Books like Feminine Genius by LiYana Silver

Examines traditional masculine and feminine stereotypes and argues for a redefinition and recognition of the creative strengths of women.

Landmark, groundbreaking, classic―these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire.

213 pages ; 24 cm

Any woman reading The Girl Within will have the extraordinary experience of self-discovery as she finds in this collection of women's life stories the playful, purposeful, self-possessed girl of her childhood. Author Emily Hancock claims that this self-possessed girl -- a girl who knows who she is and what she's about -- is a resource for contemporary women. Dr. Hancock concludes, however, that a female easily loses sight of who and what she really is beneath the feminine facade she adopts in youth -- simply through the process of growing up female. The women Hancock interviewed reclaim the forgotten girl. They trace not just one but a variety of paths back to her. In a series of first-person accounts that read like marvelous mini-novels, Hancock elucidates the vicissitudes of losing and refinding the essential self. From the story of Katherine, a pediatrician whose grandmother hosted musical salons, to that of Jo, whose father put bootblack on her white socks when her toes poked through her black shoes, the girl who harbors a female's original identity reappears again and again. Women who reached back to catch hold of a girl they could rely on to found in the girl a source of womanly strength. Through engrossing life stories, psychologist Hancock provides the female reader one self-realization after another as she clarifies the girl's image and shows how important it is to recapture her. Like Gail Sheehy's Passages and Maggie Scarf's Unfinished Business, Hancock's is a landmark book. Written in a style as lucid as it is lively, it gives the intelligent reader -- man and woman alike -- an invaluable understanding of the forces at work in women's psychology. The Girl Within offers a natural, female model of identity development that starts with the girl and circles back to her. In a study that is destined to have a profound impact, Hancock shows just how the girl begets the woman.

327 p. : 21 cm

What is memory, and where is it stored in the body? Can a room be symbolic of a lifetime? Memories are like layers of your skin or layers of paint on a canvas. In The Queen of Peace Room, Magie Dominic peels away these layers as she explores her life, that of a Newfoundlander turned New Yorker, an artist and a writer — and frees herself from the memories of her violent past. On an eight-day retreat with Catholic nuns in a remote location safe from the outside world, she exposes, and captures, fifty years of violent memories and weaves them into a tapestry of unforgettable images. The room she inhabits while there is called The Queen of Peace Room; it becomes, for her, a room of sanctuary. She examines Newfoundland in the 1940s and 1950s and New York in the 1960s; her confrontations with violence, incest, and rape; the devastating loss of friends to AIDS; and the relationship between life and art. These memories she finds stored alongside memories of nature’s images of trees pulling themselves up from their roots and fleeing the forest; storms and ley lines, and skies bursting with star-like eyes. In The Queen of Peace Room, from a very personal perspective, Magie Dominic explores violence against women in the second half of the twentieth century, and in doing so unearths the memory of a generation. In eight days, she captures half a century. (description by publisher)