Edited by iconic musician Kim Gordon and esteemed writer Sinéad Gleeson, this powerful collection of award-winning female creators shares their writing about the female artists that matter most to them. This book is for and about the women who kicked in doors, as pioneers of their craft or making politics central to their sound: those who offer a new way of thinking about the vast spectrum of women in music. This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music is edited by iconic musician Kim Gordon and esteemed writer Sinéad Gleeson and features an array of talented contributors, including: Anne Enright, Fatima Bhutto, Jenn Pelly, Rachel Kushner, Juliana Huxtable, Leslie Jamison, Liz Pelly, Maggie Nelson, Margo Jefferson, Megan Jasper, Ottessa Moshfegh, Simone White, Yiyun Li, and Zakia Sewell. In this radical departure from the historic narrative of music and music writing being written by men, for men, This Woman’s Work challenges the male dominance and sexism that have been hard-coded in the canons of music, literature, and film and has forced women to fight pigeon-holing or being side-lined by carving out their own space. Women have to speak up, to shout louder to tell their story—like the auteurs and ground-breakers featured in this collection, including: Anne Enright on Laurie Anderson; Megan Jasper on her ground-breaking work with Sub Pop; Margo Jefferson on Bud Powell and Ella Fitzgerald; and Fatima Bhutto on music and dictatorship. This Woman’s Work also features writing on the experimentalists, women who blended music and activism, the genre-breakers, the vocal auteurs; stories of lost homelands and friends; of propaganda and dictatorships, the women of folk and country, the racialized tropes of jazz, the music of Trap and Carriacou; of mixtapes and violin lessons.

A profound and personal exploration of the intersections of womanhood, femininity, and creativity This Woman’s Work is a powerfully raw autobiographical work that asks vital questions about femininity and the assumptions we make about gender. Julie Delporte examines cultural artifacts and sometimes traumatic memories through the lens of the woman she is today—a feminist who understands the reality of the women around her, how experiencing rape culture and sexual abuse is almost synonymous with being a woman, and the struggle of reconciling one’s feminist beliefs with the desire to be loved. She sometimes resents being a woman and would rather be anything but. Told through beautifully evocative colored pencil drawings and sparse but compelling prose, This Woman’s Work documents Delporte’s memories and cultural consumption through journal-like entries that represent her struggles with femininity and womanhood. She structures these moments in a nonlinear fashion, presenting each one as a snapshot of a place and time—trips abroad, the moment you realize a relationship is over, and a traumatizing childhood event of sexual abuse that haunts her to this day. While This Woman’s Work is deeply personal, it is also a reflection of the conversations that women have with themselves when trying to carve out their feminist identity. Delporte’s search for answers in the turmoil created by gender assumptions is profoundly resonant in the era of #MeToo.

Dominique Christina guides women in exploring their deepest, most essential, and most liberated selves. “An unearthing, the soil of which connects us to our past and our many selves.” —Staceyann Chin, playwright, feminist, author of The Other Side of Paradise “A woman’s work is to define herself,” writes award-winning slam poet Dominique Christina. While this task is important for everybody, Dominique says, “There is an urgency for women. When you have inherited a construct that names, describes, and practices an ideology that women are somehow less important, less necessary, then the work of defining yourself carries with it a kind of fury.” This is why she wrote This Is Woman’s Work: to help women reclaim every single aspect of their selves, whether caring or cunning or fierce. Every woman is composed of many selves—archetypal players of the psyche who contribute their voices to her greater “I.” In this paperback edition of This Is Woman’s Work, Dominique introduces us to our council of inner women, delving into the secret wisdom and gifts of the Willing Woman, the Rebel, the Shapeshifter, the Warrior, and more. Combining writing exercises with fresh and dynamic insights, Dominique helps us make an intimate connection with each inner woman—known and unknown, loved and feared—so we may integrate their voices, realize their wisdom, and open ourselves to our full expression and power.

"When Harriet Harman started her career, men-only job adverts and a 'women's rate' of pay were the norm. Female MPs were a tiny minority and a woman couldn't even sign for a mortgage. In A Woman's Work Harriet, Britain's longest-serving female MP looks at her own life to see how far we've come and where we should go next. This is a refreshingly honest account of the part she played in the movement that transformed politics and women's lives."--Provided by publisher.

"A fascinating history of…[a craft] that preceded and made possible civilization itself." —New York Times Book Review New discoveries about the textile arts reveal women's unexpectedly influential role in ancient societies. Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women. Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture. Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methods—methods she herself helped to fashion. In a "brilliantly original book" (Katha Pollitt, Washington Post Book World), she argues that women were a powerful economic force in the ancient world, with their own industry: fabric.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 From National Book Award finalist Megan K. Stack, a stunning memoir of raising her children abroad with the help of Chinese and Indian women who are also working mothers When Megan Stack was living in Beijing, she left her prestigious job as a foreign correspondent to have her first child and work from home writing a book. She quickly realized that caring for a baby and keeping up with the housework while her husband went to the office each day was consuming the time she needed to write. This dilemma was resolved in the manner of many upper-class families and large corporations: she availed herself of cheap Chinese labor. The housekeeper Stack hired was a migrant from the countryside, a mother who had left her daughter in a precarious situation to earn desperately needed cash in the capital. As Stack's family grew and her husband's job took them to Dehli, a series of Chinese and Indian women cooked, cleaned, and babysat in her home. Stack grew increasingly aware of the brutal realities of their lives: domestic abuse, alcoholism, unplanned pregnancies. Hiring poor women had given her the ability to work while raising her children, but what ethical compromise had she made? Determined to confront the truth, Stack traveled to her employees' homes, met their parents and children, and turned a journalistic eye on the tradeoffs they'd been forced to make as working mothers seeking upward mobility—and on the cost to the children who were left behind. Women's Work is an unforgettable story of four women as well as an electrifying meditation on the evasions of marriage, motherhood, feminism, and privilege.

A 1975 classic, this highly readable, in-depth study examines a familiar female role in contemporary American society. The authors apply fieldwork methods to the study of social behavior in a college baras viewed from the perspective of cocktail waitresses. They describe in detail the day-to-day lives of women and the meaning of work for women in a mans world. Not a feminist tract, their book provides a wealth of empirical data on the nature of being female in our culture. The Cocktail Waitress examines female/male relationships as well as patterns of male dominance in social interaction, and shows how these are linked to more general issues in anthropology. The work teaches important social science concepts while always dealing with the college students own world. Its objective presentation of the waitress casts light on significant social issues and the role of women in todays society, together with the manner in which female-male roles are interlocked.

A MUST-HAVE COLLECTION OF RARE AND UNSEEN PHOTOGRAPHS OF KATE BUSH. WITH ESSAYS BY HER BROTHER, JOHN CARDER BUSH, ABOUT KATE'S LIFE AND CAREER. Stunning and unique images from throughout Kate Bush's career including: Outtakes from classic album shoots and never-before-seen photographs from The Dreaming and Hounds of Love sessions Rare candid studio shots and behind-the-scenes stills from video sets, including 'Army Dreamers' and 'Running Up that Hill' Includes original essays from Kate's brother: From Cathy to Kate: Describes in vibrant detail their shared childhood and the whirlwind days of Kate's career Chasing the Shot: A vivid evocation of John's experience of photographing his sister 'For me, each of these images forms part of a golden thread that shoots through the visual tapestry of Kate's remarkable career. Storytelling has always been the heartbeat of Kate's body of work, and it has been a privilege to capture these photographic illustrations that accompany those magical tales' John Carder Bush

Discover an unexplored dimension of the life of a popular 19th-century gardener, poet, and personality