19 March 2008

Feminist book club

I wrote about this on my books blog: I'm planning on reading a few feminist classics over the next year. I mentioned this at the meeting last Saturday and a few people were keen to join in (in addition to the meetings every three months, we might get together in between and discuss what we're reading). Books that I've thought of/others have suggested so far (some classics, some more recent) are:
  • Simone de Beauvoir: The second sex
  • Germaine Greer: The female eunuch
  • Shulamith Firestone: The dialiectic of sex
  • Mary Wollstonecraft: A vindication of the rights of woman
  • Betty Friedan: The feminine mystique
  • Kate Millett: Sexual politics
  • Virginia Woolf: Three guineas
  • Sheila Rowbotham: Woman's consciousness, man's world
  • Elisabeth Badinter: XY, de l'identité masculine (not sure whether this is available in English translation)
  • Susan Faludi: The terror dream
  • Deborah Siegel: Sisterhood, interrupted

Suggestions welcome, and anyone who wants to read along, that would be great.

13 March 2008

Sylvia Plath, by Margaret Drabble

I love this article by Margaret Drabble on Sylvia Plath: I think this is what's so important about Palth, not her suicide: the fact that she started writing about the difficulties of the female experience before the feminist second wave, the frustrations of being a wife as well as childbirth and breatfeeding.

11 March 2008

Feministing Meetup Alliance

Feministing have started a meet-up alliance for local feminist groups (link in title), so I have added our group to it.

Clinton v Obama

A couple of interesting articles, via Feministing, reponding to the media's attempts to portray supporting Clinton as a feminist act, or the 'only' feminist choice, or whether it's unfeminist to support Obama: Deborah Siegel and Courtney E Martin in the Washington Post, and Jessica Valenti writing in the Nation about a split in feminism between older, more establishment feminists, and younger ones.