Book picks similar to
Male and Female by Margaret Mead


anthropology
non-fiction
sociology
nonfiction

The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men


Christina Hoff Sommers - 2000
    The author who aroused a storm of debate with Who Stole Feminism? takes sexual politics to a new level in a book that demonstrates how feminist ideals and politically correct practices are putting American boys at risk.

The Feminine Mystique


Betty Friedan - 1963
    Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. This 50th–anniversary edition features an afterword by best-selling author Anna Quindlen as well as a new introduction by Gail Collins.

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature


Donna J. Haraway - 1990
    Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as creatures which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called outstanding, original, and brilliant, by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.)

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution


Shulamith Firestone - 1970
    She goes on to deftly synthesize the work of Freud, Marx, de Beauvoir, and Engels to create a cogent argument for feminist revolution. Identifying women as a caste, she declares that they must seize the means of reproduction for as long as women (and only women) are required to bear and rear children, they will be singled out as inferior. Ultimately she presents feminism as the key radical ideology, the missing link between Marx and Freud, uniting their visions of the political and the personal. In the wake of recent headlines bemoaning women's squandered fertility and the ongoing debate over the appropriate role of genetics in the future of humanity, The Dialectic of Sex is revealed as remarkably relevant to today's society, a testament to Shulamith Firestone's startlingly prescient vision.

Woman: An Intimate Geography


Natalie Angier - 1999
    Angier takes readers on a mesmerizing tour of female anatomy and physiology that explores everything from organs to orgasm, and delves into topics such as exercise, menopause, and the mysterious properties of breast milk.A self-proclaimed "scientific fantasia of womanhood." Woman ultimately challenges widely accepted Darwinian-based gender stereotypes. Angier shows how cultural biases have influenced research in evolutionary psychology (the study of the biological bases of behavior) and consequently led to dubious conclusions about "female nature." such as the idea that women are innately monogamous while men are natural philanderers.But Angier doesn't just point fingers; she offers optimistic alternatives and transcends feminist polemics with an enlightened subversiveness that makes for a joyful, fresh vision of womanhood. Woman is a seminal work that will endure as an essential read for anyone intersted in how biology affects who we are as women, as men, and as human beings.

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.

When God Was a Woman


Merlin Stone - 1976
    Under her, women's roles were far more prominent than in patriarchal Judeo-Christian cultures. Stone describes this ancient system and, with its disintegration, the decline in women's status. Index, maps and illustrations.

The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure


Tristan Taormino - 2012
    This book investigates not only how feminists understand pornography, but also how feminists do porn—that is, direct, act in, produce, and consume one of the world's most lucrative and growing industries. With original contributions by Susie Bright, Candida Royalle, Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, Buck Angel, and more, The Feminist Porn Book updates the debates of the porn wars of the 1980s, which sharply divided the women's movement, and identifies pornography as a form of expression and labor in which women and other minorities produce power and pleasure.Tristan Taormino is an award-winning author, columnist, editor, sex educator, and feminist pornographer. She is the author of seven books including The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and Opening Up. She runs the adult film production company Smart Ass Productions and is an exclusive director for Vivid Entertainment.Celine Parreñas Shimizu is an associate professor of film and performance studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founding editor of Camera Obscura. She is the author of Straitjacket Sexualities and the 2009 Cultural Studies Book Award winning, The Hypersexuality of Race.Mireille Miller-Young is assistant professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her forthcoming book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography (Duke University Press) examines African American women’s sex work in the porn industry.

Sexual Politics


Kate Millett - 1969
    Her work rocked the foundations of the literary canon by castigating time-honored classics for their use of sex to degrade women.

Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future


Jennifer Baumgardner - 2000
    Young women live by feminism's goals, yet feminism itself is undeniably at a crossroads; "girl power" feminists appear to be obsessed with personal empowerment at the expense of politics while political institutions such as Ms. and NOW are so battle weary they've lost their ability to speak to a new generation. In Manifesta, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards show the snags in each feminist hub--from the dissolution of riot grrrls into the likes of the Spice Girls, to older women's hawking of young girls' imperiled self-esteem, to the hyped hatred of feminist thorns like Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf--and prove that these snags have not, in fact, torn feminism asunder. In an intelligent and incendiary argument, Baumgardner and Richards address issues instead of feelings and the political as well as the personal. They describe the seven deadly sins the media commits against feminism, provide keys to accessible and urgent activism, discuss why the ERA is still a relevant and crucial political goal, and spell out what a world with equality would look like. They apply Third Wave confidence to Second Wave consciousness, all the while maintaining that the answer to feminism's problems is still feminism.

The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Updated With a New Epilogue)


Riane Eisler - 1987
    The Chalice and the Blade tells a new story of our cultural origins. It shows that warfare and the war of the sexes are neither divinely nor biologically ordained. It provides verification that a better future is possible—and is in fact firmly rooted in the haunting dramas of what happened in our past.

Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights


Katha Pollitt - 2014
    Wade ruling, "abortion" is still a word that is said with outright hostility by many, despite the fact that one in three American women will have terminated at least one pregnancy by menopause. Even those who support a woman's right to an abortion often qualify their support by saying abortion is a "bad thing," an "agonizing decision," making the medical procedure so remote and radioactive that it takes it out of the world of the everyday, turning an act that is normal and necessary into something shameful and secretive. Meanwhile, with each passing day, the rights upheld by the Supreme Court are being systematically eroded by state laws designed to end abortion outright.In this urgent, controversial book, Katha Pollitt reframes abortion as a common part of a woman's reproductive life, one that should be accepted as a moral right with positive social implications. In Pro, Pollitt takes on the personhood argument, reaffirms the priority of a woman's life and health, and discusses why terminating a pregnancy can be a force for good for women, families, and society. It is time, Pollitt argues, that we reclaim the lives and the rights of women and mothers.

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.

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.

The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980


Elaine Showalter - 1985
    A vital counter-interpretation of madness in women, showing how it is often a consequence of, rather than a deviation from, the traditional female role.