The Guilty Feminist: From Our Noble Goals to Our Worst Hypocrisies


Deborah Frances-White - 2018
    My goals were noble but my concerns were trivial. I desperately wanted to close the pay gap, but I also wanted to look good sitting down naked.From inclusion to the secret autonomy in rom-coms, from effective activism to what poker can tell us about power structures, Deborah explores what it means to be a twenty-first-century feminist, and encourages us to make the world better for everyone.The book also includes exclusive interviews with performers, activists and thinkers - Jessamyn Stanley, Zoe Coombs Marr, Susan Wokoma, Bisha K. Ali, Reubs Walsh, Becca Bunce, Amika George, Mo Mansfied and Leyla Hussein - plus a piece from Hannah Gadsby.

Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions


Gloria Steinem - 1983
    Both male and female readers have acclaimed it as a witty, warm, and life-changing view of the world—"as if women mattered." Steinem's truly personal writing is here, from the humorous exposé "I Was a Playboy Bunny" to the moving tribute to her mother "Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It)" to prescient essays on female genital mutilation and the difference between erotica and pornography. The satirical and hilarious "If Men Could Menstruate" alone is worth the price of admission.This second edition features a new preface by the author and added notes on classic essays.

Civil Disobedience and Other Essays


Henry David Thoreau - 1849
    Contained in this volume are the following essays: Civil Disobedience, Natural History of Massachusetts, A Walk to Wachusett, The Landlord, A Winter Walk, The Succession of Forest Trees, Walking, Autumnal Tints, Wild Apples, Night and Moonlight, Aulus Persius Flaccus, Herald of Freedom, Life Without Principle, Paradise (to be) Regained, A Plea for John Brown, The Last Days of John Brown, After the Death of John Brown, The Service, Slavery in Massachusetts, and Wendell Phillips Before Concord Lyceum.

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind


Siri Hustvedt - 2016
    She is a lover of art, the humanities, and the sciences. She is a novelist and a feminist. Her lively, lucid essays in A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women begin to make some sense of those plural perspectives.Divided into three parts, the first section, “A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women,” investigates the perceptual and gender biases that affect how we judge art, literature, and the world in general. Among the legendary figures considered are Picasso, De Kooning, Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, Susan Sontag, Robert Mapplethorpe, the Guerrilla Girls, and Karl Ove Knausgaard.The second part, “The Delusions of Certainty,” is about the age-old mind/body problem that has haunted Western philosophy since the Greeks. Hustvedt explains the relationship between the mental and the physical realms, showing what lies beyond the argument—desire, belief, and the imagination.The final section, “What Are We? Lectures on the Human Condition,” discusses neurological disorders and the mysteries of hysteria. Drawing on research in sociology, neurobiology, history, genetics, statistics, psychology, and psychiatry, this section also contains a profound and powerful consideration of suicide.There has been much talk about building a beautiful bridge across the chasm that separates the sciences and the humanities. At the moment, we have only a wobbly walkway, but Hustvedt is encouraged by the travelers making their way across it in both directions. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women is an insightful account of the journeys back and forth.

The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World


Michelle Goldberg - 2009
    But as networks of religious fundamentalists, feminists, and bureaucrats struggle to remake sexual and childbearing norms worldwide, the battle to control women's bodies has become a high-stakes enterprise, with the United States often supporting the most reactionary forces. In a work of incisive cultural analysis and deep reporting, Michelle Goldberg shows how the emancipation of women has become the key human rights struggle of the twenty-first century. The Means of Reproduction travels through four continents, examining issues such as abortion, female circumcision, and Asia's missing girls to show how the battle over women's bodies has been globalized and how, too often, the United States has joined sworn enemies such as Iran and Sudan in an axis of repression. Reporting with unique insight from both the rarefied realm of international policy and from individual women's lives, Goldberg elucidates the economic, demographic, and health consequences of women's oppression, which affect more than half the world's population. As The Means of Reproduction reveals, the conflict between self-determination and patriarchal tradition has come to define pressing questions of global development. Empowering women is the key to retarding the progress of AIDS, curbing overpopulation, and helping the third world climb out of poverty, but attempts to improve women's status elicit fierce opposition from conservatives who see women's submission as key to their own national or religious identity. From the anticommunist genesis of America's attempts to stem population growth in poor countries to the current worldwide attack on women's rights as a decadent Western imposition, Goldberg explores the interplay between the great issues of our time and the politics of sex and childbearing. Finally, The Means of Reproduction shows how women, strengthened by a solidarity that transcends borders, are fighting for freedom.

