feminism Archives - The Quick and the Read

Book Review: ‘The Darcy Myth’ by Rachel Feder

Happy publication day to this funny, thought-provoking, non-fiction book!

I am a ‘Pride and Prejudice’ fan. Not a super-fan, or a Janeite or an Austen obsessive, but I can enjoy the novel. I’ll never love ‘Mansfield Park’ (hideous A Level flashbacks) and I was the wrong generation to appreciate Colin Firth in THAT shirt (yes, I totally get it now…) but I totally respect the way that Jane Austen quietly wrote novels that are still part of the collective consciousness over 200 years after her death.

So I came to this book with purely an interest in a feminist reading of Mr Darcy by someone who really knows ‘Pride and Prejudice’ inside out – and has had the headspace to ponder on it at length as part of her career in academia. Rachel Feder is an associate professor in English at the University of Denver and really knows her stuff.

Book Review: ‘Femina’ by Janina Ramirez

I’m a big fan of Janina Ramirez on Twitter and TV but new to her writing – thanks to NetGalley for granting me a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

I loved the premise for this book – a kind of re-evaluation of what we think we know about the middle ages and a reinstatement of women within that historical narrative. Ramirez starts from the idea that actually we do know about some powerful and influential women from this time period, but that the dominant narrative of kings, battles and manly Vikings have erased them. When I saw ‘we do know’, I really mean that Ramirez knows – I didn’t have a clue and was pleased to be introduced to some of history’s forgotten women.

Blog Tour: ‘Hotbed’ by Joanna Scutts

Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for ‘Hotbed’ by Joanna Scutts, a fascinating look at (as it is subtitled) ‘Bohemian New York and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism’.

Thanks to Random Things Tours for my place on the tour and for my copy of the book in exchange for an honest review – opinions are all my own!

This book was published in hardback by Duckworth on 14th July, 2022.

Book Review: ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ by Bonnie Garmus

This was one of my most anticipated reads of 2022 so I was delighted to be granted a review copy – thanks to NetGalley for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

The story is about a highly gifted Chemist, Elizabeth Zott, who is carrying out important research at the Hastings Research Institute – even though her efforts are often belittled and her work stolen by the men around her. After all, it’s the early 1960s and women can’t expect sexual equality – except Elizabeth Zott absolutely does. Her uncompromising stance gets her into trouble but also attracts the attention of older, Nobel-prize-nominated Calvin Evans. An unconventional relationship ensues – one that leaves Elizabeth with a dog, a daughter, and a hit TV cooking show. Things don’t work out as planned at all, but Elizabeth has the strength to work with whatever is thrown at her.

(Audio)Book Review: ‘Square Haunting’ by Francesca Wade

Another book that I’m shamefully late in reading – but very glad that I did.

Thanks to NetGalley for my copy in exchange for an honest review – I also bought a copy of the audiobook from Audible and so my review reflects my experiences of both.

This book centres on Mecklenburgh Square, an address in Bloomsbury, London that was home to five groundbreaking and fascinating women during the interwar years. It’s an interesting idea, that this little corner of London famous for its thinkers and writers, was the shared address of these brilliant women – even though they didn’t live there at the same time and were often resident at very different points in their lives. For all of them, Mecklenburgh Square proved to be the ‘room of one’s own’ (in Virgina Woolf’s words) that gave the women the freedom to develop their careers independently.

Blog Tour: ‘The Ethical Stripper’ by Stacey Clare

Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for ‘The Ethical Stripper’ by Stacey Clare.

Thanks to Random Things Tours and Unbound for inviting me onto the tour and the copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

From the Publisher:

Forget everything you’ve heard about strippers: this book is an antidote to stigma, shame and stereotyping.

How can a feminist also be a stripper? Is stripping sex work? What makes sex work “ethical”?

In this powerful book, Stacey Clare, a stripper with over a decade of experience, takes a detailed look at the sex industry – the reality of the work as well as the history of licensing and regulation, feminist themes surrounding sex work, and stigma. Bringing her personal knowledge of the industry to bear, she offers an unapologetic critique and searing indictment of exploitation and raises the rights
of sex workers to the top of the agenda.

‘The Ethical Stripper’ rejects notions of victimhood, challenges stigma and shame, and unpacks decades of confusion and contradictions. It’s about the sex-work community’s fight for safety and self-determination, and it challenges you to think twice about every newspaper article, documentary and film you have seen about stripping and sex work.

‘The Ethical Stripper’ takes a comprehensive look at sex work, balancing the lived experience of the author with an examination of the different legal frameworks for sex work around the world.

Blog Tour: ‘The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls’ by Mona Eltahawy

Many thanks to Helen Richardson for inviting me onto the blog tour for ‘The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls’ by Mona Eltahawy.

This non-fiction feminist book creates a manifesto for women’s action and was published yesterday (22nd April) by Tramp Press.

