ON HIATUS! Check back in the fall for updated information!
Open to feminists of all genders, our Feminist Book Group meets the second Sunday of every month and focuses on various social issues facing feminists today. Since November 2019, we have been focusing on CLIMATE CHANGE. We will continue with this topic as long as there is interest.
Facilitator: Staffer Kaylie Padgett (Contact via wcfkaylie@gmail.com)
Upcoming Selection
Upcoming Selection
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, June 14, 2020 via Zoom
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, May 10, 2020
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, April 12, 2020 Via Zoom
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, March 8, 2020
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, February 9, 2020
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, January 12, 2020
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, November 17, 2019
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, October 13, 2019
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, September 8, 2019
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, August 11, 2019 at 5:30 p.m.
This will be the first of three discussions exploring issues of feminism and spirituality.
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, July 14, 2019
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, June 9, 2019
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, May 12, 2019
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, April 14, 2019
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** February 10, 2019
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, January 13, 2019
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, December 9, 2018
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, October 14, 2018
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, September 9, 2018
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, July 8, 2018
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, June 10, 2018
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, May 13, 2018
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, April 8, 2018
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, March 11, 2018
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, February 11, 2018
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** for Sunday, December 10, 2017
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, November 12, 2017
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, October 8, 2017
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, September 10, 2017
***PREVIOUS MEETING*** Sunday, August 13, 2017 at 6:30 PM
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 4 p.m.
This will be the first of six discussions exploring climate change through a feminist lens. All are welcome!
***PREVIOUS MEETING*** Sunday, May 14, 2017
***PREVIOUS SELECTION*** Sunday, April 9, 2017
***PREVIOUS SLECTION*** Sunday March 12, 2017
***PREVIOUS MEETING***
Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 6 PM
***PREVIOUS MEETING***
Sunday, January 8, 2017 at 6:30 PM
***PREVIOUS MEETING***
Sunday, December 11, 2016 at 6:30 PM
***PREVIOUS SELECTION***
Sunday, October 9th at 6:30 PM
A fiercely assured debut novel about four second-generation Chinese sisters, one of whom happens to be a boy.
***PREVIOUS SELECTION***
for Sunday, September 11th at 6:30 PM
This powerful revelation uncovers the astonishing, untold history of the million-and-a-half women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before "Roe v. Wade."
***PREVIOUS SELECTION***
A single woman considers her life, the lives of the bold single ladies who have gone before her, and the long arc of slowly changing attitudes towards women.
***PREVIOUS SELECTION***
Sunday, July 10th at 6:30 PM
A fresh and provocative debut novel about a reclusive young woman saving up for weight loss surgery when she gets drawn into a shadowy feminist guerilla group.
***PREVIOUS SELETION***
Sunday, June 12th at 6:30 PM
***PREVIOUS MEETING***
Sunday, May 8th at 6:30 PM
A history of America's civil rights movement traces the pivotal influence of sexual violence that victimized African American women for centuries, revealing Rosa Parks's contributions as an anti-rape activist years before her heroic bus protest.
***Selection Meeting & Potluck: Sunday, April 10, 2016 at 6:30 PM***
Previous Selection: Sunday, March 13, 2016 at 6:30 PM
Depicted as duplicitous, traitorous, and promiscuous, bisexuality has long been suspected, marginalized, and rejected by both straight and gay communities alike. "Bi" takes a long overdue, comprehensive look at bisexual politics--from the issues surrounding biphobia/monosexism, feminism, and transgenderism to the practice of labeling those who identify as bi as either "too bisexual" (promiscuous and incapable of fidelity) or "not bisexual enough" (not actively engaging romantically or sexually with people of at least two different genders). In this forward-thinking and eye-opening book, feminist bisexual and genderqueer activist Shiri Eisner takes readers on a journey through the many aspects of the meanings and politics of bisexuality, specifically highlighting how bisexuality can open up new and exciting ways of challenging social convention. Informed by feminist, transgender, and queer theory, as well as politics and activism, "Bi" is a radical manifesto for a group that has been too frequently silenced, erased, and denied--and a starting point from which to launch a bisexual revolution.
***PREVIOUS SELECTION***
Sunday, February 14, 2016 at 6:30 PM
Entertainment Weekly Eisner Award-nominated writer Kelly Sue DeConnick (Pretty Deadly, Captain Marvel) and Valentine De Landro (X-Factor) team up to bring you the premiere volume of Bitch Planet, a deliciously vicious riff on women-in-prison sci-fi exploitation. In a future just a few years down the road in the wrong direction, a woman's failure to comply with her patriarchal overlords will result in exile to the meanest penal planet in the galaxy. When the newest crop of fresh femmes arrive, can they work together to stay alive or will hidden agendas, crooked guards, and the deadliest sport on (or off!) Earth take them to their maker?
