In 1970, Sexual Politics explained why sexual relationships – and indeed sex itself – are political. ‘The world was sleeping,’ wrote Andrea Dworkin of this book. ‘And Kate Millett woke it up.’
Madeline Green’s Glasgow (1930).
National Gallery of Victoria / Bridgeman
This new pocket-sized book is an excellent place to begin an education about the women who have contributed to the history of western art.
The main photo is author Nora Willis Aronowitz, with her mother Ellen Willis pictured, in black & white, on right. (Left image is from Unsplash/Gabriel Nune.)
Nona Willis Aronowitz, daughter of a second-wave feminist, ranges across the contemporary sexual landscape – and looks back at the history of feminism – in a ‘zig zag pursuit of sexual liberation’.
Shulamith Firestone interviewed in 1969.
Still from Hezayka News report via babyradfem_tv on YouTube
Second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone was mocked when she published a 1970 manifesto advocating artifical wombs, but her arguments about the exploitation of reproductive labour remain timely.
Nancy Miriam Hawley, founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Inc., with different editions of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Bizuayehu Tesfaye/AP Photo
Like their predecessors, today’s feminists can get mired in disagreements over strategies and goals. The celebrated feminist text suggests a more constructive approach.
Hillary Clinton: she has been shamed by women as every kind of bad feminist.
Brian Snyder/Reuters
The US election has exposed deep divisions between older and younger feminists. Women have shamed Hillary Clinton as every kind of bad feminist.
Bill Shorten, launching Labor’s childcare policy, inadvertently set off a debate about the major party leaders’ respective feminist credentials.
AAP/Joel Carrett
Talk of ‘women’s issues’, such as childcare, both accepts they are less important than other issues and assumes they have no universal value.
A typescript for the Female Eunuch with photo of a young Greer on a book.
Germaine Greer archive: 2014.0038.0001. Picture Nathan Gallagher, copyright University of Melbourne
The Greer archives brim with notebooks and papers from her time as a student of the traditional humanities. And reading The Female Eunuch for evidence of the Bard reveals a new kind of book, one that is deeply informed by this scholarship.
Women need to recalibrate feminist action so that it’s not just about them advancing in society on men’s terms.
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