Don't Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life

by Peggy Orenstein

Overview

The New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter delivers her first ever collection of essays—funny, poignant, deeply personal and sharply observed pieces, drawn from three decades of writing, which trace girls’ and women’s progress (or lack thereof) in what Orenstein once called a “half-changed world.”

Named one of the “40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years” by Columbia Journalism Review, Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.

In Don’t Call Me Princess, Orenstein’s most resonant and important essays are available for the first time in collected form, updated with both an original introduction and personal reflections on each piece. Her takes on reproductive justice, the infertility industry, tensions between working and stay-at-home moms, pink ribbon fear-mongering and the complications of girl culture are not merely timeless—they have, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, become more urgent in our contemporary political climate.

Don’t Call Me Princess offers a crucial evaluation of where we stand today as women—in our work lives, sex lives, as mothers, as partners—illuminating both how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062688903
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/27/2018
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	790,453
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Peggy Orenstein is the New York Times bestselling author of Boys & Sex, Don’t Call Me Princess, Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Waiting for Daisy, Flux, and Schoolgirls. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and Afar, she has also been published in New York, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other publications. Her TED Talk has received over five million views. She lives in Northern California with her husband and daughter. 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Two Girls in a Room ix

Part 1 Starlets, Scientists, Artists, Activists & Other Noteworthy Women

Atsuko Chiba: The Nonconformist 3

Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan: Ms. Fights for Its Life 15

Phoebe Gloeckner: A Graphic Life 41

Gaitlin Moran: They Don't Make Feminists This Outrageous Anymore 53

Elizabeth Blackburn: Why Science Must Adapt to Women 65

Miranda Cosgrove: The Good Girl 77

Katherine Mary Flannigan: The Story of My Life 95

Part 2 Body Language

Does Father Know Best? 109

Thirty-Five and Mortal: A Breast Cancer Diary 117

The Problem with Pink 147

Mourning My Miscarriage 171

Baby Lust 185

Breast Friends 191

Put to the Test 203

What Makes a Woman a Woman? 213

Call of the Wild 219

Part 3 Not Your Mama's Motherhood

The Perfect Mother Trap 233

Your Gamete, Myself 245

Bringing Down Baby 273

Where I Got Daisy 279

The Femivore's Dilemma 285

Part 4 Girls! Girls! Girls! (And one About Boys)

Children Are Alone 291

What's Wrong with Cinderella? 319

Playing at Sexy 337

The Hillary Lesson 341

The Empowerment Mystique 345

The Fat Trap 351

The Battle over Dress Codes 355

Our Barbie Vaginas, Ourselves 359

When Did Porn Become Sex Ed? 365

How to Be a Man in the Age of Trump 373

Acknowledgments 379

Editorial Reviews

02/12/2018
Drawn from over three decades of work, this middling collection of essays by Orenstein (Girls & Sex) explores many of the same topics as her previous books: parenthood, cancer, infertility, and body image. Orenstein is at her best and most personal when she writes about breast cancer: she recounts her own diagnosis and its effect on her fertility, and reflects on the “pink ribbon culture” and how increased attention on breast cancer and early screening may do more harm than good. The collection also includes a handful of profiles of successful women artists and scientists, including biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, graphic novelist Phoebe Gloeckner, and Guardian columnist Caitlin Moran. In a posthumous profile of Atsuko Chiba, published in 1989, Orenstein vividly captures the Japanese journalist’s strong personality and relentless writing career without having ever met her. Chiba, however, is the only woman of color profiled in the book (though Orenstein does write about her own teenage daughter, Daisy, who is biracial). While Orenstein thoughtfully and incisively captures the perspectives of the people she writes about, those perspectives appear too similar to each other when presented in collected form; notably missing are lower-income women, black women, and trans women. Nonetheless, Orenstein is an enduring and important voice in the feminist choir, and the book will be welcomed by her longtime fans. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

[Orenstein] has long woven trenchant feminist analysis of social issues with honest, often moving, self-interrogation.... One of Orenstein’s greatest strengths is in breaking personal and cultural silences around living in a female body.