***PREVIOUS SELECTION***
Sunday, January 10, 2016 at 6:30 PM
This debut novel tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., who becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy. Growing up in the 1980s, she confronts her identity as a biracial young woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.
***PREVIOUS SELECTION***
Sunday, December 13, 2015 at 6:30 PM
"Crow After Roe is a must-read for anyone who cares about women's rights. A comprehensive look at the never-ending war on women's bodies, the book will shock and move you to action. Most importantly, though, Crow After Roe gives you hope and a roadmap for what we can do to change the current anti-woman tide."--Jessica Valenti, feminist author and speaker, founder of Feministing.com and columnist at The Nation
*****PREVIOUS SELECTION****
Sunday, November 8, 2015 at 6:30 p.m.
A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay.
Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.
In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.
Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better."
****Previous Selection*****
Sunday, October 11, 2015 at 6:30 pm
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local powhitetrash. At eight years old and back at her mother s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ( I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare ) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
***PREVIOUS SELECTION***
Sunday, August 9, 2015 at 6:30pm
The Feminist Porn Book celebrates the power of desire, turning the spotlight on an industry where feminism is thriving.
**PREVIOUS SELECTION***
Sunday, July 12, 2015 at 6:30pm
Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI’s "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.
Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.
*** Previous Selection ***
Sunday, June 14, 2015 at 6:30pm
Recent years have seen a panic over “online red-light districts,” which supposedly seduce vulnerable young women into a life of degradation, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s live tweeting of a Cambodian brothel raid. But rarely do these fearful, salacious dispatches come from sex workers themselves, and rarely do they deviate from the position that sex workers must be rescued from their condition, and the industry simply abolished — a position common among feminists and conservatives alike.
In Playing the Whore, journalist Melissa Gira Grant turns these pieties on their head, arguing for an overhaul in the way we think about sex work. Based on ten years of writing and reporting on the sex trade, and grounded in her experience as an organizer, advocate, and former sex worker, Playing the Whore dismantles pervasive myths about sex work, criticizes both conditions within the sex industry and its criminalization, and argues that separating sex work from the “legitimate” economy only harms those who perform sexual labor. In Playing the Whore, sex workers’ demands, too long relegated to the margins, take center stage: sex work iswork, and sex workers’ rights are human rights.
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Sunday, May 10, 2015 at 6:30pm
In this "New York Times" bestseller--the first transgender memoir written by an African American--an extraordinary young woman recounts her coming-of-age. "Undercurrents of strong emotion swirl throughout this well-written book...An enlightening, much-needed perspective on transgender identity" ("Kirkus Reviews").
In 2011, "Marie Claire" magazine published a profile of Janet Mock in which she stepped forward for the first time as a trans woman. Those twenty-three hundred words were life-altering for the People.com editor, turning her into an influential and outspoken public figure and a desperately needed voice for an often voiceless community. In these pages, she offers a bold and inspiring perspective on being young, multicultural, economically challenged, and transgender in America.
This "heart-rending autobiography of love, longing, and fulfillment" (bell hooks, author of "All About Love") follows Mock's quest for identity, from an early, unwavering conviction about her gender to a turbulent adolescence in Honolulu that saw her transitioning during the tender years of high school, self-medicating with hormones at fifteen, and flying across the world alone for sex reassignment surgery at just eighteen. Despite the hurdles, Mock received a scholarship to college and moved to New York City, where she earned a master's degree and enjoyed the success of an enviable career. Now, with unflinching honesty, Mock uses her own experience to impart vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of trans youth and brave girls like herself.
A profound statement of affirmation from a courageous woman, "Redefining Realness" provides a whole new outlook on what it means to be a woman today, and shows as never before how to be authentic, unapologetic, and wholly yourself.
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Sunday, April 12, 2015 at 6:30pm
The widely acclaimed novel that brilliantly recasts the Snow White fairy tale as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity.
In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman.
A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, exposes the Whitman family secret. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.
Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.
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Sunday, March 8, 2015 at 6:30pm
Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a "call to action."
Called "stunning" by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Levering Lewis, "invaluable" by the Daily Kos, "explosive" by Kirkus, and "profoundly necessary" by the Miami Herald, this updated and revised paperback edition of The New Jim Crow, now with a foreword by Cornel West, is a must-read for all people of conscience.
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Sunday February 8, 2015 at 6:30 pm
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
**Previous selection**
Sunday November 9, 2014 at 6:30 pm
In her debut memoir, actress and comedian Jen Kirkman delves into her off-camera life with the same snarky sensitivity and oddball humor she brings to her sold-out standup shows and the "Chelsea Lately" roundtable, where she is a writer and regular performer.
**Previous selection**
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Sunday, October 12, 2014 at 6:30 pm
A powerful, tender story of race and identity by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of "Half of a Yellow Sun."
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion--for each other and for their homeland.
