Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity

Examining the lives and work of feminist thinkers throughout history, this book explores their struggles with politics, intellectual work, and material and existential conditions of femininity. A new introduction to this second edition resituates these themes in contemporary feminist literature and theory.

Feminist autobiographical accounts exploring multiple lives and loves, encounters with political comrades and enemies, and frustrations with social expectations about feminine respectability, offer tastes of feminist lives across history and situation. But the stories are not always inspirational or exemplary. How do feminists survive and thrive in situations marked by intersecting harms of sexism, racism, and colonial and capitalist extraction? Thinking beyond representation and empathy as ways to connect, this book features disorienting and disruptive examples from feminist experiments in living and explores the uncomfortable feelings they invite in readers. Insisting that feminists should read the autobiographies and memoirs of feminist actors alongside their theoretical contributions, the volume features the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Emma Goldman, Ida B. Wells, Audre Lorde, Azar Nafisi, Ana Castillo, Carolyn Kay Steedman, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and more.

Written for students and scholars of Women’s History, and everyone who “feels like a feminist,” this book embodies and electrifies the feminist insight that the personal is political.

"It is not only in their victories, or even their defeats, that the women in this book move between their immediate personal circumstances and their larger political contexts. Rather, it is in their on-going and often unresolved struggles to love well and to work well that Lori Marso articulates a powerful feminist energy. Women’s struggles to 'get free' don’t have to fully succeed in order to stimulate our imaginations. These 'feminist experiments in living' create space for multiple approaches to the task of inventing a satisfactory life in an unjust world."

Kathy Ferguson, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA, author of Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets

"Lori Marso’s book is an essential exploration of the feminist intellectual. Marso traces how feminist thinkers have struggled against the normative demands of femininity to think boldly, to pose urgent questions, and to imagine freedom in their personal and political lives. This book is necessary reading in a time when radical thought feels more urgent than ever."

Jennifer Nash, Duke University, USA, author of How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory

"The first edition of Lori Marso’s Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity was one of the books that made me want to become a feminist political theorist. Its vibrant appreciation of feminist foremothers in their human complexity invites our full and imperfect selves into a relation of collective feminist becoming. An intellectual and political genealogy that centers desire and intimacy as core to both lived constraints and liberatory strategies, it illuminates the corporeal and relational stakes that link distinct struggles within and against sexism, racism, class oppression, and state violence. Under conditions of increasing reproductive coercion and gender policing, this reissued invitation, grounded in a richly theorized account of femininity as political 'situation,' could not be timelier."

Annie Menzel, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA, author of Fatal Denial: Racism and the Political Life of Black Infant Mortality

"Lori Marso's capacious book remains critically important, twenty years later. When the demands of femininity shift across time, space, and political context, questions about how to live a feminist life resist easy resolution. Marso vividly demonstrates how contemporary feminist thought may be enlivened by turning to foremothers' writing and lives as their lifework—or the ways their thought and material circumstances variously but inevitably intertwine in the feminist preoccupations that make and remake a life."

Isabelle Laurenzi, Yale University, USA

Lori Jo Marso is Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Literary and Historical Studies and Professor of Political Science at Union College, NY. Her books include Feminism and the Cinema of Experience (2024), Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter (2017), Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (2016) and Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers (2016).

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