Celebrate International Women's Day March 8th with these inspiring and enlightening DVDs, streaming movies and books from the Library collection... highlighting both well known and lesser known women, and aspects of women's lives, rights and concerns.
DVDs
SUZI Q (2020)
Suzie Quatro redefined the role of women in rock 'n'roll. The first woman in front of a rock band and a first class musician (bass player) in her own right - rare in its day.
On the basis of sex [DVD] ( 2018)
Inspired by the powerful true story of a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg, On the Basis of Sex depicts a then-struggling attorney and new mother facing adversity in her fight for equal rights. When Ruth takes on a ground-breaking case, she knows the outcome could alter the courts' view of gender discrimination. Stronger together, Ruth teams up with her husband, Martin Ginsburg, to fight the case that catapults her into one of the most important public figures of our time.
Frida: Vida la vida (2020)
A cinematic documentary that highlights Frida Kahlo's two souls: the woman, fiercely independent and tormented by love, and the artist, free from the leashes of her physical bounds.
An extraordinary artist who expressed her pain through her art. She had a spinal (hip) injury from an accident and had to endure the pain throughout her whole life.
Finding Vivian Maier [DVD and Kanopy movie]
A nanny in her lifetime, however, after her death, considered one the world’s best 20th century street photographers. After her death her unknown work fell into the hands of an archivist who revealed her talent to the world and discovered details of her secret life.
Camille Claudel (French) [ DVD]
Rodin’s lover and muse who was extraordinarily talented sculptor, however, overshadowed by her lover, in a man’s world, women weren’t taken seriously as artists and it drove her insane.
Books
Hunger : a memoir of my body by Roxanne Gay
Gay has written ... about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as 'wildly undisciplined,' Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care"
The woman who cracked the anxiety code : the extraordinary life of Dr. Claire Weekes by Judith Hoare
The true story of the little-known mental-health pioneer who revolutionised how we see the defining problem of our era- anxiety.
The international bestseller Self-Help for Your Nerves, first published in 1962 and still in print, has helped tens of millions of people to overcome all of these, and continues to do so. Yet even as letters and phone calls from readers around the world flooded in, thanking her for helping to improve - and in some cases to save - their lives, Dr Claire Weekes was dismissed as underqualified and overly populist by the psychiatric establishment.
Hood Feminism - Notes from the Women White Feminism forgot - Mikki Kendall
All too often the focus of mainstream feminism is not on the basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. Meeting basic needs is a feminist issue. Food insecurity, the living wage, access to education and medical care are feminist issues. The fight against racism, ableism and transmisogyny are all feminist issues. How can feminists stand in solidarity as a movement without addressing these issues? Insightful, incendiary and ultimately hopeful, Hood Feminism is both an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux and also clear-eyed assessment of how to save it.
Sister love: the letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 edited by Julie R Enszer
African American writer Audre Lorde and poet Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes. This book gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker as they discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer.
Your own kind of girl : a memoir by Clare Bowditch
'This is the story I promised myself, aged twenty-one, that I would one day be brave enough - and well enough - to write.' Clare Bowditch has always had a knack for telling stories. Through her music and performing, this beloved Australian artist has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. But what of the stories she used to tell herself? That 'real life' only begins once you're thin or beautiful, that good things only happen to other people. Your own kind of girl reveals a childhood punctuated by grief, anxiety and compulsion, and tells how these forces shaped Clare's life for better and for worse
Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and White Feminism by Aileen Moreton Robinson
In this ground-breaking and timeless book, Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson undertakes a compelling analysis of the whiteness of Australian feminism and its effect on Indigenous women. As a Goenpul woman and an academic, she operationalises an Indigenous women's standpoint as she 'talks up', engages with and interrogates western feminism in representation and practice.
Vagina : A re-education - Lynne Enright
Vagina provides girls and women with information they need about their own bodies - about the vagina, the hymen, the clitoris, the orgasm; about conditions like endometriosis and vulvodynia. It confronts taboos, such as abortion, miscarriage, infertility and masturbation. It tackles vital social issues like period poverty, female genital mutilation and the rights of transgender women. It is honest and moving as Lynn Enright shares her personal stories but this is about more than one woman - this is a book that will provoke thousands of conversations. We urgently need to talk about women's sexual and reproductive health, about our experiences of sex and pregnancy and pain and pleasure.
Aysha, Deborah and Meenah
Format
Books
Subject
Reactions