Verso celebrates International Women's Day

Woman's Estate

Scrutinizing the political background of the movement, its sources and its common ground with other radical movements of the sixties, Women's Estate describes the organization of women's liberation...

The Arcana of Reproduction

by Leopoldina Fortunati

Translated by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono

Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic work expands and transforms how we analyze the...

The Anti-Social Family

by Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh

The stereotypical nuclear family is in the minority of households, yet remains a powerful ideology. This classic of socialist feminism charts how the family reinforces conditions of inequality, and...

Females

by Andrea Long Chu

“Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.”So begins Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and ...

Motherdom

by Alex Bollen

When Alex Bollen had her first baby, the fear of being a bad mother made her guilty and anxious. A researcher with twenty years’ experience, she went looking for answers. To her surprise the studie...

Straight Sex

by Lynne Segal

Is heterosexual sex inherently damaging to women? Is it possible for women to enjoy sensuality and pleasure with men that does not increase male power? Lynne Segal's unflinching examination of femi...

Bodies Under Siege

by Sian Norris

Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today's anti-abortion movements is largely financed and planned by far-right extr...

Feminist Antifascism

by Ewa Majewska

In this exciting, innovative work, Polish feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska maps the creation of feminist counterpublics around the world—spaces of protest and ideas, community and common struggle,...

Red Valkyries

by Kristen Ghodsee

Through a series of lively and accessible biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism century Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five promi...

A Kick in the Belly

by Stella Dadzie

The forgotten history of women slaves and their struggle for liberation.Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. In this riveting work of historical r...

Feminism or Death

by Francoise d'Eaubonne

Translated by Ruth Hottell

Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne surveyed women’s status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggle was not about equality but abo...

A Short History of Trans Misogyny

by Jules Gill-Peterson

Award-winning historian Jules Gill-Peterson’s richly detailed narrative takes us from New York, London, and Paris to the colonial districts of the British Raj, the Philippines, and Hawai’i to tell ...

Organize, Fight, Win

by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean

Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete mater...

Fortunes of Feminism

by Nancy Fraser

Second Wave feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements. But feminism’s subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a dec...

Sexuality and Class Struggle

by Reimut Reiche

This book which combines the methods and results of both Freud and Marx is by one of the leaders of the West German student left during its most militant phase in the late 1960s. For reasons the au...

Feminist City

by Leslie Kern

What should a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space wi...

A Kick in the Belly

by Stella Dadzie

The forgotten history of women slaves and their struggle for liberation.Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. In this riveting work of historical r...

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

by Katherine Angel

Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And m...

Daring to Hope

by Sheila Rowbotham

In this powerful memoir Sheila Rowbotham looks back at her life as a participant in the women’s liberation movement, left politics and the creative radical culture of a decade in which freedom and ...

Making Space

by Matrix

Making Space is a pioneering work first published in 1984 which challenges us to look at how the built environment impacts on women’s lives. It exposes the sexist assumptions on gender and sexualit...

Feminism for the 99%

by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser

Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, healthcare, climate change, border policing; not the issues you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But don’t these issues impact the vast majority of wome...

Revolting Prostitutes

by Juno Mac and Molly Smith

How the law harms sex workers - and what they want insteadDo you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justi...

Glitch Feminism

by Legacy Russell

The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our...

Feminism or Death

by Francoise d'Eaubonne

Translated by Ruth Hottell

Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne surveyed women’s status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggle was not about equality but abo...

Full Surrogacy Now

by Sophie Lewis

"Rooted in historical, site-based, narrative, and political accounts, Full Surrogacy Now is the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for. This kind of gestation depends on...

Females

by Andrea Long Chu

“Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.”So begins Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and ...

Taking A Long Look

by Vivian Gornick

For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and pe...

Sylvia Pankhurst

by Barbara Winslow

Foreword by Sheila Rowbotham

Along with her mother Emmeline, and her sister Christabel, Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the leading women’s suffrage activists in early twentieth-century England, working with the militant Women’s S...

Feminist Antifascism

by Ewa Majewska

In this exciting, innovative work, Polish feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska maps the creation of feminist counterpublics around the world—spaces of protest and ideas, community and common struggle,...

What We Don't Talk About

by JoAnn Wypijewski

What if we took sex out of the box marked ‘special’, either the worst or best thing that a human person can experience, and considered it within the complexity of reality? In this extraordinary boo...

Feminist International

by Verónica Gago

Translated by Liz Mason-Deese

Recent years have seen massive feminist mobilizations in virtually every continent, overturning social mores and repressive legislation. In this brilliant and original look at the emerging feminist...

Fortunes of Feminism

by Nancy Fraser

Second Wave feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements. But feminism’s subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a dec...

Burn It Down!

by Breanne Fahs

Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. Collecting over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to acti...

The Xenofeminist Manifesto

by Laboria Cuboniks

The Xenofeminist Manifesto is an attempt to articulate a feminism fit for the twenty-first century. Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, exploring both oppressive and emancipatory po...

Heart Of The Race

by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe

Introduction by Lola Okolosie

Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting...

The Future of Difference

by Sabine Hark and Paula-Irene Villa

Translated by Sophie Lewis

The Future of Difference theorises contemporary regimes of power as engaged primarily in the violent production of difference. In this moment, the logic of ‘other and rule’ thoroughly permeates the...

The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems

by Nancy Folbre

Why do patriarchal systems survive? In this groundbreaking work of feminist theory, Nancy Folbre examines the contradictory effects of capitalist development. She explains why the work of caring fo...

The Verso Book of Feminism

Edited by Jessie Kindig

Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women’s bodies and women’s lives. People—of any and no gender—have pro...

Betraying Big Brother

by Leta Hong Fincher

On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary C...

Sexuality in the Field of Vision

by Jacqueline Rose

A pivotal work in the history of feminism and a groundbreaking intervention into film theory, Sexuality in the Field of Vision is a brilliantly original exploration of the interface between feminis...

Red Rosa

by Kate Evans

A giant of the political left, Rosa Luxemburg is one of the foremost minds in the canon of revolutionary socialist thought. But she was much more than just a thinker. She made herself heard in a wo...

If They Come in the Morning

by Angela Davis

The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Ange...

Trans

by Juliet Jacques

Afterword by Sheila Heti

In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery—a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to ...

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 Midd...

Constituting Feminist Subjects

by Kathi Weeks

Kathi Weeks suggests that one of the most important tasks for contemporary feminist theory is to develop theories of the subject that are adequate to feminist politics. Although the 1980s modernist...

Playing the Whore

by Melissa Gira Grant

The sex industry is an endless source of prurient drama for the mainstream media. Recent years have seen a panic over "online red-light districts," which supposedly seduce vulnerable young women ...

Woman's Consciousness, Man's World

by Sheila Rowbotham

A groundbreaking contribution to debates on women's oppression and consciousness, and the connections between socialism and feminism. Examining feminist consciousness from various vantage points - ...

Women's Oppression Today

by Michèle Barrett

Foreword by Kathi Weeks

Women’s Oppression Today is a classic text in the debate about Marxism and feminism, exploring how gender, sexuality and the “family-household system” operate in relation to contemporary capitalism...