Top 100 Feminist Non-Fiction Countdown: 20-11

  Nearing the top 10, we’ve got some heavy hitters. Famous feminists Simone De Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Naomi Wolf, Eve Ensler and Jessica Valenti appear along with revolutionary self-help manual, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and popular books by Julia Serano, Marjane Satrapi and Yoani Sanchez. Now is the time to submit your guesses in the comments [...]

Ms. Readers’ Choice: Top 100 Non-Fiction Books?

Time’s recent article on the 100 best non-fiction reads got us Ms. bloggers thinking about what we’d put on our own list. Time included a respectable number of arguable feminist classics such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Margaret [...]

Scapegoating Black Women in a Recession

You know the media spin cycle and the propagandists are winning when you advise a young, promising black woman undergraduate student about her prospects for doctoral studies, and she immediately takes herself out of the running. Not because there are fewer fellowships to help pay for graduate school or because she wants to pursue a [...]

Does the Reaction to IMF Rape Charges Show Progress?

International Monetary Fund leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn is being held without bail in Manhattan today on charges of attempted rape, sexual assault and unlawful imprisonment. The powerful French politician is accused of confining a maid in an upscale New York hotel and sexually abusing her on Saturday afternoon. Theories of a plot to defame the beloved [...]

Naomi Wolf: Liberty, Interrupted

Late last year, when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was accused of rape by two women, noted feminist and one-time anti-sexual-violence advocate Naomi Wolf brazenly denied the accusations, outraging feminists everywhere. As the story broke, I was just picking up Wolf’s 2008 book, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. What I discovered was, in [...]

Crying (Naomi) Wolf Over Rape

Naomi Wolf has been making the media rounds lately on the Julian Assange case, beginning  with three pieces on The Huffington Post and then in a debate on Democracy Now! She claimed that the governments involved in prosecuting Assange for rape are only “pimping feminism” to go after him in retaliation for WikiLeaks, and that [...]

Women We’ll Be Reading 200 Years From Now

“Women I admire have gone through hell to get their work out there,” Erica Jong told us this past weekend. “I’d like to change that for you.” Despite its sale of 20 million copies worldwide, Jong’s 1973 feminist novel Fear of Flying provoked a backlash, the vestiges of which still own a sliver of Jong’s [...]