Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

Transforming a Rape Culture

Emilie Buchwald, Pamela R. Fletcher, Martha Roth · 412 pages

Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

Kate Harding · 261 pages

"From Congressman Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" gaffe to the high school rapists of Steubenville, Ohio, to the furor at Vanderbilt, sexual violence has been so prominent in recent years that the feminist term "rape culture" has finally entered the mainstream. But what, exactly, is it? And how do we change it? In Asking for It, Kate Harding answers those questions in the same blunt, bullshit-free v

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

Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport

Anna Krien · 288 pages

What does a young footballer do to cut loose? At night, some play what they think of as pranks, or games. Night games with women. Sometimes these involve consensual sex, but sometimes they don't, and sometimes they fall into a grey area. In the tradition of Helen Garner's The First Stone comes a closely observed, controversial book about sex, consent and power. In Night Games, Anna Krien follows t

Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town

Jon Krakauer · 391 pages

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs · 228 pages

The true story of an individual's struggle for self-identity, self-preservation, and freedom, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains among the few extant slave narratives written by a woman. This autobiographical account chronicles the remarkable odyssey of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) whose dauntless spirit and faith carried her from a life of servitude and degradation in North Carolina to l

Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

Peggy Orenstein · 319 pages

The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World

Nawal El-Saadawi · 282 pages

Beschrijving van allerlei aspecten van het vrouw-zijn in Islamitische landen en van de man-vrouw verhouding tegen de achtergrond van het sociale, politieke religieuze leven

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

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

Gail Collins · 471 pages

Tells how American women got from there to here, in politics, fashion, economics, sex, families and work in the past five decades.

The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan · 410 pages

Landmark, groundbreaking, classic―these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average

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 Body Project:: An Intimate History of American Girls

Joan Jacobs Brumberg · 267 pages

Girls today are in crisis - and this book shows why. Drawing on a vast array of lively historical sources, unpublished diaries by adolescent girls, and photographs that conjure up memories of the past, The Body Project chronicles how growing up in a female body has changed over the past century and why that experience is more difficult today than ever before. Girls' bodies have certainly changed

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).

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood

Maureen Ryan · 348 pages

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

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.

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Silvia Federici · 285 pages

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

Jack Holland · 320 pages

A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique & American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

Stephanie Coontz · 256 pages

In 1963, Betty Friedan unleashed a storm of controversy with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique . Hundreds of women wrote to her to say that the book had transformed, even saved, their lives. Nearly half a century later, many women still recall where they were when they first read it. In A Strange Stirring , historian Stephanie Coontz examines the dawn of the 1960s, when the sexual revolu

Take It as a Compliment

Maria Stoian · 104 pages

Promiscuities: An Opinionated History of Female Desire

Naomi Wolf · 286 pages

Promiscuities follows a group of adolescent girls as they gradually become aware of themselves as sexual beings and discover what our culture tells them being female means. Drawing on her own experiences as well those of her contemporaries, Naomi Wolf reveals the secrets of our coming of age: the sexual games, forbidden crushes, losses of virginity, and rites of initiation. She also uncompromisin

Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild

Deborah Siegel · 232 pages

Chronicling the battles that have shaped modern conceptions of feminism across two generations, this book illuminates how younger women are reliving, often without realizing it, the battles of the past. Contrary to cliches about the end of feminism, the author argues that younger women are not abandoning the movement but reinventing it. After forty years, is feminism today a culture, or a cause? A

Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983

Barbara Kingsolver · 224 pages

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver began her writing career with Holding the Line. It is the story of how women's lives were transformed by an eighteen-month strike against the Phelps-Dodge Copper Corporation. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, the story is partly oral history and partly social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community.