I have news in the gloom! The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is coming in the spring. I have gathered voices from over 600 years ago up to the present day & from all around the world. There is poetry & philosophy, novels & manifestos. I wanted it to be a pleasure & a treasure.

Today is Betty Friedan's birthday & the anniversary of her death. In The Feminine Mystique (1963) she articulated 'the problem that has no name', 'a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered' as 'they made the beds' & cared for their children...

...and the question started to bubble into consciousness: 'Is this all?' The Feminine Mystique ran like electricity through the USA, and has sold over 3 million copies.

Friedan had her blindspots. She reportedly said that lesbian feminists were a 'lavender menace' to the movement. Lesbian feminists took that insult & turned it into a badge of pride. They wore LAVENDER MENACE on their tops, and formed the Radicalesbians. Here is Rita Mae Brown

In The Woman-Identified Woman (1970) Radicalesbians wrote 'together we must find, reinforce & validate our authentic selves. As we do...we confirm in each other that...sense of pride & strength, the divisive barriers begin to melt, we feel this growing solidarity with our sisters

In 1984, bell hooks wrote that the women Friedan was talking about were 'college-educated white women' who wanted careers. 'She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women & poor white women'.

In Feminism is for Everybody (2000), bell hooks affirmed that 'There is no one path to feminism ... Feminist politics aims to end domination to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace'.

These are 3 voices from the book. The history of feminism is the history of the conflict between feminists, between women, as well as & as part of their struggle against patriarchy, & we need to face these conflicts if we are to move towards justice & liberation for all.

It can be productive to sit with conflict & contradiction, and it is a joy to find a way through, together. All of life is in this book: selfhood & abjection, socialism & capitalism, racism, imperialism, rage, sex, solidarity, violence, care, sorrow, elation, laughter & freedom.

There are 116 pieces in the book. There could have been thousands more, and it was agony to choose. This is only a beginning and I am still travelling, but I hope that if you read it you will find at least one voice that you have not heard before and that you will love it.