This anthology of female experience in America, draws on the letters, diaries, speeches, and biographies of women from Colonial days to the early days of the women's movement. There are chapters on childhood, marriage, motherhood, single life, housewifery, old age and death.

An urgent testament to the trials of life for women living without a financial safety net Indie icon Michelle Tea -- whose memoir The Chelsea Whistle details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts -- shares these fierce, honest, tender essays written by women who can't go home to the suburbs when ends don't meet. When jobs are scarce and the money has dwindled, these writers have nowhere to go but below the poverty line. The writers offer their different stories not for sympathy or sadness, but an unvarnished portrait of how it was, is, and will be for generations of women growing up working class in America. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from selling blood for grocery money to the culture shock of "jumping" class. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Bee Lavender, Eileen Myles, and Daisy Hernáez.

Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and opportunity that continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residences as well as essays that analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory--such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing. While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education.

This novel was the major inspiration for the Women's Movement and continues to be a powerful and illuminating analysis of the position of women in Western society___

True stories from some of the world's most pro-sex feminists. These women have provided intimate, anti-censorship essays, to reestablish the idea that equality of the sexes doesn't have to mean no sex. From intimate sexual experiences and physical perception through to the academic arena, this ground-breaking volume documents women's POSITIVE thoughts, uses, and desires for, with, and about pornography. Essays include such diverse topics as how the authors discovered porn, what it means to a blind and deaf woman, running a sex magazine, starting a sex shop, and what the contributors would actually LIKE to see. Compiled by Feminists Against Censorship, Tales From The Clit is erotically and intellectually arousing. Contributors include: Deborah Ryder, Jan Grossman, Sue Raye, Linzi Drew, Annie Sprinkle, Tuppy Owens, Lucy Williams, Nettie Pollard, Avedon Carol, Scarlet Harlot, and Caroline Bottomley.

Argues that contemporary female Gothic novels of death can, in fact, breathe new life into feminist debates about victimization, essentialism, agency, and the body.

Essays reprinted from the website Black girl dangerous.