Blog entries

“More a Diva Like Her Than Anybody Else”: Billie Holiday and Nina Simone

WRB Blog — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:35:09 +0100

By Salamishah Tillet for WOMEN = BOOKS

Photo courtesy of Queereaster Media Working Group 2006

In 1965, Nina Simone released Pastel Blues, her least successful album at that time, rising only to number 139 on the Billboard charts....

Running Joke

WRB Blog — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:00:00 +0100

Column: Fiction from the Front Lines

By Rebecca Meacham for WOMEN = BOOKS

It was mile four of a summer afternoon run. The pavement was steaming, the sun high and bright. Suddenly, I had to stop. I doubled over.

Laughing.

It wasn’t the first time I’d stopped jogging to laugh. Since 2002, when I heard humorist David Sedaris read his nonfiction live, I’d begun listening to his audiobooks during my runs. Today I...

I Say No

WRB Blog — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 04:00:00 +0100

Column: Nothing but the Toth

Marilyn Monroe and Ulysses

By Emily Toth

I’m thinking about the lads who love James Joyce, and what he and they don’t know about real women. In particular, they love to froth and slaver over Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses. She runs on and on about sex, and conc...

Abortion in the Time of Obama

WRB Blog — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 04:00:00 +0100

By Carole Joffe for WOMEN = BOOKS

Photo courtesy of ClinicEscort

I started my recent book, Dispatches from the Abortion Wars, during the second term of George W. Bush; I completed it during the first months of the Obama administration. After documenting the seemingly endless attacks—political, legal, and cultural—on ...

Fat, Female, Furious: Weapons of Mass Distraction

WRB Blog — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 04:00:00 +0100

By Esther Rothblum for WOMEN = BOOKS

Although my book, The Fat Studies Reader, focuses on scholarship from multiple disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, public health, medicine, and popular culture, the vast majority of media reactions focus on only two questions: “But aren’t fat wo...

A Little Poetry Death

WRB Blog — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 04:00:00 +0100

By Maxine Kumin for WOMEN = BOOKS

Featured: Poetry Reading by Irene Sheri

For me, the hardest part about putting together Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010, was the death, early in the process, of my old editor at Norton, Carol Houck Smith.

We had done eight books together. Assembling one of them—I think it was Connecting the...

French Fat Women? Fighting the Stigma from Paris to Dubuque

WRB Blog — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 04:00:00 +0100

By Abigail Saguy for WOMEN = BOOKS

Photo courtesy of Helga Webber

I am writing this from the Bibliotheque Mazarine in Paris, where I have been, among other things, interviewing French fat-acceptance activists.

“But,” you say. “French women don’t get fat.”

Indeed, this is the conventional wisdom, as well as the title of...

They’re Hiding the Sex Scenes

WRB Blog — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 04:00:00 +0100

Photo Credit: Adrea Smith

Column: Nothing But the Toth

By Emily Toth for WOMEN = BOOKS

Somebody had been messing with Judy’s book.

“When I first read Peyton Place,” she wailed, “it was full of sex. And now I can hardly find any sex scenes at all!”

Judy, a teacher, diver, and avid reader, is not alone.

Looking through Grace Metalious’s Peyton Pla...

Pakistan Is Different—or Is It?

WRB Blog — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 04:00:00 +0100

By Gayatri Devi for WOMEN = BOOKS

Photo Credit: Laura Frankstone

Everything I read and heard about Pakistan, as a child growing up in India, emphasized that life in Pakistan was different.

Days and nights were different; food, clothing, how we prayed, what we wore, where we worked, how parents and children related to each other, how men...

Contemporary Arabic Fiction: The Gender Politics of Popularity

WRB Blog — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100

By Marilyn Booth for WOMEN = BOOKS

Photo Credit: Indigo Goat

When I first translated Nawal El Saadawi—the first full-length translation I ever did was her Memoirs from the Women’s Prison—there were very few Arab female authors translated into English.

Even in the mid 1980s, there were not many works of Arabic fiction by writers of either gender available in translation. Tho...

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Flaws of American Feminism

WRB Blog — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100

By Lori D. Ginzberg for WOMEN = BOOKS

Recently, someone asked me what surprised me the most in writing a biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Here it is: I foolishly imagined that she is still, as she was in her own time, a household name.

Yet even before my book came out, and many times in the months since, the most common question I'v...

Academic Feminism, the “Equality” Principle, and Peggy Pascoe

WRB Blog — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0100

By Sandra F. VanBurkleo for WOMEN = BOOKS

Photo Credit: K. Sawyer

On July 23, 2010, Peggy Ann Pascoe died in Eugene, Oregon, of ovarian cancer, the pernicious disease that she had battled for years, and against which she had struggled valiantly while finishing What Comes Naturally and many other significant works of history and political commentary. She was only 55 years ol...

BP in the Gulf: Drilling on the Edge

WRB Blog — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0100

By Kerryn Higgs for WOMEN = BOOKS

Photo Credit: IBRRC

At a conference in Melbourne last year, where British sustainability theorist Tim Jackson spoke about his book Prosperity Without Growth, I met a feminist critic who railed against the power and limitations of “men in suits.”

It is, of course, men in suits who h...

The Curse of `Flow`: I Already Wrote This Book

WRB Blog — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Column: Nothing But the Toth

By Emily Toth for WOMEN = BOOKS

“In this hip, hilarious and truly eye-opening cultural history, menstruation is talked about as never before,” reads the publisher’s hype. “Flow spans its fascinating, occasionally wacky and sometimes downright scary story: from mikvahs (ritual cleansing baths) to menopau...

Women’s Poetry: Opportunities in Restriction

WRB Blog — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0100

Column: Music of Fragments

By Carol Dorf for WOMEN = BOOKS

I recently attended a reading in Oakland, California, where poet Rusty Morrison read from her book the true keeps calm biding its story. Every nine-line poem is titled “please advise stop,” and each line ends with words like stop or please.

The other poet at the reading, Janet Holmes, read from her book The Ms of M y Kin. Writing out of the pressure of the Gulf War, Holmes found the words she needed i...

What You’re Not Reading Now

WRB Blog — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0100

Column: Fiction From the Front Lines

By Rebecca Meacham for WOMEN = BOOKS

What you’re not reading now is a book review.

In particular, what you’re not reading now is a review of the new novel by my favorite author. You’re not reading a review that I begged Editor Amy Hoffman of WRB to assign me. The review you’re not reading would have opened with a pearl of wisdom by my favorite author, advice that changed my writing, and when I passed...

Identity and the Politics of Book Reviewing

WRB Blog — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:00:00 +0100

By Eileen Boris for WOMEN = BOOKS

Location counts, I found myself asserting in the May/June 2010 issue of WRB, when reviewing three powerful books on Black women’s political resistance against segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa.

Not wanting to de-center their authors, I kept myself out of the review. But, of course, the writer always is present even without the use of the pronoun “I.” My own standpoint as a White left feminist, with a history of ant...

Splitting the Health-Reform Baby: What Women Lost by Winning

WRB Blog — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 23:00:00 +0100

By Gloria Feldt for WOMEN = BOOKS

Let me be clear: Had I been a member of Congress, I would have pressed the “yes” lever for the health-reform bill when it came down to the vote for final passage. It was incredibly important that we start somewhere to make health care accessible and affordable to all Americans. And we can celebrate, as Ms. magazine recounts in “What the Health Care Bill Means for Women,” that contraceptives will be covered, gender ...

Beyond God the Style Guide: Me? Edit Mary Daly?

WRB Blog — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:00:00 +0100

Column: One Wired Sister

By Susanna J. Sturgis for WOMEN = BOOKS

I'm a copyeditor by trade, and a major fan of Mary Daly, but I'm glad I didn't have to copyedit Gyn/Ecology or Outercourse or Amazon Grace. Why? Consider this gem from Gertrude Stein, hiding in the endnotes to Outercourse, Mary's 1992 autobiography:

"Sometimes one feels that Italians should be spelled with a capital and sometimes with a small letter, one can feel like that about almost anything."

...

Deconstructing Marilyn Monroe: Not Easy

WRB Blog — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 23:00:00 +0100

By Lois Banner for WOMEN = BOOKS

I’ve been writing a biography of Marilyn for seven years, the first really feminist academic scholar to do so. I thought it would be easy: I live in Los Angeles, near Hollywood, and I teach at USC, what may be the center of film studies in the nation.

I joined the Marilyn Monroe fan club here, and that was a great way to begin. I’ve now become a major fan club member, and I love all the people in it. They are all very smart and ...