publishing award-winning, innovative, and controversial feminist books since 1991

Mira Robertson

It’s 1974 when 20-year-old Grace arrives in London determined to shrug off her Australian past and reinvent herself. While embracing her new life in the Free Republic of Beltonia, a street of communal squats, she’s haunted by the unbearable thought that she might be a lesbian – a fate she considers almost worse than death. Before long, she falls (secretly) in love with Marigold, upper class, enigmatic and avowedly straight. When Marigold mysteriously disappears without a trace, the search for her leads Grace to a life-changing epiphany.

Evoking the spirit of 1970s London through the world of squatting and political protests, street parties, encounter groups and gurus, and the mayhem of a rackety publishing outfit where Grace gets a job, Grace and Marigold is both witty and moving in its exploration of the inner turmoil, and ultimate liberation of a young woman’s journey to self-acceptance. 

6 AUGUST 2024 | ISBN 9781922964045 | Paperback | 272 pages | 228 x 152 mm

Jennifer Bilek

In this thought-provoking collection of articles drawn from her blog, The 11th Hour, Jennifer Bilek delves into the intricate relationship between transsexualism, transgenderism, and transhumanism. She sheds light on how the push for perceived human rights for marginalized groups often obscures broader societal dynamics.

Jennifer Bilek traces the evolution of transsexualism from a personal fetish into an industry that commodifies human reproductive sex, particularly womanhood. This process divorces it from its biological roots and its connection to the environment, reducing human reproductive sex to medically and technologically manipulated components.

She highlights how young people are sold the notion of expressing themselves and alleviating feelings of dissociation through the purchase of these manufactured identities with the term ‘transgender’.

Through an exploration of the transhumanist movement, Bilek investigates how its proponents blur the boundaries between humanity and mechanization. Society is undergoing a profound transformation away from the biological realities of reproductive sex, driven by emerging technologies that shape children's perceptions of their bodies from an early age. The narrative of gender identity transcendence exploits their vulnerability, pushing them toward an increasingly medicalized future.

Her thorough analysis exposes the technological and financial motivations behind a political agenda masquerading as a human rights movement. This agenda seeks to redefine reproductive norms and propel society toward a posthuman future, ultimately undermining womanhood and eroding women's rights.

2 JULY 2024 | ISBN 9781922964106 | Paperback | 224 pages | 152 mm x 228 mm

THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE GENDER CRITICAL COLLECTION

Robyn Bishop

‘You ask too many questions, Matilda. It’s not becoming in a girl.’

But Matilda is full of questions. It’s the late 1800s in rural New South Wales and Matilda, as the oldest daughter, is expected to cook, clean and help Mama with her brothers and sisters. But her inquiring mind will not be stilled nor her rebellious spirit tamed. When frustration overcomes her, she finds escape in the land she loves and in her imagination, nourished by books.

In the rust red landscape, both striking and harsh, and against the backdrop of World Wars and a changing Australia, Matilda is torn between her desire for freedom and allegiance to her growing family. With their never-ending demands, and crises of poverty, drought and illness, what Matilda really wants seems further from her reach. Will she ever see the sea? Have a vocation and earn her own money? Have the time to read?

 This sweeping novel brings to life the injustices faced by women in the 1800s and 1900s. Punctuated with betrayal and loyalty, hope and despair, love and loss, Matilda and her family come alive showing how the grip of patriarchy tried to strangle the ambitions of women, but there were women who refused to give up.

OCTOBER 2023 | ISBN 9781925950854 | Paperback | 320 pages | 229 x 152 mm

Powerfully evoking time and place, a compelling portrait of an extraordinary woman in an ordinary man's world.

—Noni Hazlehurst

Carol Lefevre

The wooden stair was just as she had imagined it, even down to the creak in its second-to-bottom step. But the tower room was lovely beyond anything she could have dreamed – afloat at the level of the treetops, it seemed to Dorelia more like a boat than a room, with everything that might trouble her banished.

Widowed after a long marriage, Dorelia MacCraith swaps the family home for a house with a tower, and there, raised above the run of daily life, sets out to rewrite the stories of old women poorly treated by literature.

Throughout this winding story, Dorelia and the elderly artist Elizabeth Bunting are sustained by a friendship that reaches back to their years at art school, and bonded by the secrets of a six-month period when they painted together in France.

The loneliness of not belonging, of being cut adrift by grief, betrayal, or old age, binds these twelve connected stories into a dazzling composite novel. Within its complex crossings and connections, young and old inhabit separate yet overlapping firmaments; grown children, though loved and loving, cannot imagine their parents’ young lives. For most, the past is not past, but exerts a magnetic pull, while future happiness hinges on retreat, or escape.

