Category: Women

The British photographer Franki Raffles (1955-94) died shockingly young, as a result of complications following the birth of twin daughters. But by then she had already amassed almost 40,000 images of women at work the world over. Her photographs are as strong as their subjects. Raffles photographed women in the Philippines, Israel and China, the […]

The question I’m a divorced woman in my 50s. My younger child, 23, left home five months ago, his 25-year-old sister having left a couple of years before, and my sense of grief is intermittent but vicious. This feels quite shocking at times and I’m hurt by how little my children contact me or come […]

In the early stages of researching Want, a book about women’s sexual fantasies, the thing that shocked Gillian Anderson the most was the prevalence of shame. The book, which is based on My Secret Garden, the 1973 classic by Nancy Friday, is a compilation of anonymous letters by women sharing their sexual fantasies, and many […]

I was barely five years old in 1973, when the novelist Nancy Friday’s cult classic, My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, began making its way on to the bookshelves and into the handbags of millions of women. What Friday’s book revealed was that – unconstrained by assumed social conventions, self-consciousness, or perhaps the fear of […]

Actor Gillian Anderson on prudes, powerful women, and collecting secret fantasies; How singer-songwriter Chappell Roan slow-burned her way to stardom; and Oliver Burkeman tells you how to stop being such a people-pleaser. How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know Source link

One of the weirdest experiences for me in early motherhood was a recurrent image or sense, when I was walking down the street, pushing the baby in the pram, that a slight breeze could disintegrate me, dissolve me into fragments or dust. I imagine some of this was due to the startling (to me) metamorphosis […]

As with any hugely valuable, yet also problematic, historical movement, the history of second-wave feminism is still being fully understood to this day. Shows like Mrs America are establishing popular renditions of the second wave, while public intellectuals such as Tressie McMillan Cottom and Roxane Gay critique its legacy. Clara Bingham’s The Movement arrives as […]

In her article on reading smut, Zoe Williams focuses on the difference between romance and erotica (My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled – and I soon found out why, 6 August. To my mind, that misses the point. For me, it is about the difference between “good” smut and … well, just smut. I […]

There comes a point in every child’s life when they start seeing their parents not solely as all-powerful protectors, but also as human beings, flaws and all. Spurred by the discovery of her mother’s attempt to kill herself, Belgian film-maker Faustine Cros revisits countless home videos from her childhood through fresh eyes. In light of […]

I too hated my wavy/frizzy hair for decades like Diana Spechler (I spent decades straightening my ‘Jewish hair’ – until I realised I was hiding my true self, 5 August). Long, straight hair was fashionable in my youth in the 1960s, so, like Spechler, I pulled, pushed, ironed and generally tortured my hair into straightness. Unlike hers, […]