On Womanhood
Bodies, Literature, Choice
Twelve incisive, probing essays on womanhood in popular culture. An Atlantic Edition, featuring long-form journalism by Atlantic writers, drawn from contemporary articles or classic storytelling from the magazine’s 165-year archive.
On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice gathers a selection of Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert’s essential and attentive essays on womanhood and popular culture. Unflinchingly positioning television and literature as capacious sites of feminist critique, Gilbert’s criticism sharply surveys our contemporary media landscape. This collection joins treatises on beloved series like Game of Thrones with thoughtful meditations on Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale; ponders the lessons supermodels offer us on questions of consent; and examines the rebellious literary legacies of Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, and their respective contemporaries. On Womanhood offers some of the most commanding popular criticism of this generation.
Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about television, books, and popular culture. She was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. Before joining The Atlantic in 2014, she was the arts editor at Washingtonian, where she won three Society of Professional Journalists awards for arts reporting and criticism. She has previously written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Brooklyn Rail.
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