Gender Studies

In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf instructs women to ‘write calmly’ and ‘not in a rage’. Commentator Catherine Fox writes ‘calmly’ about contemporary realities with great potential to spark rage.

Stop Fixing Women operates partly as a rejoinder to Sheryl Sandberg’s popular manifesto Lean In (2013), which addressed ‘internal obstac ... More

The Sex Myth announces some lofty aspirations in its title, which invokes game-changing feminist interventions like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (1991). Saturated as we are now by sex talk of all kinds, it is hard to imagine a critique of sex/gender mores having anything like the same impact. Nonethe ... More

When Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, it created a sensation. Within six months, it had almost sold out its second print run and had been translated into eight languages. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the influence of which critics see in Greer’s book, had come out in France in 1949. The Feminine Mystique, b ... More

In a review of several books on motherhood (LRB, 14 June 2014), Jacqueline Rose – feminist, writer on psychoanalysis, English professor, ‘public intellectual’ – interprets Adrienne Rich’s belief that to give birth is to testify to the possibilities of humanity, as a v ... More

Friendship between women is ideal. It is affectionate and nurturing, founded on generosity and mutual love. It is intimate and loyal, because you can tell your best friend anything and she won’t betray you. It lasts a lifetime.