Shall we make a feminist reading list?

Various ones, a couple mentioned already. But definitely Fat is a Feminist Issue, Susie Orbach.

The Female Eunuch.

(When it first came out. I'm quite old.)

For me it was Anticlimax by Sheila Jeffreys. It made me realise how heterosexual sex was totally for the benefit of men and that is society's unchallenged perception of sex. Before I read it I hadn't questioned the nature of sex relations; my socialised expectations about what that looked like. I thought that what was typical, say between married couples, is just what sex looked like and natural. it never occured to me that if women had been dominant for 3 millenia it could look radically different. My eyes were opened!

The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.

Blew open the lib-fem beauty / sexuality as empowerment thing for me, and made me realise (as a young woman) that a battle I thought was won had just changed.

Ain’t I a Woman by bell hooks. It really opened my eyes not only to black women’s different experiences but to my own unconscious racial bias when thinking about ‘women’.

There will be lots of academic texts recommended here, so I’m going to throw in a fiction book.

Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe.

Evelyn’s transformation from subservient housewife to angry feminist is amazing. The chapter about men’s balls is ace.

It was true. Those two little balls opened the door to everything. They were the credit cards she needed to get ahead, to be listened to, to be taken seriously. No wonder Ed had wanted a boy.

Then another truth occurred to her. Another sad, irrevocable truth: She had no balls and never would or could have balls. She was doomed. Ball-less forever. Unless, she thought, if maybe the balls in your immediate family counted. There were four in hers . . . Ed's and Tommy's . . . No, wait . . . six, if she counted the cat. No, wait just another minute, if Ed loved her so much, why couldn't he give her one of his? A ball transplant . . . . That's right. Or, maybe she could get two from an anonymous donor. That's it, she'd buy some off a dead man and she could put them in a box and take them to important meetings and bang them on the table to get her way. Maybe she'd buy four.

Looking forward to reading other people’s recommendations!

Another autocorrect typo.....

I feel like I should have shares in this book!

I feel like I should have shared in this book as I recommend it so much....

Michelle Goldberg: The Means of Reproduction; Sex, Power & the future of the world

She’s an award winning New York Times journalist and the book is extremely readable. I read it in just a few sittings as found it so engaging.

It is a vast account of women’s reproductive rights spanning the last 50 years, over every continent and documenting warring ideologies from the left and right which both seek to control and use women’s reproductive function for their own ends.

It shows how when women are given control over their bodies and destinies, the whole of society benefits.

I’m not really doing it justice as strapped for time this morning but would say it’s a must read (and a very enjoyable one at that!)

I can't remember now, it was so long ago. I don't think I could point to one book and say 'that was it', as I felt, since a very small child, that the world was unfairly weighted against females. Just from observation.

Schulamith Firestone - The Dialectic of Sex.

Mine isn't strictly a 'feminist' book, but it's the one that came to mind when I read the thread title. It's the autobiography of a strong, brave, flawed-but-human woman in the music industry (i.e. a male dominated industry). I found it inspiring.

It's Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine