Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity : The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women

Examining the lives and work of feminist thinkers throughout history, this book explores how they have striven to balance politics, intellectual work, and the material conditions of femininity. A new introduction to this second edition resituates these themes in contemporary feminist literature.

Feminist accounts of struggles with life, love, political comrades, and social expectations about feminine respectability offer tastes of feminist lives, but these narratives are not always inspirational or exemplary. How do feminists survive and thrive in situations marked by inequalities of sexism, racism, colonial and capitalist extraction, and accompanying forms of harm? Thinking beyond representation and empathy as ways to connect, this book features disorienting and disruptive examples from feminist experiments in living and the uncomfortable feelings they invite. Insisting that feminists should read the autobiographies and memoirs of feminist actors alongside their theoretical contributions, the volume includes writings from Simone de Beauvoir, Emma Goldman, Ida B. Wells, Audre Lorde, Azar Nafisi, Ana Castillo, Carolyn Kay Steedman, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and more.

Written for students and scholars of Women’s History, and everyone who “feels like a feminist,” this book embodies and electrifies the feminist insight that the personal is political.