What's on your feminist/women's studies reading list?
What's on your feminist/women's studies reading list?
Books I have on my TBR pile:
Good and Mad / Rebecca Traister
Women of Ideas, and what men have done to them / Dale Spender
Backlash / Susan Faludi
Who Cooked the Last Supper? / Rosalind Miles
ain't i a woman / bell hooks
The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women's Movement / Susannah Gibson
Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials / Marion Gibson
The Heroine with 1,001 Faces / Maria Tatar
I have read Invisible Women, and it's amazing work.
I also read The Feminine Mystique / Betty Friedan during the pandemic, when my mom and I had a mother-daughter book club for a while.
While limited in scope, I found Friedan's analysis of the lives of middle class American housewives to be very enlightening re: my grandmothers. They were both very troubled women, and exactly of that generation of women that Friedan interviewed and described.
Seeing all these suggestions, I'll just butt in to ask - Clovenhooves book club when?
'While limited in scope' - sorry, you've triggered a personal pet peeve for me.... Apparently when women write books they have to make sure they're writing about every demographic, particularly ones they don't belong to, or they're being too narrow at best and downright bigoted at worst. What, her analysis didn't address the experience of working-class black lesbian women? Well that was poor judgement on her part, she should have done better. Men, meanwhile, can write about whatever they want without being criticised for not writing about something/someone else.
Just reflecting on this more - I'm guessing it's because women are interchangeable, and all pretty much the same - so a woman writing about women would be expected to be writing about all women. Whereas each man is a separate unique special individual, so he can write about his own experience without the expectation that it should be generalisable to all men.
(Feb 22 2025, 12:50 PM)Clover(Feb 22 2025, 4:18 AM)Persephone Seeing all these suggestions, I'll just butt in to ask - Clovenhooves book club when?That would be really fun! We just gotta pick a book. :)
(Feb 22 2025, 12:50 PM)Clover(Feb 22 2025, 4:18 AM)Persephone Seeing all these suggestions, I'll just butt in to ask - Clovenhooves book club when?That would be really fun! We just gotta pick a book. :)
(Feb 22 2025, 11:22 PM)komorebi(Feb 22 2025, 12:50 PM)Clover(Feb 22 2025, 4:18 AM)Persephone Seeing all these suggestions, I'll just butt in to ask - Clovenhooves book club when?That would be really fun! We just gotta pick a book. :)
I'd be willing to do one for Hags, since that's the book I'm in the middle of! I didn't really like the idea of making a new post for every chapter—felt a bit spammy and decentralized—but I also wasn't sure of a good way to organize it. What do you think, Clover?
(Feb 22 2025, 11:22 PM)komorebi(Feb 22 2025, 12:50 PM)Clover(Feb 22 2025, 4:18 AM)Persephone Seeing all these suggestions, I'll just butt in to ask - Clovenhooves book club when?That would be really fun! We just gotta pick a book. :)
I'd be willing to do one for Hags, since that's the book I'm in the middle of! I didn't really like the idea of making a new post for every chapter—felt a bit spammy and decentralized—but I also wasn't sure of a good way to organize it. What do you think, Clover?