Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women

by Lori Jo Marso

Overview

Examining the lives and work of feminist thinkers throughout history, this book explores their struggles with politics, intellectual work, and material and existential conditions of femininity. A new introduction to this second edition resituates these themes in contemporary feminist literature and theory.

Feminist autobiographical accounts exploring multiple lives and loves, encounters with political comrades and enemies, and frustrations with social expectations about feminine respectability, offer tastes of feminist lives across history and situation. But the stories are not always inspirational or exemplary. How do feminists survive and thrive in situations marked by intersecting harms of sexism, racism, and colonial and capitalist extraction? Thinking beyond representation and empathy as ways to connect, this book features disorienting and disruptive examples from feminist experiments in living and explores the uncomfortable feelings they invite in readers. Insisting that feminists should read the autobiographies and memoirs of feminist actors alongside their theoretical contributions, the volume features the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Emma Goldman, Ida B. Wells, Audre Lorde, Azar Nafisi, Ana Castillo, Carolyn Kay Steedman, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and more.

Written for students and scholars of Women’s History, and everyone who “feels like a feminist,” this book embodies and electrifies the feminist insight that the personal is political.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040350812
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/20/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	282
File size:	710 KB

About the Author

Lori Jo Marso is Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Literary and Historical Studies and Professor of Political Science at Union College, NY. Her books include Feminism and the Cinema of Experience (2024), Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter (2017), Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (2016) and Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers (2016).

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Feminist Genealogies: Connecting Women's Lives
2. Women's Situation, I: The Material Constraints of Femininity
3. Women's Situations, II: Existential Experiments with the Feminine
4. Love in Exile: Reading the Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft and Germaine de Staël
5. A Feminists Search for Love: Emma Goldman on the Politics of Marriage, Love, Sexuality, and the Feminine
6. Maternal Genealogies and Feminist Consciousness: Simone de Beauvoir on Mothers, Daughters, and the Potential for Sisterhood
7. Wanting it All: Contemporary Struggles for Freedom and Fulfillment

What People are Saying About This

Mary Hawkesworth

In creating a conversation among pioneering feminist thinkers, who struggled to resist the demands of conventional femininity as a key component of their political activism, Lori Marso makes a critical contribution to building an "imagined community" of women as a strategy for continuing feminist struggles to achieve meaningful freedom. (Mary Hawkesworth, editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society)

Editorial Reviews

"In creating a conversation among pioneering feminist thinkers, who struggled to resist the demands of conventional femininity as a key component of their political activism, Lori Marso makes a critical contribution to building an "imagined community" of women as a strategy for continuing feminist struggles to achieve meaningful freedom."

—Mary Hawkesworth, Editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

"Creatively exploring the complexities of ‘living as a woman’ and ‘thinking as a feminist’ in the writings of Germaine de Stael, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Goldman, and Simone de Beauvoir, Lori Marso breathes new life into the familiar feminist slogan, ‘the personal is political.’"

—Linda Zerilli, author of Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom

"...Marso's work, in my view, exemplifies an admirable tendency in recent feminist scholarship to reconnect and engage with classical feminist authors. The author envisages her project as opening a dialogue with these feminist mothers and potentially inspiring a shared consciousness among women of different races, classes, and cultures of the role that restrictive social norms play in their lives."

—Regina F. Titunik, University of Hawaii at Hilo

From the Publisher