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Please please please no Phyllis Chesler. She wrote about woman's inhumanity to woman because she embodies it in everything she does. She's a hate-filled, racist, paranoid nutbag, who blames the world's failings on the left-wingers she makes up in her head. I can only hope you've never met her or heard her speak in public because it's an experience that will fill you with discomfort like no other.
I disagree with the previous commenter. Regardless of Phyllis Chesler's personality or politics, "Woman's Inhumanity to Woman" is a must-read.
The big thing I see missing is history. Ruth Rosen's "The World Split Open" is my favorite go-to feminist history book, but I also like Estelle Friedman's "No Turning Back."
If you are interested, I have kind of a feminist books primer list on my blog: http://www.noonewatching.com/
arc...nist_canon.html
wasn't the whole "all heterosexual sex is rape" thing actually catherine mackinnon's doing?
angela davis' autobiography, as well as "women, race, and class", which is a great elementary text. "this bridge called my back", and the sequel, "this bridge we call home". "borderlands/la frontera" by gloria anzaldua. bettina aptheker's recent memoir. "zami" by audre lorde. "stone butch blues" by leslie feinberg. "s/he" by minnie bruce pratt. "feminists respond to the men's movement." and i know there's about a billion essays that i had in readers that i've forgotten about now.
I recently finished Whipping Girl by Julia Serrano. It's more about transsexual issues and how that intersects with feminism, but it was fascinating and a really good read.
wasn't the whole "all heterosexual sex is rape" thing actually catherine mackinnon's doing?
Nope.
Does Reviving Ophelia count?
I loved Nickel and Dimed, too, and would probably have reacted like your friend did.
One work I've found particularly useful in making lots of social critique relevant in an everyday kind of way is Frigga Haug and the Women's Memory Collective: Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory. The project they are sharing about took place in the late 80s/early 90s, but the lessons are still quite relevant. For instance, there is a whole chapter on women's legs and how they are made and remade by popular culture, clothing, the law, religious doctrine, etc., across time. The personal memories that are shared show how these acts become part of things like how women sit, walk, or groom themselves. It's all very accessible and yet very meaningful and insightful.
And I can't say enough about Barbara Ehrenreich. For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women is a classic (reprinted and updated in 2005); the Women in the Global Factory is amazing, too. The thing about her work is how well she shows the connection between class and gender oppression.
Gosh golly Barbara Ehrenreich pisses me off--but that's a personal opinion.
Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is not about feminism, but about consciousness and spirituality and it's frequently her voice I hear in my head at contemplative moments.
Fiction by Alice Munro--women who made difficult choices and stood by them.
I'd like to recommend Estelle B. Freedman's The Essential Feminist Reader. It's far from comprehensive, but an excellent starting point for feminism and study. There's also Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World, by Rosalind Miles. It's interesting and (gasp) funny.
Also, what about fiction? Something in the Margaret Atwood/Dorothy Allison ouvre?
Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood by Kristin Luker. It's from 1984, but it's fabulous.
Seconding This Bridge Called My Back.
"wasn't the whole "all heterosexual sex is rape" thing actually catherine mackinnon's doing?
Nope."
huh. my bad. *hoping nobody from UCSC notices and revokes my women's studies degree*
You need some feminist film criticism in there, too. Any feminist film reader with Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema" essay would be great.
And B. Ruby Rich's Chick Flicks is a really good collection of essays.
The Second Sex!
And the trilogy of Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, and For the Time Being.
I think the feminist fiction like Atwood would be a *great* idea! In an intro to Women's Studies I took we had this book called Feminism in Our Time and it was decent- covered things by women of color, but had a pretty American focus.
Thank you for this. Now I have new books to read. My suggestion would be "Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species" by Sara Blaffer Hrdy. Not specifically feminist, but fascinating.
I found Nickel and Dimed to be unlike any experience I or anyone else I know ever had being that poor. I guess it was because she was so removed from family and friends, which made things much harder. I also didn't think she was especially...resourceful, at least compared to the poor people I know and work with.
I love your book reviews!
One of my favorites is Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel by Jean Kilbourne. (Formerly titled Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising)
Last night, as I was falling asleep, I was thinking about how lacking my feminist education is, and wondering what books I could read to rectify that. I was trying to think who I could ask for a reading list. Doubtless I would have come up with your name in time, flea, but now I don't have to. Thank you.
It's been almost twenty years since I read it, but I recall Germaine Greer's 'The Female Eunuch' having a huge impact on me in my youth.
