International Women's Day

It's International Women's Day on Wednesday, so today's 'Book of the Week' post features recommendations of books in relation to this year's theme, #EmbraceEquity, and to women's writing and writers in general.

Top Girls by Caryl Churchill
Recommended by Mr Dormandy

Sarah Lam, Lesley Sharpe, Lesley Manville and Deborah Findlay in the Royal Court's 1991 revival of Top Girls 

The best known and most influential play by England's greatest living playwright (sorry Tom Stoppard!), Top Girls is at once a theatrical and human delight - rich, layered characters; effortlessly natural dialogue; exhilaratingly unpredictable tone - an endlessly intriguing exploration of female experience and gender politics, responding to the complex challenges posed to feminists by Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, and an epoch-making series of experiments in dramatic form.  Its influence, especially on contemporary European dramatic writing, is hard to overstate.  An all-male school version of this all-female play would be a blast!

Book of the Week

Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes

Recommended by JMcL

In Greek myth, the box (or jar) Pandora opens contains all sorts of evils and terrors. At first glance, the same could be said of this book: within it are characters who seethe with murderous intent and incestuous desire, figures of fatal beauty and petrifying ugliness, sorceresses and seducers, villains and victims.   

Classicist and broadcaster Natalie Haynes uses the stories of ten well-known women from Greek myth to explore the ways in which classical culture represents the female. Should we really blame Pandora for the ills she unleashed? Why do we care more about Oedipus than his mother/wife Jocasta? Was it Helen’s fault that Troy fell? Haynes suggests we think carefully before leaping to conclusions.  

A Hundred Years On

Gathering dust in a charity shop in Leeds, a seemingly innocuous roll of purple material was left unnoticed for nearly a decade before it was recently discovered to be a suffragette banner dating back to 1908.

The banner was first unveiled by suffragettes Mary Gawthorpe and Rona Robinson in Stevenson Square on 20 June 1908 before it shared the stage with Emmeline Pankhurst at a rally in Manchester’s Heaton Park on 19 July 1908, when she spoke to a crowd of 50,000 people.

Book of the Week

Suffragette by Emmeline Pankhurst
Recommended by Dr Duits. 

Pankhurst’s autobiography is an account of her lifelong quest for women to have the vote – from the moment she was first awakened to the gender inequalities surrounding her (she movingly recounts overhearing her father lament ‘pity she wasn’t born a lad’) up until the outbreak of 1914 (when the struggle for women’s votes was put on hold).