But few people are aware that Nightingale's career began only after years of struggle to free herself from her suffocating Victorian family. In this surprisingly passionate feminist essay (a "brilliant polemic," states Martha Vicinus), Nightingale denounces the lives of idleness she and other women of her class were forced to lead.

    Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary. Split into four sections—"Reading," "Being," "Seeing," and "Feeling"—Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith's unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays-some published here for the first time-on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani. In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers—E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others—have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences—in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond—that have nourished Smith's rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected. Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.

    Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control, from the proliferation of capitalist logistics through governance by credit and management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.

    In Women & Power, she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial. As far back as Homer’s Odyssey, Beard shows, women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life, public speech being defined as inherently male. From Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren (who was told to sit down), Beard draws illuminating parallels between our cultural assumptions about women’s relationship to power—and how powerful women provide a necessary example for all women who must resist being vacuumed into a male template. With personal reflections on her own online experiences with sexism, Beard asks: If women aren’t perceived to be within the structure of power, isn’t it power itself we need to redefine? And how many more centuries should we be expected to wait?

    Well-behaved women seldom make history. Good thing these women are far from well behaved . . .Illustrated in a contemporary animation style, Rejected Princesses turns the ubiquitous "pretty pink princess" stereotype portrayed in movies, and on endless toys, books, and tutus on its head, paying homage instead to an awesome collection of strong, fierce, and yes, sometimes weird, women: warrior queens, soldiers, villains, spies, revolutionaries, and more who refused to behave and meekly accept their place.An entertaining mix of biography, imagery, and humor written in a fresh, young, and riotous voice, this thoroughly researched exploration salutes these awesome women drawn from both historical and fantastical realms, including real life, literature, mythology, and folklore. Each profile features an eye-catching image of both heroic and villainous women in command from across history and around the world, from a princess-cum-pirate in fifth century Denmark, to a rebel preacher in 1630s Boston, to a bloodthirsty Hungarian countess, and a former prostitute who commanded a fleet of more than 70,000 men on China’s seas.

    Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

    It explores the use of art to survive abuse, incest, madness and depression, and the often deep-seated impulse toward self-destruction including cutting, eating disorders, and addiction. Here, some of our most compelling cartoonists, novelists, poets, dancers, playwrights, and burlesque performers traverse the pains and passions that can both motivate and destroy women artists, and mark a path for survival. Taken together, these artful reflections offer an honest and hopeful journey through a woman's silent rage, through the power inherent in struggles with destruction, and the ensuing possibilities of transforming that burning force into the external release of art. With contributions by Nan Goldin, bell hooks, Patricia Smith, Cristy C. Road, Carol Queen, Annie Sprinkle, Elizabeth Stephens, Carolyn Gage, Eileen Myles, Fly, Diane DiMassa, Bonfire Madigan Shive, Inga Muscio, Kate Bornstein, Toni Blackman, Nicole Blackman, Silas Howard, Daphne Gottleib, and Stephanie Howell.

    This anthology charts the history of those debates, bringing together the key, classic essays in feminist film theory. Feminist Film Theory maps the impact of major theoretical developments on this growing field-from structuralism and psychoanalysis in the 1970s, to post-colonial theory, queer theory, and postmodernism in the 1990s.Covering a wide range of topics, including oppressive images, woman as fetishized object of desire, female spectatorship, and the cinematic pleasures of black women and lesbian women, Feminist Film Theory is an indispensable reference for scholars and students in the field.Contributors include Judith Butler, Carol J. Clover, Barbara Creed, Michelle Citron, Mary Ann Doane, Teresa De Lauretis, Jane Gaines, Christine Gledhill, Molly Haskell, bell hooks, Claire Johnston, Annette Kuhn, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, B. Ruby Rich, Kaja Silverman, Sharon Smith, Jackie Stacey, Janet Staiger, Anna Marie Taylor, Valerie Walkerdine, and Linda Williams.

    prisons are routinely subjected to physical, sexual, and mental abuse. While this has been documented in male prisons, women in prison often suffer in relative anonymity. Women Inside addresses this critical social justice issue, empowering incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women to share the stories that have previously been silenced. Among the narrators:•Irma Rodriguez, in prison on drug charges. While in prison in 1990, Irma was diagnosed HIV positive, but after a decade and a half of aggressive and toxic treatment, Irma learned that she never had HIV.•Sheri Dwight, a domestic violence survivor who was sent to prison for attempting to kill her batterer. While in prison, she underwent surgery for abdominal pain and learned more than four years later that she had been sterilized without her consent.

