Don't Call Me Princess
Essays on Girls, Women, Sex and Life
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter delivers her first ever collection of essays—funny, poignant, deeply personal and sharply observed pieces, drawn from three decades of writing, which trace girls’ and women’s progress (or lack thereof) in what Orenstein once called a “half-changed world.”
Named one of the “40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years” by Columbia Journalism Review, Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.
In Don’t Call Me Princess, Orenstein’s most resonant and important essays are available for the first time in collected form, updated with both an original introduction and personal reflections on each piece. Her takes on reproductive justice, the infertility industry, tensions between working and stay-at-home moms, pink ribbon fear-mongering and the complications of girl culture are not merely timeless—they have, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, become more urgent in our contemporary political climate.
Don’t Call Me Princess offers a crucial evaluation of where we stand today as women—in our work lives, sex lives, as mothers, as partners—illuminating both how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawn from over three decades of work, this middling collection of essays by Orenstein (Girls & Sex) explores many of the same topics as her previous books: parenthood, cancer, infertility, and body image. Orenstein is at her best and most personal when she writes about breast cancer: she recounts her own diagnosis and its effect on her fertility, and reflects on the "pink ribbon culture" and how increased attention on breast cancer and early screening may do more harm than good. The collection also includes a handful of profiles of successful women artists and scientists, including biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, graphic novelist Phoebe Gloeckner, and Guardian columnist Caitlin Moran. In a posthumous profile of Atsuko Chiba, published in 1989, Orenstein vividly captures the Japanese journalist's strong personality and relentless writing career without having ever met her. Chiba, however, is the only woman of color profiled in the book (though Orenstein does write about her own teenage daughter, Daisy, who is biracial). While Orenstein thoughtfully and incisively captures the perspectives of the people she writes about, those perspectives appear too similar to each other when presented in collected form; notably missing are lower-income women, black women, and trans women. Nonetheless, Orenstein is an enduring and important voice in the feminist choir, and the book will be welcomed by her longtime fans.
