Collection: Feminism

In this book, Jaime Harker uncovers a largely forgotten literary renaissance in southern letters. Anchored by a constellation of southern women, the Women in Print movement grew from the queer union of women's liberation, civil rights activism, gay liberation, and print culture. Broadly influential from the 1970s through the 1990s, the Women in Print movement created a network of writers, publishers, bookstores, and readers that fostered a remarkable array of literature.

With the freedom that the Women in Print movement inspired, southern lesbian feminists remade southernness as a site of intersectional radicalism, transgressive sexuality, and liberatory space. Including in her study well-known authors--like Dorothy Allison and Alice Walker--as well as overlooked writers, publishers, and editors, Harker reconfigures the southern literary canon and the feminist canon, challenging histories of feminism and queer studies to include the south in a formative role.

An intimate portrait of a new generation of transmasculine individuals as they undergo gender transitions

Award-winning sociologist Arlene Stein takes us into the lives of four strangers who find themselves together in a sun-drenched surgeon's office, having traveled to Florida from across the United States in order to masculinize their chests. Ben, Lucas, Parker, and Nadia wish to feel more comfortable in their bodies; three of them are also taking testosterone so that others recognize them as male. Following them over the course of a year, Stein shows how members of this young transgender generation, along with other gender dissidents, are refashioning their identities and challenging others' conceptions of who they are. During a time of conservative resurgence, they do so despite great personal costs.

Transgender men comprise a large, growing proportion of the trans population, yet they remain largely invisible. In this powerful, timely, and eye-opening account, Stein draws from dozens of interviews with transgender people and their friends and families, as well as with activists and medical and psychological experts. Unbound documents the varied ways younger trans men see themselves and how they are changing our understanding of what it means to be male and female in America.

From a highly lauded modern voice in feminism and racial justice comes a deeply personal and insightful testament to the power of reimagining to dismantle the frameworks and systems that no longer serve us while building new ones that do.

"Powerful . . . You will leave these pages changed for the better."--Gabrielle Union, New York Times bestselling author of We're Going to Need More Wine

There are breaking points in all our lives when we realize that the way things have been done before just don't work for us anymore, be it the way we approach our relationships, our belief systems, our work, our education, even our rest. For activist, philanthropist, and CEO Rachel E. Cargle, reimagining--the act of creating in our minds that which does not exist but that we believe can and should--has been a lifelong process. Reimagining served as the most powerful catalyst for Cargle's personal transformation from a small-town Christian wife to an incisive queer feminist voice of a generation.

In A Renaissance of Our Own, we witness the sometimes painful but always inspiring breaking points in Cargle's life that fostered a truer identity. These defining moments offer a blueprint for how we must all use our imagination--the space that sees beyond limits--to live in alignment with our highest values and to craft a world independent of oppressive structures, both personal and societal. Cargle now invites you to acknowledge ways of being that stem from societal expectations instead of your personal truth, and to embark on a renaissance of your own. She provides the very tools and prompts that she used to unearth her own truth, tools that opened her up to being a more authentic feminist and purpose-driven matriarchal leader.

A Renaissance of Our Own gives us the courage to look at the world and say "I want something different." It serves as a reminder of the power and possibility of reimagining a life that feels right, all the way down to the marrow of your bones.

From the author of For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts, a celebration of the women at the heart of Latine families

Born into a large, close-knit family in Nicaragua, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez grew up surrounded by strong, kind, funny, sensitive, resilient, judgmental, messy, beautiful women. Whether blood relatives or chosen family, these tias and primas fundamentally shaped her view of the world--and so did the labels that were used to talk about them. The tia loca who is shunned for defying gender roles. The pretty prima put on a pedestal for her European features. The matriarch who is the core of her community but hides all her pain.

In Tias and Primas, the follow-up to her acclaimed debut For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts, Mojica Rodríguez explores these archetypes. Fearlessly grappling with the effects of intergenerational trauma, centuries of colonization, and sexism, she attempts to heal the pain that is so often embodied in female family lines.

Tias and Primas is a deeply felt love letter to family, community, and Latinas everywhere.

