"On the one hand I am a writer, regardless of gender; on the other hand, I am not only a writer, but also a woman. I have to go on, I have to do a little more. Otherwise, I would have failed both the past and the future, and the women who had absolutely done their best and made great sacrifices. British female writer Janet Winterson's words, revisited on International Women's Day on March 8, still have inspiration.
I hope that this "she writes" book list can let more colorful voices enter the chorus, empathize with the details of their pens in the daily life situation, and let more "she write" be seen, understood, and tolerated.
Flowers on the Sea: The Daily Life of Women in Shanghai Workers' New Villages
Ye Ziting, Zhang Yu, Liu Xi
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
"Flowers on the Sea: The Daily Lives of Women in Shanghai Workers' New Villages" is the result of the "Urbanization, Gender and the Southern Hemisphere: Transforming the Knowledge Network Research Project Shanghai Team (GenUrb)", which includes oral history interviews with six women and three grassroots mothers and daughters in Shanghai Workers' New Village, as well as a four-week mixed online and offline diary workshop to explore gender issues from the perspective of urban development and family communities under socialist construction through participatory field observation.
Zhang Yu, one of the authors and a lecturer at the Marxist Institute of Shanghai Polytechnic, said about the original intention of the research: The research team of this book is all women, and the research objects are also women. When women write women, who is writing?
In the past four years, three intellectual women living in Shanghai and Suzhou have left the room where they wrote and walked into the old "public houses" in the new village of Shanghai workers, which carry the glory and dream of socialist revolution and construction, and live some ordinary Shanghai women, who are like the magnolias that can be seen everywhere in Shencheng, beautiful, tenacious, and full of vicissitudes but silently guarding the busy roadsides and lanes of the city. They are self-reliant laborers, mothers-in-law, mothers, sisters, daughters-in-law who marry out of the country, brave women who escape arranged marriages, and seriously ill survivors who dedicate their residual heat... This is their story and their story, where they meet, and this is the life course and life diary of the grassroots women in Shanghai Workers' New Village, written by the researchers and the study participants.
Industry evaluation: One of the important contributions of this book is to record the daily lives of women in the community of Shanghai Workers' New Village through empathy and participatory research, to investigate and analyze the daily lives and difficulties of women in the process of urbanization, as well as the methods they face and solve difficulties, so that we can understand the ordinary shanghai grassroots women, extraordinary encounters and overcoming difficulties.
"Grandma and Her House"
Wu Genmei dictated by Shang Chuyuan
Oriental Publishing Center
When the grand wheel of history passes in the course of an individual's life, it will leave a deep or shallow rut, and thus lay the grass snake gray line of his or her future life. In "Grandma and Her House", the past of the "post-50s" grandmother is not only her efforts to jump out of her original family and change herself, but also the struggle of her grandmother's daughter, Shen Yifei, an associate professor of the Department of Sociology of Fudan University, and the prologue to the life of the granddaughter of the "post-00s".
Shen Yifei mentioned that ordinary mothers are neither celebrities nor brilliant experiences, so "the oral history of mothers is precisely to enrich the image of women, and jump out of the shackles of consumerism, reflecting the image of most of China's grassroots women, who are an important force carrying China's social development." ”
As Wu Xiaoying, a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, commented: In the existing family history research or biography, women rarely become the main body of family narratives. This book provides a special oral text that takes the reader into the story of the grandmother's individual life course and family changes from the perspective of a little girl. This dialogue that spans social time and space presents the memory traces of 70 years of social changes in ordinary families and women, and also conveys the unique generational continuity and emotional connection between women through flexible thoughts and words.
"My Genius Girlfriend"
[Italian] Elena Ferrante by Chen Ying translation
Jiujiu Reader People's Literature Publishing House
My Genius Girlfriend is the first installment of Elena Ferrante's "Neapolitan Tetralogy" and tells the story of the girlhood of two heroines, Lila and Elena. At the beginning of the story, Elena, who has achieved fame, receives a call from Lila's son Reno, saying that his mother has completely disappeared. Elena remembers Lila's prophecy of her fate, so she writes the story of their lives...
Lila and Elena grew up in a run-down community in Naples, inseparable from each other, trusting each other, but both see each other as their own secret mirrors, dark wrestling. The sisters' life experiences have also become one of the typical samples of women's stories.
Selected Chinese Women's Literature in 2021
Zhang Li, eds
Tianjin People's Publishing House
This book is a continuation of the 2019 Selected Chinese Women's Literature and the 2020 Selected Chinese Women's Literature, edited by Zhang Li, a critic and professor at Beijing Normal University.
The book contains the works of 20 different generations of Chinese female writers in 2021, looking for and marking the wayposts of contemporary women's literature. These gazes and writings from women converge into the voices and literature of women unique to this era, from which we can see the changes in the spiritual outlook and literary temperament of contemporary women's literature, which can be called the annual record of the survival of Chinese women.
"Inseparable"
[French] Simone de Beauvoir by Cao Dongxue translated
Zhejiang Education Press
The author of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, published the first manuscript of a novel Chinese Simplified without being made public. It's a novel that was "sentenced to death" by Sartre, based on Beauvoir's best girl's friend Zaza, to mourn the most memorable friendship of her life: at the age of nine, Sylvie first met a girl her age, André.
She had never seen such a cool girl. Unlike the obedient "good student" Sylvie, Andrea is intelligent but rebellious, and is indifferent to everything. They became inseparable. This emotion is fierce and deep into the soul. From the beginning of the disobedience to the school order together, the conformist Sylvie went step by step to freedom; the unruly Andrea, under the constraints of family and etiquette, struggled step by step and gradually became a trapped beast.
Becoming a Mother: Confessions of an Intellectual Woman
Translated by Rachel Kasker by Huang Jianshu
Wenjing Shanghai People's Publishing House
As a woman, what is it like to be a mother? What is it like to take care of a young baby? And when the child grows up and has his own consciousness, how does the mother feel?
Rachel Casker faithfully documents her multifaceted experiences of the year: personal freedom, sleep and the end of time, a new understanding of human nature and hard work, the search for the true meaning of love, wandering between madness and death, the emotional experience of infants and young children, thinking about breastfeeding... This is the process of ordinary life that is never visible and unsentimentable, to fierce passion, love and slavery, and it is still a bondage, a compromise.
"Fifty, I Quit"
[Japanese] Emiko Inagaki by Guo Li translated
Shanghai Translation Publishing House
Born in 1965, Emiko Inagaki worked her way up to the editorial board of Weekly Asahi. With an explosive head and a career in a big company, Cool Sister begins a new life that feels "aging" at any time.
Resignation, which seems to happen to young people most of the time, will appear "ill-conceived" when placed on people who are about to retire and enjoy happiness.
However, Emiko's decision is actually very rational, and it is also faced by almost all women in the workplace: In front of the glass ceiling of promotion, do you choose to endure half your life, or do you withdraw?
How to Stop Women's Writing
[Beauty] by Joanna Russ Translated by Zhang Yan
Nanjing University Press | Sanhui Books
The book explores an intriguing phenomenon: not only is the entire writing circle implicitly discriminating against women, but perhaps female writers themselves are constantly doubting comparisons, worrying about whether they are as good at writing as male writers.
The author points out that in fact, we can think outside the box and refuse to enter the "suppressed" discourse. Write, and then become a better writer, comparing yourself only to your former self.
Graphic synthesis: Publisher
Editor: Xu Yang
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Xin