OCTOBER 2022 | 9781925950625 | Paperback | 300 pages | 216 x 140 mm

Somer Brodribb

Lévi-Strauss tried to convince women that we are spoken, exchanged like words; Lacan tried to teach women we can’t speak, because the phallus is the original signifier; and then Derrida says that it doesn’t matter, it’s just talk. Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Nietzsche: the chant resonates through universities around the world. Have you ever tried to untangle the words of postmodernist theorists? How to find your way through the labyrinth to sense and clarity? If so, this is the book for you.

First published in 1992, second edition published 1993, reprinted 2022

ISBN 9781925950724 | Paperback | 152 mm x 228 mm | 178 pp

Lynne Spender (ed)

These heart-warming tales of trials tribulations and trysts at Australia’s only ocean pool ­ just for women – will make you want to dive in, naked at midnight, to revel in all that joyous aquatic camaraderie.

—Kathy Lette, Writer, ocean swimmer and shameless sea pool skinny dipper.

The history of Coogee’s McIver’s Ladies Baths – Australia’s only ocean pool reserved for women – is eloquently told in these stories from women who have found friendship, sanctuary and sheer pleasure as they have gathered and swum at ‘the Women’s Pool’.

Humorously told tales of encounters at the pool sit together with stories of sorrow and regret. Older women tell of the history of the pool and the famed ‘Thursday Married Ladies Club’; younger women detail their delight at the natural beauty, the safety and the sense of freedom that the pool offers. No aquatic manspreading here.

In this book, women from a diverse range of cultures reveal the role that the women’s pool has played in their lives. From the ‘365ers’ who brave the elements all year round to the younger women who seek summer sun on the rocks, a picture emerges of a place of natural beauty and a space for women to simply be themselves.

The ancient seasonal cycles find their own rhythm at our pool, at our place of ‘women’s business’. In the vastness of the largest Continent on Earth, it is a tiny space of companionship if wanted, or solitude if needed.

—Mary Goslett

The Baths welcomes us to its shelves of stone and grass for drying off, to doze, to talk, to preen, to gaze into the aqua green, ivory and midnight blue pool, to the rocks and outcrops either side, and the Pacific Ocean beyond.

—Jane Messer

NOVEMBER 2021 | ISBN 9781925950458 | Paperback | 140 x 210 mm | 160 pp

Angela Costi

I can see how I carry Yiayia’s war
in the ample dunes of my belly,
the moment she smelt the guns,
she pinched the candle’s wick,
gathered the startled shadows of her children,
flung my baby-mother onto her back
and sprinted towards the neutral moon—

Migration and the memories of women’s traditions are woven throughout these poems. Angela Costi brings the world of Cyprus to Australia. Her mother encounters animosity on Melbourne’s trams as Angela learns to thread words in ways that echo her grandmother’s embroidery. Here are poems that sing their way across the seas and map histories.

Winner Greek Australian Cultural League Poetry Book Prize (in English) 2022

MARCH 2021 | 9781925950243 | Paperback | 210 x 146 mm | 96 pp

Heather Brunskell-Evans

Transgenderism in the twenty-first century is patriarchy emblazoned in imperial form.

At a time when supposedly enlightened attitudes are championed by the mainstream, philosopher and activist Heather Brunskell-Evans shows how, in plain view under the guise of liberalism, a regressive men’s rights movement is posing a massive threat to the human rights of women and children everywhere.

This movement is transgender politics which, while spouting platitudes about equality, is in reality colonising and erasing the bodies, agency and autonomy of women and children, while asserting men’s rights to bodily intrusion into every social and personal space. The transgender agenda redefines diversity and inclusion utilising the language of victimhood.

In a complete reversal of feminist gender critical analyses, sex and gender are redefined: identity is now called ‘innate’ (a ‘feeling’ located somewhere in the body) and biological sex is said to be socially constructed (and hence changeable). This ensures a lifetime of drug dependency for transitioners, thereby delivering vast profits for Big Pharma in a capitalist dream.

Everyone, including every trans person, has the right to live freely without discrimination. But the transgender movement has been hijacked by misogynists who are appropriating and inverting the struggles of feminism to deliver an agenda devoid of feminist principles.

In a chilling twist, when feminists critique the patriarchal status quo it is now they who are alleged to be extremists for not allowing men’s interests to control the political narrative. Institutions whose purpose is to defend human rights now interpret truth speech as hate speech, and endorse the no-platforming of women as ethical.

This brave, truthful and eye-opening book does not shirk from the challenge of meeting the politics of liberalism and transgender rights head on. Everyone who cares about the future of women’s and children’s rights must read it.

