Ruby, Dana, Brazil, and Jessie--choose the extraordinary when they join the Minneapolis Fire Department. Prepared to fight literal fires, none of them anticipates the threats lurking in the dark corners of the firehouse. Is it better to secure her own place in a flawed system or fight for a better system for everyone?
About this novel, which focuses on two young women early in the 20th century, both victims of sexual abuse, as they struggle to gain for themselves and their children the rights and opportunities usually denied to poor women, Tillie Olsen said, "I love and am ineradicably grateful for this book, this writer, as I have been but to a few dozen others in my lifetime... Images, scenes, relationships, comprehensions portrayed here will never leave us. She is a writer of international stature and significance."
Published in 1982, But Some of Us Are Brave was the first-ever Black women's studies reader and a foundational text of contemporary feminism. Featuring writing from eminent scholars, activists, teachers, and writers, such as the Combahee River Collective and Alice Walker, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Bravechallenges the absence of Black feminist thought in women’s studies, confronts racism, and investigates the mythology surrounding Black women in the social sciences. As the first comprehensive collection of Black feminist scholarship, But Some of Us Are Brave was recognized by Audre Lorde as “the beginning of a new era, where the ‘women’ in women’s studies will no longer mean ‘white.’” Coeditors Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith are authors and former women's studies professors. Brittney C. Cooper is a professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of several books, including Eloquent Rage, named by Emma Watson as an Our Shared Shelf read for November/December 2018.
First Digital Edition; Grier Rating: A*** This is the true-life story of what happens when scores of young girls live intimately together in a French military barracks. Many of these girls, utterly innocent and inexperienced, meet other women who have lived every type of existence. Their problems, their temptations, their fights and failures are those faced by all women who are forced to live together during dangerous and stressful times. The girls who chose Tereska Torres, the author, as their confidante poured out to her their most intimate feelings, their secret thoughts. With all of its revelations and tenderness, Women’s Barracks is an important book because it tells a story that had never been truly told before--the story of women in war. It also has the special distinction of being the first “lesbian pulp” novel ever published and became a record-breaking bestseller. This autobiographical novel takes place in London, England during World War II. The terror of the V-1 and V-2 rocket bombings, and the resulting fires and destruction, are an unknown experience to most readers. The women enduring these events were not even 20 years old when they first arrived. Many volunteered to be there. They were French, or of French heritage, and wanted to be part of the effort to help protect France from invasion by the Nazis. Throughout it all, passions flare, long-standing taboos are tossed to the wind, and passionate relationships are begun between older, more experienced butch officers and the young, inexperienced femme girls under their charge. In her telling of these women’s stories, Torres remains nonjudgmental of the lesbian relationships these women explored. Perhaps as a result, Women’s Barracks was banned in several states for being obscene. The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials denounced the book in 1952 as an illustration of how the newly emerging paperback industry was breeding and promoting moral depravity. By today’s standards, of course, the book is somewhat tame; however, the eroticism and honesty with which Torres writes immerses the reader in the love, tenderness, loyalty and passion that women share with each other.
In 54 chapters that unfold like a series of yoga poses, each with its own logic and beauty, Williams creates a lyrical and caring meditation of the mystery of her mother's journals in a book that keeps turning around the question, "What does it mean to have a voice?"