Sexuality has been reframed by postmoderism, but this clear discussion of literature, politics, and popular culture provides a useful historical view. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s is remembered as a time of great freedom for women, but did the sexual revolution have the same goals as the Women's Liberation Movement? Was it truly liberation for women or just another insidious form of oppression? This provocative book argues that sexual freedom sometimes directly opposed actu...

It is only recently that transgenderism has been accepted as a disorder for which treatment is available. In the 1990s, a political movement of transgender activism coalesced to campaign for transgender rights. Considerable social, political and legal changes are occurring in response and there is increasing acceptance by governments and many other organisations and actors of the legitimacy of these rights.This provocative and controversial book explores the consequences of these c...

The new edition of Beauty and Misogyny revisits and updates Sheila Jeffreys' uncompromising critique of Western beauty practice and the industries and ideologies behind it. Jeffreys argues that beauty practices are not related to individual female choice or creative expression, but represent instead an important aspect of women's oppression. As these practices have become increasingly brutal and pervasive, the need to scrutinize and dismantle them is if anything more urgent now as...

A brilliant overview of the oppression all women face – the system of male domination – and how feminists have fought back against it. Sheila Jeffreys provides a sometimes startling, always incisive, picture of the struggles she and other radical feminists have faced to protect the rights of women and girls over decades of activism. As well as outlining the many recognisable forms of oppression faced by women today – including pornography, violence, reproductive slavery and domestic servit...

Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life is both an engaging autobiography and a fascinating account of feminist history, from the heady days of the Women's Liberation Movement through to the backlash against radical feminism as neoliberal laissez-faire attitudes took hold. Fast forward to the current re-examination of feminism in light of the #MeToo movement and an emerging new wave of radical feminism—Sheila Jeffreys' bold account makes it clear that the feminism and lesbianism...

The Lesbian Revolution argues that lesbian feminists were a vital force in the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). They did not just play a fundamental role in the important changes wrought by second wave feminism, but created a powerful revolution in lesbian theory, culture and practice. Yet this lesbian revolution is undocumented.The book shows that lesbian feminists were founders of feminist institutions such as resources for women survivors of men’s violence, including ...

In this feminist critique of the politics of religion, Sheila Jeffreys argues that the renewed rise of religion is harmful to women’s human rights. The book seeks to rekindle the criticism of religion as the founding ideology of patriarchy.Focusing on the three monotheistic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam, this book examines common anti-women attitudes such as ‘male-headship’, impurity of women, the need to control women’s bodies, and their modern manifestations in multi...

First published in 1987. From the 1870's to the 1920's, feminists actively campaigned against men's sexual abuse of women. This collection brings together the major articles which fuelled the feminist campaigns and helped to bring about significant reforms.

The industrialization of prostitution and the sex trade has created a multibillion-dollar global market, involving millions of women, that makes a substantial contribution to national and global economies.The Industrial Vagina examines how prostitution and other aspects of the sex industry have moved from being small-scale, clandestine, and socially despised practices to become very profitable legitimate market sectors that are being legalised and decriminalised by governments. She...

Sheila Jeffreys examines the activities of feminist campaigners around such issues as child abuse and prostitution and how these campaigns shaped social purity in the 1880s and 1890s. She demonstrates how the thriving and militant feminism of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was undermined, and asserts that the decline of this feminism was due largely to the promotion of a sexual ideology which was hostile to women's independence. The circumstances about which she writes are f...

Originally published in 1984. The history of sex in the last 100 years has usually been written as a story of progress from repression to sexual liberation. This book argues that the reverse is true, demonstrating that the ‘sexual revolution’ came as a backlash to a women’s movement which challenged men’s sexual abuse and tried to reconstruct male sexuality in women’s interest. At first it looks at those groups at the turn of the twentieth century who campaigned to challenge prevailing ide...

In this blisteringly persuasive and piercingly intelligent book, Sheila Jeffreys argues that women live under penile imperialism, a regime in which men are assumed to have a ' sex right' of access to the bodies of women and girls. She reasons that the ' sexual revolution' that began in the 1960s unleashed an explicit male sexual liberation and that even now, under current laws and cultural mores, women do not have the right to self-determination in relation to their bodies. Sheila Jeffreys...