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Life-saving J eanette Winterson. Photograph: David Levene
Six years writing the life of Eleanor Marx made me review everything I've
read about fighting injustice against women and the arrested
development left to men by patriarchy. Living with her and her radical
friends brought an intimacy to my relationship with the trailblazers of
feminism. I rather hope that Tussy as Marx was known to her friends
might enjoy my choices.
What makes a great feminist text? The right
values for sure. But it also needs sufficient wit,
wisdom, energy and eloquence to inspire
change beyond its time, perhaps beyond the
imagination of its author. My list includes fact
and "non-fact" as I sometimes think of fiction
poetry, original English and translated writing.
Two male authors have made the cut, though I
could easily have included more.
Gender-based inequality remains the greatest
global injustice and the struggle against it
spans millennia and continents. These books
make us more impatient for change, but they
may also be turned to in dark hours when it
feels change might never come. Feminism is
no impulse or outcome of modernity. As these
books show, it has been around for centuries.
We don't need to re-invent the wheel, or
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The top 10 feminist books
Eleanor Marx's biographer Rachel Holmes picks works, from
J eanette Winterson to George Bernard Shaw, that address 'the
greatest global injustice'
Series: Top 10s Previous | Index
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Eleanor Marx: A Life
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The top 10 feminist books | Books | theguardian.com
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/11/top-10-feminist-books-rachel-holmes-eleanor-marx[12/06/2014 16:43:57]
number what "wave" we are now riding; we
need to harness an atomic rocket to it.
1. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal ? by Jeanette
Winterson (2012)
This book literally saves lives. Some on the edge have stepped back to
have another go after reading this. Bestselling 80s novel Oranges Are
Not The Only Fruit was a "cover version a story I could live with. The
other one was too painful." Twenty-five years later Winterson confronts it
head on in the "finding place" of literature: "A tough life needs tough
language and that's what poetry is. That's what literature offers a
language powerful enough to say how it is."
2. Fat Is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach (1978)
Groundbreaking in 1978, Orbach's original exploration of the body
fascism of diets and body obsession is sadly even more relevant
today. Activist and psychotherapist Orbach recently founded Endangered
Bodies, a global campaign challenging the merchants of body hatred.
There is a growing movement of girls, women and men who reject the
horrors of body uniformity, cherishing the variety of shapes, sizes,
colours, ages of us all.
3. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
Publication in France prompted an obscenity prosecution. The novel was
first translated into English by Eleanor Marx in 1886, the same year she
published The Woman Question from a Socialist Point of View. Emma
Bovary haunted Tussy: "She is foolish, but there is a nobleness about
her too. She is never mercenary her life is idle, useless. And this
strong woman feels there must be something to do and she dreams
In all literature there is perhaps nothing more pathetic than her hopeless
effort to 'make herself in love'."
4. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
(1792)
This principled, logical tract is an inspiration for three centuries of
subsequent human rights thinking. Wollstonecraft identifies natural rights
as inalienable and God-given. So they cannot be denied to any group in
society by another. Enemies of the Human Rights Act, please note.
5. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by
Toni Morrison (1992)
Nobel laureate Morrison is the greatest living philosopher of the
racialised imagination, its pervasive effect on culture and why racism can
never be separated from gendered inequality. This political and cultural
analysis encapsulates in an elegant 90 pages Morrison's thinking, whose
relevance reaches far beyond literary criticism.
6. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
Like Emma Bovary, J ong's hero Isadora Wing reminds us feminism
makes us badgirls. "The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of
ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not 'taking' and
the woman is not 'giving'. No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or
humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of
anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than
the unicorn. And I have never had one." J ong's unabashed sexual
adventure has sold more than 20m copies worldwide, mostly to women
fed up with bad marriages.
7. The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues by Angela
Davis (2012)
I waited all my adult life for this book. An indispensible collection of great
speeches by this activist for equality and social justice, its cover and
contents - feature the apartheid wall that blights all our lives and shared
humanity.
8. The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology edited by

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biography of the tireless
socialist
Karl Marx's daughter
was a brilliant feminist
betrayed by the men
she loved, not least her
own father, writes Lucy
Hughes-Hallett
Guardian Shorts: All
the Rebel Women: The
rise of the fourth wave
of feminism
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The top 10 feminist books | Books | theguardian.com
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/11/top-10-feminist-books-rachel-holmes-eleanor-marx[12/06/2014 16:43:57]
Nathalie Handal (2001)
The Arabic poetic tradition is among the world's oldest. Iraqis say if you
throw a stone you are bound to hit a poet. Arab women's poetic voices
are still too rarely heard. This groundbreaking anthology by award-
winning poet Nathalie Handal, protege of Adrienne Rich, is an all-
important first of its kind.
9. The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism,
Sovietism and Fascism by George Bernard Shaw (1928)
Polly Toynbee says it all in her new introduction to Shaw's masterpiece.
This is a brilliant debunking of the myriad excuses for inequality. Shaw
hates the poor, pities the rich and is bent on the extermination of both.
Women of all classes must free themselves from economic dependence
on men. Raising children and family structures are at the heart of
patriarchy; capitalism the villain of the piece. Humanity is driven by
forces other than self-interest. Like slavemasters, men will not be free
and realise their full potential until women are, and do.
10. Saint Joan of Arc by Vita Sackville-West (1936)
"She breaks as an apparently ordinary little girl of 12 or 13 into the pages
of history." The Maid of Orleans's story has been told many times, but
never like this. Sackville-West portrays peasant girl, soldier and saint as
the icon she is. Vita understands the central power of the biographical
form; there is the grand impersonal narrative of history; and then there is
the life lived.
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The top 10 feminist books | Books | theguardian.com
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/11/top-10-feminist-books-rachel-holmes-eleanor-marx[12/06/2014 16:43:57]

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Swastika Night anyone?
11 J une 2014 2:16pm
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