Early manifestos honored a high-stakes feminist anger that swept through the writing. It burns and simmers even today.
Tag: Women
Nancy Hale, at Last
Hale's stories reveal that the woman who’s right is still the one kept up at night.
Helen of West Hollywood
It hardly seems necessary to offer a spoiler alert for news that is well over two millennia old. But some news is so surprising, so contrary to everything we thought we knew, that time can do little ...
What Next for MeTooLit?
What happens when a woman’s words are believed? And what doesn’t happen? Two years have passed since the viral hashtag #MeToo carried the intersectional movement to end sexual violence to a global ...
B-Sides: Mary Borden’s “The Forbidden Zone”
Mary Borden’s taut masterpiece has long been overshadowed by the other Great War books of 1928–29 (All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms ...
MAGA: Margaret Atwood’s Gilead Again
Margaret Atwood has argued that there is “within each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it ...
Imperial Couplings
Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies explores the couple, and intimacy, as foundational historical categories in postcolonial and decolonial studies. At the heart of her narrative lie Carl, a Jamaican ...
The Lyric Me, Too
“The” is a suspect word. It’s small and ubiquitous, but there’s something presumptuous about it. It aggrandizes and abstracts. Unlike “this” and “that,” which also indicate specificity (“this word,” ...
B-Sides: Gene Stratton-Porter’s “A Girl of the Limberlost”
All but forgotten today, Gene Stratton-Porter was—in the early 20th century ...
A Black Counternarrative
Master narratives become the background music of our lives, undercurrents so ingrained that the violence they often engender is rendered unremarkable. One master narrative is the tale we tell about ...
B-Sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
When should a woman kill her husband? I have turned this question over and over ...
What Can “Women’s Fiction” Do for Women?
“I am the proud and happy writer of popular fiction,” says novelist Jennifer Weiner, “and I would never argue that it matters as much as the award-winning ...
“Down the Rabbit Hole of America”: Katha Pollitt Talks with Susan Jane Gilman
Susan Jane Gilman is a storyteller with a lot to say—about life in our unequal and bewildering America, about refugees, about what happens to youthful ambition ...
Translation and Other Children: Liberaki’s “Three Summers”
While metaphors linking translation to human reproduction abound, Karen ...
Bleached Atmospheres of Dread
Myles McRae MLA was a monster of male entitlement. Any person who read the Australian newspapers in the year 1891 would have thought so. Six feet tall ...
A Black Counternarrative
Master narratives become the background music of our lives, undercurrents so ingrained that the violence they often engender is rendered unremarkable. One master narrative is the tale we tell about ...
Women Who Write About Their Feelings and Lives
Two recent memoirs by women who grew up in “sexually liberated” 1970s artistic Australia present a sobering picture: of predatory and violent men whose ...
Female Futures, Future Females
In the midst of an intergalactic war between Earth and an empire of cyborg machines, a mother desperately uploads the consciousness of her dead daughter ...
Back to the Women’s Land
How do women gain power in a society economically and politically dominated by men? This question vexed mid-20th-century second-wave feminists. At issue was whether women should occupy male spaces or ...
Who Is Sick and Who Is Well?
I might be tempted to describe Terese Mailhot’s new memoir, Heart Berries, as “raw,” had she not warned against it. “The danger politically or artistically is that ...
