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Aristotle (c.
mid 4th century
) Generation of Animals, in J.
Barnes (ed.) The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, 1111–218. (Aristotle’s discussion of male and female roles in procreation.) |
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Beauvoir, S. de (1949) The Second Sex , trans. and ed. H.M.
Parshley, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. (The classic existentialist interpretation of masculinity and femininity and a path-breaking analysis of the social construction of gender.) |
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Davies, E. (1866) The Higher Education of Women, London: Hambledon, 1988. (The case for women’s education put by a pioneer.) |
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Engels, F. (1884) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, intro. M.
Barrett, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. (A vastly influential discussion of the family by one of the founders of Marxism. ) |
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Firestone, S. (1970) The Dialectic of Sex, London: The Women’s Press, 1979. (Firestone argues that women’s oppression lies in their reproductive role and that the goal of feminist revolution is the elimination of sexual difference.) |
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Goldman, E. (1972) Red Emma Speaks. Selected Speeches and Writings of the anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman, ed. A.
Kates Shulman, New York: Random House. (Includes selections from Goldman’s writing on the individual and the state, woman’s emancipation, prostitution and marriage.) |
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Gouges, O. de (1782) The Rights of Women, trans. V.
Stevenson, London: Pythia, 1989. (An impressive early statement of women’s rights.) |
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Gournay, M. Le Jars de (1622) Égalité des Hommes et des Femmes, Paris: Côté-Femme, 1989. (A brief defence of the equality of the sexes by a woman whom Montaigne described as his adopted daughter. This edition includes the Grief des Dames, a defence of women of letters.) |
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Griffith, E. (1984) In her own Right. The life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, New York: Oxford University Press. (A biography of one of the best-known US suffragists.) |
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Kollontai, A. (1977) Selected Writings, trans. and intro. A.
Holt, London: Allison & Busby. (Includes selections from Kollontai’s writing on women and work, work and motherhood, communism, the family and marriage.) |
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Lloyd, G. (1984) The Man of Reason, London: Methuen. (Innovative analysis of the prevalence of the association of women and irrationality within the philosophical tradition.) |
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Maclean, I. (1977) Woman Triumphant. Feminism in French literature 1610–1652, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (A study of works by and about women in seventeenth-century France. Includes a chapter on the Querelle des femmes.) |
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Mill, J.S. (1869) On the Subjection of Women, in S.
Collini (ed.) On Liberty and other Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. (A classic, nineteenth-century account of the advantages of giving women the same access to education and work, and the same civil rights, as men.) |
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Millett, K. (1969) Sexual Politics, London: Virago, 1977. (A formative analysis of the construction of femininity in twentieth-century literature and in social theory.) |
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Oakley, A. (1972) Sex, Gender and Society, London: Temple Smith. (An influential discussion of the biological and social aspects of sexuality.) |
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Pateman, C. (1989) The Disorder of Women, Cambridge: Polity Press. (Includes seminal essays on the place of women in contractarian political theories.) |
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Perkins Gilman, C. (1919) Herland, London: Women’s Press, 1979. (Utopian novel by a leading American feminist about a community of women who live without men.) |
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Pizan, C. de (1405) The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E.J.
Richards, New York: Persea Books, 1982. (An exchange between Christine and the figures of Reason, Rectitude and Justice, who reassure her that women are not evil and instruct her to build a city for ladies.) |
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Poulain de la Barre, F. (1673) The Equality of the Sexes, trans. D.M.
Clarke, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. (An early defence, along Cartesian lines, of the equality of the sexes.) |
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Sartre, J.-P. (1943) Being and Nothingness, trans. H.
Barnes, London: Methuen, 1958. (Sartre’s classic work, mentioned in §5 above.) |
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Wollstonecraft, M. (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in S.
Tomaselli (ed.) A Vindication of the Rights of Man and A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. (A classic defence of the view that women and men have the same rights though different social roles.) |