Feminism

This Thread of Gold: A Celebration of Black Womanhood

Catherine Joy White

£12.99 £12.34

Weaving together narratives that celebrate the triumph of Black female resistance, Catherine Joy White takes us on a unique journey through the eyes of positive and inspiring disruptors. Throughout history, acts of defiance have taken place in secret, in kitchens, churches, through trusted networks. Others were projected onto a global stage through art, politics and activism. From Alice Walker to Beyoncé, from Audre Lorde to Doreen Lawrence, from Aretha Franklin to Zendaya: Catherine Joy White charts her own journey to self-discovery through the prism of extraordinary women to create a beautiful tapestry of Black joy. Taking on the legacy of Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, This Thread of Gold brings new life to the history of Black women’s resistance.

Fix the System, Not the Women

LAURA BATES

£9.99 £9.49

Too often, we blame women. For walking home alone at night. For not demanding a seat at the table. For not overcoming the odds that are stacked against them. This distracts us from the real problem: the failings and biases of a society that was not built for women. In this explosive book, feminist writer and activist Laura Bates exposes the systemic prejudice at the heart of five of our key institutions. Education Politics Media Policing Criminal justice Combining stories with shocking evidence, Fix the System, Not the Women is a blazing examination of sexual injustice and a rallying cry for reform.

She’s In CTRL: How women can take back tech – to communicate, investigate, problem-solve, broker deals and protect themselves in

Anne-Marie Imafidon

£10.99 £10.44

An inspirational exploration of why women are under-represented in tech, why it matters, and what we can do about it. The tech world might feel beyond reach, particularly if you’re a woman. With increasingly frank admission women are woefully under-represented in tech – roughly a mere quarter of the UK STEM workforce – the dangerous fact is clear our technology is the product of a series of big decisions made by a small number of people, mainly men. Our lives have gone digital, but our technology risks being tailored to a section of society whose lived experience may be far from our own. In She’s In CTRL, computer scientist Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon, a dynamic advocate for women in STEM, calls time on women being cut out of the tech story. Technology is not an unchangeable force, nor the preserve of the elite, she argues. It is in our homes and in our hands. In her powerful book about women, tech and daring to dream, Dr Imafidon shows we have more agency than we think, drawing on her own experience and the stories of other pioneers and innovators who have, against the odds, transformed technology. The world needs more women in tech and, in her inspiring narrative, Dr Imafidon shows not only why this is but how we can all play our part in ensuring a future that’s evenly distributed.

See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse

Jess Hill

£12.99

Every year in England and Wales alone, one in twenty adults suffer domestic abuse, two thirds of them women. Every week, two men kill a woman they were intimate with. And still we ask the wrong question: Why didn’t she leave? Instead, we should ask: Why did he do it? Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators — and the systems that enable them — in the spotlight. Her radical reframing of domestic abuse takes us beyond the home to explore how power, culture and gender intersect to both produce and normalise abuse. She boldly confronts uncomfortable questions about how and why society creates abusers, but can’t seem to protect their victims, and shows how we can end this dark cycle of fear and control. ‘See What You Made Me Do’ is a profound and bold confrontation of this urgent crisis and its deep roots. It will challenge everything you thought you knew about domestic abuse.

Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate

Anna Bogutskaya

£12.99 £12.34

How bitches, trainwrecks, shrews, and crazy women have taken over pop culture and liberated women from having to be nice. Female characters throughout history have been burdened by the moral trap that is likeability. Any woman who dares to reveal her messy side has been treated as a cautionary tale. Today, unlikeable female characters are everywhere in film, TV, and wider pop culture. For the first time ever, they are being accepted by audiences and even showered with industry awards. We are finally accepting that women are-gasp-fully fledged human beings. How did we get to this point? Unlikeable Female Characters traces the evolution of highly memorable female characters, from Samantha Jones as “The Slut” in Sex and the City to the iconic Mean Girl, Regina George, examining what exactly makes them popular, how audiences have reacted to them, and the ways in which pop culture is finally allowing us to celebrate the complexities of being a woman. Anna Bogutskaya, film programmer, broadcaster, and co-founder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls, takes us on a journey through popular film, TV, and music, looking at the nuances of womanhood on and off-screen to reveal whether pop culture-and society-is finally ready to embrace complicated women.

Virginia's Sisters

Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, et al.

£16.99 £16.14

A unique anthology of short stories and poetry by feminist contemporaries of Virginia Woolf, who were writing about work, discrimination, war, relationships and love in the early part of the 20th Century. Includes works by English and American writers Zelda Fitzgerald, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Radclyffe Hall, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf, alongside their recently rediscovered ‘sisters’ from around the world. This book offers a diverse and international array of over 20 literary gems from women writers living in Bulgaria, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Italy, Palestine, Romania, Russia, Spain and Ukraine.

Women in Black: Against violence, For peace with justice

£15.99

For a network held together by shared passion and aims, with no membership or organisational structure, Women in Black has reached surprisingly far and wide in just over thirty years. It began when Israeli and Palestinian women took a stand against the occupation of Palestine, it spread across Europe and to India, South Africa, North and South America, Armenia and beyond. Women in Black is worldwide and continues to work with imagination and determination for peace and justice. Women in Black works with other feminist movements, builds on shared strengths, and develops joint actions. Its opposition to militarism draws on a critique of capitalism and imperialism. It brings women together across cultures, religions, and ethnicities with a shared analysis of gender relations, and how these intersect. This book has a bibliography, a contact list for Women in Black groups and allied organisations across the world.

A Very Easy Death

Simone de Beauvoir

£12.99 £12.34

Long considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces, A Very Easy Death is a profoundly affecting, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s final days after she is hospitalized following a fall. Though a devout Catholic, her faith is subsumed by her terror of death, and as her body fails, she clings to life with fierce, primal desperation. In depicting her mother’s refusal to ‘go gentle’ while her autonomy and dignity are taken from her, Simone de Beauvoir ‘shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence’ (Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget.