Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity

The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women
2. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-41318-1
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 282 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 566 g

Examining the lives and work of feminist thinkers throughout history, this book explores their struggles with politics, intellectual work, and material and existential conditions of femininity. A new introduction to this second edition resituates these themes in contemporary feminist literature and theory.

Feminist autobiographical accounts exploring multiple lives and loves, encounters with political comrades and enemies, and frustrations with social expectations about feminine respectability, offer tastes of feminist lives across history and situation. But the stories are not always inspirational or exemplary. How do feminists survive and thrive in situations marked by intersecting harms of sexism, racism, and colonial and capitalist extraction? Thinking beyond representation and empathy as ways to connect, this book features disorienting and disruptive examples from feminist experiments in living and explores the uncomfortable feelings they invite in readers. Insisting that feminists should read the autobiographies and memoirs of feminist actors alongside their theoretical contributions, the volume features the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Emma Goldman, Ida B. Wells, Audre Lorde, Azar Nafisi, Ana Castillo, Carolyn Kay Steedman, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and more.

Written for students and scholars of Women’s History, and everyone who “feels like a feminist,” this book embodies and electrifies the feminist insight that the personal is political.

The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Zielgruppe

General and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Marso, Lori Jo

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Feminismus, Feministische Theorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Feeling Like a Feminist, by Example 1. Feminist Genealogies: Connecting Women’s Lives 2. Women’s Situation, I: The Material Constraints of Femininity 3. Women’s Situation, II: Existential Experiments with the Feminine 4. Love in Exile: Reading the Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Staël 5. A Feminist Search for Love: Emma Goldman on the Politics of Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and the Feminine 6. Maternal Genealogies and Feminist Consciousness: Simone de Beauvoir on Mothers, Daughters, and Political Coalitions 7. Wanting It All: Contemporary Struggles for Freedom and Fulfillment. Conclusion

Über Autor(innen)

Lori Jo Marso is Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Literary and Historical Studies and Professor of Political Science at Union College, NY. Her books include Feminism and the Cinema of Experience (2024), Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter (2017), Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (2016) and Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers (2016).