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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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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Woolf advises female writers to write as independent of men, with their own money and their own space.
Read moreDonna Kaz’s Un/Masked: Memoirs of a Guerrilla Girl on Tour (Skyhorse, 2016), chronicles the birth of a feminist who uses feminism to overcome a history of intimate partner violence that prevented her from seeing herself as a strong and vibrant
Read moreAlice Hoffman’s The Story Sisters (Crown, 2009), a family saga, is a haunting examination of how the rape of a child affects not only the child herself, but also every single person in her life. No one is exempt from the evil
Read moreMarilyn Yalom’s A History of the Wife (HarperCollins, 2001). A scholar and writer focused on deconstructing the ways with which institutions have normalized archaic attitudes toward women, Yalom uses this book to examine the role of the wife beginning from Ancient
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