From the former editor-in-chief of Nylon comes a provocative and intimate collection of personal and cultural essays featuring eye-opening explorations of hot button topics for modern women, including internet feminism, impossible beauty standards in social media, shifting ideals about sexuality, and much more.

Gabrielle Korn starts her professional life with all the right credentials. Prestigious college degree? Check. A loving, accepting family? Check. Instagram-worthy offices and a tight-knit group of friends? Check, check. Gabrielle's life seems to reach the crescendo of perfect when she gets named the youngest editor-in-chief in the history of one of fashion's most influential publication. Suddenly she's invited to the world's most epic parties, comped beautiful clothes and shoes from trendy designers, and asked to weigh in on everything from gay rights to lip gloss on one of the most influential digital platforms.

But behind the scenes, things are far from perfect. In fact, just a few months before landing her dream job, Gabrielle's health and wellbeing are on the line, and her promotion to editor-in-chief becomes the ultimate test of strength. In this collection of inspirational and searing essays, Gabrielle reveals exactly what it's truly like in the fashion world, trying to find love as a young lesbian in New York City, battling with anorexia, and trying not to lose herself in a mirage of women's empowerment and Instagram perfection.

Through deeply personal essays, Gabrielle recounts her struggles to reconcile her long-held insecurities about her body while coming out in the era of The L Word, where swoon-worthy lesbians are portrayed as skinny, fashion-perfect, and power-hungry. She takes us with her everywhere from New York Fashion Week to the doctor's office, revealing that the forces that try to keep women small are more pervasive than anyone wants to admit, especially in a world that's been newly branded as woke.

From #MeToo to commercialized body positivity, Korn's biting, darkly funny analysis turns feminist commentary on its head. Both an in-your-face take on impossible beauty standards and entrenched media ideals and an inspiring call for personal authenticity, this powerful collection is ideal for fans of Roxane Gay and Rebecca Solnit.

An urgent, intimate investigation into the experience of seeking an abortion after the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the economic, emotional, and life-threatening consequences of being denied reproductive freedom.

On June 24, 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the impact was immediate: by 2023, abortion was virtually unavailable or significantly restricted in 21 states. As other nations largely expand legal abortion access, the U.S. has gone backwards; the bans being enforced in many states are some of the most severe in the entire world.

In Undue Burden, reporter Shefali Luthra traces the unforgettable stories of patients faced with one of the most personal decisions of their lives. Outside of Houston, there's a 16-year-old girl who becomes pregnant well before she intends to. A 21-year-old mother barely making ends meet has to travel hundreds of miles in secret to access care in another state. A 42-year-old woman with a life-threatening condition wants nothing more than to safely carry her pregnancy to term, but her home state's abortion bans fail to provide her with the options she needs to make an informed decision. And a 19-year-old trans man struggles to access care in Florida as abortion bans radiate across the American South.

Before, it was a common misconception that abortion restrictions affected only people in certain states, but left one's own life untouched. Now, patients forced to travel to access care creates a domino effect across the entire country. As the landscape of abortion rights continues to shift, the experiences of these patients--those who had to cross state lines to seek life-saving care, who risked everything they had in pursuit of their own bodily autonomy, and who were unable to plan their reproductive future in the way that they deserved--illustrates how fragile the system is, and how devastating the consequences can be.

Through the perspectives of patients, providers, activists, and lawmakers, Undue Burden is a revelatory portrait of human rights, healthcare, and economic and racial inequality in America.

When we are born, we are each assigned a gender based on our physical anatomy. But why is it that some people experience dissonance between their biological sex and their personal identity? Is gender something we are, or something we do? Is our expression of gender a product of biology, or does it develop based on our environment? Are the traditional binary male and female gender roles relevant in an increasingly fluid and flexible world? Sally Hines, whose work on transgender issues draws on the intersections and disconnections of gender, sexuality, and their biological embodiment, is an ideally well-informed author to explore these questions. Supplementing this text are numerous illustrations that provide an accessible and informative visual component to the book.

This intelligent volume in the Big Idea series considers the relations between gender, psychology, culture, and sexuality, examining the evolution of individual and social attitudes over the centuries and throughout the world.

