Reviewing Women's Literature from a Feminist Perspective
Ada Calhoun’s Wedding Toasts I Will Never Give (2017, W. W. Norton & Company), was originally centered on an article she had written for the New York Times in 2015. It went viral because it was written after a fight she had had with her
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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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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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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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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
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 moreSalman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence (Random House, 2009) is perhaps the most beautifully crafted book in terms of the language and the intricate storytelling that revolves around its main characters. However, it is a book written by a man who
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Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (U of California Press, 1993) is put together by Bordo’s various lectures, talks, and published essays on the liberal feminist ideology that the female body is a cultural construct designed
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A feminist book review of Cycling World and Olympic Champion Nicole Cooke’s memoir, The Breakaway.
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