Perimenopause Power: Navigating your hormones on the journey to menopause


Maisie Hill - 2021
    Perimenopause Power is here to change that: finally, this is a book for women experiencing perimenopause and menopause who want to understand what's going on with their bodies and how to deal with troublesome symptoms, but also gain valuable insights into making menopause a positive and powerful experience--yes, it's possible!Perimenopause Power is a handbook that exudes calm positivity and makes sense of complex physiological processes in an easy-to-understand manner, helping women to understand what the hell's going on with them and provide instruction on what can be done to improve their experience of the dreaded "change." Maisie Hill, the celebrated author of Period Power, delves into the science of menopause in an accessible way and provides a whole slew of tips to see women through the challenge of wildly fluctuating hormones. There is a glaring gap in the market for a well-researched, evidence-based book on menopause that empowers women to address their issues and have conversations with loved ones and their doctors.

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History


Florence Williams - 2012
    But in the modern world, the breast is changing. Breasts are getting bigger, arriving earlier, and attracting newfangled chemicals. Increasingly, the odds are stacked against us in the struggle with breast cancer, even among men. What makes breasts so mercurial—and so vulnerable?In this informative and highly entertaining account, intrepid science reporter Florence Williams sets out to uncover the latest scientific findings from the fields of anthropology, biology, and medicine. Her investigation follows the life cycle of the breast from puberty to pregnancy to menopause, taking her from a plastic surgeon’s office where she learns about the importance of cup size in Texas to the laboratory where she discovers the presence of environmental toxins in her own breast milk. The result is a fascinating exploration of where breasts came from, where they have ended up, and what we can do to save them.

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture


Roxane GayLisa Mecham - 2018
    Cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay has edited a collection of essays that explore what it means to live in a world where women are frequently belittled and harassed due to their gender, and offers a call to arms insisting that "not that bad" must no longer be good enough.

The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence


Rachel Simmons - 2009
    Unerringly nice, polite, modest, and selfless, the Good Girl is a paradigm so narrowly defined that it's unachievable. When girls inevitably fail to live up- experiencing conflicts with peers, making mistakes in the classroom or on the playing field-they are paralyzed by self-criticism, stunting the growth of vital skills and habits. Simmons traces the poisonous impact of Good Girl pressure on development and provides a strategy to reverse the tide. At once expository and prescriptive, The Curse of the Good Girl is a call to arms from a new front in female empowerment. Looking to the stories shared by the women and girls who attend her workshops, Simmons shows that Good Girl pressure from parents, teachers, coaches, media, and peers erects a psychological glass ceiling that begins to enforce its confines in girlhood and extends across the female lifespan. The curse of the Good Girl erodes girls' ability to know, express, and manage a complete range of feelings. It expects girls to be selfless, limiting the expression of their needs. It requires modesty, depriving the permission to articulate their strengths and goals. It diminishes assertive body language, quieting voices and weakening handshakes. It touches all areas of girls' lives and follows many into adulthood, limiting their personal and professional potential. Since the popularization of the Ophelia phenomenon, we have lamented the loss of self-esteem in adolescent girls, recognizing that while the doors of opportunity are open to twenty-first-century American girls, many lack the confidence to walk through them. In The Curse of the Good Girl, Simmons provides a catalog of tangible lessons in bolstering the self and silencing the curse of the Good Girl. At the core of Simmons's radical argument is her belief that the most critical freedom we can win for our daughters is the liberty not only to listen to their inner voice but also to act on it. Watch a Video

Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History


Sarah Knott - 2019
    Knott structures the book to mirror the phases of pregnancy and early mothering, and covers everything from miscarriage to late-night feedings, from morning sickness to evolving terminologies. Though her own story is ever-present--we feel the baby on her hip, always at her side--Knott uses her present moment as a means of exploring the past, drawing on techniques from literary nonfiction and feminist maternal theory's embrace of anecdote. She builds a trellis of tiny scenes of mothering, using diaries, letters, reports, court records, conduct guides, clothing, and objects, as well as her own experiences. In so doing, Knott creates an unexpectedly moving and visceral depiction of mothering, past and present, as both a shared and an endlessly various human experience. Mothering, in her hands, is bodily but not merely biological.

Nobody's Mother: Life Without Kids


Lynne Van Luven - 2006
    Nobody's Mother is a collection of stories by women who have already made this choice.From introspective to humorous to rabble-rousing, these are personal stories that are well and honestly told. The writers range in age from early 30s to mid-70s and come from diverse backgrounds. All have thought long and hard about the role of motherhood, their own destinies, what mothering means in our society and what their choice means to them as individuals and as members of their ethnic communities or social groups.Finalist for the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award, 2007 BC Book Prizes

The Hunting Ground: The Inside Story of Sexual Assault on American College Campuses


Kirby Dick - 2015
    The film has sparked calls for legislation by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and other prominent public figures and sparked a backlash from university administrators, fraternities, and conservative groups. Now, in a new companion volume to the film, all those concerned about the “rape culture” on campus will be offered an inside perspective on the controversy, as well as reactions to the film from a range of leading writers and guidance on how to learn more and get active. As in the film, it’s the gripping personal stories told by female students—and the obstinate refusal of college administrators and law enforcement authorities to recognize the severity of the problem—that will rivet readers.

