Marriage may seem like an outdated aspect of people’s lives that is no longer necessary in the 21st century.
Yet these books make the case for a new feminist perspective on this officially bound bond.
Read about dating tips, how to healthily maintain partnerships, and how to integrate new gender roles into a historically misogynistic bond. The Adventures and Discoveries of a Feminist Bride by Katrina Majkut is a particular favorite of ours – perfect if you’re in that stressful wedding planning stage!
#1 Dr. Romance’s Guide to Finding Love Today by Tina B. Tessina
Whether you are dating as an adult, a single parent, a widow/er or a senior and have experienced loss, or even if you have given up on relationships, or been single for a while, or are new to dating, this guide will tell you what you need to know to draw on your own life experience and knowhow and apply those skills to the dating process. Helps women make dating safe, fun and successful.
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#2 How to Be Happy Partners by Tina B. Tessina
Based on equal partnerships, How to Be Happy Partners is full of information and exercises teaching couples how to solve problems instead of fighting about them. It will teach you how to turn fights into productive discussions, and how to stand up for yourself without fighting.
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#3 How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free by Tina B. Tessina
The first, and still the best, book for couples who want to create an equal partnership, where both parties work together to ensure that both of them get what they want.
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#4 Female Breadwinners by Suzanne Doyle-Morris
Female breadwinners — women who are the main earners at home — are well placed to command respect both in the workplace and in the home, and their numbers are increasing globally. How exactly do these women negotiate romantic relationships when they and their male partners are bucking convention and entering unchartered territory between the sexes?
Female Breadwinners offers readers insights into how this social change can benefit women, men and families. It details candid observations of real women who earn the majority of the income for their family.
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#5 The Trouble with Marriage by Srimati Basu
The Trouble with Marriage is part of a new global feminist jurisprudence around marriage and violence that looks to law as strategy rather than solution. In this ethnography of lawyer-free family courts and mediations of rape and domestic violence charges in India, Srimati Basu depicts everyday life in legal sites of marital trouble, reevaluating feminist theories of law, marriage, violence, property, and the state.
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#6 Minimizing Marriage by Elizabeth Brake
This book examines its morally salient features — promise, commitment, care, and contract – with surprising results. In Part One, De-Moralizing Marriage, essays on promise and commitment argue that we cannot promise to love and so wedding vows are (mostly) failed promises, and that marriage may be a poor commitment strategy. The book contends with the most influential philosophical accounts of the moral value of marriage to argue that marriage has no inherent moral significance.
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#7 How to Be Married by Jo Piazza
Everyone tells you marriage is hard, but no one tells you what to do about it. In the tradition of writers such as Nora Ephron and Elizabeth Gilbert, award-winning journalist and nationally bestselling author Jo Piazza writes a provocative memoir of a real first year of marriage that will forever change the way we look.
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#8 Wedding Planning for the Busy Feminist by Amanda Pendolino
Wedding Planning For the Busy Feminist is filled with practical, funny advice from real brides, grooms and vendors about how to plan your dream wedding on a budget. It’s also an empowering survival guide thatexamines how modern women feel conflicted about outdated traditions and expensive social media fantasies but kinda want the perfect wedding anyway. With tons of tips, interviews and funny stories, the book is about everything from dress shopping and confusing caterer gratuities to Pinterest anxiety and managing your partner’s role in the process.
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#9 Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England by Mary Lyndon Shanley
Bridging the fields of political theory and history, this comprehensive study of Victorian reforms in marriage law reshapes our understanding of the feminist movement of that period. As Mary Shanley shows, Victorian feminists argued that justice for women would not follow from public rights alone, but required a fundamental transformation of the marriage relationship.
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#10 Marriage and Love by Emma Goldman
Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can completely outgrow a convention.
There are to-day large numbers of men and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who submit to it for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so regardless of marriage, and not because of it.
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#11 The Adventures and Discoveries of a Feminist Bride by Katrina Majkut
Majkut takes readers on the journey of marriage through the eyes of a feminist. Answering questions like why women change their surname and giving fearless insights into wedding traditions, you’ll be left inspired and hopefully ready to challenge your own assumptions about this beautiful yet perhaps outdated traditional ceremony. Majkut inspires you and your partner to walk down the aisle not just as a union, but as equals.
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Dr Suzanne Doyle-Morris from inclusiq
Kristina Savina from Wedding Forward
Adina Mahalli from Enlightened Reality
