Vintage Feminism: classic feminist texts in short form WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NATALIE HAYNES When this book was first published in 1949 it was to outrage and scandal. Never before had the case for female liberty been so forcefully and successfully argued. De Beauvoir’s belief that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman’ switched on light bulbs in the heads of a generation of women and began a fight for greater equality and economic independence. These pages contain the key passages of the book that changed perceptions of women forever. TRANSLATED BY CONSTANCE BORDE AND SHEILA MALOVANY-CHEVALLIER ANNOTATED AND INTRODUCED BY MARTINE REID

"Like man, woman is a human being." When The Second Sex was first published in Paris in 1949--groundbreaking, risqué, brilliantly written and strikingly modern--it provoked both outrage and inspiration. The Independent Woman contains three key chapters of Beauvoir's masterwork, which illuminate the feminine condition and identify practical social reforms for gender equality. It captures the essence of the spirited manifesto that switched on light bulbs in the heads of a generation of women and continues to exert profound influence on feminists today.

The British suffragette who led the movement to victory tells her story of tireless activism in this political memoir. One of the most influential leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, Emmeline Pankhurst developed a confrontational style of protest that would get her and her followers arrested many times before ultimately winning all women over the age of twenty-one the right to vote. Born in Manchester in 1858, Pankhurst became a dedicated suffragette at the age of fourteen. By 1927, she would run for parliament. Told in her own words, this is Pankhurst’s story of organization and outrage, hardship and hunger strikes, and her dogged determination to dismantle the many roadblocks designed to stop her and all women from claiming their freedom. This fascinating memoir is the basis for the award-winning film Suffragette, starring Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst.

The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.

In these letters, de Beauvoir tells Sartre everything, tracing the extraordinary complications of their triangular love life; they reveal her not only as manipulative and dependent, but also as vulnerable, passionate, jealous, and committed.

Released for the first time in paperback, this landmark social and political volume on feminism is credited with being responsible for raising awareness, liberating both sexes, and triggering major advances in the feminist movement. Reprint.

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

'It is possible for man to snatch the world from the darkness of absurdity' How should we think and act in the world? These writings on the human condition by one of the twentieth century's great philosophers explore the absurdity of our notions of good and evil, and show instead how we make our own destiny simply by being. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

Intercourse is a book that moves through the sexed world of dominance and submission. It moves in descending circles, not in a straight line, and as in a vortex each spiral goes down deeper. Its formal model is Dante's Inferno; its lyrical debt is to Rimbaud; the equality it envisions is rooted in the dreams of women, silent generations, pioneer voices, lone rebels, and masses who agitated, demanded, cried out, broke laws, and even begged. The begging was a substitute for retaliatory violence: doing bodily harm back to those who use or injure you. I want women to be done with begging. The public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world in which we live is a strategy of threat that usually works. Men often react to women's words - speaking and writing - as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women's words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men - control, violence, insult, contempt - that no threat seems empty. Intercourse does not say, forgive me and love me. It does not say, I forgive you, I love you. For a woman writer to thrive (or, arguably, to survive) in these current hard times, forgiveness and love must be subtext. No. I say no. Intercourse is search and assertion, passion and fury; and its form - no less than its content - deserves critical scrutiny and respect.---- PREFACE

The bestselling classic that redefined our view od the relationship between beauty and female identity. In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."