A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag’s writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascism
Susan Sontag was one of the most formidable, original, and influential thinkers of the last century. “The most interesting ideas are heresies,” she remarked, and indeed, her writing rejects the familiar and refuses party lines.
On Women presents seven essays and exchanges, spanning a range of subjects: the challenges and humiliations women face as they age; the relationship between women’s liberation and class struggle; beauty, which Sontag calls “that over-rich brew of so many familiar opposites”; feminism; fascism; and film. Taken together, these pieces―relentlessly curious, historically precise, politically robust, and allergic to easy categorization Sontag’s inimitable mind at work.
"Sontag made thinking exciting–her great gift to the common reader. The essays that informed her early career–the ones written more than fifty years ago–are alive to this day with the love of intellection that was always at the heart of her work." - Vivian Gornick, The New York Times Book Review
"Susan Sontag is a powerful thinker, as smart as she's supposed to be, and a better writer, sentence for sentence, than anyone who now wears the tag 'intellectual.'" - Adam Begley, Observer (New York)