**Previous selection**
Sunday September 14, 2014 at 6:30pm
Daisy Hernandez of "Ms" and poet Bushra Rehman have collected a diverse, lively group of emerging writers who speak to their experience--to the strength and rigidity of community and religion, to borders and divisions, both internal and external--and address issues that take feminism into the 21st century.
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Sunday August 10, 2014 at 6:30pm
This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years--using a black feminist lens and the issue of the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on black women's--especially poor black women's--control over their bodies' autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives. It gives its readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new, and socially transformative, definition of "liberty" and "equality" for the American polity from a black feminist perspective.
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Sunday July 13, 2014 at 6:30pm
Girls to the Front is the epic, definitive history of the Riot Grrrl movement--the radical feminist punk uprising that exploded into the public eye in the 1990s, altering America's gender landscape forever. Author Sara Marcus, a music and politics writer for Time Out New York, Slate.com, Pos, and Heeb magazine, interweaves research, interviews, and her own memories as a Riot Grrrl front-liner. Her passionate, sophisticated narrative brilliantly conveys the story of punk bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy--as well as successors like Sleater-Kinney, Partyline, and Kathleen Hanna's Le Tigre--and their effect on today's culture.
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Sunday May 11, 2014 at 6:30pm
Why are so many women single, so many men resisting marriage, and so many gays and lesbians having babies? In "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal," J. Jack Halberstam answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late-life lesbians, SpongeBob SquarePants, and queer families. So how do we understand the dissonance between these real lived experiences and the heteronormative narratives that dominate popular media? We can embrace the chaos! With equal parts edge and wit, Halberstam reveals how these symbolic ruptures open a critical space to embrace new ways of conceptualizing sex, love, and marriage. Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new era, Halberstam deftly unpacks what the pop superstar symbolizes, to whom and why. The result is a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem, a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity. Part handbook, part guidebook, and part sex manual, "Gaga Feminism" is the first book to take seriously the collapse of heterosexuality and find signposts in the wreckage to a new and different way of doing sex and gender.
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Sunday March 9, 2014 at 6:30 PM
With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money ten years before. But that past has caught up with her. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College alumna is now inmate #11187–424—one of the millions of people who disappear “down the rabbit hole” of the American penal system. From her first strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary rules. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with small tokens of generosity, hard words of wisdom, and simple acts of acceptance. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and at times enraging, Kerman’s story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison—why it is we lock so many away and what happens to them when they’re there.
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Sunday February 9, 2014 at 6:30 PM
"At one time a wild young girl and a brilliant artist, Ava Delaney changes dramatically after a violent event that rocks her entire family. Once loved and respected in their community and in their church, the Delaneys are ostracized by their neighbors, led by their church leader, and a seventeen year feud ensues." -cover
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Sunday January 12, 2014 at 6:30 PM
Black women in marginalized communities are uniquely at risk of battering, rape, sexual harassment, stalking and incest. Through the compelling stories of Black women who have been most affected by racism, persistent poverty, class inequality, limited access to support resources or institutions, Beth E. Richie shows that the threat of violence to Black women has never been more serious, demonstrating how conservative legal, social, political and economic policies have impacted activism in the U.S.-based movement to end violence against women. Richie argues that Black women face particular peril because of the ways that race and culture have not figured centrally enough in the analysis of the causes and consequences of gender violence. As a result, the extent of physical, sexual and other forms of violence in the lives of Black women, the various forms it takes, and the contexts within which it occurs are minimized--at best--and frequently ignored. Arrested Justice brings issues of sexuality, class, age, and criminalization into focus right alongside of questions of public policy and gender violence, resulting in a compelling critique, a passionate re-framing of stories, and a call to action for change.
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Sunday December 8, 2013 at 6:30 PM
In this informative and highly entertaining account, intrepid science reporter Williams sets out to uncover the latest scientific findings from the fields of anthropology, biology, and medicine. Her investigation follows the life cycle of the breast from puberty to pregnancy to menopause.
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November 10, 2013
The classic work that revolutionized disability studies-and the national body politic-in an expanded edition.
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In this groundbreaking new look at rape edited by writer and activist Jaclyn Freidman and "Full Frontal Feminism" and "He's A Stud, She's A Slut" author Jessica Valenti, the way we view rape in our culture is finally dismantled and replaced with a genuine understanding and respect for female sexual pleasure. Feminist, political, and activist writers alike will present their ideas for a paradigm shift from the "No Means No" model--an approach that while necessary for where we were in 1974, needs an overhaul today.
"Yes Means Yes" will bring to the table a dazzling variety of perspectives and experiences focused on the theory that educating all people to value female sexuality and pleasure leads to viewing women differently, and ending rape. "Yes Means Yes" aims to have radical and far-reaching effects: from teaching men to treat women as collaborators and not conquests, encouraging men and women that women can enjoy sex instead of being shamed for it, and ultimately, that our children can inherit a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished. With commentary on public sex education, pornography, mass media, "Yes Means Yes" is a powerful and revolutionary anthology.