Showing titles in Gender Studies

Inside The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women, a fascinating book about life during medieval times, you will discover tantalizing true stories about medieval women and a myriad of historical facts.

In the autumn of 1992, two young women students at Melbourne University went to the police claiming that they had been indecently assaulted at a party. The man they accused was the head of their co-ed residential college. The controversial book that Helen Garner wrote about the resulting Ormond College sexual harassment case caused a social media storm. Prominent feminists were outraged at Garner's perceived support for the man involved, but many saw her approach a necessary and much welcome nuance towards the power dynamic between men and women.

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists...

After getting arrested at a Venezuelan airport with a suitcase of cocaine, Natalie was clueless about the danger she was facing. Sentenced to 10 years, she arrived at a prison with armed men on the roof, whom she mistakenly believed were the guards, only to find out they were homicidal gang members. Immediately, she was plunged into a world of unimaginable horror and escalating violence, where murder, rape, and gang warfare were carried out with the complicity of corrupt guards

Everything that thousands of men who started in dead bedrooms and lackluster relationships have learned and refined over the years, distilled into a single series of pro-man concepts. Dread is more than taking back your masculinity, but thriving in a society increasingly hostile towards men. Nothing gets soccer moms, feminists, and traditionally conservative wives angrier than watching men thrive in a way that may not necessarily benefit them (though it does if she's a value add to a relationship).

A Times Book of the Year 2025 The Shindig Book of the Year “The godmothers of indie-pop” Mojo “A tale of pop life well lived” Shindig “Winningly captures the devil-may-care optimism of adolescence” Guardian An evocative coming of age story from one of the UK’s first ever female...

When Nancy Friday began her research for My Mother/My Self in the early 1970s no work existed that explored the unique interaction between mother and daughter. Today psychotherapists throughout the world acknowledge that if women are to be able to love without possessing, to find work that fulfills them, and to discover their full sexuality, they must first acknowledge their identity as separate from their mother’s. Nancy Friday’s book played a major role in that acceptance.

'It's a boy!' or 'It's a girl!' are the first words almost all of us hear when we enter the world. Before our names, before we have likes and dislikes - before we, or anyone else, has any idea who we are. And two years ago, as Juno Dawson went to tell her mother she was (and actually, always had been) a woman, she started to realise just how wrong we've been getting it.

Brought to you by Penguin. Lady Hale is an inspirational figure admired for her historic achievements and for the causes she has championed. Spider Woman is her story. As 'a little girl from a little school in a little village in North Yorkshire', she only went into the law because her...

This part-memoir, part feminist-manifesto meets women where they are and as they are. Hannah exposes and celebrates the messy, honest and insular parts of ourselves in a book designed to feel like a late-night conversation with your best friend – one that will make you laugh, cry and that you'll never want to end.

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own," but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, and Alice Neel. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, Phillips illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women's lives.

This is the story of Tenzin Palmo, the daughter of a fishmonger from London's East End who became a Tibetan nun. After meditating for 12 years in a cave 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas, she became a world-renowned spiritual leader and champion of the right of women to achieve spiritual enlightenment.

No One Tells You This is “sharp, intimate…A funny, frank, and fearless memoir…and a refreshing view of the possibilities—and pitfalls—personal freedom can offer modern women” (Kirkus Reviews). When a successful woman in New York City approaches her fortieth birthday without a partner...

Doon Mackichan is best known for her comedy characters in the hugely popular Brass Eye, Smack the Pony and Toast of London - but throughout her career there are parts she's refused to take and roles she's been forced to play. The Feisty Feminist. The Hot Lesbian. The Desperate Cougar. In My Lady Parts, Doon shares her experience on stage, screen and in real life, examining how our culture still expects women to adhere to certain stereotypes - and punishes those who don't.

Rainbow History Class is your entry into LGBTQ+ history, sharing queer and trans stories from Ancient civilisations all the way up to the internet. So much of queer and trans history and culture has been erased, but Hannah McElhinney, writer and creator of Rainbow History Class (as seen on TikTok), is here to help us all with this crash course.

This is perhaps one of the best-loved of all journals. William Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, began it in May 1800 and resolved to keep it for a short time. She continued it for nearly three years. In it, she brought the Dove Cottage years to vivid and intimate life. She noted the walks and weather, the friends, country neighbours, and travellers on the roads. She set down accounts of the garden, of Wordsworth's marriage, their concern for Coleridge, and the composition of Wordsworth's poetry.

The Housekeeper's Tale reveals the personal sacrifices, bitter disputes and driving ambition that shaped these women's careers. Using secret diaries, unpublished letters, and the neglected service archives of our stately homes, Tessa Boase tells the extraordinary stories of five working women who ran some of Britain's most prominent households.

In this brilliantly original book, Camille Paglia identifies some of the major patterns that have endured in western culture from ancient Egypt and Greece to the present. According to Paglia, one source of continuity is paganism, which, undefeated by Judeo-Christianity, continues to flourish in art, eroticism, astrology, and pop culture. Others, she says, are androgyny, sadism, and the aggressive western eye, which has created our art and cinema.

How does a feminist raise a son in a world that conditions boys into entitlement, privilege and power at the expense not just of girls' humanity but also their own? All boys start innocent, but by the time they are adolescents many of them will subscribe to a view of masculinity that is openly contemptuous of women and girls. This explosive new work will look at toxic masculinity and the closed ranks of brotherhood that shape an entitled, disrespectful and potentially dangerous idea of manhood.

With A Woman's Worth, Marianne Williamson turns her charismatic voice--and the same empowering, spiritually enlightening wisdom that energized her landmark work, A Return to Love-- to exploring the crucial role of women in the world today. Drawing deeply and candidly on her own experiences, the...