From the Publisher:

‘She is here for your liberation, and that of every woman and girl, from Nunavut to Namibia’
REBECCA SOLNIT, author of MEN EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME

‘Shocking, brave, gloriously unfeminine, and right on time’
GLORIA STEINEM, writer and feminist activist

‘It is as piercingly intelligent as it is uncompromising. Every woman should read this’
MAAZA MENGISTE, Booker Prize shortlisted author of THE SHADOW KING

Feminism should terrify the patriarchy. It should put patriarchy on notice that we demand nothing short of its destruction. We need fewer road maps toward a peace treaty with patriarchy and more manifestos on how to destroy it. The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls is my manifesto’ – Mona Eltahawy

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls identifies seven ‘sins’ women and girls are socialised to avoid–anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence and lust. With essays on each, Mona Eltahawy creates a stunning manifesto encouraging women worldwide to defy, disobey and disrupt the patriarchy. Drawing on her own life and the work of intersectional activists from around the world, #MeToo and the Arab Spring, Eltahawy’s work defines what it is to be a feminist now.

My Review:

I was intrigued to read this book – the idea of a feminist manifesto was hugely appealing. I was also interested to see that this collection of essays offers a more global view of feminism – I’m very conscious that a lot of the feminist books I read are by white UK or US-based women, whereas Eltahawy is of Egyptian heritage and offers examples and analysis across many countries.

Finally, I liked the sound of Eltahawy’s active approach to the problems faced by women around the world – she advocates action and a rejection of patriarchy rather than women accepting the ‘crumbs’ offered to them by a male-dominated society.

Although I wasn’t aware of Eltahawy’s work before, she definitely proved herself a strong voice worth listening to in this book!

The seven essays in this collection offer insights into seven ‘sins’ that women are raised not to commit – anger, wanting attention, profanity, ambition, the desire for power, violence and lust are seen as ‘unfeminine’ and to be avoided. However, Eltahawy suggests that these things are exactly what women need to reclaim and do in order to dismantle the patriarchy. After all, what is the sense in following patriarchal rules if they keep women down?

Eltahawy is a persuasive and engaging voice throughout the essays. She sometimes takes a shocking stance – such as the war against patriarchy section in which she imagines the unprovoked killing of men – before contextualising it in regards to what women face every day. It’s a surprising and effective tactic and definitely kept me reading.

Although she isn’t actually advocating the random killing of men, she certainly leads by example with regard to taking dramatic action. Part of the book covers Eltahawy’s arrests in both Egypt and the US, plus her reasons for wanting to take a stand – right from her experiences with a Cairo flasher when she was 4 years old and her assault during prayers that inspired her to start #MosqueMeToo for Muslim women with similar experiences.

What I loved about the book was the breadth of focus. Eltahawy seamlessly moves across the globe, selecting examples from places as diverse as Ireland and Iraq, the US and Russia, India and Uganda. What unites the examples is women’s oppression and its place in her call to arms. It is an eye-opening trip around the world and did make me feel angry at what women face simply for being female in a male-dominated system.

This international dimension was particularly interesting as it added to my understanding of intersectional feminism – the sense that not all women have the same experiences as some face the double oppression of being female and Black, for example (in what Moya Bailey refers to as ‘misogynoir’). I also loved the idea that minority groups should stand together as patriarchy undermines us all – not a new idea, but one that I’ve not seen presented as eloquently and fiercely before.

Given Eltahawy’s dual Egyptian and American citizenship, it was fascinating to read about her take on the Trump presidency – this book was written while he was in office. She suggests that women (called ‘patriarchy’s foot soldiers’ by Eltahawy) helped to facilitate the election of Trump and accepted the ‘crumbs’ offered to them to support his power. She posits that women deserve more than being token women who are granted some limited power as a tool of Trump and the patriarchy.

This is a compelling and engaging argument for women defying male control and dismantling the patriarchal structures that limit them. Eltahawy calls for women to stand up and seize power – which cannot be done within the existing societal model. This is a powerful book that calls on female rage – and it certainly hit the spot for me.

About the Author:

Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author and award-winning commentator and public speaker. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications around the world. She is frequent commenter on current affairs on the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and other media outlets, where her goal is always to disrupt patriarchy. She is the author of Headscarves and Hymens and recently launchedher newsletter, Feminist Giant. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram:@monaeltahawy

About Tramp Press:

Tramp Press was launched in 2014 to find, nurture and publish exceptional literary talent. Based in Dublin and Glasgow, they publish internationally. Tramp Press authors have won, been shortlisted and nominated for many prizes including the AnPost Irish Book of the Year,the Booker Prize, the Costa, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Guardian First Book Award.

