Book picks similar to
Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary by Martin Duberman
biography
feminism
non-fiction
nonfiction
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..."
Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement
Tarana Burke - 2021
How could she help these girls if she couldn't even be honest with herself and face her own demons? A fitful night led to pages and pages of scribbled notes with two clear words at the top: Me too.Tarana Burke is the founder and activist behind the largest social movement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the me too movement, but first she had to find the strength to say me too herself. Unbound is the story of how she came to those two words, after a childhood growing up in the Bronx with a loving mother that took a terrible turn when she was sexual assaulted. She became withdrawn and her self split: there was the Tarana that was a good student, model kid, and eager to please young girl, and then there was the Tarana that she hid from everyone else, the one she believed to be bad. The one that would take all the love in her life away if she revealed.Tarana's debut memoir explores how to piece back together our fractured selves. How to not just bring the me too movement back to empathy, but how to empathize with our past selves, with out bad selves, and how to begin to love ourselves unabashedly. Healing starts with empowerment, and to Tarana empowerment starts with empathy. This is her story of finding that for herself, and then spreading it to an entire world.
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy
Barbara Ehrenreich - 2003
But for every female executive racking up frequent flier miles there are multitudes of women whose journeys go unnoticed. Each year, millions leave Mexico, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and other third world countries to work in the homes, nurseries, and brothels of the first world. This broad-scale transfer of labor associated with women's traditional roles results in an odd displacement. In the new global calculus, the female energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones, often to the detriment of the families left behind. The migrant nanny or cleaning woman, nursing-care attendant, maid eases a "care deficit" in rich countries, while her absence creates one back home. Confronting a range of topics, from the fate of Vietnamese mail-order brides to the importation of Mexican nannies in Los Angeles and the selling of Thai girls to Japanese brothels, a diverse and distinguised group of writers offer an unprecedented look at a world shaped by mass migration and economic exchange. Collected and introduced by bestselling authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, these fifteen essays of which only four have been previously published reveal a new era in which the main resource extracted from the third world is no longer gold or silver, but love. Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and The Worst Years of Our Lives, as well as Blood Rites. She lives near Key West, Florida.
Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of national bestsellers The Time Bind and The Second Shift. She live in San Francisco, California.
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
Claire L. Evans - 2018
But they've often been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize.Author Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the internet what it is today. Learn from Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, who wove numbers into the first program for a mechanical computer in 1842. Seek inspiration from Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing by leading the charge for machine-independent programming languages after World War II. Meet Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, who ran one of the first-ever social networks on a shoestring out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s. Evans shows us how these women built and colored the technologies we can't imagine life without.Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention and the longest odds to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs.
Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir
Susie Bright - 2011
It belongs to Susie Bright. In this stunning and courageous coming-of-age story, Susie Bright opens her heart and her life. From fearful Irish Catholic Girl Scout to gun-toting teenage revolutionaryand finally the "The Avatar of American Erotica" (NYTimes)Bright s life story is shaped as much by America s sexual awakening as the national sexual landscape was altered by Bright herself. In Big Sex Little Death, Bright introduces us to her influences and experiences, including her early involvement with notorious high school radicals The Red Tide as well as the magazine she co-founded in the 1980s, On Our Backsthe first-ever erotic magazine created by women, which turned the lesbian and bisexual community upside down before it took the "straight" world by storm. Big Sex Little Death is an explosive yet intimate memoir that s pure Susie: bold, free-spirited, unpredictablelarger than life, yet utterly true to life."
Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger
Lilly DancygerMelissa Febos - 2019
But all rage isn't created equal. Who gets to be angry? (If there's now space for cis white women's anger, what about black women? Trans women?) How do women express their anger? And what will they do with it-individually and collectively? In Burn It Down, a diverse group of women authors explore their rage-from the personal to the systemic, the unacknowledged to the public. One woman describes her rage at her own body when she becomes ill with no explanation. Another writes of the anger she inherits from her father. One Pakistani American writes, "To openly express my anger would be too American," and explains why. Broad-ranging and cathartic, Burn It Down is essential reading for any woman who has burned with rage but questioned if she is entitled to express it.
To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells
Mia Bay - 2009
Wells became a fearless antilynching crusader, women’s rights advocate, and journalist. Wells’s refusal to accept any compromise on racial inequality caused her to be labeled a “dangerous radical” in her day but made her a model for later civil rights activists as well as a powerful witness to the troubled racial politics of her era. In the richly illustrated To Tell the Truth Freely, the historian Mia Bay vividly captures Wells’s legacy and life, from her childhood in Mississippi to her early career in late nineteenth-century Memphis and her later life in Progressive-era Chicago. Wells’s fight for racial and gender justice began in 1883, when she was a young schoolteacher who traveled to her rural schoolhouse by rail. Forcibly ejected from her seat on a train one day on account of her race, Wells immediately sued the railroad. Though she ultimately lost her case on appeal in the Supreme Court of Tennessee, the published account of her legal challenge to Jim Crow changed her life, propelling her into a career as an outspoken journalist and social activist. Also a fierce critic of the racial violence that marked her era, Wells went on to launch a crusade against lynching that took her across the United States and eventually to Britain. Though she helped found the NAACP in 1910 after resettling in Chicago, she would not remain a member for long. Always militant in her quest for racial justice, Wells rejected not only Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism but also the moderating influence of white reformers within the early NAACP. The life of Ida B. Wells and her enduring achievements are dramatically recovered in Mia Bay’s To Tell the Truth Freely.
