Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography


Victor Bockris - 1998
    And she did -- with a vengeance. Patti's intensely dramatic style, her sensuality, and her outrageous acts set her apart from other performers of the 1970s. She was an astonishingly bold and powerful artist. In "Patti Smith," Victor Bockris, the much-respected biographer of Lou Reed and Keith Richards, and Roberta Bayley present the first full-length biography of one of the most revered female rock artists of all time -- as well as a fascinating portrait of the frenzied New York scene in which she rocketed to fame. From her roots in New Jersey to her reemergence after the death of her husband in the 1990s, this remarkable biography documents Patti Smith's life within the larger context of the ebullient artistic climate of the 1970s and examines her influence on the generation of women artists who followed. Bockris and Bayley explore Patti's complicated and intriguing relationships with Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Shepard and her friendships with Bob Dylan, John Cale, Lou Reed, and many other avant-garde musicians and artists, placing her at the heart of the New York art scene. But as quickly as she rose to acclaim, she did the unexpected: She dropped out of sight and moved to Detroit to marry and raise a family.Filled with little-known stories and anecdotes about some of rock's most famous names, Bockris and Bayley's stunning profile of this cultural icon confirms what ingrid Sischy wrote in an article in "Interview" magazine: "[Smith] gives us something that music and words are supposed to but, in fact, rarely deliver: the power to transport ourselves."

To The Women: words to live by


Donna Ashworth - 2020
    

Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs


Beth Ann Fennelly - 2017
    Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer, and deeply original observer of life’s challenges and joys.Some pieces are wistful, some wry, and many reveal the humor buried in our everyday interactions. Heating Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments, and awakens us to these moments as they appear in the margins of our lives.

The Female Eunuch


Germaine Greer - 1970
    When Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch" was first published it created a shock wave of recognition in women, one that could be felt around the world. It went on to become an international bestseller, translated into more than twelve languages, and a landmark in the history of the women's movement. Positing that sexual liberation is the key to women's liberation, Greer looks at the inherent and unalterable biological differences between men and women as well as at the profound psychological differences that result from social conditioning. Drawing on history, literature, biology, and popular culture, Greer's searing examination of women's oppression is a vital, passionately argued social commentary that is both an important historical record of where we've been and a shockingly relevant treatise on what still remains to be achieved.

Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey


Lillian Schlissel - 1982
    The frontiersmen have become an integral part of our history and folklore, but the Westering experiences of American women are equally central to an accurate picture of what life was like on the frontier.Through the diaries, letters, and reminiscences of women who participated in this migration, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey gives us primary source material on the lives of these women, who kept campfires burning with buffalo chips and dried weeds, gave birth to and cared for children along primitive and dangerous roads, drove teams of oxen, picked berries, milked cows, and cooked meals in the middle of a wilderness that was a far cry from the homes they had left back east. Still (and often under the disapproving eyes of their husbands) they found time to write brave letters home or to jot a few weary lines at night into the diaries that continue to enthrall us.In her new foreword, Professor Mary Clearman Blew explores the enduring fascination with this subject among both historians and the general public, and places Schlissel’s groundbreaking work into an intriguing historical and cultural context.

The Folded Clock: A Diary


Heidi Julavits - 2015
    Decades later she found her old diaries in a storage bin, and hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she’d since become. Instead, “The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor.”     Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a fortysomething woman, wife, mother, and writer. The dazzling result is The Folded Clock, in which the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self, youth and aging, betrayal and loyalty, friendship and romance, faith and fate, marriage and family, desire and death, gossip and secrets, art and ambition.     The Folded Clock is as playful as it is brilliant, a tour de force by one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters.

Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion


Carol P. Christ - 1979
    Womanspirit RisingThe classic anthology on feminist spirituality -- Now with an update preface in which the editors discuss its initial reception and continuing impact.

The Writing Life


Annie Dillard - 1989
    A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions.

Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine


Michele Lent Hirsch - 2018
    She did.Sophie navigates being the only black scientist in her lab while studying the very disease, HIV, that she hides from her coworkers.For Victoria, coming out as a transgender woman was less difficult than coming out as bipolar.Author Michele Lent Hirsch knew she couldn't be the only woman who's faced serious health issues at a young age, as well as the resulting effects on her career, her relationships, and her sense of self. What she found while researching Invisible was a surprisingly large and overlooked population with important stories to tell.Though young women with serious illness tend to be seen as outliers, young female patients are in fact the primary demographic for many illnesses. They are also one of the most ignored groups in our medical system--a system where young women, especially women of color and trans women, are invisible.And because of expectations about gender and age, young women with health issues must often deal with bias in their careers and personal lives. Not only do they feel pressured to seem perfect and youthful, they also find themselves amid labyrinthine obstacles in a culture that has one narrow idea of womanhood.Lent Hirsch weaves her own harrowing experiences together with stories from other women, perspectives from sociologists on structural inequality, and insights from neuroscientists on misogyny in health research. She shows how health issues and disabilities amplify what women in general already confront: warped beauty standards, workplace sexism, worries about romantic partners, and mistrust of their own bodies. By shining a light on this hidden demographic, Lent Hirsch explores the challenges that all women face.

Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood


Mick LaSalle - 2000
    Then two stars came along: Greta Garbo, who turned the femme fatale into a woman whose capacity for love and sacrifice made all other human emotions seem pale; and Norma Shearer, who succeeded in taking the ingenue to a place she'd never been: the bedroom. In their wake came a deluge of other complicated women-Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, and Mae West, to name a few. Then, in July 1934, the draconian Production Code became the law in Hollywood and these modern women of the screen were banished, not to be seen again until the code was repealed three decades later.A thorough survey and a tribute to these films, Complicated Women reveals how this was the true Golden Age of women's films.

Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love


Yehuda Koren - 2006
    Missing for more than four decades has been a third perspective on the events that brought their marriage to its ill-fated end, the story of another—the other—woman: Hughes' mistress Assia Wevill. Like Plath before her, Assia shared her life with Hughes for seven years, until she took her own life and that of their daughter at the age of forty-two, in a manner that nearly replicated Plath's suicide six years earlier. Drawing on previously unavailable documents and private papers, including Assia's diaries and her intimate correspondence with Hughes, this book shows the vital influence Assia exerted on the poet and his work, and the uneasy life they shared under the long shadow of Plath. A Lover of Unreason is the first-ever full-length biography of Assia Wevill. It casts a keen light, and explores the emergence of a singular twentieth-century woman. Three-times divorcée, career woman, mistress, and single mother, Assia Wevill openly defied the conventions of a censorious pre-feminist Britain and mesmerized men and women alike with her quick-mind and exotic beauty.

The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir


Alice S. Rossi - 1973
    Her introductions to each section are informative and written with nonpolemical grace. -- Doris Grumbach, New RepublicIntroduction : analysis versus action --"Remember the Ladies": Abigail Adams vs. John Adams --Selected letters from the Adams family correspondence --Away from puddings and garments : Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) --On the equality of the sexes / Judith Sargent Murray --Champion of womankind: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) --A vindication of the rights of woman / Mary Wollstonecraft --Woman of Action: Frances Wright (1795-1852) --Education ; Of free enquiry / Frances Wright --The first woman sociologist: Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) --Society in America / Harriet Martineau --The making of a cosmopolitan humanist: Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) --The great lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus women / Margaret fuller --Prestige from the other sex: John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) --The subjection of women / John Stuart Mill. Introduction: social roots of the woman's movement in America --From abolition to sex equity: Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) and Angelina Grimké (1805-1879) --Appeal to the Christian woman of the South / Angelina Grimké --Letters on the equality of the sexes and the condition of women / Sarah Grimké --Letters to Catherine Beecher / Angelina Grimké --The Blackwell Clan --Medicine as a profession for women / Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell --Sex and evolution / Antoinette Brown Blackwell --A feminist friendship: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) --Motherhood / Elizabeth Cady Stanton --Introduction to The Woman's Bible / Elizabeth Cady Stanton --Along the Suffrage Trail --Selections from the History of Woman Suffrage --Seneca Falls convention --Reminiscences of Emily Collins --The Akron Convention --The Newport convention --The Kansas Campaign of 1867 --Political equality for women. Introduction: feminism and class politics --Marriage and property: Friedrich Engles (1820-1895) --The origin of the family / Friedrich Engels --Working-class socialist: August Bebel (1840-1913) --Woman and socialism / August Bebel --Red Emma on women: Emma Goldman (1869-1940) --The tragedy of woman's emancipation / Emma Goldman --the right to one's body: Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) --My fight for birth control : Birth Control- a parent's problem or woman's? / Margaret Sanger --Beware the State: Suzanne LaFollette (b. 1893) --Concerning Women / Suzanne LaFollette --The "Militant Madonna": Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) --Women and Econommics / Charlotte Perkins Gilman --Pioneer on the urban frontier: Jane Addams (1860-1935) --Utilization of women in city Government / Jane Addams --Introduction: Feminism and intellectual complexity. Guineas and locks: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) --A room of one's own / Virginia Woolf --Cultural stretch: Margaret Mead (b.1901) --Sex and temperament / Margaret Mead --A not-so rebellious "other": Simone de Beauvoir (b. 1908) --The second sex / Simone de Beauvoir

The Erotic Silence of the American Wife


Dalma Heyn - 1992
    Something had changed during marriage--they experienced an inexplicable silencing of their inner and sexual selves--and so despite the moral codes against it, they committed adultery. "Dalma Heyn shows us a new reality and a tantalizing hint of the future--and neither women nor marriage will ever be the same."--Gloria Steinem.

13 Ways of Looking at the Novel


Jane Smiley - 2005
    She invites us behind the scenes of novel-writing, sharing her own habits and spilling the secrets of her craft. And she offers priceless advice to aspiring authors. As she works her way through one hundred novels–from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith and Alice Munro–she infects us anew with the passion for reading that is the governing spirit of this gift to book lovers everywhere.

For the Love of Books: Stories of Literary Lives, Banned Books, Author Feuds, Extraordinary Characters, and More


Graham Tarrant - 2019
    A treasure trove of compelling facts, riveting anecdotes, and extraordinary characters, For the Love of Books is a book about books—and the inside stories about the people who write them.Learn how books evolved, what lies behind some of the greatest tales ever told, and who’s really who in the world of fiction.From banned books to famous feuding authors, from literary felons to rejected masterpieces, from tips for aspiring writers to stand-out book lists for readers to catch up on, For the Love of Books is a celebration of the written word and an absolute page-turner for any book lover.Read all about it!