We linked earlier this week to Ariel Levy’s New Yorker review of Leslie Sanchez’s and Gail Collins’ new books (respectively, You’ve Come A Long Way, Maybe and When Everything Changed). In the article, Levy discussed why feminism is so divisive today, and compared the two books, Collins’ (which I am currently reading) looks back fondly to second-wave feminism, while the other (which Amelia reviewed for Equal Writes a week ago) openly describes feminists as “obnoxious.”
In the New Yorker’s book bench section, they asked Levy for some background reading on the subject – a feminist reading list, if you will. A few of Levy’s responses: Susan Brownmiller’s In Our Time: A Memoir of the Revolution, and Andrea Dworkin’s memoir Heartbreak.
It’s a good question for all feminists – so what’s on your feminist reading list? Here are some of our bloggers’ answers:
Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux: “I always tell people to read Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s wonderful gender-bending novel, and I just read Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and can’t get over how awesome it is.”
Anne Frances Durfee: “The Feminine Mistake, by Leslie Bennetts – it seriously changed my life.”
Chloe Angyal: The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf, and Michael Kimmel’s Guyland.
Jordan Kisner: “To Be Real, a DEFINITE feminist must-read. an anthology of essays edited by Rebecca Walker (Alice Walker’s daughter).”
What are your favorite feminist books?
1 Comment
November 15, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I’m also a huge Virginia Woolf fan–When I read A Room of One’s Own in high school and discovered what it meant that “Chloe liked Olivia,” everything I thought I knew about gender relations changed.