March 8th was International Women’s Day, a holiday celebrated all around the world, if less so in the U.S.A.. Let’s honor it here at CutBank.
First off, take a gander at this roster of talented women on the just-released 2019 longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Over at The New York Times, Kristen R. Ghodsee decries the American preference for Mother’s Day over International Women’s Day (attributing this to the latter’s socialist, Eastern bloc origins) and declares, “we are more than our wombs.”
Meanwhile at Broadly, twelve leading feminist thinkers from all backgrounds come together to discuss their visions for the future of the feminist movement and what it means for race, gender, art, and politics.
Across the pond, many an eyebrow was raised on Friday at the speech made by Megan Markle at the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust in honor of International Women’s Day, which she used to call attention to the stigmatization of menstruation, while at ElectricLit, Lily Meyer interviews Swedish comic artist Liv Strömquist about the shame associated with menstruation and the female body explored in her new graphic novel Fruit of Knowledge: The Vulva vs. The Patriarchy, panels of which have been put up by transit authorities in the Stockholm subway.
The Atlantic considers whether rebranding clothing and beauty products to appeal to “real” women misses the mark by implying that some versions of womanhood are false, and moreover by continuing to feed into the notion that beauty is a necessary female goal. Meanwhile, Nicholas Dames reviews L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”, the first ever biography about one of the most famous female literary figures of the pre-Victorian period.
Finally, as always McSweeney’s is prepared with a list for the modern woman seeking to take advantage of that extra hour of daylight to squeeze a bit more into her already packed life.
Here’s to all the women dancing backwards in high heels. Happy International Women’s Day!