The Moral Foundations of Politics


Ian Shapiro - 2003
    Showing how these political philosophies have all been decisively shaped by the core values of the Enlightenment, he demonstrates that each one contains useful insights that survive their failures as comprehensive doctrines and that should inform our thinking about political legitimacy. Shapiro then turns to the democratic tradition. Exploring the main arguments for and against democracy from Plato's time until our own, he argues that democracy offers the best resources for realizing the Enlightenment's promise and managing its internal tensions. As such, democracy supplies the most attractive available basis for political legitimacy.

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution


Adrienne Rich - 1976
    The experience is her own - as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother - but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed in its many variations on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.One of our most distinguished poets, ADRIENNE RICH was born in Baltimore in 1929. Over the last forty years she has published more than seventeen volumes of poetry and five books of nonfiction prose, including Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations; On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Blood, Bread, and Poetry; and What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. She has received numerous awards, including the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Lambda Book Award, the National Book Award, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives in California.

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape


Susan Brownmiller - 1975
    In lucid, persuasive prose, Brownmiller has created a definitive, devastating work of lasting social importance.Chosen by THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW as One of the Outstanding Books of the Year

Toward a Feminist Theory of the State


Catharine A. MacKinnon - 1989
    Using the debate over Marxism and feminism as a point of departure, MacKinnon develops a theory of gender centered on sexual subordination and applies it to the state. The result is an informed and compelling critique of inequality and a transformative vision of a direction for social change.

Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement


Nadya Okamoto - 2018
    They’re taboo. They’re embarrassing. They’re gross. And due to a crumbling or nonexistent national sex ed program, they are misunderstood. Because of these stigmas, a status quo has been established to exclude people who menstruate from the seat at the decision-making table, creating discriminations like the tampon tax, medicines that favor male biology, and more.Power to the Period aims to explain what menstruation is, shed light on the stigmas and resulting biases, and create a strategy to end the silence and prompt conversation about periods.

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights


Molly Smith - 2018
    You often hear, "There should be a law against it!" Or, perhaps just against the buyers. What do sex workers want? That's not something you hear asked very often. In this accessible manifesto, the strong argument for full decriminalization of sex work is explored through personal experience and looking at laws around the world.In some places, like New York, selling sex is illegal. In others, like Sweden, only buying it is. In some, like the UK and France, it's legal to sell sex and to buy it, but not to run a brothel or solicit a sale. In New Zealand, it's not illegal at all. In What Do Sex Workers Want?, Juno Mac and Molly Smith - both sex workers - explain what each of these laws do in practice to those doing the work. Addressing each model in turn, they show that prohibiting the sex industry actually exacerbates every harm that sex workers are vulnerable to.

The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense


Gad Saad - 2020
    Dr. Gad Saad, the host of the YouTube show THE SAAD TRUTH, exposes the bad ideas—what he calls “idea pathogens”—that are killing common sense and rational debate. Incubated in our universities and spread through the tyranny of political correctness, these ideas are endangering our most basic freedoms—including freedom of thought and speech. The danger is grave, but as Dr. Saad shows, politically correct dogma is riddled with logical fallacies. We have powerful weapons to fight back with—if we have the courage to use them. A provocative guide to defending reason and intellectual freedom and a battle cry for the preservation of our fundamental rights.

Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes


Thomas Cathcart - 2006
    Its Philosophy 101 for everyone who knows not to take all this heavy stuff too seriously. Some of the Big Ideas are Existentialism (what do Hegel and Bette Midler have in common?), Philosophy of Language (how to express what its like being stranded on a desert island with Halle Berry), Feminist Philosophy (why, in the end, a man is always a man), and much more. Finally it all makes sense!

Written in History: Letters that Changed the World


Simon Sebag Montefiore - 2018
    Acclaimed historian Simon Sebag Montefiore selects over one hundred letters from ancient times to the twenty-first century: some are noble and inspiring, some despicable and unsettling; some are exquisite works of literature, others brutal, coarse and frankly outrageous; many are erotic, others heartbreaking. The writers vary from Elizabeth I, Rameses the Great and Leonard Cohen to Emmeline Pankhurst, Mandela, Stalin, Michelangelo, Suleiman the Magnificent and unknown people in extraordinary circumstances - from love letters to calls for liberation, declarations of war to reflections on death. In the colourful, accessible style of a master storyteller, Montefiore shows why these letters are essential reading: how they enlighten our past, enrich the way we live now - and illuminate tomorrow.

Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics


Marjorie J. Spruill - 2017
    The legacy of that rift is still evident today in American politics and social policies.Although much has been written about the role that social issues have played in politics, little attention has been given to the historical impact of women activists on both sides. DIVIDED WE STAND reveals how the battle between feminists and their conservative challengers divided the nation as Democrats continued to support women's rights and Republicans cast themselves as the party of family values. The women's rights movement and the conservative women's movement have irrevocably affected the course of modern American history. We cannot fully understand the present without appreciating the events leading up to Houston and thereafter.