The Feminist Memoir Project


Book Description

The voices of the Second Wave of Feminism, both famous and less familiar, weave a fascinating history of what it felt like to live through and contribute to the massive social movement that transformed the nation.




The Feminist Memoir Project


Book Description

The women of The Feminist Memoir Project give voice to the spirit, the drive, and the claims of the Women's Liberation Movement they helped shape, beginning in the late 1960s. These thirty-two writers were among the thousands to jump-start feminism in the late twentieth century. Here, in pieces that are passionate, personal, critical, and witty, they describe what it felt like to make history, to live through and contribute to the massive social movement that transformed the nation. What made these particular women rebel? And what experiences, ideas, feelings, and beliefs shaped their activism? How did they maintain the will and energy to keep such a struggle going for so long, and continuing still? Memoirs and responses by Kate Millett, Vivian Gornick, Michele Wallace, Alix Kates Shulman, Joan Nestle, Jo Freeman, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Smith, Ellen Willis, Eve Ensler, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Roxanne Dunbar, Naomi Weisstein, Alice Wolfson and many more embody the excitement that fueled the movement and the conflicts that threatened it from within. Their stories trace the ways the world has changed.




The Memoir Project


Book Description

An extraordinary "practical resource for beginners" looking to write their own memoir—​now new and revised (Kirkus Reviews)! The greatest story you could write is one you've experienced yourself. Knowing where to start is the hardest part, but it just got a little easier with this essential guidebook for anyone wanting to write a memoir. Did you know that the #1 thing that baby boomers want to do in retirement is write a book—about themselves? It's not that every person has lived such a unique or dramatic life, but we inherently understand that writing a memoir—whether it's a book, blog, or just a letter to a child—is the single greatest path to self-examination. Through the use of disarmingly frank, but wildly fun tactics that offer you simple and effective guidelines that work, you can stop treading water in writing exercises or hiding behind writer's block. Previously self-published under the title, Writing What You Know: Raelia, this book has found an enthusiastic audience that now writes with intent.




Getting Personal


Book Description

In the era of identity politics, whose is the I of cultural criticism? And what does the invention of an autobiographical persona have to do with contemporary theory? In Getting Personal, Nancy K. Miller reflects upon the ways in which contingencies of identity and location shape the writing of academic argument and the living of an academic life. Getting Personal explores the new territory of feminist cultural studies and its connections to literary interpretation. The book is organized around a number of academic scenes in which Miller analyses the stakes of feminist critical performance. The focus on occasions, from the conference to the seminar to the professional colloquium, produces an autobiographical perspective on the mini-drama of institutional politics - whether faculty struggles over the canon in elite universities, or student strivings for self-authorization in large urban ones. Writing as a feminist critic, Miller describes the dilemmas of a responsible pedogogic practice: the contradictory demands of authority and complicity for a feminist teacher of literature. Getting Personal examines the rhetorical strategies of a feminism traversed by internal debates over its own self-representations. Working through and among quotations of voices that might otherwise not address each other, Miller assesses a crisis and offers a project for moving on.




The Feminism of Uncertainty


Book Description

The Feminism of Uncertainty brings together Ann Snitow’s passionate, provocative dispatches from forty years on the front lines of feminist activism and thought. In such celebrated pieces as "A Gender Diary"—which confronts feminism’s need to embrace, while dismantling, the category of "woman"—Snitow is a virtuoso of paradox. Freely mixing genres in vibrant prose, she considers Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Dorothy Dinnerstein and offers self-reflexive accounts of her own organizing, writing, and teaching. Her pieces on international activism, sexuality, motherhood, and the waywardness of political memory all engage feminism’s impossible contradictions—and its utopian hopes.




Resilience and Triumph


Book Description

A collection of true stories from 54 racialized immigrant and refugee women create an eclectic mix of three generations of voices. Women in their 20s to those in their 70s provide snapshots that begin in the 1960s and go to the present. Together these vividly recounted entries capture historical and everyday moments that reveal striking similarities and differences. Resilience and Triumph provides readers with an eye-opening glimpse into 50 years of immigrant women's lives in Canada.




A Life in Motion


Book Description

“A sharp and compelling memoir” of a feminist icon who forged positive change for herself, for women everywhere, and for the world (Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association). Florence Howe has led an audacious life: she created a freedom school during the civil rights movement, refused to bow to academic heavyweights who were opposed to sharing power with women, established women’s studies programs across the country during the early years of the second wave of the feminist movement, and founded a feminist publishing house at a time when books for and about women were a rarity. Sustained by her relationships with iconic writers like Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, and Marilyn French, Howe traveled the world as an emissary for women’s empowerment, never ceasing in her personal struggle for parity and absolute freedom for all women. Howe’s “long-awaited memoir” spans her ninety years of personal struggle and professional triumphs in “a tale told with startling honesty by one of the founding figures of the US feminist movement, giving us the treasures of a history that might otherwise have been lost” (Meena Alexander, author of Fault Lines).




The Feminist Porn Book


Book Description

The Feminist Porn Book celebrates the power of desire, turning the spotlight on an industry where feminism is thriving.




The Doulas


Book Description

Weaving together how-to manual, activist memoir, and manifesto, The Doulas is an “honest, raw, and charged” treatise on full-spectrum doula care. (Rewire) As more feminist conversation migrates online, the activist providers of the Doula Project remain focused on life’s physically intimate relationships: between caregivers and patients, parents and pregnancy, individuals and their own bodies. They are committed to supporting a pregnancy no matter the outcome—whether it results in birth, abortion, miscarriage, or adoption—and to facing the question of choice head-on. In this eye-opening book, Doula Project founders Mary Mahoney and Lauren Mitchell present the history, philosophy, and practices of these caregivers, contextualizing the doula movement within the larger scope of pregnancy care and reproductive rights. They illustrate how, through their unique hands-on activism, full-spectrum doulas provide tangible support for those confronting life, death, and the sticky in-between.




Blow Your House Down


Book Description

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A LitReactor Best Book of the Year • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month "A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced, and shamed her: everyday misogyny, puritanical expectations regarding female sexuality and maternal sacrifice, and male oppression." —Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness. Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.