Reviewing Women's Literature from a Feminist Perspective
Photographer Moyra Davey, overwhelmed by the birth of her first-born, began to read women’s narratives about mothering and writing in an effort to discover voices that articulated the ambivalence she felt as a first-time mom. From this came the idea
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Most famous for her work with Sandra M. Gilbert in writing The Madwoman in the Attic, Susan Gubar edits and presents to us True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School (W.W. Norton, 2011), a collection of narratives contributed by 27
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Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From The Front Lines of the Girlie-Girl Culture (Harper, 2011) addresses the conflict that arises when culture begins to define little girls. A mother and writer, Orenstein grapples on a personal level with
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Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir shows how she went from dutiful daughter to one of the most fierce and prominent feminist figures in the world.
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Luce Irigaray’s “This Sex Which Is Not One” (1977) is one that all women must read. She argues that women do not have one sex; they have multiple sex organs all over their bodies, not to mention two lips that encompass our pleasure.
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In “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), Helene Cixous, a French feminist and writer, rallies women to do the one thing that will liberate their voices, their bodies, and their sexuality: to write themselves.
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In Growing Up Femalem in America, Eve Merriam chronicles the struggles of female lives that continue to exist today.
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Kate Chopin tell the radical tale of a woman who dares reject marriage an motherhood at a time when it was unthinkable and unwomanly.
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Carrie Fisher’s The Princess Diarist (Penguin, 2016) is a tell-all memoir that reveals her 3-month long affair with Harrison Ford in 1977, during the filming of Star Wars. She was only 19 years old; he was 35, married, and a
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A children’s book, Seven Brave Women (Greenwillow Books, 1997) is based on the author’s grandmothers and mother, each woman strong and individually unique in her own right. In her introduction, Dr. Betsy Hearne, a writer and teacher of children’s literature on the college level, notes that
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A few years ago, I got my hands on a terrific book that exemplified my struggle with writing and mothering. Edited by Patricia Diensfrey and Brenda Hillman, The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood, is the kind of
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