Part memoir, part guide, Burning My Roti is essential reading for a new generation of South Asian women.

With chapters covering sexual and cultural identity, body hair, colorism and mental health, and a particular focus on the suffocating beauty standards South Asian women are expected to adhere to, Sharan Dhaliwal speaks openly about her journey towards loving herself, offering advice, support and comfort to people that are encountering the same issues.

This provocative book celebrates the strides South Asian women have made, whilst also providing powerful advice through personal stories by Sharan and other South Asian women from all over the world.

"For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics. It's a wonderful, necessary book."
- Hillary Clinton

The four most powerful African American women in politics share the story of their friendship and how it has changed politics in America.

The lives of black women in American politics are remarkably absent from the shelves of bookstores and libraries. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics is a sweeping view of American history from the vantage points of four women who have lived and worked behind the scenes in politics for over thirty years--Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore--a group of women who call themselves The Colored Girls. Like many people who have spent their careers in public service, they view their lives in four-year waves where presidential campaigns and elections have been common threads. For most of the Colored Girls, their story starts with Jesse Jackson's first campaign for president. From there, they went on to work on the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Over the years, they've filled many roles: in the corporate world, on campaigns, in unions, in churches, in their own businesses and in the White House. Through all of this, they've worked with those who have shaped our country's history--US Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, well-known political figures such as Terry McAuliffe and Howard Dean, and legendary activists and historical figures such as Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, and Betty Shabazz.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics is filled with personal stories that bring to life heroic figures we all know and introduce us to some of those who've worked behind the scenes but are still hidden. Whatever their perch, the Colored Girls are always focused on the larger goal of "hurrying history" so that every American -- regardless of race, gender or religious background -- can have a seat at the table. This is their story.

This is a historical account of feminism that looks at the roots of feminism, voting rights, and the liberation of the sixties, and analyzes the current situation of women across Europe, in the United States, and elsewhere in the world, particularly the Third World countries. Walters examines the difficulties and inequities that women still face, more than forty years after the "new wave" of 1960s feminism--difficulties, particularly, in combining domesticity, motherhood and work outside the home. How much have women's lives really changed? In the West, women still come up against the "glass ceiling" at work, with most earning considerably less than their male counterparts. What are we to make of the now commonplace insistence that feminism deprives men of their rights and dignities? And how does one tackle the issue of female emancipation in different cultural and economic environments--in, for example, Islam, Hinduism, the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian sub-continent?

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

A leading trans scholar and activist explores cultural representations of gender transition in the modern period

In Pleasure and Efficacy, Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one's sex. This ambivalence, she argues, has contributed to both antitrans oppression and the civil rights claims with which trans people have confronted it. Lavery examines what she terms "trans pragmatism"--the ways that trans people resist medicalization and pathologization to achieve pleasure and freedom. Trans pragmatism, she writes, affirms that transition works, that it is possible, and that it happens.

With Eliot and Freud as the guiding geniuses of the book, Lavery covers a vast range of modern culture--poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, fiction, cinema, pop music, pornography, and memes. Since transition takes people out of one genre and deposits them in another, she suggests, it should be no surprise that a cultural history of gender transition will also provide, by accident, a history of genre transition. Considering the concept of technique and its associations with feminine craftiness, as opposed to masculine freedom, Lavery argues that techniques of giving and receiving pleasure are essential to the possibility of trans feminist thriving--even as they are suppressed by patriarchal and antitrans feminist philosophies. Contesting claims for the impossibility of transition, she offers a counterhistory of tricks and techniques, passed on by women to women, that comprises a body of knowledge written in the margins of history.

Winner of a 2017 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, this moving manifesto "empowers women to access a fearlessness that will enable community progress" (Essence). Through one incredible woman's journey from a small Zimbabwe village to becoming one of the world's most recognizable voices in women's empowerment and education, this book "can help any woman achieve her full potential" (Kirkus Reviews).

