Including: Susan B. Anthony Simone de Beauvoir W.E.B. Du Bois Hélène Cixous Betty Friedan Charlotte Perkins Gilman Emma Goldman Guerrilla Girls Ding Ling • Audre Lorde John Stuart Mill Christine de Pizan Adrienne Rich Margaret Sanger Huda Shaarawi • Sojourner Truth Mary Wollstonecraft Virginia Woolf The Essential Feminist Reader is the first anthology to present the full scope of feminist history. Prizewinning historian Estelle B. Freedman brings decades of teaching experience and scholarship to her selections, which span more than five centuries. Moving beyond standard texts by English and American thinkers, this collection features primary source material from around the globe, including short works of fiction and drama, political manifestos, and the work of less well-known writers. Freedman’s cogent Introduction assesses the challenges facing feminism, while her accessible, lively commentary contextualizes each piece. The Essential Feminist Reader is a vital addition to feminist scholarship, and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of women.

Virginia Woolf's playful exploration of a satirical »Oxbridge« became one of the world's most groundbreaking writings on women, writing, fiction, and gender. A Room of One's Own [1929] can be read as one or as six different essays, narrated from an intimate first-person perspective. Actual history blends with narrative and memoir. But perhaps most revolutionary was its address: the book is written by a woman for women. Male readers are compelled to read through women's eyes in a total inversion of the traditional male gaze. VIRGINIA WOOLF [1882–1941] was an English author. With novels like Jacob’s Room [1922], Mrs Dalloway [1925], To the Lighthouse [1927], and Orlando [1928], she became a leading figure of modernism and is considered one of the most important English-language authors of the 20th century. As a thinker, with essays like A Room of One’s Own [1929], Woolf has influenced the women’s movement in many countries.

DigiCat presents to you this unique collection of feminist masterpieces - from fictional protagonists who influenced generations of young women to the real heroines of the past, their life stories and their legacy. Fiction: Camilla (Fanny Burney) Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman (Mary Wollstonecraft) Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) Lady Macbeth of the Mzinsk District (Nikolai Leskov) Hester (Margaret Oliphant) Life in the Iron Mills (Rebecca Davis) Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell) The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen) Hedda Gabler (Henrik Ibsen) The Awakening (Kate Chopin) The Woman Who Did (Grant Allen) Miss Cayley's Adventures (Grant Allen) New Amazonia (Elizabeth Corbett) A Girl of the Limberlost (Gene Stratton-Porter) The Iron Woman (Margaret Deland) My Ántonia (Willa Cather) The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton) Summer (Edith Wharton) Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser) Sisters (Ada Cambridge) Hagar (Mary Johnston) Samantha on the Woman Question (Marietta Holley) The Precipice (Elia Wilkinson Peattie) To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) Miss Lulu Bett (Zona Gale) Lady Chatterley's Lover (D. H. Lawrence) The Enchanted April (Elizabeth von Arnim) Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell) Emily of New Moon (Lucy Maud Montgomery) Memoirs: Madame Vigée Lebrun Jane Austen Caroline Herschel Mrs. Seacole Elizabeth Cady Stanton Emmeline Pankhurst Biographies: Lucretia Sappho Aspasia of Cyrus Portia Octavia Cleopatra Julia Domna Zenobia Valeria Hypatia Roswitha the Nun Marie de France Mechthild of Magdeburg Joan of Arc Catharine of Arragon Anne Boleyn Queen Elizabeth Mary, Queen of Scots Queen Anne Maria Theresa Marie Antoinette Madame de Stael Augustina Saragoza Charlotte Brontë Florence Nightingale Harriet Tubman

An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate “Handmaids” under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred’s persistent memories of life in the “time before” and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning.

Explores and analyses the main philosophical theories, ideas and arguments that inform, and are raised by questions of gender and sexuality.

How have ideas about white women figured in the history of racism? Vron Ware argues that they have been central, and that feminism has, in many ways, developed as a political movement within racist societies. Dissecting the different meanings of femininity and womanhood, Beyond the Pale examines the political connections between black and white women, both within contemporary racism and feminism, as well as in historical examples like the anti-slavery movement and the British campaign against lynching in the United States. Beyond the Pale is a major contribution to anti-racist work, confronting the historical meanings of whiteness as a way of overcoming the moralism that so often infuses anti-racist movements.

Repeatedly declared dead by the media, the women’s movement has never been as vibrant as it is today. Indeed as Stanford professor and award-winning author Estelle B. Freedman argues in her compelling new book, feminism has reached a critical momentum from which there is no turning back. A truly global movement, as vital and dynamic in the developing world as it is in the West, feminism has helped women achieve authority in politics, sports, and business, and has mobilized public concern for once-taboo issues like rape, domestic violence, and breast cancer. And yet much work remains before women attain real equality. In this fascinating book, Freedman examines the historical forces that have fueled the feminist movement over the past two hundred years–and explores how women today are looking to feminism for new approaches to issues of work, family, sexuality, and creativity. Freedman begins with an incisive analysis of what feminism means and why it took root in western Europe and the United States at the end of the eighteenth century. The rationalist, humanistic philosophy of the Enlightenment, which ignited the American Revolution, also sparked feminist politics, inspiring such pioneers as Mary Wollstonecraft and Susan B. Anthony. Race has always been as important as gender in defining feminism, and Freedman traces the intricate ties between women’s rights and abolitionism in the United States in the years before the Civil War and the long tradition of radical women of color, stretching back to the impassioned rhetoric of Sojourner Truth. As industrialism and democratic politics spread after World War II, feminist politics gained momentum and sophistication throughout the world. Their impact began to be felt in every aspect of society–from the workplace to the chambers of government to relations between the sexes. Because of feminism, Freedman points out, the line between the personal and the political has blurred, or disappeared, and issues once considered “merely” private–abortion, sexual violence, homosexuality, reproductive health, beauty and body image–have entered the public arena as subjects of fierce, ongoing debate. Freedman combines a scholar’s meticulous research with a social critic’s keen eye. Sweeping in scope, searching in its analysis, global in its perspective, No Turning Back will stand as a defining text in one of the most important social movements of all time.

Here are, as Alice Rossi claims in her well-written preface, 'the essential works of feminism, ' published over a period of 200 years. Her introductions to each section are informative and written with nonpolemical grace. -- Doris Grumbach, New Republic

Saloni Chopra is an actor by choice and a writer by accident. While one helps her serotonin, the other helps her mortgage*. Raised in Australia, but firmly believes it’s not where she “grew up”, because that happened in the heart of Mumbai, an over-populated city where she ironically learnt to take up more space by fighting for rights she didn’t even know she would need one day. From falling into a puddle of quicksand and staying calm enough to not get sucked in, to the art of finding her own voice in a patriarchal society - she learnt everything in her early 20s the hard way (only one of the above is true). There came a point when Saloni realised that if she was going to keep living a life that was such a dramatic page-turner, she may as well write a book about it. * And she doesn’t even have a mortgage

Through close readings of these eight North American and British novels, which have had a powerful impact on the development of literature for girls, Foster and Simons consider genres from the domestic myth to the school story, analyze the transgressive figure of the tomboy, and discuss ways in which superficially conventional texts implicitly undermine patterns of patriarchy.