Feminism is the insight that sexism exists, and the struggle against that oppression. The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is a global anthology of feminist writers, edited and introduced with a major new essay by Hannah Dawson.

 

Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, who imagined a City of Ladies that would serve as a refuge from the harassment of men, the book reaches around the earth and through the years to us, now, crashing about in the fourth wave. It goes beyond the usual white, western story, encompassing also race, class, capitalism, imperialism, and other axes of oppression that intersect with patriarchy. Alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who declared in Seneca Falls in 1848 the self-evident truth 'that all men and women are created equal', we find Sojourner Truth, born into slavery in New York in 1797, who replied and Ain't I a woman? Deeply sensitive to the exclusions and exploitations of feminism itself, the anthology is as alive to the conflicts between women as it is to the struggle against patriarchy. Maximally inclusive, and drawing on poems, novels and memoirs, as well as roaring manifestos, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing parts the clouds on a constellation of feminist classics.