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.
Broken Horses
Brandi Carlile - 2021
Though imperfect in every way, her dysfunctional childhood was as beautiful as it was strange, and as nurturing as it was difficult. At the age of five, Brandi contracted bacterial meningitis, which almost took her life, leaving an indelible mark on her formative years and altering her journey into young adulthood.As an openly gay teenager, Brandi grappled with the tension between her sexuality and her faith when her pastor publicly refused to baptize her on the day of the ceremony. Shockingly, her small town rallied around Brandi in support and set her on a path to salvation where the rest of the misfits and rejects find it: through twisted, joyful, weird, and wonderful music.In Broken Horses, Brandi Carlile takes listeners through the events of her life that shaped her very raw art - from her start at a local singing competition where she performed Elton John’s “Honky Cat” in a bedazzled white polyester suit, to her first break opening for Dave Matthews Band, to many sleepless tours over 15 years and six studio albums, all while raising two children with her wife, Catherine Shepherd. This hard-won success led her to collaborations with personal heroes like Elton John, Dolly Parton, Mavis Staples, Pearl Jam, Tanya Tucker, and Joni Mitchell, as well as her peers in the supergroup The Highwomen, and ultimately to the Grammy stage, where she converted millions of viewers into instant fans.Evocative and piercingly honest, Broken Horses is at once an examination of faith through the eyes of a person rejected by the church’s basic tenets and a meditation on the moments and lyrics that have shaped the life of a creative mind, a brilliant artist, and a genuine empath on a mission to give back.
Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation
Karla Jay - 1999
In Southern California in the early '70s, she continued in the battle for gay civil rights and helped to organize the takeover of The Ladies' Home Journal and an "ogle-in" — where women staked out Wall Street and whistled at the men.
x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender
Eugenia Cheng - 2020
In x + y, Cheng argues that her mathematical specialty -- category theory -- reveals why. Category theory deals more with context, relationships, and nuanced versions of equality than with intrinsic characteristics. Category theory also emphasizes dimensionality: much as a cube can cast a square or diamond shadow, depending on your perspective, so too do gender politics appear to change with how we examine them. Because society often rewards traits that it associates with males, such as competitiveness, we treat the problems those traits can create as male. But putting competitive women in charge will leave many unjust relationships in place. If we want real change, we need to transform the contexts in which we all exist, and not simply who we think we are.
Roaring Girls: The Forgotten Feminists of British History
Holly Kyte - 2019
But first, they need the opportunity.The recent enthusiasm for reclaiming women’s place in history and celebrating their forgotten lives and overlooked achievements mustn’t be a fad – we cannot allow it to be. These women’s stories deserve to be told, talked about, remembered and learned from until they are household names just like the men of history. Women of the twenty-first century owe our predecessors a debt of gratitude, whether their contribution went unrecorded or made a significant change in the world, and it’s up to us to continue their work. To chip away at the glass ceiling. To redefine what powerful women look like. To refuse to be silenced. To keep roaring.’
The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World
Nawal El Saadawi
This powerful account of brutality against women in the Muslim world remains as shocking today as when it was first published, more than a quarter of a century ago. It was the horrific female genital mutilation that she suffered aged only six, which first awakened Nawal el Saadawi's sense of the violence and injustice which permeated her society. Her experiences working as a doctor in villages around Egypt, witnessing prostitution, honour killings and sexual abuse, inspired her to write in order to give voice to this suffering. She goes on explore the causes of the situation through a discussion of the historical role of Arab women in religion and literature.Saadawi argues that the veil, polygamy and legal inequality are incompatible with the just and peaceful Islam which she envisages.
Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
Rosemary Sullivan - 2015
Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.As she gradually learned about the extent of her father’s brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet and in 1967 shocked the world by defecting to the United States—leaving her two children behind. But although she was never a part of her father’s regime, she could not escape his legacy. Her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Wisconsin.With access to KGB, CIA, and Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana’s daughter, Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana’s incredible life in a masterful account of unprecedented intimacy. Epic in scope, it’s a revolutionary biography of a woman doomed to be a political prisoner of her father’s name. Sullivan explores a complicated character in her broader context without ever losing sight of her powerfully human story, in the process opening a closed, brutal world that continues to fascinate us.Illustrated with photographs.
Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story
Peter Bagge - 2013
In his signature cartoony, rubbery style, Bagge presents the life of the birth-control activist, educator, nurse, mother, and protofeminist from her birth in the late nineteenth century to her death after the invention of the birth control pill. Balancing humor and respect, Bagge makes Sanger whole and human, showing how her flaws fueled her fiery activism just as much as her compassionate nature did. Sanger's life takes on a whole new vivacity as Bagge creates a fast-paced portrait of a trailblazer whose legacy as the founder of Planned Parenthood is still incredibly relevant, important, and inspiring.