Verso Feminist Classics
Announcing two new books in our Feminist Classics: a founding text of transnational feminism by Kumari Jayawardena, and a classic analysis of gender relations and patriarchy under capitalism by Christine Delphy.
All our Feminist Classics - including Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace and Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History by Vron Ware - are 40% off until Sunday October 2nd, with free worldwide shipping (and bundled ebooks).
Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World by Kumari Jayawardena Foreword by Rafia Zakaria
For twenty-five years, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World has been an essential primer on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of women’s movements in Asia and the Middle East. Kumari Jayawardena presents feminism as it originated in the Third World, erupting from the specific struggles of women fighting against colonial power, for education or the vote, for safety, and against poverty and inequality.
Journalist and human rights activist Rafia Zakaria’s foreword to this new edition is an impassioned letter in two parts: the first to Western feminists; the second to feminists in the Global South, entreating them to use this “compendium of female courage” as a bridge between women of different nations.
>>> Saving Solidarity: Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World - read Rafia Zakaria's foreword here.
Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression by Christine Delphy
Translated by Diana Leonard. Foreword by Rachel Hills
Close to Home is a classic study of family, patriarchal ideologies, and the politics and strategy of women’s liberation. On the table in this forceful and provocative debate are questions of whether men can be feminists, whether “bourgeois” and heterosexual women are retrogressive members of the women’s movement, and how best to struggle against the multiple oppressions women endure.
Rachel Hills’s foreword to this new edition explores how Christine Delphy’s analysis of marriage as the institution behind the exploitation of unpaid women’s labor is as radical and relevant today as it ever was.
Verso Feminist Classics brings together foundational texts in the critical and left feminist traditions, including works of politics, history, and critical thought. Addressing debates that continue into the present day, their ideas inform contemporary discussion about feminism at the intersection of class and race.