Women Unbound Possible Lists

WOMEN UNBOUND Challenge

I am a feminist;  I believe in equal rights.    I know that the world has many places where women do not enjoy the freedoms I do in the US and yet we have some more work to go here in treating all humans with respect and providing opportunity and positive expectations of ability and brain power.     I admit that I have some work to do and am so looking forward to the learning experience of this challenge!    I absolutely love all the lists and everyone’s thoughts on feminism and women’s rights and the highlighting of awesome women all around the world.    Amen, Sister!

I’ve already read The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimarera.    This is a story of a little girl born into the family of a Māori village chief but he is extremely disappointed that she wasn’t born male.  She has a role to fill and does it with can-do spirit.    I look forward to re-viewing the movie.

I wanted to see if any in house books might also work for my options and these are the ones I came up with:

Fiction:  Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, undiscovered gyrl by Allison Burnett,  The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty, Alias Grace by Atwood, I am Madame X by Gioia Diliberto, A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick.

Nonfiction:  Shooting the Boh* by Tracy Johnston, Dead Man Walking by Sister Helen Prejean, and Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir.

My past reading in this extremely broad category includes a few of the more well known works:  The Feminist Mystique / Betty Friedan, The Beauty Myth / Naomi Wolf, and The Awakening / Kate Chopin.    But I really am looking forward to diving into books by Virginia Woolf,  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Audre Lorde, Tillie Olsen, Nancy Friday, Simone de Beauvoir…

And not just women’s issues books, but I would like to read bios of fascinating women:    Sandra Day O’Connor, Mae West, Margaret Mead;  and possibly that Geo Johnson book about Miss Leavitt’s Stars.

I’ve always wanted to read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.     I’m curious about Escape by Carolyn Jessop.   I am keenly interested in society’s expectations in the choice to have children or not (I don’t have any book titles in mind  yet.)

Thank you to everyone who has suggested books!    I’m still not committing because I keep changing and my mind when I read the other participants lists.

* I’m reading Shooting the Boh and can justify it with this sentence from the back of the book:  “…perhaps the most frightening discovery that Johnston made was what she learned about herself:  about what it means to be an adventurer – a WOMAN adventurer – on the wrong side of forty, hampered by a changing body and the fear, loss, and envy that haunt any woman in a world that – even in Borneo – seems made exclusively for the young.”   This fits my desire to read about amazing women.

 

Updated to add this great quote I found at RENEGADEconversations

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a door mat or a prostitute. (Rebecca West, “Mr Chesterton in Hysterics: A Study in Prejudice,” The Clarion, 14 Nov 1913)

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