn and plenty to laugh at.Over two episodes, women’s health expert and author of Period Power, Maisie Hill, welcomes guests into the soundproofed safety of Audible’s studio to tackle long unanswered questions, lay myths to rest, and smash loads of taboos along the way.You can expect explanations of vulvas, PMS and period pants; personal stories about period sex and leakage nightmares; and discussion of menstrual education and period poverty.When you add There Will Be Blood to your library, you’ll get two episodes, each with a runtime of about 55 minutes.
Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World
Peggy Orenstein - 2000
Now Orenstein uses the same interviewing and reporting skills to examine the lives of women in their 20s, 30s and 40s. The advances of the women's movement allow women to grow up with a sense of expanded possibilities. Yet traditional expectations have hardly changed. To discover how they are navigating this double burden personally and professionally, Orenstein interviewed hundreds of women and has blended their voices into a compelling narrative that gets deep inside their lives and choices. With unusual sensitivity, Orenstein offers insight and inspiration for every woman who is making important decisions of her own.
Fat Is a Feminist Issue
Susie Orbach - 1978
Reflecting on our increasingly diet and body-obsessed society, Susie Orbach's new introduction explains how generations of women and girls are growing up absorbing the eating anxieties around them. In an age where women want to be sexy, nurturing, domestic goddesses, confident at work, and feminine too, the twenty-first-century woman is poorly armed for survival. Never before has the Fat Is A Feminist Issue revolution been more in need of revival.Exploring our love/hate relationship with food, Susie Orbach describes how fat is about so much more than food. It is a response to our social situation; the way we are seen by others and ourselves. Too often food is a source of anguish, as are our bodies. But Fat Is A Feminist Issue discusses how we can turn food into a friend and find ways to accept ourselves for who and how we are. Following the step-by-step guide, and you too can put an end to food anxieties and dieting.
Tough Plants for Southern Gardens
Felder Rushing - 2003
This is the book for gardeners who want plants they can plant and forget! Tough Plants for Southern Gardens is written for novice and accomplished gardeners alike, for all gardeners who value their leisure time. They also value the appearance of their home and appreciate the benefits of well-placed landscaping…however; they do not want to devote too much time to keeping it beautiful. Tough Plants for Southern Gardens includes 120 of the toughest plants for Southern gardens, including annuals, bulbs, perennials, shrubs and small trees, ornamental vines, and lawns. Each featured plant is noted for its ability to thrive with minimal care. Many of the selections can withstand drought, poor soils, and minimal (or no) pruning, while providing beauty and charm in the home landscape. Each selection provides specific information on the plant's use in the landscape, mature size, flowering characteristics (if applicable), varieties, soil preference, and propagation. Each chapter also contains informative essays covering topics such as: companion planting tips, pest avoidance, and handling invasive plants.
Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East
Isobel Coleman - 2010
Their challenge in the Middle East has been intensified by the rise of a political Islam that too often condemns women’s empowerment as Western cultural imperialism or, worse, anti-Islamic. In Paradise Beneath Her Feet, Isobel Coleman shows how Muslim women and men are fighting back with progressive interpretations of Islam to support women’s rights in a growing movement of Islamic feminism. In this timely book, Coleman journeys through the strategic crescent of the greater Middle East—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—to reveal how activists are working within the tenets of Islam to create economic, political, and educational opportunities for women. Coleman argues that these efforts are critical to bridging the conflict between those championing reform and those seeking to oppress women in the name of religious tradition. Success will bring greater stability and prosperity to the Middle East and stands to transform the region. Coleman highlights a number of Muslim men and women who are among the most influential Islamic feminist thinkers, and brilliantly illuminates the on-the-ground experiences of women who are driving change: Sakena Yacoobi, an Afghan educator, runs more than forty women’s centers across Afghanistan, providing hundreds of thousands of women with literacy and health classes and teaching them about their rights within Islam. Madawi al-Hassoon, a successful businesswoman, is challenging conservative conventions to break new ground for Saudi professional women. Salama al-Khafaji, a devout dentist-turned-politician, relies on moderate interpretations of Islam to promote opportunities for women in Iraq’s religiously charged environment. These quiet revolutionaries are using Islamic feminism to change the terms of religious debate, to fight for women’s rights within Islam instead of against it. There is no mistaking that women and women’s issues are very much on the front lines of a war that is taking place between advocates of innovation, tolerance, and plurality and those who use violence to reject modernity in Muslim communities around the world. Ultimately, Paradise Beneath Her Feet offers a message of hope: Change is happening—and more often than not, it is being led by women.
Big Fat Lies
Kaelin Tuell Poulin - 2017
This book is not for those who want to continue in the energy draining cycle of losing weight only to gain it back again. This book is for those who want the TRUTH. Everything You’ve Been Told about Weight Loss Is A Big Fat Lie! Seriously, it really is. You’ve tried it all haven’t you? Weight-Loss fads, challenges, and every other diet out there—but nothing seems to stick. Finally, someone has the courage to tell you why. Kaelin Tuell Poulin, the woman who lost 65 pounds in 7 months while still eating pizza and ice cream, cuts through the B.S. She debunks the MYTHS and reveals the TRUTHS about losing weight and creating a lasting healthy lifestyle that will TRANSFORM your life. No more weight loss tips from people who haven't lost any weight. On her own personal journey, Kaelin discovered that the reason her and other women had a hard time losing weight and keeping it off was because the weight-loss industry was lying about how to actually get healthy and have long-term success. To help you discover your own incredible story, the founder of the LadyBoss movement now shares her inspiring personal journey from being clinically obese and hopeless to fit and confident. Kaelin’s award-winning achievements in fitness and health , backed by careful research, led her to develop the Lady Boss Formula for weight loss success that tens of thousands of women around the world—housewives, executives, athletes, students, and busy moms—have used to lose weight and keep it off forever. How is your health holding you back? What would life be like if it wasn't? Through this book you will lay the foundation to create YOUR story so it becomes one you love to tell. You deserve the life of your dreams. It's time to start living it. Kaelin will show you the way as you become part of the most powerful community of women on the planet. Are you ready for the truth?
Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults
Laurie Penny - 2017
From the shock of Donald Trump's election and the victories of the far right to online harassment and the transgender rights movement, this darkly humorous collection is an unflinching look at the definitive issues of our age.Penny is lyrical and passionate in her desire to confront injustice; she writes at the raw edge of the zeitgeist at a time when it has never been more vital to challenge social norms. This revelatory, revolutionary collection will give readers hope and tools for change from a bitch who wants to get stuff done.
Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers
Sady Doyle - 2019
Men from Aristotle to Freud have insisted that women are freakish creatures, capable of immense destruction. Maybe they are. And maybe that’s a good thing.... Sady Doyle, hailed as “smart, funny and fearless” by the Boston Globe, takes readers on a tour of the female dark side, from the biblical Lilith to Dracula’s Lucy Westenra, from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park to the teen witches of The Craft. She illuminates the women who have shaped our nightmares: Serial killer Ed Gein’s “domineering” mother Augusta; exorcism casualty Anneliese Michel, starving herself to death to quell her demons; author Mary Shelley, dreaming her dead child back to life. These monsters embody patriarchal fear of women, and illustrate the violence with which men enforce traditionally feminine roles. They also speak to the primal threat of a woman who takes back her power. In a dark and dangerous world, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers asks women to look to monsters for the ferocity we all need to survive. “Some people take a scalpel to the heart of media culture; Sady Doyle brings a bone saw, a melon baller, and a machete.”—Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once