On Women

On Women

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

Summary

‘A brilliant, glittering intelligence’ Sunday Times

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.'

'One of America's greatest public intellectuals' Observer

'Susan Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' The Times

'At the time she died, she was America's best-known public intellectual. To my mind, she was also the most exemplary' John Gray, New Statesman


WITH A PREFACE BY MERVE EMRE

Reviews

  • 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

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 On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others and At the Same Time. She was also the author of four novels, including The Volcano Lover and In America, as well as a collection of stories and several plays. She was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, and received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more