On Women
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  • Published: 27 August 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241996843
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $30.00

On Women

A new collection of feminist essays from the influential writer, activist and critic, Susan Sontag

Formats & editions
Paperback
27 Aug 2024
Hardback
6 Jun 2023
EBook
2 Mar 2023
Audiobook
1 Jun 2023
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On Women brings together Susan Sontag's most fearless and incisive writing on women, a crucial aspect of her work that has not until now received the attention it deserves

For the most part written in the 1970s during the height of second-wave feminism, Sontag's essays are strikingly relevant to our contemporary conversations. At times powerfully in sync and at others powerfully at odds with them, they are always characteristically original in their examinations of the 'biological division of labour', the double-standard for ageing and the dynamics of women's powerlessness and women's power.

As Merve Emre writes in her introduction, 'They offer us the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand: to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas and the world.'
  • Published: 27 August 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241996843
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $30.00
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About the author

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. Her non-fiction works include Against Interpretation, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, AIDS and its Metaphors and Regarding the Pain of Others. She is also the author of four novels, a collection of stories and several plays. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.

portrait photo of Susan Sontag

Also by Susan Sontag

Notes on Camp
On Photography
Against Interpretation And Other Essays
The Medium is the Massage
Stories
The Benefactor
In America
See all

Praise for On Women

It's her clarity that can make you gasp, combined with her confidence . . . what shines through this book is the extraordinary suppleness of her mind . . . She articulated, in punchy, matter-of-fact prose, thoughts that for most of us would stay at best half-formed

Christina Patterson, Sunday Times

On Women offers tantalizing glimmers and hints [of] what Susan Sontag would make of our current political moment . . . Sontag's stylish, idiosyncratic approach to the feminist debates and preoccupations of her era can be distilled pretty well into tangible guidance for ours

The Atlantic

On Women demonstrates a powerful mind and equally forceful personality . . . like turning back the clock to the days of Sontag's prime

Rosemary Goring, The Herald

Sontag's language is urgent . . . and boldly provocative. Those previously unsure where she stood on the politics of womanhood, or found her opaque on the topic, can be in no doubt after this

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