The Body Project:: An Intimate History of American Girls

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body

Courtney E. Martin · 330 pages

Draws on original research and more than one hundred interviews with patients, psychologists, and nutritionists to analyze the pervasiveness of eating disorders and body-image-related emotional challenges in today's generation of young women.

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body

Susan Bordo · 361 pages

The Beauty Myth

Naomi Wolf · 348 pages

In the struggle for womenʼs equality, there is one hurdle that has yet to be fully cleared-the myth of female beauty. It challenges every woman, every day, by seeking to undermine psychologically and covertly the material freedoms that feminism has achieved for women. And, fueled by new technology in media and medicine, its ravages are reaching epidemic proportions. The Beauty Myth cuts to the roo

Bad Feminist

Roxane Gay · 360 pages

A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. "Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink, all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once l

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

Mary Pipher · 304 pages

Bodies

Susie Orbach · 216 pages

Orbach diagnoses the crisis in our relationship to our bodies, and points the way toward a process of healing. (Publisher-supplied data) Esteemed Psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach diagnoses the crisis in our relationship to our bodies and points the way toward a process of healing. Throughout the Western world, people have come to believe that general dissatisfaction can be relieved by some

How to Be a Woman

Caitlin Moran · 313 pages

Though they have the vote and the Pill and haven't been burned as witches since 1727, life isn't exactly a stroll down the catwalk for modern women. They are beset by uncertainties and questions: Why are they supposed to get Brazilians? Why do bras hurt? Why the incessant talk about babies? And do men secretly hate them? Caitlin Moran interweaves provocative observations on women's lives with l

Girl Culture

Lauren Greenfield · 155 pages

"The body has become a primary expression of individual identity for girls in contemporary American culture. Girl Culture investigates girls’ relationships to their bodies and the ways in which they use body projects to establish their identities. The photographs explore the relationship between girls’ inner lives and emotional development, and the material world and popular culture. They also rev

Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap

Peggy Orenstein · 351 pages

In 1990, the American Association of University Women conducted a ground-breaking poll that highlighted how, as young girls reach adolescence, their self-esteem plummets. The conclusion of the study (an investigation that involved over three thousand girls and boys between the ages of nine and fifteen and cut across ethnic and regional lines) was alarming: there is a crisis in this country regardi

Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

Laurie Penny · 82 pages

Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society

Nickie Roberts · 380 pages

'If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, then men writing about it is certainly the second oldest.' It was to retrieve an important part of women's history from the hands of male writers - who have defined prostitution from their own point of view as the client sex - that Nickie Roberts undertook this invigorating blend of social history and sexual politics. In her far-reaching narrative

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

Ann Fessler · 358 pages

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler bril

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

Lindy West · 272 pages

Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible--like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you--writer and humorist Lindy West quickly discovered that she was anything but. From a painfully shy childhood in which she tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her big body and even bigger opinions; to her public war with stand-up comedians over rape jo

The Good Body

Eve Ensler · 95 pages

Botox, bulimia, breast implants: Eve Ensler, author of the international sensation The Vagina Monologues, is back, this time to rock our view of what it means to have a "good body." "In the 1950s," Eve writes, girls were "pretty, perky. They had a blond Clairol wave in their hair. They wore girdles and waist-pinchers. . . . In recent years good girls join the army. They climb the corporate ladder.

Beautiful Bodies

Kimberly Rae Miller · 222 pages

Blending social history and personal experiences, an exploration of how people try to control their bodies with food reveals the struggle everyone experiences with their own bodies.

Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight--and What We Can Do about It

Harriet Brown · 288 pages

"Over the last 25 years, our longing for thinness has morphed into a relentless cultural obsession with weight and body image. You can't be a woman or girl (or, increasingly, a man or boy) in America today and not grapple with the size and shape of your body, your daughter's body, other women's bodies. Even the most confident people have to find a way through a daily gauntlet of voices and images

America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

Gail Collins · 592 pages

From the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs, America's Women tells the story of how women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America. Spanning wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, a

A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

Jack Holland · 320 pages

The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future

Riane Eisler · 261 pages

"In prehistorical times, Eisler argues, women and men lived together in egalitarian communities devoted to nurturance; with the imposition of male domination, female values gave way to creeds of hierarchy, aggression, power, obedience. Eisler, a futurist, posits a new society based on the recovery of more humane values."--Library journal (6/1/85).

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

Anne Helen Petersen · 285 pages

A popular BuzzFeed columnist examines the phenomenon of popular provocative womanhood to discuss the rise of such counterculture stars as Amy Schumer, Nicki Minaj, and Caitlyn Jenner, exploring why they are popular in spite of nonconforming behaviors. "From celebrity gossip expert and Buzzfeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen comes an accessible, analytical look at how female celebrities are pu

Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century

Betsy Israel · 304 pages

Women's Studies Journalist Betsy Israel paints remarkably vivid portraits of single women -- and how they have been perceived -- throughout the decades using primary sources, including private journals, newspapers, and other materials from popular media. From the nineteenth-century spinsters of New England to the Bowery girls of New York City, to the career girls of the 1950s and 1960s, single wom

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

Susan Brownmiller · 480 pages

"A 'history of rape, including psychological, sociopolitical, and legal perspectives ... The material is well documented and compellingly presented.'" Choice.

For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women

Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English · 369 pages

From the Publisher: A provocative new perspective on female history, the history of American medicine and psychology, and the history of child-rearing unlike any other.

Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

Stephanie Coontz · 440 pages

Just when the clamor over “traditional” marriage couldn’t get any louder, along comes this groundbreaking book to ask, “What tradition?” In Marriage, a History, historian and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz takes readers from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the torments of Victorian lovers to demonstrate how recent the idea of marrying for love is—and how absurd it would have seemed t