Woman Study

Filled with fun stories, insightful information, and responses to popular cultural objections, How (Not) to Read the Bible is a lifeline for anyone—Christians and doubters alike—who are confused or discouraged with questions about the Bible.

Sex trafficking. Self-help coaching. Forced labour. Mentorship. Multi-level marketing. Gaslighting. Investigative journalist Sarah Berman explores the shocking practices of NXIVM, an organization run by Keith Raniere and his high-profile enablers (Seagram heir Clare Bronfman; Smallville actor Allison Mack; Battlestar Galactica actor Nicki Clyne). In her deeply researched account, Berman unravels how young women seeking creative coaching and networking opportunities found themselves blackmailed, literally branded, near-starved, and enslaved.

What is it about Iceland that makes many women's experience there so positive? Eliza Reid, the First Lady of Iceland, examines her adopted homeland's attitude toward women—the deep-seated cultural sense of fairness, the influence of historical role models, and, crucially, the areas where Iceland still has room for improvement. Reid's own experience as an immigrant from small-town Canada who never expected to become a first lady is expertly interwoven with interviews with dozens of sprakkar ("extraordinary women") to form the backbone of an illuminating discussion.

The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity. In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife.

In the last few years, as identity politics has taken hold, middle-aged women have found themselves talked and written about as morally inferior beings, the face of bigotry, entitlement and selfishness, to be ignored, pitied or abused. Hags asks the question why these women are treated with such active disdain. Each chapter takes a different theme - care work, beauty, violence, political organization, sex - and explores it in relation to middle-aged women's beliefs, bodies and choices.

The best news on the planet is that your mother doesn't have to change in order for you to be happy. In fact, author Karen C.L. Anderson will take it a step further and say your mother doesn't have to change in order for you to be free, peaceful, contented, and joyful. You can emotionally separate without guilt: Inspired by her own journey, Anderson's Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters shows women how to emotionally separate from their mothers without guilt and anxiety so they can finally create a life based on their own values, desires, needs, and preferences.

A rousing call to arms, packed with surprising insights, that explores how carrying "the mental load" - the thankless day-to-day anticipating of needs and solving of problems large and small - is adversely affecting women’s lives and feeding gender inequality, and shows the way forward for better balancing our lives.

For most women, getting their period sucks. Bloating. Cramps. Acne. Aches. Moodiness. Messiness. No wonder we call it "The Curse"! For many, it's not just an inconvenience - it's a colossal life disruption, forcing them to miss work, school, appointments, or dates. We've been encouraged to medicate away common period problems with birth control and ibuprofen and just survive the mood swings as best we can. But as Nicole Jardim explains, periods aren't a nuisance, they're information.

Modern women - who use psychotherapeutic antidepressants at a rate never before seen in history - need liberating now more than ever. The truth is, feminists don't know what liberation is. They have led us into a very boring dead end. Once those fictionalized stereotypes are out of the way - whether they're things that make you gag or things you think look pretty fun - Christians can focus on real women. What did God make real women for?

By most people’s standards I would say I’ve had a pretty good career. I’ve reached the top of the ‘ladder’ and been lucky enough to have had a damned good life. But at what cost? At the cost of who I truly was. I played the business game for years, where the rules were set by men for men. I was tough and aggressive. I put in long hours, was competitive and resilient. But I suppressed my natural energy, sensitivity and instinct. I worked like this until I couldn’t any more. And then I changed....

In Jezebel Unhinged Tamura Lomax traces the use of the jezebel trope in the Black church and in Black popular culture, showing how it is pivotal to reinforcing men's cultural and institutional power to discipline and define Black girlhood and womanhood. Drawing on writing by medieval thinkers and travelers, Enlightenment theories of race, the commodification of women's bodies under slavery, and the work of Tyler Perry and Bishop T. D. Jakes, Lomax shows how Black women are written into religious and cultural history as sites of sexual deviation.

How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings - and especially for women? Because, when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. For the last 20 years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift society up, you need to stop keeping women down.

Sexual Intimacy for Women helps female couples examine the emotional, physical, and psychological aspects of their relationships, with the goal of creating more intimacy. Exercises and client-based anecdotes from Dr. Corwin’s years of experience with same-sex couples help women overcome common issues around orgasm, body image, identity, aging, and parenthood. Dr. Corwin dispels myths, examines the intricacies of female desire, and gives advice to help couples achieve long-lasting, healthy, and fulfilling relationships.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.

A spirited, deeply researched exploration of why capitalism is bad for women and how, when done right, socialism leads to economic independence, better labor conditions, better work-life balance, and yes, even better sex.

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart—the eccentric'—the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.

A worldwide best seller, translated into more than 12 languages, The Female Eunuch is a landmark in the history of the women’s movement. Drawing liberally from history, literature and popular culture, past and present, Germaine Greer’s searing examination of women’s oppression is at once an important social commentary and a passionately argued masterpiece of polemic. Probably the most famous, most widely read book on feminism ever.

How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway? Guided by Katy Hessel, art historian and founder of @thegreatwomenartists, discover the glittering paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century United States, and the artist who really invented the "readymade." Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women defining art in the 2020s.

At long last, Mary Beard addresses in one brave book the misogynists and trolls who mercilessly attack and demean women the world over, including, very often, Mary herself. In Women & Power, she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial.

Ever since the release of her seminal first book, Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia has remained one of feminism's most outspoken, independent, and searingly intelligent voices. Now, for the first time, her best essays on the subject are gathered together in one concise volume. At once illuminating, witty, and inspiring, these essays are essential listening that affirm the power of men and women and what we can accomplish together.