RECOMMENDED READING
WOMEN’S BODILY AUTONOMY
REPRODUCTIVE AUTONOMY & COMMERCIAL SEXUAL EXPLOITATION
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The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service
By Laura Kaplan
What was the world like for women before Roe v Wade? For those of us too young to remember, The Story of Jane by Laura Kaplan provides a gripping tale that will suck you right back into the 1970s.
The book follows the true story of the rise and fall of a secret underground abortion service in Chicago - and Kaplan doesn’t hold back. Her descriptions of group in-fighting, racial tension, and a desperate desire to do everything possible to help women will resonate with feminists of any era.
The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power And the Future Of the World
By Michelle Goldberg
By New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, this book explores decades of international policy around women’s reproductive freedom.
The book provides an eye-opening timeline of Western intervention in birth control and abortion access across the globe, religious control over reproductive rights, and how women’s and girls’ bodies serve as a battleground where the men of the world wrestle for power.
Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women's Freedom
By Janice Raymond
Published in 1993, Janice Raymond’s Women as Wombs provides a scathing feminist critique of modern reproductive technologies and the “baby industry”.
Serving as a bit of a spiritual precursor to The Means of Reproduction, the book points out how technologies like IVF are used in the west to increase women’s fertility while “infertility technologies” are deployed in developing countries as a means of population control.
Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy, and the Split Self
By Kasja Ekis Ekman
Grounded in the reality of the violence of the sex trade, Kasja Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought exposes the lies of “sex work.”
She argues that the body can not be sold without selling the self, and connects the between surrogacy and prostitution.
Check out a review of this book, written by WoLF member Aurora!
Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
By Gail Dines
Many women have no idea how bad the porn men in their lives watch can truly be. Gail Dines’ Pornland pulls back the curtain, revealing the dark truth we may have never wanted to know.
Tracing the rise of the modern porn industry from early magazines to “gonzo” internet porn, the book argues that porn is increasingly desensitizing us to sexual violence and abuse.
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
By Louise Perry
According to Perry, the Sexual Revolution ushered into Western society a "sexual disenchantment": the idea that sex means nothing. It is merely another leisure activity that "exemplifies freedom overall values." She explains how this disenchantment has had several largely unexamined consequences, primarily for women.
Check out a review of this book, written by WoLF volunteer Lindsey!