Holy crap. I can just feel my bank account sinking.
I just read "The Story of Jane" which is totally biased but really fascinating...
Damn, someone beat me to Sara Blaffer Hrdy.
If you're looking for feminist fiction, there's always Octavia Butler and Alice Sheldon (who wrote as James Tiptree, Jr. in the 50s). Angela Carter was a fabulour Brit essayist and novelist, very accessible.
And I know she gets villified for some wackiness, but Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth was my real introduction to feminism, and meant a lot to me as a woman shedding her fundie upbringing. I would say the same for Anne Lamott; she's nonthreatening but asks good questions.
Okay, I have my Christmas list now! 
Thanks for some wonderful recommendations!
thanks for including cunt. yeah, she says some stuff that was positively cringeworthy (using only lunarception as a form of birth control), but a lot of great things (just refusing to engage in media that glorifies rape scenes/violence to women).
i'm sure they already have it, but there's eve ensler.
i can't think of her name ... who was the other radical chick who said all the crazy stuff? it started with a v?
I was about to leave you a comment at Books Are Pretty, stating how you'd once again convinced me to purchase a particular book (Susan Faludi's latest), when I find this entry here. Not only do I enjoy your book reviews due to your excellent writing, but I trust them more - I feel safer (or at least my money does!) somehow.
And...thank you for linking to Women & Children First. No, I don't work there, I just don't want to see another independent bookseller (particularly a feminist one) go down the tubes. Thanks again, flea.
Our Bodies, Ourselves!
Something by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Herland, maybe, or The Yellow Wallpaper.
Wait, I'm sorry, "regardless of her politics" we should read Chesler's book? Isn't that the point? Her politics are abhorrent; her logic is worse. She hates every other feminist who doesn't agree with her, which is almost everyone. You don't have to take my word for it. Read her interchange with Katha Pollit over at the Nation.
Please everyone remember this thread is for helpful suggestions. Feminism has a wide range of view points and college students have the right to have access to all of them. People are free to loathe any of the writers on my list, and are certainly free to say so, but please let's limit this to one "Aaagh, not her!" apiece.
We need some more minority writers besides Octavia Butler. As fabulous as she may be, she can't do it all alone. Does anyone have any suggestions for books written by Muslim, Hispanic, Asian, African-American writers? Or books with writers well-versed in politics of disabled women or writers who cover issues regarding weight?
bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress rocked my head. Anyone with an interest in pedagogy should pick that up.
And on the fiction front, The Female Man by Joanna Russ. Her short stories are also excellent.
Simply responding to a response, conversing, and raising what I thought was a pertinent point. Does the politics of people on a list of 'feminists' not matter? Can I recommend Ann Coulter?
How about linking books on your site to Amazon so when we click through and buy them you earn what....3 cents or something. I am personally feeling an Amazon trip coming on.
Concerned Feminist, you have made your point. I would like this to be a thread of helpful suggestions, not an ongoing argument that builds in defensiveness until personal insults begin. Please respect my request.
Karen, I thought about that, but I felt it was more appropriate to link to a feminist bookstore when making feminist book recommendations. Symmetry, symmetry.
Sorry, honestly didn't mean to be obnoxious. Shutting up now.
a recommendation for men:
"perfect girls, starving daughters" by courtney e. martin.
after reading it, i think i can finally understand for the first time the pressures that girls and young women feel to be perfect. the pressures that drive them to become sexualized too early and to stop eating and to work too hard with too little sleep, etc.
not feminist, exactly, but i think it could bring a lot of men around to seeing things from a more feminist point of view.
Ooh, ooh, ooh! Best subject ever! (Can you tell my PhD minor is in feminist studies? =P)
Here's an idiosyncratic list:
3 essentials:
*The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
*Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity by Chandra Mohanty
*Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
Other Good Things:
Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies, for that essential fourteenth century perspective.
S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College by (disclaimer: my friend) Heather Corinna
Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf
States of Injury by Wendy Brown, a great take on identity politics
Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self by Susan Brison, especially good for survivors of sexual assault
Thank you thank you thank you for having all your links (well all but one) to a store/information site *other* than amazon. I always try to support the indie bookstores over the "killer B's".
Guess I got some shopping to do!
Concerned Feminist, I love you.
How about Blood, Bread, and Poetry by Adrianne Rich? I love her essay titled " Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence". For that matter,I love most anything by Adrianne Rich. Good stuff. Great writer, thinker, feminist, poet.
