Moving Beyond Words
Essays on Age, Rage, Sex, Power, Money, Muscles: Breaking the Boundaries of Gender
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Essays from the New York Times–bestselling author who inspired the film The Glorias, a “woman who has told the truth about her life and ours” (Los Angeles Times).
With cool humor and rich intellect, Gloria Steinem strips bare our social constructions of gender and race, explaining just how limiting these invented cultural identities can be.
In the first of six sections, Steinem imagines how our understanding of human psychology would be different in a witty reversal: What if Freud had been a woman who inflicted biological inferiority on men (think “womb envy”)? In other essays, she presents positive examples of people who turn gendered stereotypes on their heads, from a female bodybuilder to Mahatma Gandhi, whose followers absorbed his wisdom that change starts at the bottom. And in some of the most moving pieces, Steinem reveals some of her own complicated history as a writer, woman, and citizen of the world.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Gloria Steinem including rare images from the author’s personal collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Steinem is at her polemical best in these six compelling essays--three of which are new, three revised from Ms. articles. She invents ``Dr. Phyllis Freud,'' founder of psychoanalysis, who proved that men's lack of wombs make them terminally envious and whose theories serve as a semi-scientific rationale for men's lower status in a matriarchal society. An interview with women's weightlifting world champ Bev Francis leads Steinem to question assumptions of female weakness and male strength. Another piece demystifies economics by interpreting it as a system of human values, with special reference to women's unpaid or underrated work. Elsewhere Steinem analyzes the growing feminization of poverty and masculinization of wealth, exposes advertisers' restrictive control over the editorial content of women's magazines and reflects on turning 60, an age, she finds, when women grow more radical and rebellious. Each essay is prefaced by an extensive introduction which Steinem uses as a platform to discuss sexual politics. First serial to Ms.
