Late last year, bloggers Ana, Amy, Emily Jane, and Iris set up a cool online feminist classics book club for 2011. It’s a really great idea, but I wasn’t sure I had time for more reading on top of the books already on my list. Butseeing that I already owned but hadn’t read some of the choices, and that participants don’t have to read/respond every month won me over.
Each month starts with some historical context from that month’s host, then later in the month we get discussion questions, which we can respond to on our own blogs or on the comments on the main page. It’s been amazing to start to see what others have to say so far. There’s still time to join and the reading list is below for those interested. I’ll post in the next few days about my trials and tribulations plodding through the first book: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication on the Rights of Woman, as well as look at answering some of the suggested discussion questions.
January: A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft AND So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba
February: The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill
March: A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
April: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
May: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
June: God Dies by the Nile by Nawal Saadawi
July: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
August: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
September: The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
October: Ain’t I a Woman? by bell hooks AND Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism Anthology
November: Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
December: Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
-Jarrah
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, is truly a classic and should be added for a baker’s dozen.
Good call! I think that’s one I should add to my personal list this year, even if it doesn’t make the book club.
Wollstonecraft right off the bat, hey? I just saw this and already feel behind! I read part of it in a feminist literature class that I took, but not the whole thing. To me, it seems like a bit of a project. Are people going to speed-read it? Where are the questions going to be posted? Thanks!
I don’t know if people are speed reading it. You’ll see when I get my response up that I read most of it in University and this time all I managed to do was listen to half the audiobook before I got pretty bored. I think some of the other books will be a bit more enjoyable, at least for me, but the discussion on this one is already shaping up to be interesting. All the questions will be posted at http://feministclassics.wordpress.com and specifically for Wollstonecraft the questions are at http://feministclassics.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/a-bit-more-on-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman/
Feminine Mystique – Friedan
Laugh of the Medusa (article) – Cixous
Epistemology of the Closet – Sedgwick
The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe
LOVING the postcolonial fems!
I would sugest Stephanie Coontz’s new book A Strange Stirring – The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960′s