More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Each month, Ms. provides readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.
Whether or not you pick up the science books on our lists, or you try some poetry, or a new-to-you genre of fiction, I hope you find something here that’s both exciting and educational.
Happy April, and Happy National Poetry Month. Since my dormant love of poetry was reignited, I’ve found it so refreshing and inspiring to read beautiful collections each year and share them with you.
In 2021, I tried something a bit different with the poetry list: Instead of the usual blurb, I focused my thoughts about each collection into three words. Readers responded so well to it that I decided to keep doing it. Sometimes the words are nouns, sometimes verbs, sometimes adjectives—and I may have just made up some words too. The words I choose are always inspired by the collection and often taken directly from it. Sometimes I try to be clever, other times straightforward and you can tell I love my alliteration. Since I find it challenging to be succinct, this is a valuable exercise in imagination, reflection and, well, restraint.
I hope you find some collections that will have you reflecting on how poetry moves you, challenges you and represents you.
With a global market worth of over $56 billion, handbags are one of the main drivers of the fashion industry.
However, as Kathleen B. Casey shows in her latest book, The Things She Carried: The Social History of the Purse in America, they are more than just a fashionable accessory: Women’s purses are an important marker of identity and social status. They are a statement of power, of resilience, of defiance and even protection. Indeed, you can tell a lot about a person from their handbag and what’s in it.
While both women and men have carried bags in the past, it was the evolution of pockets (and lack thereof in women’s clothes) that led to the purse being specifically marked as a feminine accessory, often associated with the female body and particularly the womb.
With pockets becoming a symbol of functionality and masculinity, it is not a coincidence that utilitarian pockets became a feminist demand. Feminists have long argued for their right to free hands and movement, while keeping their possessions secure and concealed. Pockets were often equated to votes during the suffrage campaign, as activists criticized the lack of both in hindering women’s independence.
Despite being a conspicuous item, one that could be snatched or stolen, Casey is careful to show the power of the purse (pun intended) in offering women the ability to gain visibility in public as equal to men. Women could not only carry with them money, sanitary pads and birth control pills that allowed them freedom of movement and independence, but their bags enabled them to do it while maintaining their respectability and status. At times when women had little control over their bodies, the privacy of their purse offered them an autonomy they could not otherwise gain.
Each month, Ms. provides readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.
April means a new season, with plants sprouting and leaves returning to deciduous trees. It also means new books—and lots of them!
Check out the 25 books we’ve chosen to highlight this month.
Each month, Ms. provides readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.
Wishing you a powerful, inspired and liberatory Women’s History Month!
Check out this month’s list of 24 books.
An exciting new anthology, Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online synthesizes decades of experience and pushes forward dynamic conversations about feminist pedagogy and remote learning, offering a meaningful and much-needed contribution to this area of research and teaching.
Overall, the collection strives to explore how online education can “align more thoughtfully with intersectional feminism and practices of social justice education.”
Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online, in print and as an electronic book, was preceded by the FeministsTeach.org website. The website went viral in August 2020 when large numbers of college professors were grappling with how to teach online. Two of the anthology’s coeditors compiled resources for colleagues at the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University for online teaching.
I thought I was mentally prepared to read Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumous book, Nobody’s Girl. I was wrong. If reading the book was gut-wrenching, I can’t imagine what it was like for her and other girls and women who experience the horrors of being trafficked.
In the final paragraph of the book, and perhaps in some of the final sentences she ever wrote, Giuffre tells that she will have achieved her goal with Nobody’s Girl if “just one person” is moved to create “a world in which predators are punished, not protected; victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as everybody else.”
Although she never lived to see this day, her book, her courage and her rage compel us to fight for this goal in the name of all victims and survivors of sex trafficking.
Each month, Ms. provides readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.
I hope you find something on this list of 20 that fuels your feminism and reminds you of the power of our collective stories.
Russia’s hostility to feminism today stems not from its foreignness, but from memory. A century ago, it was Russian women who lit the first sparks of revolution. On International Women’s Day in 1917, factory workers filled the streets of Petrograd demanding bread, peace and equality—an uprising that toppled the Romanovs and pulled the world into modernity. Under the Bolsheviks, women won the right to vote, divorce became accessible and abortion was legalized. For a brief, radical moment, the Soviet experiment made women’s liberation a pillar of the state.
Julia Ioffe’s book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, reminds us that today’s Russia rejects feminism precisely because it once knew what it could do: ignite revolutions, upend hierarchies and reimagine power itself.
On a cold Sunday morning in January 2021, Qadria Yasini, a judge on the Supreme Court of Afghanistan in Kabul, set out for work with her colleague, Zakia Herawi. As they rode in the back seat of a government-provided car, they were gunned down in broad daylight by three assassins, who then fled on foot and by motorcycle. When Yasini’s possessions were returned to her family, a Mother’s Day greeting from her two teenage sons was found in her handbag, riddled by bullets.
This heartbreaking story opens British journalist Karen Bartlett’s deeply reported, troubling new book: Escape From Kabul: The Afghan Women Judges Who Fled the Taliban and Those They Left Behind.
But Bartlett’s narrative also provides an inspiring tale of resilience.