San Francisco Chronicle

A satisfyingly succinct handbook of Orenstein’s incisive, witty and necessary observations.... The conclusions Orenstein draws are often unexpected, always brilliant. The confessions she extracts from her subjects are stunning.”                                                      

Chicago Tribune

★ 02/01/2018
Like her previous books Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Orenstein's latest looks at the damage that gender stereotyping has on lives and laws, among other things. This book would complement women's, gender, and sexuality studies because of the range of the essays, especially in the first section, in which Orenstein profiles women such as graphic novelist Phoebe Gloeckner, iCarly star Miranda Cosgrove, and scientist Elizabeth Blackburn. That being said, the real strength of this collection is Orenstein's beautiful interweaving of personal stories with politics and her writings on/about politics. In some ways, her description of Gloeckner's deployment of genre conventions (mixing a traditionally female form, the diary, with male-dominated comic book writing) could describe her own approach, which blurs the boundaries among polemical, personal, and political. Orenstein situates her writing within her own identity, thereby suggesting the limitations of her viewpoints. Overall, she enriches her readers' understanding of abortion laws, breast cancer, body image, pornography, and other timely issues in specific yet open-ended and complex ways. VERDICT For all interested in how situation and circumstance influence women's everyday lives.—Emily Bowles, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison

Library Journal

2017-10-30
A feminist journalist gathers some of her most influential pieces.New York Times Magazine contributing writer Orenstein (Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, 2016, etc.) came to journalism believing that individual stories—especially those about girls and women—could "illuminate something universal [and] essential about our time." Here, she collects articles written over a distinguished career spanning more than 30 years. The author groups her work into four themed sections. The first presents profiles of well-known women such as Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan. Both became the driving forces behind Ms. magazine, which they saw gutted and remade over the decades by a sexist, profit-driven media industry. Orenstein also covers lesser-known figures such as the "worldly and independent" feminist Japanese journalist Atsuko Chiba and the controversial graphic artist Phoebe Gloeckner, whose work about teenage sexuality is as unique as it is disturbing. In the second section, Orenstein covers topics related to female corporeality. These articles are among the most personal in the book. They include a piece comprised entirely of diary entries that Orenstein wrote during a battle with breast cancer and a memoir-style reflection about her post-cancer experiences with miscarriage. In the third section, the author tackles modern motherhood. She observes that working mothers still struggle with critical attitudes toward a life split between parenting and a career. Advances in bio-technology have "shattered conventional definitions of ‘parent,' " further complicating notions of what constitutes a "mother." The last section of the book contains Orenstein's musings on girlhood in America. In one piece she profiles two teenage girls: one poor and the other middle class. Their one commonality was feeling alone and misunderstood in a system hostile to them and their needs. In another, the author discusses the way girls must navigate a "princess culture" that infantilizes notions of "girl power" as it sexualizes it. Compelling and intelligent, Orenstein's book offers a powerful vision of the challenges of modern womanhood and of what it means to be female in 21st-century America.A sharp, timely collection of essays.

Kirkus Reviews

Insightful…. Also offers an intimate portrait of Orenstein herself…. The power of her work comes from her incessant curiosity and her general unwillingness to provide a singular answer to life’s biggest questions.

starred review Booklist

Known for her wide-ranging feminist writing about everything from princess culture to breast cancer, Orenstein presents a collection of her essays that are both striking and timely.

New York Times Book Review

Orenstein punctuates many of her insightful points with wry wit and fresh humor.... After a round of surprising medical results, a member of Orenstein’s medical team tells her, ‘I’m afraid this is a bit like peeling an onion.’ So, too, is Orenstein’s writing. It’s layered. It stings. It may very well make you cry—and then do something with it.”                                

Shelf Awareness

A satisfyingly succinct handbook of Orenstein’s incisive, witty and necessary observations.... The conclusions Orenstein draws are often unexpected, always brilliant. The confessions she extracts from her subjects are stunning.”                                                      

Chicago Tribune

[Orenstein] has long woven trenchant feminist analysis of social issues with honest, often moving, self-interrogation.... One of Orenstein’s greatest strengths is in breaking personal and cultural silences around living in a female body.

San Francisco Chronicle

Praise for Girls & Sex: “Provocative and thoughtful.... Both an examination of sexual culture and a guide on how to improve it.... The breadth of Orenstein’s reporting...is impressive.

Laura Stepp

A nuanced read for anyone who remembers being a young woman and anyone who is raising the next generation of girls (and boys) for whom we hope the future holds sexual satisfaction, not pain or disappointment.

Rebecca Traister

Nonsensational but deeply entertaining…. A must-read.

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