The Dialectic of Sex

The Dialectic of Sex
Author: Shulamith Firestone
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2003-03-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1466833513

"No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory second-wave landmark." —Naomi Wolf Originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, and going on to become a bestseller, The Dialectic of Sex was the first book of the women's liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politics. Beginning with a look at the radical and grassroots history of the first wave (with its foundation in the abolition movement of the time), Firestone documents its major victory, the granting of the vote to women in 1920, and the fifty years of ridicule that followed. She goes on to deftly synthesize the work of Freud, Marx, de Beauvoir, and Engels to create a cogent argument for feminist revolution. Identifying women as a caste, she declares that they must seize the means of reproduction—for as long as women (and only women) are required to bear and rear children, they will be singled out as inferior. Ultimately she presents feminism as the key radical ideology, the missing link between Marx and Freud, uniting their visions of the political and the personal. In the wake of recent headlines bemoaning women's squandered fertility and the ongoing debate over the appropriate role of genetics in the future of humanity, The Dialectic of Sex is revealed as remarkably relevant to today's society—a testament to Shulamith Firestone's startlingly prescient vision. Firestone died in 2012, but her ideas live on through this extraordinary book.

Airless Spaces

Airless Spaces
Author: Shulamith Firestone
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Total Pages: 170
Release: 1998-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

"A collection of short tales about losers in and out of (mostly mental) hospitals and the small crises which trigger their awareness that they're in trouble." -- Back cover.

Sexual Politics

Sexual Politics
Author: Kate Millett
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2016-02-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231541724

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

Feminism or Death

Feminism or Death
Author: Francoise d'Eaubonne
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2022-03-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1839764406

The passionately argued, incendiary French feminist work that first defined “eco-feminism”—now available for the first time in English Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne surveyed women’s status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggle was not about equality but about life and death—for humans and the planet. In this wide-ranging manifesto, d’Eaubonne first proposed a politics of ecofeminism, the idea that the patriarchal system's claim over women's bodies and the natural world destroys both, and that feminism and environmentalism must bring about a new “mutation”—an overthrow of not just male power but the system of power itself. As d’Eaubonne prophesied, “the planet placed in the feminine will flourish for all.” Never before published in English, and translated here by French feminist scholar Ruth Hottell, this edition includes an introduction from scholars of ecology and feminism situating d’Eaubonne’s work within current feminist theory, environmental justice organizing, and anticolonial feminism.

The Verso Book of Feminism

The Verso Book of Feminism
Author: Jessie Kindig
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1788739264

An unprecedented collection of feminist voices from four millennia of global history Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women's bodies and women's lives. People–of any and no gender–have protested and theorized, penned manifestos and written poetry and songs, testified and lobbied, gone on strike and fomented revolution, quietly demanded that there is an "I" and loudly proclaimed that there is a "we." The Book of Feminism chronicles this history of defiance and tracks it around the world as it develops into a multivocal and unabashed force. Global in scope, The Book of Feminism shows the breadth of feminist protest and of feminist thinking, moving through the female poets of China's Tang Dynasty and accounts of indigenous women in the Caribbean resisting Columbus's expedition, British suffragists militating for the vote and the revolutionary petroleuses of the 1848 Paris Commune, the first century Trung sisters who fought for the independence of Nam Viet to women in 1980s Botswana fighting for equal protection under the law, from the erotica of the 6th century and the 19th century to radical queer politics in the 20th and 21st. The Book of Feminism is a weapon, a force, a lyrical cry, and an ongoing threat to misogyny everywhere.

Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment

Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment
Author: Jane Gallop
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 116
Release: 1997
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 9780822319184

Sexual harassment is an issue in which feminists are usually thought to be on the plaintiff's side. But in 1993--amid considerable attention from the national academic community--Jane Gallop, a prominent feminist professor of literature, was accused of sexual harassment by two of her women graduate students. In Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, Gallop tells the story of how and why she was charged with sexual harassment and what resulted from the accusations. Weaving together memoir and theoretical reflections, Gallop uses her dramatic personal experience to offer a vivid analysis of current trends in sexual harassment policy and to pose difficult questions regarding teaching and sex, feminism and knowledge. Comparing "still new" feminism--as she first encountered it in the early 1970s--with the more established academic discipline that women's studies has become, Gallop makes a case for the intertwining of learning and pleasure. Refusing to acquiesce to an imperative of silence that surrounds such issues, Gallop acknowledges--and describes--her experiences with the eroticism of learning and teaching. She argues that antiharassment activism has turned away from the feminism that created it and suggests that accusations of harassment are taking aim at the inherent sexuality of professional and pedagogic activity rather than indicting discrimination based on gender--that antiharassment has been transformed into a sensationalist campaign against sexuality itself. Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment offers a direct and challenging perspective on the complex and charged issues surrounding the intersection of politics, sexuality, feminism, and power. Gallop's story and her characteristically bold way of telling it will be compelling reading for anyone interested in these issues and particularly to anyone interested in the ways they pertain to the university.

The Dialectic of Sex

The Dialectic of Sex
Author: Shulamith Firestone
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1784780537

An international bestseller, originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, The Dialectic of Sex was the first book of the women's liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politics. Beginning with a look at the radical and grassroots history of the first wave (with its foundation in the abolition movement of the time), Firestone documents its major victory, the expansion of the franchise in 1920, and the fifty years of ridicule that followed. She goes on to deftly synthesize the work of Freud, Marx, de Beauvoir, and Engels to create a cogent argument for feminist revolution. Ultimately she presents feminism as the key radical ideology, the missing link between Marx and Freud, uniting their visions of the political and the personal. The Dialectic of Sex remains remarkably relevant today-a testament to Firestone's startlingly prescient vision. The author died in 2012, but her ideas live on through this extraordinary book.

The Feminism of Uncertainty

The Feminism of Uncertainty
Author: Ann Snitow
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2015-08-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822375672

The Feminism of Uncertainty brings together Ann Snitow’s passionate, provocative dispatches from forty years on the front lines of feminist activism and thought. In such celebrated pieces as "A Gender Diary"—which confronts feminism’s need to embrace, while dismantling, the category of "woman"—Snitow is a virtuoso of paradox. Freely mixing genres in vibrant prose, she considers Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Dorothy Dinnerstein and offers self-reflexive accounts of her own organizing, writing, and teaching. Her pieces on international activism, sexuality, motherhood, and the waywardness of political memory all engage feminism’s impossible contradictions—and its utopian hopes.

Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, & Feminism

Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, & Feminism
Author: Nancy Bauer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2001
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780231116657

In the introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir notes that "a man never begins by establishing himself as an individual of a certain sex: his being a man poses no problem." Nancy Bauer begins her book by asking: "Then what kind of a problem does being a woman pose?" Bauer's aim is to show that in answering this question The Second Sex dramatizes the extent to which being a woman poses a philosophical problem. In exploring what it might mean to philosophize as a woman, Beauvoir produced a book that not only sparked the contemporary feminist movement but also, Bauer argues, made an important but still profoundly undervalued contribution to the philosophical tradition.

How to Be a Revolutionary

How to Be a Revolutionary
Author: C.A. Davids
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-02-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1839760877

Winner of the 2023 UJ Prize Winner of the 2023 Sunday Times Literary Award An extraordinary, ambitious, globe-spanning novel about what we owe our consciences Fleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude, and to dodge whatever pangs of conscience she feels for her fealty to a South African regime that, by the 21st century, has betrayed its early promises. At night, she hears the sound of typing, and then late one evening Zhao arrives at her door. They explore hidden Shanghai and discover a shared love of Langston Hughes--who had his own Chinese and African sojourns. But then Zhao vanishes, and a typewritten manuscript--chunk by chunk--appears at her doorstep instead. The truths unearthed in this manuscript cause her to reckon with her own past, and the long-buried story of what happened to Kay, her fearless, revolutionary friend... Connecting contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising--and refracting this globe-trotting and time-traveling through Hughes' confessional letters to a South African protege about the poet's time in Shanghai--How to Be a Revolutionary is an amazingly ambitious novel. It's also a heartbreaking exploration of what we owe our countries, our consciences, and ourselves.