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Feminism in Our Time

From Simone de Beauvoir to Susan Faludi, from the ERA to Anita Hill, a historically informed sourcebook that defines the intellectual and political underpinnings of contemporary feminism.
In this important volume, the respected feminist historian Miriam Schneir completes the work she began in her best-selling Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, presenting contemporary writings that define the women's movement today add reveal how radically transformative a force it is throughout the world. Ranging from intensely personal statements to ringing manifestos, from diagnosis to outright rebellion, and incorporating both public records and works addressing such specific issues as religion, rape, women's health, pornography, and the concerns of lesbians and women of color, Feminism in Our Time is the most thorough record to date of women's ongoing struggle to control their own destinies and provide alternative visions of the just society and a true human equality.
Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present by Miriam Schneir
ISBN: 0679745084

The Second Wave

The Second Wave collects many of the major essays of feminist theory of the past forty years, essays by the figures who have made key contributions to feminist theory during this period and have generated extensive discussion. Organized historically, these essays provide a sense of the major turning points in feminist theory.
Contributors include: Norma Alarcon, Linda Alcoff, Michele Barrett, Elsa Barkley Brown, Judith Butler, Nancy Chodorow, Patricia Hill Collins, Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Nancy Fraser, Carol Gilligan, Heidi Hartmann, Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Luce Irigaray, Catharine MacKinnon, Uma Narayan, Linda Nicholson, Ellen Rooney, Gayle Rubin, Gayatri Spivak, Wendy W. Williams and Monique Wittig.
Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory by Linda J. Nicholson
ISBN: 0415917611

Maternal Desire

What is the desire to mother? How do we understand it, talk about it, and think about it? These questions are at the heart of Maternal Desire, a groundbreaking book that gives a voice and a vocabulary to one of the most transforming and powerful experiences in women's lives.
If a century ago it was women's sexual desires that were unspeakable, today it is women's desire to mother that has become taboo. One hundred years of Freud and feminism have liberated women to acknowledge and explore their sexual selves, as well as their public and personal ambitions. What has remained inhibited is women's thinking about motherhood. Simplistic images of stay-at-home moms or career super-moms, along with endless debates about what is better for children, continue to obscure the profound meaning of mothering for many women, in all its chaos, complexity, and joy.
Maternal Desire is the first book to treat women's desire to mother as a legitimate focus of intellectual inquiry and personal exploration.
Shedding new light on old debates, Daphne de Marneffe provides an emotional road map for mothers who work and mothers who are at home. The book both explores the enjoyment and anxieties of motherhood and offers mothers in all situations valuable ways to think through their self-doubts and connect to their capacity for pleasure. Drawing on a rich tradition of writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, Carol Gilligan, and Susan Faludi, as well as her experience as a psychologist and mother of three, Daphne de Marneffe illuminates how we, as individuals and as a society, express our desire to care for children. By treating maternal desire as a central feature of women's identity rather than as an inconvenient or slightly embarrassing detail, we can look with fresh insight at controversial issues such as childcare, fertility, abortion, and the role of fathers.
Daphne de Marneffe unearths ideas that have unwittingly shaped our inner lives, and offers women a more complete vision of liberation. Revolutionary and transforming, Maternal Desire is a book about ideas, a book about culture, and an invitation to self-reflection.
Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life by Daphne de Marneffe
ISBN: 0316059951

Margaret Sanger

While working as a nurse amid the squalor of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century, Margaret Sanger witnessed the devastating effects of unwanted pregnancies. Women already overwhelmed by the burdens of poverty had no recourse; their doctors were either ignorant of effective methods of birth control or were unwilling to risk defying the law.
Margaret Sanger resolved to dedicate her life to establishing birth control as a basic human right. Her battles brought a world of troubles-arrest, indictment, and exile among them-but ultimately Margaret triumphed, opening the first American birth control clinic in 1916 and serving as the first president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1953.
A fascinating, firsthand account of an early crusade for women's healthcare, this autobiography us a classic of women's studies and social reform.
The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger
ISBN: 0486434923