There is a danger, when listening to polemical books, that the listener will emerge feeling a little battered. Not so with the late writer and activist Susan Sontag’s On Women, which comprises a series of her writing and interviews published in the 1970s, when feminism’s second wave was at its height in the US, and which is read with thoughtfulness and clarity by the voice actor Laurel Lefkow.
Sontag’s commitment to the feminist cause has been relentlessly questioned during her life and posthumously, so it is useful to have her thoughts on women and womanhood all in one place. She could undoubtedly be argumentative: “Like all capital truths, feminism can be simple-minded,” she wrote in an open letter to the feminist poet Adrienne Rich, published in the New York Review of Books. Rich, in return, said Sontag’s writings on women were “more of an intellectual exercise than the expression of a felt reality”.
Elsewhere, Sontag makes broader observations about women’s experience that are still pertinent today, pointing out the ways they are undermined and objectified, and dismissed as soon as they start to go grey. In “The Double Standards of Aging” she notes how older men are seen as wise in their autumn years while women are seen as sexless and washed up: “Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.” On Women comes over not as a furious diatribe but a collection characterised by clear-eyed wisdom. And while Sontag offers no easy solutions, her reflections are underpinned by an optimism that things can change for the better.
• Available via Penguin Audio, 6hr 17min
Further listening:
The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America
Monica Potts, Penguin Audio, 7hr 41min
The writer and journalist reads her moving, meticulously reported account of deprivation and dysfunction in the Arkansas town where she grew up and the hardship endured by her best friend from high school, Darci.
The River Man
RB Croft, Audible Original, 6hr 17min
Dominic West narrates this eerie crime thriller about mysterious deaths in a small town and an investigator forced to go rogue to uncover the truth.
