The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girlto Sex and the City

by Imelda Whelehan

Imelda Whelehan provides an overview of popular women's writing from the late 1960s to the present, looking at how key feminist texts such as The Women's Room, Kinflicks and Fear of Flying have influenced popular contemporary fiction such as Bridget Jones' Diary and Sex and the City . Whelehan reconsiders the links between the politics of feminist thought, action and writing and creative writing over the past 30 years and suggests that even so-called 'post feminist' writing owes an enormous debt to feminism's second wave.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction

248 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2005

About the author

Professor Imelda Whelehan has published widely in the areas of feminism, adaptation studies, popular culture and women's writing. She has recently co-edited the Bloomsbury Adaptations: Critical and Primary Sources (2022) with Professor Deborah Cartmell. Forthcoming is a co-authored chapter, 'Screening the Australian Novel' (with Claire McCarthy) which will be published in The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel in 2023. She is also writing a monograph, Post-War Adaptations which will be published by Bloomsbury. She has spend many years in research leadership in the UK and Australia and has been Dean and PVC for Graduate Research at the University of Tasmania, The Australian National University and the University of Western Australia.

Reviews

[Jackie Morrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Imelda Whelehan traces the evolution of feminist writings from the academic to the iconic pop culture books of modern times. The writings may evolve but one thing is clear, that the introduction of the pill radically altered how men and women dated and mated, especially in major cities. The Feminist Bestseller is a synopsis and analysis of how feminist literature defined generations, segmented into sub-feminist themes, and continues to impact female sexual behavior.

Feminism is a political statement but it has taken many forms given geography and cultural trends. Feminism promised equality and with the pill became the driving force for sexual emancipation in the 1960s. Pop culture books and movies appeal to women who are single or married because of the promise of an eternal youth, free of the confines of Victorian sensibilities. Between serious books and more stylish outpourings in the feminist genre, sex and the single female has never been the same.

Chick lit, a sub version of feminist literature, is the most read version of mainstream feminist bestsellers. Ripe with romance, angst, heartbreak, a career girl making a choice, it's the perils of feminism made front and center in a funny witty fashion. Have women become equal now? In some ways but in other respects, feminism has rendered entire groups of women alone, isolated, and robbed of the joys of motherhood. We can't be Carrie Bradshaw forever. Eventually she too got married and the woman who brought her to life is settled in domestic comfort with a husband and three children.

[Jessica Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

More about the history of feminism than the books that were influenced by it, which was interesting but not what I was looking for based on the title.