    The American Midwest is a place beyond definition, whose very boundaries are a question. It’s a place of rolling prairies and towering pines, where guns in bars and trucks on blocks are as much a part of the landscape as rivers and lakes and farms. Where girls are girls and boys are boys, where women are mothers and wives, where one is taught to work hard and live between the lines. But what happens when those lines become increasingly unclear? When a girl, like the land that raised her, finds herself neither here nor there?In this intrepid collection of essays, Melissa Faliveno traverses the liminal spaces of her childhood in working-class Wisconsin and the paths she’s traveled since, compelled by questions of girlhood and womanhood, queerness and class, and how the lands of our upbringing both define and complicate us even long after we’ve left. Part personal narrative, part cultural reportage, Tomboyland navigates midwestern traditions, mythologies, landscapes, and lives to explore the intersections of identity and place. From F5 tornadoes and fast-pitch softball to gun culture, strange glacial terrains, kink party potlucks, and the question of motherhood, Faliveno asks curious, honest, and often darkly funny questions about belonging and the body, isolation and community, and what we mean when we use words like woman, family, and home.

    Comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future; all a teenager needs to know in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club, and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action from Top Gun, Die Hard, Beverly Hills Cop, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex in 9 1/2 Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, and Bull Durham; and family fun in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood, and Lean On Me.In Life Moves Pretty Fast, Hadley puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decade’s key players, genres, and tropes. She looks back on a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, where children are always wiser than adults, where science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with giddy excitement. And, she considers how the changes between movies then and movies today say so much about society’s changing expectations of women, young people, and art—and explains why Pretty in Pink should be put on school syllabuses immediately.From how John Hughes discovered Molly Ringwald, to how the friendship between Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi influenced the evolution of comedy, and how Eddie Murphy made America believe that race can be transcended, this is a “highly personal, witty love letter to eighties movies, but also an intellectually vigorous, well-researched take on the changing times of the film industry” (The Guardian).

    From sticking up for yourself, improving body image, deciding whether to have children, finding a mentor, getting dumped, feeling like an imposter, being unattractive, and dealing with gossip, we can learn a lot by reading motivational stories of heroic women who, living in much tougher times through history, took control of their own destinies and made life work for them.Here are Cleopatra’s thoughts on sibling rivalry, Mae West on positive body image, Frida Kahlo on finding your style, Catherine the Great on dealing with gossip, Agatha Christie on getting dumped, Hedy Lamarr on being underestimated—to list only a few—as well as others who address dilemmas including career-planning, female friendship, loneliness, financial management, and political engagement.Featuring whimsical illustrations by L.A.-based artist Bijou Karman, What Would Cleopatra Do? is a distinctive, witty, and gift-worthy tribute to history’s outstanding women.

    But her reputation is founded on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792. This treatise is the first great document of feminism and is now accepted as a core text in western tradition. It is not widely known that the germ of Wollstonecraft's great work came out of an earlier and much shorter vindication A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790), written in the context of the issues raised by the French Revolution. This edition, which follows the model of other Broadview Literary Texts in including a range of materials that help the reader to see the work in the context of its era out of which it emerged, is arranged chronologically, opening with Wollstonecraft's other vindication. It also includes a wide range of other documents in appendices, as well as a comprehensive and authoritative introduction, chronology, and full index.

    She’s Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She’s Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she’s Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She’s haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She’s railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she’s hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available.Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have – and, of course, continue to do so – often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval.In THE MIRROR AND THE PALETTE, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery. This is a dazzlingly original and ambitious book by one of the most well-respected art critics at work today.

    I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink—all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I’m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman of color while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years and commenting on the state of feminism today. The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better.Feel me, see me, hear me, reach me --Peculiar benefits --Typical first year professor --To scratch, claw or grope clumsily or frantically --How to be friends with another woman --Girls, girls, girls --I once was Miss America --Garish, glorious spectacles --Not here to make friends --How we all lose --Reaching for catharsis : getting fat right (or wrong) and Diana Spechler's Skinny --The smooth surfaces of idyll --The careless language of sexual violence --What we hunger for --The illusion of safety/the safety of illusion --The spectacle of broken men --A tale of three coming out stories --Beyond the measure of men --Some jokes are funnier than others --Dear young ladies who love Chris Brown --So much they would let him beat them --Blurred lines, indeed --The trouble with Prince Charming, or, He who trespassed against us --The solace of preparing fried foods and other quaint remembrances from 1960s Mississippi : thoughts on The help --Surviving Django --Beyond the struggle narrative --The morality of Tyler Perry --The last day of a young black man --When less is more --The politics of respectability --When Twitter does what journalism cannot --The alienable rights of women --Holding out for a hero --A tale of two profiles --The racism we all carry --Tragedy, call, compassion, response --Bad feminist : take one --Bad feminist : take two