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Feminism
- A Very Short Introduction
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
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Publisher's summary
How much have women's lives really changed? In the West, women still come up against the "glass ceiling" at work, most earning considerably less than their male counterparts. What are we to make of the now commonplace insistence that feminism deprives men of their rights and dignities? And how does one tackle the issue of female emancipation in different cultural and economic environments - in, for example, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa?
This book provides a historical account of feminism, exploring its earliest roots as well as key issues including voting rights, the liberation of the '60s, and its relevance today. Margaret Walters touches on the difficulties and inequities that women still face more than 40 years after the "new wave" of 1960s feminism, such as how successful women are at combining domesticity, motherhood, and work outside the house. She brings the subject completely up to date by providing an analysis of the current situation of women across the globe, from Europe and the United States to Third World countries.
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The book that changed the consciousness of a country - and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic - these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name", that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since.
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A landmark book of its time and relevant now
- By Anthony on 01-23-15
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Marx's General
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Friedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and contradictory figures of the 19th century. Born to a prosperous Prussian mercantile family, he spent his life working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable upper-middle-class existence of a Victorian gentleman.
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Not many choices here anyways.
- By Prof. Neil Larsen on 02-16-13
By: Tristram Hunt
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"Most Blessed of the Patriarchs"
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Thomas Jefferson is still presented today as a hopelessly enigmatic figure despite being written about more than any other Founding Father. Lauded as the most articulate voice of American freedom even as he held people in bondage, Jefferson is variably described by current-day observers as a hypocrite, an atheist, and a simple-minded proponent of limited government.
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Disappointing
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Without politics or polemics, this brilliant and witty book overturns centuries of preconceptions to restore women to their rightful place at the center of culture, revolution, empire, war, and peace. Spiced with tales of individual women who have shaped civilization, celebrating the work and lives of women around the world, and distinguished by a wealth of research, Who Cooked the Last Supper? redefines our concept of historical reality.
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Waste of Time
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Gandhi Before India
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Ramachandra Guha takes us from Gandhi's birth in 1869 through his upbringing in Gujarat, his two years as a student in London, and his two decades as a lawyer and community organizer in South Africa. Guha has uncovered myriad previously untapped documents, including private papers of Gandhi's contemporaries. Using this wealth of material in an exuberant, brilliantly nuanced and detailed narrative, Guha describes the social, political, and personal worlds inside of which Gandhi began the journey that would earn him the honorific Mahatma: "Great Soul".
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Somewhat repetitive and lacking
- By freehope on 03-10-21
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Men Explain Things to Me
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In Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit takes on the conversations between men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't. The ultimate problem, she shows in her comic, scathing essay, is female self-doubt and the silencing of women. Rebecca Solnit is the author of fourteen books about civil society, popular power, uprisings, art, environment, place, pleasure, politics, hope, and memory, most recently The Faraway Nearby, a book on empathy and storytelling.
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Great read - horrible performance
- By Denise Johnson on 03-26-15
By: Rebecca Solnit
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Gandhi
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- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
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This volume opens with Mohandas Gandhi's arrival in Bombay in January 1915 and takes us through his epic struggles over the next three decades. In reconstructing Gandhi's life and work, author Ramachandra Guha has drawn on 60 different archival collections. Using this wealth of material, Guha creates a portrait of Gandhi and of those closest to him that illuminates the complexity inside his thinking, his motives, his actions, and their outcomes as he engaged with every important aspect of social and public life in the India of his time.
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Well researched and heart touching
- By M Umar Khan on 02-01-21
By: Ramachandra Guha
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Ida M. Tarbell
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- By: Emily Arnold McCully
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- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
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Born in 1857 and raised in oil country, Ida M. Tarbell was one of the first investigative journalists and probably the most influential in her time. Her series of articles on the Standard Oil Trust, a complicated business empire run by John D. Rockefeller, revealed to readers the underhanded, even illegal practices that had led to Rockefeller's success.
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Excellent!
- By AKA1 on 03-16-19
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What listeners say about Feminism
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- Yinjiao Gong
- 12-29-22
Great book
Great introduction to feminism, although it did not mention the third wave of feminism, Judith Butler, etc.
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- Adam Shields
- 06-14-23
Helpful but a bit dated
Slightly Longer Summary: A short history of the feminist movement, primarily focusing on first and second-wave feminism within England, with a follow-up chapter on feminism in other geographical areas.
Because women’s role in the church has been an active conversation lately, I have been thinking about feminism. A tweet (there were several in the same vein) suggested that part of the issue with the discussion today is that feminism has changed the discussion. Today all except a few want to assert that women are equal, but roles are different. Historically the church fathers, until recently, were influenced by Greek thought that understood women as flawed men or lesser creations. Feminism has changed the terms so that even though hard patriarchalists continue to exist and have influence, most will at least say women are equal in value and Imago Dei.
The book opens with a chapter on the religious roots of feminism starting in the middle ages. And then following is a chapter on secular approaches to feminism. This is followed by a chapter on 18th-century women writers. And then two chapters on the 19th century.
Because voting rights were so central to the women’s rights movement, there were two chapters on voting rights. The last three chapters are about first-wave feminism in the 20th century. Then second-wave feminism in the late 20th century. And then, a chapter on feminists worldwide lightly touches on the critiques of first and second-wave feminism. The afterward lightly touches on continued changes to feminism. Kaitlyn Schiess has a good video on her Getting Schooled series, Feminism 101, that covers similar material in about 40 minutes.
One of the problems of the early feminist movement is that it also agreed to hierarchy as a default cultural assumption. Sojourner Truth’s famous Aint I a Woman speech raised concerns about how White women sought to make suffrage (voting rights) a competition between White women and Black men. In the book, which is primarily about English feminism, there are examples of educated White English women being offended that lower-class men, immigrants, and criminals were allowed to vote but educated, land-owning women were not allowed to vote. This is a hierarchical argument that voting is based on the worth of the voter, not on inherent dignity.
At least part of the movement toward universal suffrage of men is that part of what drove women’s suffrage. But the suffrage movement started being taken more seriously as photography became more widely used. The sexism of women being the “weaker sex” was part of what suffragettes used to raise awareness. Images of privileged women being carried by police due to women’s demonstrations raised objections. But even that gave way to violence and vandalism to express frustration when non-violent demonstrations did not work. At least three castles, several churches, a significant library, and many homes were destroyed by arson as part of the protests in England.
One of the aspects that I did not know is that consciousness-raising was coined by feminist groups in the late 1960s. I was aware of the other origin because, at the same time, Critical consciousness, conscientization or consciousness-raising was coined by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (written in 1967 and translated into English in 1970).
Overall this is a helpful, quick introduction to feminism. But because it was published in 2006, it is limited because the 3rd and 4th wave of feminists were too new or after its publication. And I think that the critique I saw in several reviews about the early parts of the book being too oriented on mini-biographies is true. I think there is value in learning about early feminists, but the format of such reliance on those biographical sketches feels a bit like “great man” history.
I also think that the focus on England as a geographical source of the story (a reasonable limitation given the size of the book) makes it harder to discuss the critiques of CRT about intersectionality, which isn’t even mentioned in the book. Every Very Short Introduction has to make difficult choices about what to include, and the focus on England, first and second-wave feminism, and then a short global survey was a reasonable choice. Still, I want a follow-up book to expand the focus.
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