Promiscuities


Naomi Wolf - 1997
    Promiscuities brazenly exposes the truths behind the conflicting messages directed at young women during and after the sexual revolution. Drawing on surprising examples from the ancient and recent past, along with vivid recollections of her own youth, Wolf shows how our "liberated" culture still fears and distorts female passion. She also shares fascinating true stories that illustrate the fantasies and sometimes crippling realities women pass through on their way toward erotic and emotional discovery. A landmark book, Promiscuities is a call to women of all ages to reclaim and celebrate their sexuality.

Iron John: A Book About Men


Robert Bly - 1984
    He addresses the devastating effects of remote fathers and mourns the disappearance of male initiation rites in our culture. Finding rich meaning in ancient stories and legends, Bly uses the Grimm fairy tale "Iron John," in which the narrator, or "Wild Man," guides a young man through eight stages of male growth, to remind us of archetypes long forgotten-images of vigorous masculinity, both protective and emotionally centered.Simultaneously poetic and down-to-earth, combining the grandeur of myth with the practical and often painful lessons of our own histories, Iron John is a rare work that will continue to guide and inspire men-and women-for years to come.

You Don't Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism


Alida Nugent - 2015
    Now, she takes on one of today’s hottest cultural topics: feminism. Nugent is a proud feminist—and she’s not afraid to say it. From the “scarlet F” thrust upon you if you declare yourself a feminist at a party to how to handle judgmental store clerks when you buy Plan B, You Don’t Have to Like Me skewers a range of cultural issues, and confirms Nugent as a star on the rise.

The Daily Question For You and Your Child: A Three Year Spiritual Journal


Waterbrook - 2018
    By answering each of the 365 questions together on the same date each year, readers will get a unique and precious picture into their child's feelings, development, and personality. Some of the questions focus on spirituality and the child's heart, while some are meant to capture their creativity, spirit, and sense of humor. All questions spark conversations and memories that span well beyond the pages of this book.

Famous In Heaven And At Home: A 31-Day Character Study of the Proverbs 31 Woman


Michelle Myers - 2016
    As you develop your roles in your family, you unlock more of His plan. He tasked no one else but you with being your husband’s wife, and He hasn’t given anyone else except you the responsibility of being mother to your children. Spoiler alert – those assignments begin before we even meet our spouse! Famous in heaven and at home. That’s what He has called us to unquestionably. As we dig into Proverbs 31 together, let’s lay down our to-do lists and worldly expectations. Let’s not overlook and undervalue what we can be certain He desires from our lives. Rather than just seeking something worthy to do, let’s passionately pursue who God purposely created us to be.

The Calm Birth School: The Practical Guide For Modern Mamas to Create a Calm, Positive Hypnobirth


Suzy Ashworth - 2016
    The Calm Birth School teaches and supports modern women (and their families) how to create calm and positive birth experiences that make them want to shout from the rooftops for all the right reasons. This comprehensive how-to guide will teach you all you need to know about hypnobirthing without morphing you into a new-age hipster. You’ll learn: The science and psychology behind why you don’t have to give birth in agony. How to work with your body and breath, defying the birthing horror stories you’ve heard and allowing your body to do what it was designed to do. A total mindset overhaul that will not only create a calm, positive birth but which will also empower you in every area of your life.Breathing techniques to enable you to deal with any stressful situation calmly and effectively: before and during birth, and beyond.Exactly what you need to do to enjoy every step of your pregnancy and birth, whether things go according to plan or not.So if you are a control freak; if you’re scared out of your mind about giving birth; if you believe in your body but do not want to waft a joss stick around your lady parts… This book is for you. With lots of juicy bonuses like birth preferences planners, a confidence building Mp3, practice schedule and lots more included you'll have everything you need to create the positive birth experience you deserve. Suzy Ashworth is a pregnancy coach, hypnotherapist and psychotherapist with two children and a growing bump. She has a passion for showing women exactly why they can and should believe in themselves, empowering them to create mind-blowing birth experiences.

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.

Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV


Jennifer L. Pozner - 2009
    In Reality Bites Back, media critic Jennifer L. Pozner aims a critical, analytical lens at a trend most people dismiss as harmless fluff. She deconstructs reality TV’s twisted fairytales to demonstrate that far from being simple “guilty pleasures,” these programs are actually guilty of fomenting gender-war ideology and significantly affecting the intellectual and political development of this generation’s young viewers. She lays out the cultural biases promoted by reality TV about gender, race, class, sexuality, and consumerism, and explores how those biases shape and reflect our cultural perceptions of who we are, what we’re valued for, and what we should view as “our place” in society. Smart and informative, Reality Bites Back arms readers with the tools they need to understand and challenge the stereotypes reality TV reinforces and, ultimately, to demand accountability from the corporations responsible for this contemporary cultural attack on three decades of feminist progress.