Upcoming Feminist Book Discussion
Wednesday, September 27, 2023, 7-8:30 p.m.
Multicultural Room, Lower Level
Registration is required
If you would like to be added to the email list for this group – please email tmiller@chplnj.org
Upcoming Feminist Book Club Discussion
The Secret History of Wonder Woman
By Jill Lepore
September 27, 2023
7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
In person
Multicultural Room
About the Book: The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Jill Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights—a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later.
Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston. The Marston family story is a tale of drama, intrigue, and irony.
Past Feminist Book Club Selections
You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey : Crazy Stories About Racism
by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar
February 22, 2023
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
In Person.
Multicultural Room
Writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers Amber Ruffin writes with her sister Lacey Lamar with humor and heart to share absurd anecdotes about everyday experiences of racism.
Now a writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers and host of The Amber Ruffin Show, Amber Ruffin lives in New York, where she is no one’s First Black Friend and everyone is, as she puts it, “stark raving normal.” But Amber’s sister Lacey? She’s still living in their home state of Nebraska, and trust us, you’ll never believe what happened to Lacey.
From racist donut shops to strangers putting their whole hand in her hair, from being mistaken for a prostitute to being mistaken for Harriet Tubman, Lacey is a lightning rod for hilariously ridiculous yet all-too-real anecdotes. She’s the perfect mix of polite, beautiful, petite, and Black that apparently makes people think “I can say whatever I want to this woman.” And now, Amber and Lacey share these entertainingly horrifying stories through their laugh-out-loud sisterly banter. Painfully relatable or shockingly eye-opening (depending on how often you have personally been followed by security at department stores), this book tackles modern-day racism with the perfect balance of levity and gravity.
Resources from our Discussion:
Women Talking by Miriam Toews
May 10, 2023
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Multicultural Room
About the Book: One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.
While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?
Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.
Now an Oscar-nominated film!
Resources from our Discussion:
Author Miriam Toews discusses the adaptation of her work to film.
Book reviews:
The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion
by Diane Greene Foster
October 26, 2022
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
In Person.
Multicultural Room
What happens when a woman seeking an abortion is turned away? Diana Greene Foster, PhD, decided to find out. With a team of scientists—psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, nursing scholars, and public health researchers—she set out to discover the effect of receiving versus being denied an abortion on women’s lives. Over the course of a ten-year investigation that began in 2007, she and her team followed a thousand women from more than twenty states, some of whom received their abortions, some of whom were turned away.
Resources from our Discussion:
The Turnaway Study – Diane Greene Foster, PHD
Twitter @dianagfoster, Professor, UCSF; Director of Research, Director of the #TurnawayStudy; studies the effect of unintended pregnancy on people’s lives.
Vox: How abortion bans make inequality worse
Consequences of Receiving Versus Being Denied a Wanted Abortion – Slides and video webinar
Abortion in America, Part II: Diana Greene Foster on “The Turnaway Study” podcast
Concerned Citizens Presents: The Turnaway Study Author Diana Greene Foster, The Effect of Abortion video interview
The Women’s Center – Cherry Hill
Thrive New Jersey – Abortion Access
Brigid Alliance
New Jersey Reproductive Choice Act
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
A writer at The New Yorker examines the fractures at the center of contemporary culture. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; and the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die.”
Video Interviews with Jia Tolentino
Other Links
What We Are About
This is a group for women – trans and non-trans – and non-binary and gender non-conforming folks, and allies of all genders.
We started a Feminist Book Club to discuss topics of gender equity, feminism, current political climate. These books can make us laugh and cry and learn.
In-person meetings take place at the Cherry Hill Library and virtual meetings occur through Zoom.
You do not have to live in Cherry Hill to attend.
Questions? Email Tierney Miller at tmiller@chplnj.org.