The micro-politics and the macro-politics of identity interact to form one of the most misogynistic expressions of patriarchy in recent times under the guise of equality, diversity and inclusion.

OCTOBER 2020 | ISBN 9781925950229 | Paperback | 135 x 180 mm | 190 pages

THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE GENDER CRITICAL COLLECTION & THE SPINIFEX SHORTS COMPLETE COLLECTION

eBook Available

For more paperback copies, please visit IPG Book in the US or Gazelle Book Services in the UK

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Vandana Shiva with Kartikey Shiva

Widespread poverty and malnutrition, an alarming refugee crisis, social unrest, economic polarisation... have become our lived reality as the top 1% of the world’s seven-billion-plus population pushes the planet – and all its people – to the social and ecological brink. In Oneness vs The 1%, Vandana Shiva takes on the Billionaires Club of Gates, Buffett, Zuckerberg and other modern Mughals, whose blindness to the rights of people, and to the destructive impact of their construct of linear progress, have wrought havoc across the world. Their single-minded pursuit of profit has undemocratically enforced uniformity and monocultures, division and separation, monopolies and external control – over finance, food, energy, information, healthcare, and even relationships.

Basing her analysis on explosive little-known facts, Shiva exposes the 1%’s model of philanthrocapitalism, which is about deploying unaccountable money to bypass democratic structures, derail diversity, and impose totalitarian ideas, based on One Science, One Agriculture and One History. She calls for the “resurgence of real knowledge, real intelligence, real wealth, real work, real well-being”, so that people can reclaim their right to: Live Free. Think Free. Breathe Free. Eat Free.

2018 | ISBN 9781925581799 | Paperback | 215 x 140 mm | 192 pp

EBOOK AVAILABLE

Robert Jensen

The pathology of patriarchy, the idea that one group of people should control another—even own them, own even life itself—is at the core of today’s crises.

The End of Patriarchyasks one key question: What do we need to create and maintain stable, decent human communities that can remain in a sustainable relationship with the larger living world?

Robert Jensen’s answer is feminism and a critique of patriarchy.

He calls for a radical feminist challenge to institutionalized male dominance; an uncompromising rejection of men’s assertion of a right to control women’s sexuality and reproduction; and a demand for an end to the violence and coercion that are at the heart of all systems of domination and subordination.

The End of Patriarchy makes a powerful argument that a socially just society requires no less than a radical feminist overhaul of the dominant patriarchal structures.

2017 | ISBN 9781742199924 | Paperback | 192 pages

eBook Available

For more paperback copies, please visit IPG Book in the US or Gazelle Book Services in the UK

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Abigail Bray

Misogyny Re-loaded is an explosive manifesto against the resurgent sexual fascism of the new world order. By exposing the casual acceptance of snuff pornography in gore culture through to the framing of rape as slapstick, Abigail Bray links the celebration of sexual sadism to the rise of an authoritarian culture of militarised violence. Arguing that a meaningful collective resistance has been scattered by the mass destruction of genuine social and economic security for ordinary women, Misogyny Re-loaded presents a scathing critique of the political drool of mainstream billionaire-friendly feminism.

Drawing on a wide range of resources from popular culture, literature, economics, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy and environmental science, this book offers a warning about the growing social and environmental threat of an out-of-control military industrial complex.

2013 | 9781876756901 | Paperback | 215 x 138 mm | 161 pp

THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE RADFEM STARTER LIBRARY

Judy Foster

with Marlene Derlet

Invisible Women of Prehistory is a revolutionary book that challenges our preconceptions about the past.

We often think of history as a linear development in which we are steadily moving out of a violent and patriarchal past to a more equitable and peaceful future. While we have no shortage of wars – and the incidence of violence against women is alarmingly high – we are told that humans have never lived in such peaceful times. We continually hear that our predecessors were violent but also that patriarchy is inevitable and universal. But what if none of this were true? What if we were descended from peaceful societies in which women were respected and equal to men? Would this inspire us to seek new ways of organizing our lives and of interpreting the present?

Based on many years of research into ancient history and prehistory, Judy Foster and linguist Marlene Derlet take on the world. They argue that three million years of peace, a period when women’s status in society was much higher than it is now, preceded the last six thousand years of war during which men have come to hold power over women.

They challenge the academic resistance to these ideas and re-examine both the archaeological work of Marjia Gimbutas and recent research into the prehistories of Africa, East and South Asia, the Americas, Australia, South-East Asia and Oceania.

