women studies

Can a literary community that praises Woolf’s cry for a feminine narrative afford to marginalize the voices of contemporary female authors who fall under the label “chic lit” or “mom lit”? Two major universities add chic lit to the curriculum.

Eroticism is often confused with pornography but they are not the same thing.

What deos it mean to be a mentor?

In Reinventing Womanhood, Heilbrun points out that the myth of Demeter and Persephone is more than just a story about a mother/daughter relationship, but about female bonding.

Modern Matriarch is celebrating our first month with a Flash Fiction Contest.

We have spent the past thirty days discussing Woolf and Heilbrun, form and content, the female narrative and the representation of women in literature. Let’s take all of that theory and put it into practice in our first Representation of Women Flash Fiction Contest:

Come on . . . join the social experiment!

Remember that either/or question “would you rather be pretty or smart?” The implication, of course, was that pretty girls where popular . . . smart girls where not.

A curious women reeks havoc in a perfect world. A handsome prince rescues a fair maiden from some ill-gotten obscurity. This is how we have been taught to interpret the myths and fairy tales handed down to us from distant ancestors. But we don't have to.

The best way to undermine the stigma of “chic lit” is not to avoid the female narratvie but to elevate the unique experiences of women (as well as the knowledge gained from those experiences) to a more honored position within the human experience.

Well, Heilbrun hits the ground running in the first chapter of Reinventing Womanhood. She begins with the supposition that “To be a feminist one had to have had an experience of being an outsider more extreme than merely being a woman.”