Do The Wave For Feminism: the Women's Review of Books Blog

In case you didn't get the email, the Women's Review of Books has a new blog: click here to go to it and bookmark. They went live on August 11, but the first real post (written by bioethicist Frances Kissling of the University of Pennsylvania) went up early this week.

Give them some traffic and check it out. And while you are at it, subscribe to the Review. Edited by the intrepid Amy Hoffman, the WRB began publishing in 1983, the year I began graduate school. Those of us who relied on it for reviews of books on women by our favorite feminists were sad to see it go belly up -- err, suspend publication -- in 2004. Hoffman promised all of us that she would try to bring it back, and solicited anyone who had ever written a review for a donation. Since Amy often gave reviews to emerging, as well as prominent feminists, there were rather a lot of us. The WRB even paid a small but significant sum for reviews, so since the feminists in this household are rarely paid by anyone else, we simply totted up the number of reviews we had written between us, multiplied by the standard sum everyone was paid, and returned the money. Incredibly, in 2005 the WRB came back as a bimonthly. It is housed at the Wellesley Centers for Women, which, also incredibly, has a $7.2 million budget.

Happily, we sent the revived WRB even more money and resubscribed. One of the things I liked best about it (and am glad to have back) was the list of feminist books, and books about women, that was published at the back of the book. A quick scan could more or less keep you up to date. The WRB also assigned me my favorite review essay every: about feminists who not only hunt but are fierce second amendment advocates. Now you don't see that in every feminist rag, do you podnah?

So subscribe now. The September/October 2009 issue features a review by Sherrilyn Ifill of the two new Ida B. Wells bios by Mia Bay and Paula Giddings, as well as Miroslavez Chavez-Garci's review of Catherine Ramirez's The Woman in the Zoot Suit (a serious must-read for United States cultural historians -- one of my favorites from last year) and much, much more.