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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2007
Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women. By Lori Jo Marso. New York: Routledge, 2006. 240p. $ 95.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.
This elegant book explores the memoirs, private correspondence, and other self-revelatory writings of prominent feminist thinkers with a view to disclosing their struggles to live feminist lives while contending with conventional gender norms. The socially constructed standards of proper femininity that encumbered these women are what the author terms “the demands of femininity.” According to Lori Jo Marso, the demands of femininity vary “in terms of race, class and historical and cultural location” (p. 30), but notwithstanding their malleable content, these normative representations constitute constraints to which all women are subject under patriarchal conditions.