Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination
Author: Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Publisher: W.W. Norton
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Cover Description
Forty years after their first groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, The Madwoman in the Attic, award-winning collaborators Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar map the literary history of feminism’s second wave.
From its stirrings in the midcentury—when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion—to a resurgence in the new millennium in the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and N. K. Jemisin, Gilbert and Gubar trace the evolution of feminist literature. They offer lucid, compassionate, and piercing readings of major works by these writers and others, including Adrienne Rich, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Sontag, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Toni Morrison. Activists and theorists like Nina Simone, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler also populate these pages as Gilbert and Gubar examine the overlapping terrain of literature and politics in a comprehensive portrait of an expanding movement.
As Gilbert and Gubar chart feminist gains—including creative new forms of protests and changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality—they show how the legacies of second wave feminists, and the misogynistic culture they fought, extend to the present. In doing so, they celebrate the diversity and urgency of women who have turned passionate rage into powerful writing.
TL;DR Review
Still Mad was perfect for someone like me, who didn’t take women’s studies or many English classes in college. I learned a lot, and it helped me put famous writers’ names in context with history’s timeline.
For you if: You like non-narrative nonfiction, feminism, history, and women writers.
Full Review
I’ve had my eye on Still Mad since it came out, and grabbed a copy in B&N’s hardcover sale earlier this year. I decided to pick it up in March in honor of Women’s History Month, which turned out to be an even more fitting choice than I’d expected.
Based on the title, I think I’d assumed this was an essay anthology. It isn’t. It’s a much more academic analysis of feminist women writers and their work, opinions, and influence dating back from the 50s through today. Think Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Gloria Steinem, Ursula Le Guin, etc.
It turned out to be a perfect read for me, as I didn’t have time in college to take any women’s studies or many English classes. I’m always looking for catch-up materials, and this book really helped me place so many of these famous feminist writers in context in history. But I still think that you might like this if you do have some knowledge of these women’s work, because it was fascinating and super useful to have them framed together against historical events this way.
My only complaint here was that I feel like it was sparse on Black women in the 60s, when I would have expected a little more about women writing in the civil rights movement. I know that part of the problem is who was and wasn’t being published — and there were certainly many more Black women included in more recent history — but that felt like a big gap.
If you are a fan of more academic-style nonfiction that teaches you new things, pick this one up.