My dear sisters, mothers, and lovers…. let’s be proud of ourselves and love ourselves boundlessly. Let us announce to the whole world that being a woman is the best thing that ever happened to us.
A history of feminism in 11 fights
by Helen Lewis
“Well-behaved women don’t make history: difficult women do.
‘This is the antidote to saccharine you-go-girl fluff. Effortlessly erudite and funny’ Caroline Criado-Perez
Strikers in saris. Bomb-throwing suffragettes. The pioneer of the refuge movement who became a men’s rights activist.
Forget feel-good heroines: meet the feminist trailblazers who have been
airbrushed from history for being ‘difficult’ – and discover how they made a difference.
Here are their stories in all their shocking, funny and unvarnished glory.”
How the Patriarchy Uses Women’s Trauma Against Them
by Dr Jessica Taylor
“Angry, opinionated, mouthy, aggressive, hysterical, mad, disordered, crazy, psycho, delusional, borderline, hormonal… Women have long been pathologized, locked up and medicated for not conforming to whichever norms or stereotypes are expected of them in that time and space. Sexy But Psycho is a challenging and uncomfortable book which seeks to explore the way professionals and society at large pathologize and sexualise women and girls. Utilising decades of research, real case studies and new data from her own
work, Dr Taylor’s book will critically analyse the way we label women with personality disorders. Why are women and girls pathologized for being angry about oppression and abuse? How have so many women been duped into believing that they are mentally ill, for having normal and natural reactions to their experiences? Sexy But Psycho argues that there is a specific purpose to convincing women and girls that they are mentally ill, as the world avoids addressing violence against women and their centuries of ignored trauma.”
“Emily Ratajkowski is an acclaimed model and actress, an engaged political progressive, a formidable entrepreneur, a global social media phenomenon, and now, a writer. Rocketing to world fame at age twenty-one, Ratajkowski sparked both praise and furor with the provocative display of her body as an unapologetic statement of feminist empowerment. The subsequent evolution in her thinking about our culture’s commodification of women is the subject of this book. My Body is a profoundly personal exploration of feminism, sexuality, and power, of men’s treatment of women and women’s rationalizations for accepting that treatment. These essays chronicle moments from Ratajkowski’s life while investigating the culture’s fetishization of girls and female beauty, its obsession with and contempt for women’s sexuality, the perverse dynamics of the fashion and film industries, and the grey area between consent and abuse.
Nuanced, unflinching, and incisive, My Body marks the debut of a fierce writer brimming with courage and intelligence.”
More Women’s Sexual Fantasies
“Nancy Friday’s second collection of sexual fantasies is even more explicit and outspoken than her erotic masterpiece My Secret Garden. The constant refrain from the thousands of women across America who read My Secret Garden was “Thank God I’m not the only one…” who has those wild, exciting, outrageous thoughts that bring so much sexual pleasure. Now the women in Forbidden Flowers rejoice in the awareness and acceptance of their inner sexual lives. The new word is joyful. And, this new breakthrough book adds an exhilarating new freedom to the changing man-woman relationship.”
Connecting with your inner truth and learning to find your voice
“Fearne Cotton’s voice is familiar to millions, whether that’s through television, radio or her hugely successful Happy Place podcast. Her voice is her career, her livelihood and the way she communicates with her audience and her loved ones. So, when Fearne’s doctor told her she was at risk of needing a throat operation followed by two weeks of being unable to speak, she found herself facing a period of unexpected contemplation.
As she considered what silence would mean, Fearne began to think about other times her voice had gone unheard – as a young woman, as ‘just the talent’, as the foil to louder, more dominant figures. She found herself wondering: at what point do we internalise this message, and start silencing ourselves? When
do we swallow down our authentic words to become pleasers and compromisers at the cost of our own happiness or wellbeing? Speak Your Truth dives into all the ways we learn to stay quiet for the wrong reasons, and explores how to find your voice, assert yourself and speak out with confidence.
Brave, vulnerable and deeply personal, Speak Your Truth shares Fearne’s compelling story and helps you to shape your own.”
Women as Viewers of Popular Culture
editors Lorraine Gamman & Margaret Marshment
“Is it only men who look?
What happens when a woman is the observer?
And what happens when women look at women?
In fourteen provocative essays on popular culture, leading commentators explore the contradictions and possibilities of new media images, and assess the impact of the female gaze. Do the
new images of powerful women such as Madonna or Cagney and Lacey mean women viewers are influencing contemporary culture? Does Joan Collins really represent the wilder side of women, or is she just another example of sex co-opted for capitalism? And what has Steven Spielberg done to The Color
Purple? Is the female gaze being made to serve ‘male ideologies? Do homoerotic Levi ads have anything to do with women? Or does active female spectatorship present a challenge even to feminist film criticism?”
by Kate Mascarenhas
“-1967-
Four female scientists invent a time travel machine. But then one of them suffers a public breakdown and puts the whole project in peril…
-2017-
Ruby knows her Granny Bee was the scientist who went mad, but they never talk about it. Until they receive a message from the future, warning of an elderly woman’s violent death…
-2018-
Odette found the dead women at work – shot in the head, door bolted from the inside. Now she can’t get her out of her mind. Who was she? And why is everyone determined to cover up her murder?”
Winner of the Noble Prize for literature in 2007
“First published in 1962 and now considered one of the major works of twentieth-century literature, The Golden Notebook is the story of Anna Wulf, a divorced single mother and novelist, labouring against writer’s block in 1950s London. Fearful of going mad, she records her experiences in four coloured notebooks. The black notebook records her writing life, the red her political views, the yellow notebook her emotional life and the blue everyday events. But it is the fifth notebook – the golden notebook – that brings the strands of her life together and holds the key to her recovery.
Bold, illuminating and indispensable, The Golden Notebook is a powerful account of a woman searching for her personal and political identity, negotiating the trauma of emotional rejection and sexual betrayal, professional anxieties, and the tensions of friendship and family.”
Yours L.
another pile of books 
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