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?

just reading back and sniggering at Voltaire's Trinny and Susannah citation.

Ah me, the footnotes, the footnotes.

I think ensuring that your children as they grow read lots of books with great brave interesting girls in them is very important. And not in some knowing post-modern type way (I really hate Princess Smartypants, what a nasty piece of work she was) but in a real way that gives good role models especially in our appearance obsessed world. I have lots of children's books with good female characters, many of which were written in the 70's. Joan Aitkin is excellent for example. We are reading A Wizard of Earthsea at present, which is excellent and thought provoking, but has some real misogyny in it - its not until she wrote a fourth book in the series many many years later that this is addressed, in really quite a feminist manner.

I am interested in some current feminist thinking for my dd in a few years, but I don't think it will be the same stuff that interested me because the things I want her to think very hard about and different from those that I battled with. So more about sexualisation and appearance obsession than power struggles and marital relationships.

I'm not sure I would recommend Wollstonecraft for your dd, assuming she is a teen. She is (or was) a set text at university, but it's all a bit dry and you have to work at the context.

IMO you need to capture a teen's imagination. I'd do that with more immediate texts - someone's already mentioned the Handmaid's Tale, which is just amazing. Also Angela Carter.

Part of the art of capturing the imagination probably is not in reading rattling feminist polemics, but in leaving books around that are susceptible to feminist readings. For instance it is perfectly possible to read Wuthering Heights as a faminist text - and many have - but that particular novel is more than that, I think. You might also try Sylvia Plath - again not a feminist writer but her poems and The Bell Jar can be read in that way.

Our Bodies Ourselves is now all online and interactive and wonderful. You can always email them with health-related questions and they get back to you.

Another votes for Susan Faludi's Backlash.

And Gloria Steinem's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.

This was asked lower down the thread:

"What is the best one SHORT brilliant inspiring piece of lit crit in the English language?"

For me it was The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy. G Wilson Knight

You have to love Shakespearean tragedy though. It's not about devising clever theories. Lots of people do that in a kind of abstract way. I used to be terribly earnest about the terms and the differences in theoretical approaches - you know - structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction .... But Wilson Knight brought me back down to earth and rooted me into the texts with new insights in 400 year old plays. He just sparkles.

Dale Spender:
Man Made Language (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980)
Women of ideas and what men have done to them: From Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich
Reflecting Men at Twice Their Natural Size.

As Nooka says, I imagine that our daughters will be drawn to slightly different issues. I could relate to a lot of the 70s feminist writing as I could see examples of women pandering to men and being constrained by their marriages all around. But I don't think my daughters are seeing that, not in our house anyway. So they may not get so gripped by many of these books, it might take longer for them to work out why feminism is still important. Things that we might know about like the gender pay gap and the continuation of rape around the world and the incidence of domestic violence aren't necessarily going to be obvious to a teenager brought up in a feminist household.

That's a very good point, and I'm sure there is a lot of truth in it. But on the other hand the great novels written by nineteenth-century women continue to speak to us, because we can see something timeless in their condition, even thruogh all the details specific to a period.

Can I just jump in to recommend 'There's More to Life than Mr Right' - a 90's collection of short stories with feminist themes - the title is fairly self explanatory. Aimed at teenagers, probably a good counterpoint to Twilight and it's ilk.

One of the things that made me feminist was the 'Wimmin' column in Private Eye where they used to quote bits of so-called 'loony feminist nonsense.' A lot of the stuff they were taking the piss out of used to sound quite sensible to me so I would seek out the books and magazines they quoted and read them
They published a book of it; have been trying to find it online so the OP could use it as a reading list, but no luck so far.
Great thread though.

The Daughters of Egalia was one v funny & consciousness-raising novel I found thanks to the dinosaurs at Private Eye.

I would second Angela Carter. Especially Nights at the Circus.

And Fay Weldon. Her books may be packaged up like the most dire sort of chick lit, but it's just not true. She is particularly brilliant at illustrating the ways in which women act against their own interests in pursuit of the "happily ever after" myth.

There's a good book about fairy tales by Marina Warner called "From the Beast to the Blonde" too.

ditto dittany (lol) - i heart twisty.

not for beginners though...

I also think 'Femmale Chauvinist Pigs' would be totally readable to a teenager with no previous feminist reading. And empowering.

at kathy using 'wimmin' as a reading list.

if it helps, i've got 'big black penis' on the top shelf, as dh says it has to be above the 9yo's eyeline...

on that sort of note, alongside 'backlash' is 'stiffed' lol.

always important to see how the other half lives etc.

A Woman In Your Own Right really changed my life when I was 16. It looks like just an assertiveness handbook which it sort of is, but it's also just about being a woman and accepting yourself and finding a path between being a doormat and being aggressive.

I genuinely think I would be a different person if I hadn't read it then - it sounds schmaltzy but to say it "set me free" wouldn't be an exaggeration.

On a practical level, something like "The Cinderella Complex" is good for making girls/women think about taking responsibility for their careers/pensions/financial matters.

I got awakened as a feminist by reading the books my mum's reading group were reading. They aren't all necessarily explicitly feminist, but they certainly provoked me to think politically about what it is to be a woman:

Any Margaret Attwood - as well as Handmaids Tale there is The Edible Woman, Cat's Eye, Blind Assassin, Bluebeard's Egg, Alias Grace

Much of Margeret Forster's writing - both fiction and non-.

Thomas Hardy - The Mayor of Casterbridge and of course, Tess

Jean Rhys - The Wide Sargasso Sea, followed by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

Maya Angelou - I know why the caged bird sings

Barbara Taylor - Eve and the New Jerusalem.

I also read all the Enid Blyton books and the Chalet School and so on but my mum talked to me about these books, and asked me what I thought about the way women and girls were portrayed in them. She didn't preach at all, just encouraged me to think critically from quite a young age (11 ish).

Oh my mum had A Woman in Your Own right and I read it as a teenager. She also had a similar book called The Mirror Within which was all about sexual politics and getting to know your vagina. Very informative for a teenager [grin.]

I enjoyed Margaret Atwood's 'Surfacing,' as a teenager along most of the Virago series. Inevitably I also read The Bell Jar and loved Sylvia Plath's poetry. Ditto many of the others already mentioned. Thank God for a well-stocked suburban library.

And just for enjoyment of fantastic literature written by a woman - AL Kennedy gets my vote every time.

I have a fantastic SCottish folk tale called Molly Whuppie and the Giant which might appeal to a pre-schooler. She is a wiley lass who escapes a giant but making a bridge from a strand of her hair and running across it.

She has an incantation which my coven of DD's can be heard chanting: "I'm Molly WHuppie, You can't scare me, I'm Molly Whuppie, hee, hee, hee!"

Am going to train as an English teacher in a few years and I can't wait to start inflicting all this on my pupils!