Writers festivals navigate the fraught frontier between social media’s echo chambers of outrage and the civilised public debate of the public square. What’s the way forward in this heated atmosphere?
Zora Simic has never been married, nor wanted to. She assesses two new books about feminism and marriage – Clementine Ford’s polemic against it and Rachael Lennon’s history of its reformation.
Ford works toward dismantling the idea that feminism is harming men. Instead, she proposes that a patriarchal society can be as harmful and destructive for individual men as it can be for women.
Clementine Ford’s Fight Like a Girl is the latest in a new wave of feminist memoirs. These frank, fearless books reveal the hostility and deep discomfort women’s ever-strengthening public voice has provoked.