Joan Smith
The State Of Feminism
Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism
By Natasha Walter
Virago Press 288pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
Publishers have a big problem with feminism. Editors tend to subscribe to the notion that feminists are dreary and not to be bothered with, but every now and then a feminist book is a spectacular (and enviable) success. People are still reading The Second Sex – even my local Waterstone's, which does its best to disguise the fact that it sells any books at all, has a copy on its shelves – and The Female Eunuch remains one of the most famous publications of the twentieth century. Publishers have an uneasy feeling that they might be missing something, and a key text in this state of affairs is The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.
Wolf sidestepped the fierce intellectualism of Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer and Kate Millett, offering in its place a mass of statistics and a species of autobiographical writing that editors and readers turned
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw