Woman Study

In Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and a practicing psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, argues that beauty is neither a cultural construction, an invention of the fashion industry, nor a backlash against feminism - it's in our biology.

Adrienne Rich's influential and landmark investigation concerns both the experience and the institution of motherhood. The experience is her own - as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother - but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.

Foregoing motherhood has traditionally marked a woman as “other.” With no official place setting for her in our society, she has hovered on the sidelines: the quirky girl, the neurotic career obsessive, the “eccentric” aunt. Instead of continuing to paint women without kids as sad, self-obsessed, or somehow dysfunctional, what if we saw them as boldly forging a first-in-a-civilization vision for a fully autonomous womankind? Or as journalist and thought leader Ruby Warrington asks, What if being a woman without kids were in fact its own kind of legacy?

A growing number of intrepid Arab and Middle Eastern sahafiyat - female journalists - are working tirelessly to shape nuanced narratives about their changing homelands, often risking their lives on the front lines of war. From sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo to the difficulty of traveling without a male relative in Yemen, their challenges are unique - as are their advantages, such as being able to speak candidly with other women at a Syrian medical clinic or with men on Whatsapp who will go on to become ISIS fighters, rebels, or pro-regime soldiers.

Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Rebelling against the aimless drinking, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopeless of reservation life, she joined the new movement of tribal pride sweeping Native American communities in the '60s and '70s.

This is the story of Tenzin Palmo, the daughter of a fishmonger from London's East End who became a Tibetan nun. After meditating for 12 years in a cave 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas, she became a world-renowned spiritual leader and champion of the right of women to achieve spiritual enlightenment.

Hirsi Ali tells the stirring story of her search for a new life in America in this vivid philosophical memoir, picking up where Infidel left off. Nomad is a portrait of a family torn apart by the clash of civilizations. But it is also a touching, uplifting, and often funny account of one woman’s discovery of today’s America.

It’s All Under Control is an audiobook for every woman who is hanging on tight and trying to get each day right - yet finding that life often feels out of control and chaotic.

Are women able to achieve anything they set their minds to? In How to Suppress Women’s Writing, award-winning novelist and scholar Joanna Russ lays bare the subtle - and not so subtle - strategies that society uses to ignore, condemn, or belittle women who produce literature. As relevant today as when it was first published in 1983, this book has motivated generations of readers with its powerful feminist critique.

Forty years ago in China, marriage was universal, compulsory, and a woman's only means to a livelihood. Enter the one-child policy, which despite its horrors, resulted in China's first generations of urban only-daughters - girls who were raised without brothers and pushed to study, achieve, and succeed as if they were sons. Fast forward to the present, where in an urbanized economic powerhouse, enough of these women have decided to postpone marriage - or not marry at all - to spawn a label: "leftovers". Unprecedentedly well-educated and goal-oriented, they struggle to find partners.

Of all the women you know, how many of them would you describe as "a lady"? Naturally, you know women who are kind and intelligent, witty and resourceful; but a lady is an altogether different variety of female. She's mindful of the effect she has on those around her, and she's careful not to let her words or appearance betray her true intentions. How to Be a Lady is a charming reminder of what it takes to be an exemplary woman - someone who knows how to breeze through an awkward conversation with poise, or delicately sidestep the beauty salon gossip.

At long last, Mary Beard addresses in one brave book the misogynists and trolls who mercilessly attack and demean women the world over, including, very often, Mary herself. In Women & Power, she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial.

Anna Prushinskaya explores the deep life shifts of pregnancy, birth and motherhood in the United States, a world away from the author's Soviet homeland. Drawing from inspirations as various as midwife Ina May Gaskin, writer and activist Alice Walker, and frontierswoman Caroline Henderson, Prushinskaya captures the inherent togetherness of motherhood alongside its accompanying estrangement. She plumbs the deeper waters of compassion, memory and identity, as well as the humorous streams of motherhood as they run up against the realities of work and the ever-present eye of social media.

"It's a truism, for instance, that a few clothes are more shocking than none. But for women especially, bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without those visual references, however, each individual woman's body can be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique."

Biblical womanhood - the belief that God designed women to be submissive wives, virtuous mothers, and joyful homemakers - pervades North American Christianity. From choices about careers to roles in local churches to relationship dynamics, this belief shapes the everyday lives of evangelical women. Yet biblical womanhood isn't biblical, says Baylor University historian Beth Allison Barr. It was born in a series of clearly definable historical moments.

When Dan Kimball first sat down to meet with a student who was disillusioned by Christianity, he wasn't ready for what he was about to hear. The student had a positive church experience. He was grateful for his youth leader. But he had serious objections to Christianity. Why? He had begun studying the Bible and found he could no longer accept what it taught. Reading the Bible had led him to become an atheist.

In her most urgent book yet, New York Times bestselling author Jessica Valenti shines a light on the conservative assault on women’s freedom, cutting through the misinformation and overwhelm to inform, engage, and enrage. From the attacks Americans know about to the ones anti-abortion lawmakers and groups are trying to hide, Valenti details the tactics and horrors that she’s been painstakingly tracking in her acclaimed newsletter, Abortion, Every Day.

A worldwide best seller, translated into more than 12 languages, The Female Eunuch is a landmark in the history of the women’s movement. Drawing liberally from history, literature and popular culture, past and present, Germaine Greer’s searing examination of women’s oppression is at once an important social commentary and a passionately argued masterpiece of polemic. Probably the most famous, most widely read book on feminism ever.

Brought to life through real-world examples and backed by rigorous data, The Athena Doctrine shows how feminine traits are ascending - and bringing success to people and organizations around the world. By nurturing, listening, collaborating and sharing, women and men are solving problems, finding profits, and redefining success in every realm.

As a psychotherapist and professor of marriage and family therapy and sexuality at a Christian University, Tina Schermer Sellers, PhD, has spent a career listening deeply to the often untold, most tightly held, shame-filled stories of people’s lives. Over the last 30 years in particular, these stories have revealed the devastating effects of abstinence education, the purity movement of the evangelical church, and the simultaneous removal of media regulations that allowed for an influx of sexual violence against women to enter all forms of commercial media beginning in the 1980s.