Hannah Dawson

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The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing

It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide

A vast global project ... a joyous multiplicity of writings incorporating collective manifestos, poetry, fiction, and autobiography ... Readers will find both old acquaintances and new discoveries ... admirably and intentionally reaching beyond received western ideas ... an endlessly fascinating anthology

Bulging with brilliant and exciting writing. Its vast sweep takes us from the 15th century, when Christine de Pizan, a court writer in medieval France, imagined a City of Ladies where women would be safe from harassment, through to the present day, with work by Maggie Nelson, Eileen Myles, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and Lola Olufemi

The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing rounds up the voices of women from across history to discuss the meaning and practice of feminism. This is a book that every person should read: the multiplicity of voices from various times and spaces allows women of the past alongside women of the present to be noisy about why feminism matters. It is a collective masterpiece

A glorious history of women's struggle for liberation from 1405 to 2020, featuring rebellious feminists of all stripes

Dawson has curated a tour de force of feminist thinking, spanning seven centuries and multiple continents, and drawing impressively across genre. Playwrights sit alongside political theorists, followed by poetry or fiction. Feminism appears as a vibrant, multi-faceted thing, changing and evolving but ever-present across the centuries ... This collection is not only interested in feminism as a political ideology, but feminism as a creative and artistic force ... what strikes the reader most is the palpable anger that rings across so many of these selections ... This anger was refreshing, a reminder that through the centuries women have had, and continue to have, so much to be angry about ... This book is an important reminder that feminism doesn't need tote bags or novelty jumpers. It doesn't need to be happy and sparkly all the time. Instead, it needs the imaginative, powerful, collective scream into the void that a collection like this provides

'A joyous multiplicity of writings incorporating collective manifestos, poetry, fiction, and autobiography... endlessly fascinating' Catherine Taylor, Financial Times 
 
'A tour de force of feminist thinking, spanning seven centuries and multiple continents' Jennifer Thomson, Review 31 
 
'The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing rounds up the voices of women from across history to discuss the meaning and practice of feminism. This is a book that every person should read: the multiplicity of voices from various times and spaces allows women of the past alongside women of the present to be noisy about why feminism matters. It is a collective masterpiece' Helen Carr, BBC History, Books of the Year 
 
'Bulging with brilliant and exciting writing. Its vast sweep takes us from the 15th century, when Christine de Pizan, a court writer in medieval France, imagined a City of Ladies where women would be safe from harassment, through to the present day, with work by Maggie Nelson, Eileen Myles, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and Lola Olufemi' Rachel Cooke, Observer 
 
Edited with an Introduction by Hannah Dawson

Hannah Dawson is Senior Lecturer in the History of Ideas at King's College London. Her previous book was Life Lessons from Hobbes. She read hundreds of thousands of words to whittle down to the sublime selection represented here.

The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing selects writing from across time and throughout the world, creating a treasure-trove of the most important feminist thought alongside surprising and delightful fiction, poetry and diaries, celebrating the multiplicity of feminist voices that have emerged over the centuries. 
 
Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, who imagined a City of Ladies that would serve as a refuge from the harassment of men, this book goes beyond the usual white, western story. The writers in this anthology ask questions about class, capitalism and colonialism, and other axes of oppression that intersect with sexism. Inside, we find writers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who declared in 1848 the self-evident truth 'that all men and women are created equal', alongside Sojourner Truth, born into slavery in New York, who asked in 1851 'and ain't I a woman?' 
 
Put together by a world-leading historian of ideas and a feminist, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is both a history of thought - readers will find incisive and provocative selections from Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde and over one hundred other pioneering thinkers - and a voyage of discovery, highlighting lesser-anthologised thinkers, like Juana Inés de la Cruz's seventeenth-century philosophical satire of 'misguided men', or the "poet of Palestine" Fadwa Tuqan's mountainous journeys towards self-knowledge and revolution. 
 
The product of many years of research and reading, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is both a deeply considered introduction to feminist thought and an abundance of riches to read and keep throughout a lifetime.

The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing

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Hannah Dawson

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