For feminist fiction, definately Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale", set in a modern American dystopia where women's rights are stripped away ala Taliban rule. Sounds heavy-handed, and it is in the Owellian sense, but it's a great read.
camille paglia! that's who i was trying to think of. not saying she's great, but that's who i was trying to think of!! phew. i hate when something's right on the tip of my tongue, and i can't get to it.
sigh.
Oh, yeah, Paglia. There's another nutball. You have to wonder if Madonna has taken out a restraining order yet.
There is a newish third-wave WOC feminist reader that is pretty good, for what it is. I am completely blanking on the title though...
Well, in high school or early college, we read Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir, The Woman Warrior. I remember nothing of it, but the Wikipedia article says the book "explores ethnicity and gender roles." Kingston's Chinese-American. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club also traffics heavily in women's roles, from a fictional standpoint.
For Islam and women, there's Ayaan Hirsi Ali's memoir, Infidel.
Kinda plain vanilla, but The Body Project.
Glad someone mentioned Joanna Russ for fiction- I was struggling to think of her name.
Emma Goldman's _Anarchism and Other Essays_ (esp. the essay on marriage and love).
MacKinnon's _Feminist Theory of the State_
"In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" by Alice Walker; it's a collection of short essays.
A Room of One's Own--Virginia Woolf
Cynthia Heimel--Her essay on diaphragm insertion is a must-read.
Someone did already put down Our Bodies, Ourselves, didn't they?
And thanks for including Natalie Angier.
also: Full Frontel Feminism is a good basic one. A bit fluffy but good.
Fictionwise, The Handmaid's Tale is a bit heavy handed for some, but I loved it. It was sort of my introduction to feminist fiction.
My feminist reading has been mostly in novel form. I like The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. If you search for Red Tent on amazon, about 8 items down is a red tent from the sports & outdoors section!
You mentioned books about weight: Camryn Manheim wrote Wake Up, I'm Fat!, which was entertaining.
I second Angie's suggestion or Adrienne Rich. How about fiction? Colette, Willa Cather. Posters of the Gee's Bend quilts. What a fun thing to think about.
One of my all-time favorite explorations of gender roles is "From Front Porch to Back Seat" by Beth Bailey (it was fun to teach that book, too). Also: "More Work for Mother" by Ruth Schwartz Cohen and "The Second Shift" by Arlie Hochschild. I found all of them really useful in thinking about (or helping students think about) the everyday parts of it all.
Fiction, I'd have to say "The Gate to Women's Country" by Sheri Tepper. A lot of her fiction has a strong feminist bent to it (though some of the fiction is more didactic than I prefer), but "Gate" blew me away. Also: "The Mists of Avalon." The other stuff by Marion Zimmer Bradley did nothing for me, but Mists also blew me away.
Actually: Ruth Schwartz Cowan
Sheri S. Tepper, her science fiction /fantasy especially. I read A Gate to Women's Country first but I do love everything she's written, she's so wonderfully angry. I later found out she was head of a regional planned parenthood based in Colorado for thirty or so years, no wonder she's pissed. I also find her books immensely comforting to read.
here's a list of some awesome books that are in my group's feminist library, in no particular order...
"FatSo?: Because You Don't Have to Apologize for Your Size", Marilyn Wann
"Exile and Pride", Eli Claire- about disability an queerness (in his own words, deconstructing how the labels crip, queer, freak, redneck apply to him)
"Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism" and "Feminism is for Everybody", bell hooks
"My Gender Workbook: How to Become the Kind of Man or Woman You Always Thought You Could Be...or Something Else Entirely", Kate Bornstein- a great and fun intro to thinking outside the gender binary
"Sexing the Body", Anne Fausto Sterling- how science has constructed our idea of two sexes, and what that means for intersex people; very informative but sometimes fun and tongue in cheek.
"Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Thinking Gender)" or anything by Judith Butler- she's really heavy on the theory and quite dense, but has fascinating things to say and a good deal of current feminist literature engages with her ideas (even when if it's critiquing her)
"Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body", Susan Bordo
"Slut! : Growing Up Female With A Bad Reputation", Leora Tanenbaum
"The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order"- from Bust magazine, one of the only good feminist magazines still out there (after Bitch...)
"BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine"- sadly, I haven't been able to read most of this one, but I looove Bitch magazine and the forward is by Margaret Cho! This and The Bust Guide are really fun and easy reads.
"Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture", Carol Queen
"Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity", Chandra Mohanty- I think someone mentioned this, but Mohanty is a great beginning source for transnational/postcolonial feminism
wow, that was a longer list than I planned on. I really like feminist books.
enjoy!
If anyone suggested this already I apologize for the redundancy, but what about Sojourner Truth or a biography of her?
I would recommend Helen Keller or a book on her (The Radical Lives of Helen Keller) but I don't know how much of a feminist she was--more into overall social issues--but a strong example of a person with disabilities who made a dynamic impact.
I really enjoyed Jane Goodall's Reason for Hope.
I guess I'm recommending out of the spectrum of feminist writers since Jane Goodall is more environmental, but as a wildlife biologist who still has to struggle against the good ole' boys club, I appreciate an eloquent, passionate female biologist who was (and continues to be) a real trail-blazer.
I'll throw in Phyllis Wheatley's writings, and a book about Alice Paul and Ethel Smith as well--Two Paths to Equality--since it covers the ERA well.
More at my blog.
A Midwife's Tale. Ulrich shows you and explains to you the cryptic diary of a New England farmhouse wife and midwife. Combines the most gripping bits of "Little House" with historical analysis.
Necessary Dreams by Anna Fels. Points out that the childhood or adolescent desire for fame is often a precursor to a more nuanced ambition, combining the urge to master some domain or skill with the desire for the recognition of one's peers or community. She also notes that women, especially, feel the need to hide that wish for fame instead of developing it into a healthy passion to guide our careers. Just blew my mind in the best way, and massively helped me guide my career development.
"Children of the River" by Linda Crew. A moving YA novel about an Asian immigrant teenage girl and her conflicts with family and a suitor. Helped me a lot when I was a young teen.
Anjana Appachana's "Incantations and Other Stories" are short stories about Indians in India and abroad, stifled by or breaking through class and gender mores. Gave me a new way to see Indian womanhood.
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. The classic lesbian coming-of-age story, messy and sexy and all mixed up with class and race.
The She's Such A Geek anthology. Great mini-memoirs about the intersection of gender politics and a particular field's attractions and annoyances.
Ellen Ullman's work, such as her memoir "Close To The Machine" and her novel "The Bug." Same attraction as above, with reliably deft writing. With "The Bug" it looks like Ullman has the Great American Girl Geek Novel title locked. Excellent, suspenseful, evocative, emotionally accurate.
Bury the Chains, by Adam Hochschild. A really inspiring tale of the British abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Reminds us that social justice battles are winnable. And reminds us about the historical connection between civil rights and women's rights.
In Code: A Mathematical Journey by Sarah Flannery. An Irish girl discovers math with the help of her dad, and makes international headlines with a discovery about cryptography. A nice memoir partly because there's nearly nothing depressing in it.
Alison Bechdel's Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip collections and Fun Home memoir.
An old "Secrets of Loveliness" or similar girl's manual from the fifties or sixties. The reader gapes at what we used to tell girls, and what we still do.
Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher, Ph.D. Puts a name to the pressures American girls face, and does some old-fashioned feminist consciousness-raising. These stories made young women, like me, say "that's me."
You asked for sci-fi by women other than Octavia Butler, so:
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness. Classic feminist/political what-if sci-fi about understanding the other and power structures.
The Phantom of Kansas by John Varley. I read this gender-fluid murder mystery set on a lunar colony when I was twelve and it still stays with me as a musing on sex and identity.
Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan. You can read the first issue for free. The last man on earth tries to figure out why all the men died, and why he's still alive. A Sorkin-esque dystopia.
The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson. What sort of education could transform any girl into a strong, independent woman? That what-if, among others, underlies this scary, funny, infuriating sci-fi novel.
Find some anthology that includes Connie Willis's short story "Even the Queen." Menstruation sci-fi. Hilarious. Nancy Kress is a sci-fi author who thinks about genetic engineering and human relationships. Her main characters are often women. Joanna Russ's sci-fi usually explores gender and power.
Others, such as my husband, tell me to tell you about Lois McMaster Bujold, A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, and Elizabeth Bear's Carnival. I haven't read them yet. Nor have I read the celebrated biography, "James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" by Julie Phillips. A bunch of Sheldon's work is available online for free.
I'm gonna put this on my blog, too.
Ack! You actually asked for stuff by ethnic minorities other than Butler and I misread. Well, here's my review of a book by a Muslim woman about Muslim feminism:
http://www.bookslut.com/
nonficti...5_06_005753.php
Oh, and Diana Abu-Jaber's "Crescent."
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