Before Tererai Trent landed on Oprah's stage as her "favorite guest of all time," she was a woman with a forgotten dream. As a young girl in a cattle-herding village in Zimbabwe, she dreamed of receiving an education but instead was married young and by eighteen, without a high school graduation, she was already a mother of three. Tererai encountered a visiting American woman who assured her that anything was possible, reawakening her sacred dream.

Tererai planted her dreams deep in the earth and prayed they would grow. They did, and now not only has she earned her PhD but she has also built schools for girls in Zimbabwe, with funding from Oprah. The Awakened Woman: A Guide for Remembering & Igniting Your Sacred Dreams is her accessible, intimate, and evocative guide that teaches nine essential lessons to encourage all women to reexamine their dreams and uncover the power hidden within them--power that can recreate our world for the better.

Tererai points out that there is a massive, untapped, global resource in women who have, for one reason or another, set aside their wisdom, their skills, and their dreams in order to take care of the personal business of their lives. Not only is this a type of invisible suffering experienced by countless women, this rich resource is a secret weapon for improving our world. Women have the capacity to inspire, to create, to transform--and Tererai's call to action "shines as a beacon of hope to women everywhere" (Danica McKellar, actress and New York Times bestselling author).

An engaging illustrated history of feminism from antiquity through third-wave feminism, featuring Sappho, Mary Magdalene, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others.

The history of feminism? The right to vote, Susan B. Anthony, Gloria Steinem, white pantsuits? Oh, but there's so much more. And we need to know about it, especially now. In pithy text and pithier comics, A Brief History of Feminism engages us, educates us, makes us laugh, and makes us angry. It begins with antiquity and the early days of Judeo-Christianity. (Mary Magdalene questions the maleness of Jesus's inner circle: "People will end up getting the notion you don't want women to be priests." Jesus: "Really, Mary, do you always have to be so negative?") It continues through the Middle Ages, the Early Modern period, and the Enlightenment ("Liberty, equality, fraternity!" "But fraternity means brotherhood!"). It covers the beginnings of an organized women's movement in the nineteenth century, second-wave Feminism, queer feminism, and third-wave Feminism.

Along the way, we learn about important figures: Olympe de Gouges, author of the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen" (guillotined by Robespierre); Flora Tristan, who linked the oppression of women and the oppression of the proletariat before Marx and Engels set pen to paper; and the poet Audre Lorde, who pointed to the racial obliviousness of mainstream feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. We learn about bourgeois and working-class issues, and the angry racism of some American feminists when black men got the vote before women did. We see God as a long-bearded old man emerging from a cloud (and once, as a woman with her hair in curlers). And we learn the story so far of a history that is still being written.

Collecting the best of the underground blog Weird Sister, these unapologetic and insightful essays link contemporary feminism to literature and pop culture.Launched in 2014, Weird Sister proudly staked out a corner of the internet where feminist writers could engage with the literary and popular culture that excited or enraged them. The blog made space amid book websites dominated by white male editors and contributors, and also committed to covering literary topics in-depth when larger feminist outlets rarely could. Throughout its decade-long run, Weird Sister served as an early platform for some of contemporary literature's most striking voices, naming itself a website that "speaks its mind and snaps its gum and doesn't apologize."Edited by founder Marisa Crawford, The Weird Sister Collection brings together the work of longtime contributors such as Morgan Parker, Christopher Soto, Soleil Ho, Julián Delgado Lopera, Virgie Tovar, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, and more, alongside new original essays. Offering nuanced insight into contemporary and historical literature, in conversation with real-life and timely social issues, these pieces mark a transitional and transformative moment in online and feminist writing.

From the bestselling author of Goddesses in Everywoman comes a celebration of life past fifty.

At some point after fifty, every woman crosses a threshold into the third phase of her life. As she enters this uncharted territory she can choose to mourn what has gone before, or she can embrace the juicy-crone years.

In this celebration of Act Three, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Jungian analyst and bestselling author of Goddesses in Everywoman, names the powerful new energies and goddess archetypes of compassion, outrage, healing laughter, and new layers of wisdom that come into the psyche at this momentous time. Bolen thus suggests that women have profound and exciting reasons for welcoming the other side of fifty.