Shall we make a feminist reading list?

[MillicentF]

One book only. That made you a feminist, or explained your feminism or raised your conscieness (no prizes for guessing what generation I come from).

Mine is The Women’s Room, by Marilyn French. Very dated now, but still depressingly relevant.

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

Schulamith Firestone - The Dialectic of Sex.

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.

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!)

Another autocorrect typo.....

I feel like I should have shares in this book!

Looking forward to reading other people’s recommendations!

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.

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’.

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.

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 Female Eunuch.

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

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

I'd love it if young feminists read the "old crones", like Greer and Dworkin and Daly and Friedan et al. Loads to disagree with- but loads to think about too. I have forced my dd to read some.

Ahh...just one!?

OK. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan probably kicked things off for me. I was a SAHM to school age children at the time of reading, I was struggling with whether I should go back to work and wondering how I'd fit everything in if I did. And then bam, read this book and felt my eyes opened to how housework expands to fill the time available, the tiredness I felt everyday stemmed from the drudgery and how advertising had influenced me.

Our Bodies Ourselves. Sadly now out of print but at the time was revolutionary.

Alice Walker's 'The Colour Purple'
It was my first A'level text.

“Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.”

“The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something.
What can she become? I asked.
Why, she said, the mother of his children.
But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something."

(At the same time as we were studying this, my English teacher helped me with a form. As we started it, she asked the simple question, 'Do you think your title needs to reflect your marital status whilst John's (also in the class) doesn't?' From that point onwards, if I had to use a title, I have always been Ms. )

Can't believe no one has suggested Cunt yet! I enjoyed it, showed different perspectives and it was err interesting.

As a linguist, I would choose one of my favourite books on language: Deborah Cameron, The Myth of Mars and Venus. Very readable and insightful.

Mine is The Women’s Room, by Marilyn French
mine too *MillicentF

just one is too difficult!

can anyone recommend feminist books for teenage girls?
Most of these are a bit heavy going!

And at the more practical end of tge scale, for me Making Babies:Stumbling into Motherhood by Anne Enright was a beautiful eye-opener. Must dig it out. And add some of the suggestions above to my list.

Steppenmum- I think Caitlin Moran might be a good start for a teenager. Incredibly easy to read and pretty sound. And also Robert Webb's How To Be A Boy is very interesting.

I was already a feminist before I read any specifically feminist books, but the first one that I did read that really made an impact was Dworkin's Pornography : Men Possessing Women. Read The Beauty Myth at about the same time too, and Merlin Ston'e When God Was A Woman. And then Susan Faludi's Backlash.

(Couldn't pick one, apparently)

Just one? Well, since some of my favourites (Female Eunuch, Myth of Mars and Venus - particularly worth it for Cameron's spectacular demolition of the view that "men just find anything short of NO too hard to understand") are already in the list, I'll plump for Susan Faludi's Backlash. As scarily relevant now as it was when it came out.