Blog Tour: ‘Bad Habits’ by Flynn Meaney

Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for ‘Bad Habits’ by Flynn Meaney, a very funny YA novel with a school setting and a feminist heart!

Everybody needs to read a funny book from time to time, and this one proved the right book at the right time for me. I’m perhaps not the target audience, being several decades older than the main characters, but it certainly made me laugh. Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher (Penguin) and The Write Reads for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

The story is set in St Mary’s Catholic School, a strict boarding school in America, where the main character, Alex, is determined to have an impact. In fact, what she’d really like is to be expelled. Her purple hair and incessant rule-breaking isn’t proving enough, so she decides that she will stage the school’s first production of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ with her (mostly less-than-keen) feminist club.

This book is the story of the battle to bring the play to the stage – a battle that Alex takes on to both shock and prove her feminist credentials. What she finds is that the challenges aren’t the ones she expects.

Alex as a main character is spiky, sassy and cool – everything I wasn’t at school, so I found her pretty interesting! I’m not sure she is really intended to be likeable at the start of the book – her instinct is to push back on everything and everyone in order to prove her rebel status. However, as the book progresses, I did warm to her and felt that she started to see the bigger picture.

However, more immediately likeable is Alex’s roommate, Mary Kate. She is more relatable for me and a whole lot less prickly – although she does have determination and is a strong character in her own right. The other supporting characters are also appealing, particularly the very tolerant Pat and the rather diverse bunch in the feminist club.

I’ve always been a sucker for a school story, even from my youngest years reading Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers books, and I enjoyed this one. I like the boarding school setting with the range of teachers (the usual suspects – scary, eccentric, kindly) and the rivalries of the cliques. The fact it is a co-ed American boarding school, whose team sport is ice hockey, seems to me to have a glamour and interest not found in the school stories of tuck boxes, lights-out and cross-country races that I grew up with!

This is more than a school story though – it is a funny school story! There were several points that made me laugh out loud and I loved the absurdity of some of the situations – I don’t want to give any spoilers so I’ll just say the recruitment drive the sleeping nun and the protest all made me smile. Alex’s voice is a humorous one and she calls on a range of unusual references, from Harry Potter to metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, which I loved – it made her narration engaging, often surprising and clever.

There are serious messages in the book, particularly around feminism and gender. I won’t give anything away, but I will say that I thought the ethos of the book was positive and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to teenagers – although there are a lot of sex references and some swearing (which I – not a regular reader of YA fiction – was quite surprised by).

Overall, I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes funny books, school stories or just likes fiction with a solid feminist message. Personally, I love all three of those things, so it is a big thumbs-up from me!

If you’d like your own copy of this book, my affiliate link is below – thanks for supporting my blog with any purchases.

‘Dearly’ by Margaret Atwood

Although I’ve been a long-time fan of Margaret Atwood’s novels, I hadn’t really read much of her poetry before this. Thanks to NetGalley for the audiobook version (narrated by Atwood herself) – I did also buy the hardback version as I think I take things in differently through reading and listening. I can recommend both formats though!

This collection of poetry was published in 2020, a year after Atwood lost her long-term partner to dementia, and the poems do understandably focus on loss, grief and ageing. However, the poems were written between 2008 and 2019 and so do also have a wider scope of Atwood’s interests and concerns, among them the environment, attitudes to female bodies and the nature of memory.

Although some of the poetry is bleak, it is not without hope and the trademark flashes of dry wit for which Atwood is famous, such as in ‘Everyone Else’s Sex Life’ – and I like to think you can hear this in Atwood’s deadpan, drawling delivery of the poems.

There are some very powerful poems in the collection and I was glad to have had the hardback book to fall back upon to read the lines again and think further about them – I am not sure the audiobook, while slow paced in its narration, really gives readers the time to absorb the poetry. For this reason, I think repeated listening would be necessary.

Particularly poignant for me was the longer poem, ‘Songs for Murdered Sisters’. This was written for the baritone singer Joshua Hopkins ‘in honour of his own murdered sister’ (as we only find out in the acknowledgements at the end of the book). This poem moves – in clearly delineated sections – from the sense of absence and grief through anger to remembrance and acceptance. It’s a striking poem that stood out to me on first listen and one I’ve gone back to.

I can’t even pretend to have absorbed and fully understood all the poetry in this collection yet. I think it is one that I will need to return to many times, yet I can say that I found the first reading very engaging, thought-provoking and moving. I’m not a crier, but definitely had a lump in my throat for some of the poems!

As other reviewers have commented, the narration by Atwood is quite flat and without much emphasis. I don’t see this necessarily as a negative – I have heard Atwood read her work before so kind of expected the monotone delivery. Instead, I think her reading of the poems allows listeners to build their own interpretations of the words – and the poetry is strong enough that it packs a punch even without the narrator giving us clues through the reading.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys poetry or who shares Atwood’s concerns – and actually many of the themes are universal. What I would say is that the poetry collection is absolutely 5-star-excellent. However, I’m not wholly convinced that the audiobook is quite the right format for the poetry so I’d recommend it ideally in conjunction with a printed copy – for me, the audiobook is a 4 star presentation of 5 star material.

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Hardback version:

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My Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of 2020

I read a lot of non-fiction books this year – regular visitors to the blog will know that I love history, popular culture, books about books, feminism and biography in particular.

So while I cannot possibly say I’ve read a huge variety of the fabulous non-fiction books published this year, I have found some real gems. In true ‘Top of the Pops’ style (yes, I am of that vintage!), here’s my countdown of the best in 2020’s non-fiction books from number 10 to 1…

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10 – ‘The Gran Tour: Travels with my Elders’ by Ben Aitken

If someone had told me that one of my favourite books of the year would be about a young man going on Shearings coach tours, I’m not sure I’d have believed you! Still, this is a witty, warm and wise story about Aitken’s travels with the older generation and is more focused on interesting people-watching than any real travel narrative. You can read my full review here.

I also read Aitken’s ‘A Chip Shop in Poznan’, an engaging tale of his year in Poland just as Brexit-fever took hold of Britain.

9 – ‘Practically Perfect: Life Lessons from Mary Poppins’ by Katy Brand

Having been raised on the glorious 1964 film of ‘Mary Poppins’, this book was a fabulously comfortable and engaging read. Brand is clearly a Poppins-obsessive and it is something I both recognise and respect! This book is packed with nostalgia, interesting facts and witty analysis. You can read my review here.

If this one floats your boat, Brand’s book about Dirty Dancing is also well worth a read (‘I Carried a Watermelon’).

8 – ‘Essex Girls: For Profane and Opinionated Women Everywhere’ by Sarah Perry

This is a brilliant re-evaluation of the stereotype of the Essex girl and a celebration of ‘profane and opinionated women’ through history. As a Southend-born and long-term Chelmsford resident, this one struck a chord with me. You can read my full review here.

7 – ‘This is Shakespeare’ by Emma Smith

I love a book about Shakespeare and I’ve read a lot! What I loved about this one was the fact that it contained so many new things that I hadn’t really thought about before, even for the plays that I consider that I know really well. You can read my review here.

If this is your thing, I can also recommend Kathryn Harkup’s ‘Death by Shakespeare’, a fascinating look at the deaths in Shakespeare from a scientific perspective. Dark but absolutely engrossing! (review here)

6 – ‘How Love Actually Ruined Christmas (or Colourful Narcotics)’ by Gary Raymond

A late entry into my favourites list but this one is hilarious! I am really not a fan of the film ‘Love Actually’ at all and I really enjoyed Raymond’s scene-by-scene evisceration of it. Thoughtfully-written and genuinely enlightening…and did I mention very, very funny?! You can read my full review here.

5 – ‘Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen’ by Greg Jenner

This is a thoroughly enjoyable jaunt through the culture of celebrity. Jenner, who was historian for the BBC’s excellent ‘Horrible Histories’ TV series, is an engaging guide and brings together stories that are funny, interesting and also occasionally tragic. You can read my review here.

If you like the look of this, I can also recommend Jenner’s first book, ‘A Million Years in A Day’, a book focusing on the history of the things we do every day.

4 – ‘Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights’ by Helen Lewis

This is a history of feminism, but with a difference – it focused on the lesser-known figures and events so that it really feels fresh and engaging. You can read my full review here.

3 – ‘A Curious History of Sex’ by Kate Lister

I supported this book on the crowd-funded publishing site, Unbound, after following Dr Kate Lister on Twitter for a while. Her take on social (sexual) history is funny, feminist and always interesting. The book itself is eye-opening and fascinating, plus Lister donated a proportion of her profits to a sex worker charity. You can read my full review here.

2 – ‘More Than A Woman’ by Caitlin Moran

Moran’s books are always worth a read, but this take on what it means to be a middle-aged woman is brilliant. She is funny and confessional, relatable and quick with her razor-sharp observations. My review can be read here.

Moran’s earlier book, ‘How to be a Woman’, about being a younger woman, is also eminently readable:

1 – ‘A Tomb With a View’ by Peter Ross

OK, so a book ostensibly about graveyards and death might be a bit of an odd choice for my non-fiction book of the year, but hear me out! This is the book that I have talked about to people more than any other this year and it is an absolute treasure.

More than anything, it celebrates life and the people associated with graveyards and burial grounds and ossuaries: the historians, the mourners and the grave-tenders and those who carry out burial rites, as well as the departed. It is strangely comforting and absolutely compelling. Although sometimes sad, it isn’t depressing at all.

This is a brilliant book and one I strongly recommend. You can read my full review here.

Header photo by Rahul Pandit from Burst.