Books like Life and Death by Andrea Dworkin

A powerful anthology of essays by Audre Lorde that traces her intellectual evolution, highlights her advocacy for minority women writers, and examines the intersections of sex, race, and class.

Betty Friedan’s 1963 classic uncovers the invisible barriers that kept women confined to domestic roles, sparking a cultural awakening that reshaped ideas about equality and personal fulfillment in the United States.

Judith Butler’s seminal text challenges essentialist views of sex and gender, proposing that identity is constructed through repeated social performances.

She writes about sex, children's books, the media, breast implants, the mind of an antiabortionist. She invokes Moby Dick and Gilligan's Island, Lorna Bobbitt and Lysistrata ("the original woman's strike-for-peace-nik"). For more than a decade, in her wonderfully provocative, wittily astute, graceful and gutsy pieces in The Nation, The New Yorker and The New York Times, she has taken the strongest positions on the thorniest moral issues and the most controversial events, from date rape to surrogate motherhood, to violence against women, to the Anita Hill hearings, to fetal rights and mothers' "wrongs.". She asks "Who's Afraid of Hillary Clinton?," considers the Smurfette Principle and explains why she hates "Family Values." She takes aim at nineteen targets in all. Her pieces delight by their language - the mastery that won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her first book of poems - and her refusal, ever, to be ponderous.

in 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill's experience shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become. Tainted Witness examines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness. Judgment falls unequally upon women who bear witness, as well-known conflicts about testimonial authority in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reveal. Women's testimonial accounts demonstrate both the symbolic potency of women's bodies and speech in the public sphere and the relative lack of institutional security and control to which they can lay claim. Each testimonial act follows in the wake of a long and invidious association of race and gender with lying that can be found to this day within legal courts and everyday practices of judgment, defining these locations as willfully unknowing and hostile to complex accounts of harm. Bringing together feminist, literary, and legal frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testimony is discredited. She demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice. -- Inside jacket flap.