Sunday, October 28, 2012

A Guest Post by Anna: A Feminist Literary Canon, Part Nine: 2000-2012



Marilyn French (1929-2009) was an American writer. Her most significant work in later life was the four-volume From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, published in 2002 and built around the premise that exclusion from the prevailing intellectual histories denied women their past, present and future. Despite carefully chronicling a long history of oppression, the last volume ends on an optimistic note.

Jennifer Baumgardner (born 1970) and Amy Richards (born circa 1971) are American writers and activists. They coauthored Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000) after writing for the feminist magazine Ms. 
This book is an analysis of U.S. feminism that claims that "girl culture," from women rock stars and athletes to female entrepreneurs and inventors, supports feminism and has become an integral part of the national psyche. At the same time, they caution young women not to stop and rest on the success of cultural feminism, but to develop political lives and awareness, and include appendixes to teach novices the nuts-and-bolts of community organizing. Jennifer is openly bisexual and has also written about the bisexual experience.
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I want to thank all my readers and the readers of my previous posts on Echidne's blog, which are the literary canon of women writers series and the post "A Feminist Criticism of Jack Kevorkian". You can read more of my writing at thenewagenda.net and at feminisms.org under the name Ann Harmon, and you might recognize me under the name ann2 as a commenter on the blog Shakesville. I also sometimes comment on Echidne's blog and at feministe under the name anna. None of those are my real names. In the interest of full disclosure, it might interest you to know that I am a white bisexual 29-year-old woman, which no doubt figures into my writing, though I do hope that everyone has enjoyed reading it. I may or may not be posting in future, but this wraps up this series.

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Echidne's note:  Links to the literary canon of women writers series can be found here.

The links to this series:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8