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?

All I mean is, what are the distinctive truths of feminism. I'm not being snippy about literature or about feminism.

It's just that in large measure the body of beliefs we call feminist are evident. And so is the project of deconstructing the cultural products of a masculine culture.

So I want to know what the duistinctive additional truths are that are conveyed in specialist literature. I don't mean the question to be sarky or undermining -- it is just a straight question!

IMO good feminist literature usually:

1. Spells out the assumptions in life that normally go unquestioned

2. Makes you question them

3. Makes you see the world from an alternative perspective

4. Encourages you to apply those new insights and questions to the rest of life/literature as you go forward.

Oh I think I was a feminist from the moment I read Famous Five and met George. I also grew up in a house of boys, and my mother brought me up as a feminist. I definitely didn't discover it through books, but through life.

However there were key books at key points which made me go 'Yes! Yes! That's what I think, yes, oh good, someone has written it down.'

These were probably from an early age to early adulthood: Rebecca, I Hear the Caged Birds Sing, The Handmaids Tale, My Beautiful Career, Colette, lots of Virago classics, all Rosamund Lehman, Flannery O'Connor. I also read The Women's Room, The Golden Notebook (which I didn't understand) Sex and Subterfuge loads of feminist texts.

Robespierre - I think it's not just that you seek an education, you can turn to writers to explain what we might call 'the female experience' and to place it in a context which is helpful and interesting and illuminating. It isn't necessarily a political education, it's to do with imaginative knowledge too. Some of these writers might not even call themselves feminists. Books matter!

"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."

--Well, that comes closest to an answer, but it is still very generic. Historical study ingeneral teaches us that, for example.

So the original edition of Our Bodies Ourselves rather than the 2005 one?

"what are the distinctive truths of feminism."

That is a HUGE question! It's like saying what are the distinctive truths of life.

Feminism is an enormous and broad church - and encompasses many people who wouldn't even call themselves feminists.

I don't think there are any "truths" as such - if anything feminist literature makes you question received "truths" more closely.

jesus, 100x. I'm not saying books don't matter. I'm asking what are the distinctive truths of feminism over and above the ones that are intuitive.

There's no one feminism either though, Robes. Personally, I loathe the Radical Feminism stuff (but it's still useful to be familiar with it ), and there is Liberal Feminism and Marxist Feminism. All very different traditions.

And Black Feminism...any others, anyone?

I don't think that the majority of people consider feminists truths intuitive or evident, unfortunately. Otherwise there would be no need for feminist literature...

Of course you're not being sarky Robes - but what do you mean by 'evident'?

I'm not sure I agree, if we're meaning the same thing by evident.

Though it's quite possible to come to feminism through an entirely unrelated critical education of course. Is that what you mean, that's its simply a matter of (shorthand alert) logic?

but Robespierre it's a question without an answer. You might as well say what are the distinctive truths of literature or history or whatever.

Feminist writers disagree violently all the time. One writer's "truth" is another writer's heresy.

There is no universal answer - except maybe to question all historical and cultural assumptions about gender.

feminist

"It's just that in large measure the body of beliefs we call feminist are evident" - weeellll; didn't they say that Churchill had a genius for recognising the obvious? I think I'm at the stage where, yes, things are evident, but when thinking it through, I'm hard pressed to properly articulate what that means - to me, to dd, to dh, etc - any kind of critical literature will do that job, and thus for me I think feminist literature will help me understand my raw feelings and articulate/refine them further.

I don't expect to agree with all I read, but all the more reason to read it, so that I can begin to understand exactly what I do think.

I meant, feminist lit will help me understand my raw feelings about women, men and society.

Well I don't think I understand the question then. I certainly don't and didn't read to find distinctive truths rather than an intuitive one.

Like OBM said, that is like asking what are the distinctive truths in life. Isn't that what we are all seeking to find out all the time?

Though if you read these books at a tender age - I guess you find written in print what you assumed to be your intuitive truth made distinctive by a women more intelligent and articulate than yourself?

Or not at a tender age then. Any age. HRH is about to do this very thing!

sexual/textual politics
kate millet def
gyn/ecology, yes.
100x list is pretty much identical with my own.

Robespierre, I also think that the moment of discovering that there was A LiteraTure about all this is part of it all - the act of making it a 'subject' (of enquiry) is in itself radicalizing.

But not all the feminist literature is political in terms of being part of a movement. It's not propaganda. It's the literature of experience, and of intuitive truth too, made real and clear by a talented writer. That's why it's important, I would argue.

also, sometimes they may be intuitive "truths", but you may not realise it until someone points it out.

However just because you find a particular truth in a book, it doesn't mean to say it is a universal truth.

I think I found, when reading a lot of feminist texts, they didn't really change my beliefs, they just made me realise that I did believe them (if you see what I mean). But that doesn't make them "truths", just views that I found I subscribed to.

On a surer footing for me - it's analogous to why historical analysis and literary criticism are of value above and beyond records of historical survival and works of literature on their own, surely? Some things will be evident, and others quite surprising.

I suppose what I had thought is that most of the observations that you might make about women's position in society, what is wrong with that postition, how has been generated, how it is maintained, how the injustice is mystified and denied, how it creates and is reinforced by the crap and illusory self-images women have...

Most of the observations are special cases of more general truths about society, power, morality. So I just wondered what the specific elements are in feminist literature, in virtue of which it constitutes a single, distinctive body. And I meant that qu at face value, not as a sarky way of dissing feminist lit.