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?

Lysistrata

The fairy tales thing gets me too (I've also read my share of theses on the subject! ). They are inherently quite horrid.

But, like the Bible and Shakespeare (ok, maybe not quite like these ), they form a critical part of our cultural currency. How does one introduce one's DD to them, so that she is "literate" in them, without importing all the alarming crap?

What have you all learned from these books?

Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious is also a good read

Lol at your dd x100. What a girl!

Our Bodies Ourselves is one of the ones I haven't read actually...would it be good for me to get dd (12)?

Robespierre: Ways of seeing the world.

Well, obv I'm not going to be reading Germaine Greer to her at bedtime, but nor do I suddenly want to pile all these books into the house as she turns 15 - can't think of much more off-putting! I just want them around, to be part of the furniture, iyswim, and for me to read, so that I can better articulate my feelings over being hot under the feminist collar.

Turns out DH has read quite a lot of feminist history, and is planning a book on queens. So there's another good thing.

Hurray for Sibh's DS!

AnybodyHome yes that was the one that I had and it was v influential

Our Bodies Ourselves - not my mum, but somebody elses. Huge influence, and in fact my only exposure to the sexual female body other than porn (which is I think where this thread was born)

Oh the female war of independence is fantastic 100x. Fantastic. And actually, it's making me really think.

Well, yes, Pen. All litwerature gives us that. But what in particular have you learnt from feminist literature?

From Lysistrata?

The plotline is: women agitate, organise and achieve world peace by withholding sex.

Robespierre, I was wondering the same thing...I have read huge amounts, yet I still come across here as an airhead who loves a good bumsex thread

From a feminist perspective I'm sorry but I don't think any princess story is appropriate without a thorough discussion of the role of inherited wealth and privilege, passing down through the royal line, the importance of marriage for the consoldation of wealth and keeping the aristocractic line, how princesses can't survive without a bevy of low paid and poorly educated servants, and the difficult issues for feminists considering cleaners or other servants in respect of class, gender and power relations. The distinctions between a marxist feminist and liberal feminist positions on this.

So princess smarty-pants and paper bag princess may be better than all the other princess crap around for small girls but still, from a feminist perspective, they need a lot of deconstructing.

See what I mean, it's not hard to find ways to introduce a feminist perspective to your small daughters My dds are used to it.

AnybodyHome (again) yes! It was Princess Smartypants! I am going to amazon Right Now.

Not sure how on-topic this is, but Alison Plowden wrote an absolutely brilliant series of five (non-fiction) books about Elizabth I. Fan-fucking-tastic and highly readable for, say, a teenager.

Well, it's true that literature of all descriptions gives you a way of seeing the world. Sure. But good feminist literature gives you a way of seeing the world which gets behind the way everyone wants you to see the world. Better?

Fennel. I heart you.

Robespierre - mostly these books have shown me alternative ways of looking at the same old same old.

(Literally in the case of Wide Sargasso Sea - it's told through the eyes of Rochester's "mad" wife)

What does any literature offer us, in the end? I'm not sure what answer you want/expect to your question?

Better, yes. But a lot of literature does that, too. What are the specific insights of feminist literature (using lit widely here to mean all or any feminist writing)?

I'm not asking with any 'edge'. I just wonder, because I've read none.

frogs - is that not happening in Kenya atm? Well, not the world peace thing, but the organising, agitating and witholding sex?

I was more of a Marxist feminist back in the day, Fennel...< nostalgic >

Penthesileia - I've found that they will pick up the stories you don't tell them because they are out there. Then you can look interested / stagily surprised about the appropriate bits.

DD1 told DH a story the other day in which she was rescued from a wolf by DH dressed as a woodcutter, so she has picked up Red Riding Hood on her travels.

DS is quite comfortable with the idea that some stories have silly ideas in them. I promised a student of mine once that I would never teach DS 'three blind mice' and I haven't. But he knows it and knows aswell why it is a bit odd.

Oops, got a bit side-tracked there.

Who mentioned Noel Streatfield? I just loved her books.

lol fennel. ds has a special glazed look for that stuff.

sibh that's a lovely story too.

robespierre - to think critically about whether things are 'natural' and 'inevitable' or the product of the power that one group in society wields over another.

really. that really is what I learned aged 13 from all this stuff, and it made my personality in part.

It certainly helped me make sense of upsetting stuff that I was seeing/experiencing.

Ah yes, the generation inspired by Our Bodies Ourselves are all coming out of the woodwork now.

You have to read the original edition and think yourself back to the 1970s (when, please remember, it was legal for your husband to rape you, and medicine bottles said 'the tablets' or 'the mixture' rather than telling you what you were acutally taking) to get any inkling of how radical it actually was. The fact that it talked about sexual pleasure was an astonishing eyeopener, and that it also managed to encompass tenderness and love with some very explicit (even now) information about how bodies worked.

And those of us reading English at university about that time were also exposed to writers like Adrienne Rich and Tillie Olsen's book Silences, which essentially deals with all the books that women haven't written because of the way society is constructed. Which in turn was prefigured by Virginia Woolf in A Room of Ones Own. Which in turn leads towards Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin. And the Greenham Common protests too.

Oh yes, you can have your life changed by reading the right books at the right time, no doubt about it.