2013 | ISBN 9781876756918 | Paperback | 240 x 170 mm | 404 pp | LOW STOCK - ALSO AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS

Merlinda Bobis

Fish-Hair Woman is a novel of many rooms running between love and war. In 1987 the Philippine government fights a total war against communist insurgency. The village of Iraya is militarised. The days are violent and the nights heavy with fireflies in the river where the dead are dumped. With her twelve-metre hair, Estrella the Fish-Hair Woman trawls the corpses from the water, which now tastes of lemongrass. She falls in love with the visiting Australian writer Tony McIntyre who disappears in the conflict.

2012 | ISBN 9781876756970 | Paperback | 230 x 155 mm | 206 pp

Abigail Bray

Melinda Tankard Reist

It is now widely acknowledged that the unprecedented mainstreaming of the global pornography industry is transforming the sexual politics of intimate and public life, popularising new forms of hardcore misogyny, and strongly contributing to the sexualisation of children. Yet challenges to the pornography industry continue to be dismissed as uncool, anti-sex and moral panics.

With contributions from leading world experts and activists, Big Porn Inc offers a cutting edge exposé of the hidden realities of a multi-billion dollar global industry that promotes itself as a fashionable life-style choice.

Unmasking the lies behind the selling of porn as ‘just a bit of fun’ Big Porn Inc reveals the shocking truths of an industry that trades in violence, crime and degradation. This fearless book will change the way you think about pornography forever.

Contributors include: (Australia) Maggie Hamilton, Nina Funnell, Christopher Kendall, Susan Hawthorne, Sheila Jeffreys, Caroline Taylor, Meagan Tyler, Robi Sonderegger, Caroline Norma, Renate Klein, Helen Pringle, Betty McLellan, Melinda Tankard Reist, Abigail Bray, Melinda Liszewski.

(International) Gail Dines, Catharine A MacKinnon, Melissa Farley, Diana Russell, Robert Jensen, Jeffrey Masson, Chyng Sun, Julia Long, Diane L Rosenfeld, Linda Thompson, Hiroshi Nakasatomi, Anne Mayne, Ruchira Gupta, Asja Armanda, Natalie Nenadic, Anna van Heeswijk, Matt McCormack Evans.

2011 | ISBN 9781876756895 | Paperback | 225 x 150 mm | 343 pages

THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE RADFEM STARTER LIBRARY

Munya Andrews

What do Halloween, Atlantis, Subaru, the American Presidential elections, the Petticoat Lane markets in London, the ship Titanic and atlases all have in common? Each can be traced to the legends of the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades. Poets, priests, prophets, shamans, storytellers, artists, singers and historians throughout time have all gazed into the night skies and come under their spell.

Inspiring and captivating diverse civilisations, this star cluster has left an indelible mark on the human psyche. Munya Andrews, a Bardi woman from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, examines the myths and legends of the Pleiades from Indigenous and ancient cultures around the world. Designated at M45 on astronomy charts and maps, the nine visible stars are named after the Seven Sisters from Ancient Greek mythology, and their parents, Atlas and Pleione.

Around the world, people looked to the skies to tell them when to sow and harvest their crops, and when the rains would come. The ‘sailing stars’ have guided explorers and endless migrations of people. In Old Europe, among the Ainu of Japan and in Indigenous Australia the Pleiades were associated with water and birds. They become Oceanids, Ice Maidens, Water Girls and the Subaru. The Parthenon in Athens, the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and the Mayan Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, are all said to be aligned with the Pleiades. The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades will amaze and awe you, and above all will remind you that all of humanity shares the night skies.

2004 | ISBN 9781876756451 | Paperback | 217 x 138 mm | 368 pp

Judy Atkinson

‘I was running a workshop in the Kimberleys, and in the circle a woman began to speak from a place of deep pain and despair. She described herself as bad, dirty, ugly, words she had taken into herself from childhood experiences of abuse. I lent forward and sang her a song. “How could anyone ever tell you, you are anything less than beautiful ...” While sitting with her, as the words settled into her soul, another woman said to the circle: you are recreating song lines — from trauma trails. I was honoured by this description of my work.’

Providing a startling answer to the questions of how to solve the problems of generational trauma, Trauma Trails moves beyond the rhetoric of victimhood, and provides inspiration for anyone concerned about Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities today. Beginning with issues of colonial dispossession, Judy Atkinson also sensitively deals with trauma caused by abuse, alcoholism and drug dependency.

Then, through the use of a culturally appropriate research approach called Dadirri: listening to one another, Judy presents and analyses the stories of a number of Indigenous people. From her analysis of these “stories of pain, stories of healing”, she is able to point both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers in the direction of change and healing.

2002 | ISBN 9781876756222 | Paperback | 217 x 140 mm | 324 pp

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