Key feminist texts for me to read and leave lying about the house for dd?

[HRHQueenElizabethII]

Spurred on by musings from another thread: I've read almost no feminist writings, and was one of those women in my early 20s who rejected the term; through not understanding it.

I've been extraordinarily lucky - I've had strong female role models, but find myself more feminist than them, and have married a man who's clearly a "natural" feminist - though he hasn't read the literature either. But so much of what I read and see makes me want to buy some key texts, past and current, so that dd will have access to them as she grows up, and so understand the contexts and conditions which will influence the choices she makes in the future, and those made by people she comes into contact with.

Anyone fancy giving me a reading list?

Yes, I liked The Whole Woman. What question did you ask ol' Germaine then?

HRH, I think you might like Woman: An Intimate Georgraphy by Natalie Angier. It's a sort of pop-sci book about female biology. Lots of stuff about bonobos and the like.

oh elaine morgan is great and her books on evolutionary theory really changed the way i thought about biology

and apologies daftpunk for being, well, insulting to you
i got a bit riled, sorry

PW, it was the time of the launch of TWW, she'd done a lot of press about how women hadn't been liberated but they had just become like men. I asked her how she thinks that manifested itself, i.e. what does it mean to be a woman?

She kind of did a big exhalation of breath and said 'well that's a good question'. Her answer involved saying that we are more nurturing and caring, I can't remember much of it but it ended up with saying that "it's not us that has to change, it's them!" to wild applause.

I still think it's one of my proudest moments .

Naomi Wolfe's Misconceptions talk a lot of sense in relation to childbirth IMO. In a similar vein see The Business of Being Born DVD.
RE Feminist literature: I have read a fair bit including Greer who seems to be a starting point, but nothing very recently. I think views must have changed somewhat in the last 20 years with the changing nature of the world in that period eg technology and work and in some instances a return to more old fashioned approach to feminine roles in recent times.

Wow. This kicked off. Could I just chuck in a bit of Queer Theory to the mix?

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble springs to mind (and, for your sons, Bob Connell on hegemonic masculinity - title escapes me but 'the Men and the Boys' was a later book)

And Arlie Hochschild's analysis of Air Stewards is a brilliant piece of work on contemporary 'emotional labour'.

And you can't beat good old fashioned Anne Oakley's Housewife for a revolutionary text.

Sorry to come over all sociological but, er, it's what I do. Might send a copy of the latter to daftpunk.

Technology, social change and feminism: Cynthia Cockburn, Judy Wacjman ('guess what: female highflyers are oppressed too') and the very very nutty Cyborgologist Donna Haraway ('technology will liberate us from our bodies': a kind of Shulamith Firestone for the 21st century)

Yes, Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter made a huge difference to my ideas.
The later one is more accessible to a wider audience I think.

Well. I haven't read the Female Eunuch, or any other of the various learned feminist texts that have been listed here. I have read a few of the novels - I love Marge Piercy, Sarah Paretsky (and Enid Blyton!) - but I have steered clear of some of the more academic texts.

But you know what? I still believe fervently in equality between men and women. Because that was how I was brought up, and it reflects the opportunities that were offered to me as I grew up.

It never occurred to me during my formative years at school/university that I wouldn't have the same opportunities as my male counterparts.

Sadly, I think daftpunk's posts reflect what I perceive to be a regression as far as feminism is concerned. The rise of lapdancing and the 'normalisation' of strip clubs, (thanks, Peter Stringfellow) has helped, IMO, to reduce women - once again - to eyecandy, as opposed to equal combantants. (For want of a better expression!)

I agree. I do this exercise with my students. They all go 'yeah yeah feminism scheminism'. So we talk about what they'll do when they graduate. Management training. Social Work. Teaching. Law. And we work out the average graduate salary and what they'll be paying on their mortgage, student loan, travel card. And food, bills, credit card repayments.

And then we imagine: bang! Up the duff. And I point out that for most women, childcare is covered out of their salary, not jointly. And they have NO IDEA how much it costs (except for the ones who do have kids who sit laughing into their lecture notes).

And we do the maths and most of them end up in a poverty trap straight away.

This is not to agree with DP by the way, but to point out the work that needs to be done in recognising the realities of many women's lives and what really traps them. The old issues - childcare, reproductive freedom, sexuality, equal pay, division of labour - are all still around.

It seems to me that there is also something important in ensuring that our children (boys and girls) understand just how much has changed in the last few generations, and how different things would have been if they had been born 10, 80, 60 or even 40 years ago. Because it seems to me that a lot of people simply forget what feminism and it's precursors has achieved and focus rather on the stereotypical image. Not that there weren't feminists who hated men, or who said women could do everything men can do and men were redundant, or indeed those that choose to celebrate their equal rights by doing stupid things like getting paralytic with drink or pole dancing. But that is not what the movement was about.

The most powerful thing I read (at university where I was already an advocate for what I saw as individualism) was an account of a someone's suffocating narrow miserable stunted little life, a middle class educated woman, not unlike myself, perhaps 5 or 10 years older and 30 odd years earlier. It certainly highlighted how much I had been taking for granted.

Argh. I think I was well and truly petulant yesterday, so disregard my ranting. Am generally in a bad mood this week.

Sorry, daftpunk. I absolutely don't agree with you, but saying that would really have been sufficient.

Angelene, I too have a signed copy of The Whole Woman! I think I may have been there when you asked your question...

hey QE;....it's all cool from where i'm standing...don't worry about it

enjoyed talking to you.

Lupusina - thankyou, thankyou, thankyou. That is exactly the challenge we face and, I suspect,one that our daughters will face in the future.

HRH - thankyou for starting this thread, I now have many of these books in my shopping basket on Amazon and have been thinking about these issues alot for many personal reasons.

Daftpunk - you get a hard time on alot of threads but you never seem to bear a grudge

lol smallorange...i live by one of my fav feminist books..

life's too fucking short

Iorek - it was a talk in Haverhill in Suffolk. Too wierd if you were!

That would have been quite a coincidence. I saw her at Westminster Central Hall. Good question.

Sorry if I'm repeating thoughts previously posted, but its also about avoiding specific influences. There was a thread recently where a mother was sad about comments her tiny DD had made over Heat or Closer or some such crap. No such poison in this house!

I know LeninGrad, the body "beautiful" is a relatively new obsession (well the level and degree of obsession anyway), so history is no help there - I just think that it is too easy to forget what a fight was had, and therefore to say that today's battles don't matter.

LambethLil (cool nn) I agree, and I avoid all crappy mags (only gardening mags and the Economist here, of and dh's Private Eye) but I think the insidious message that natural is nasty is very very pervasive.