Sally Cline puts the case for celibacy for women.

Women, celibacy, and passion

Politics & Social Sciences

CLINE, Sally

Social Sciences

A. Deutsch

Couples

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Little,Brown

Lifting the Taboo Women Death and Dying

In Victorian times, women were regarded as deviant if they enjoyed a full and exciting sex life. Today, women invite equally pejorative labels if they admit that they don't! "We are living," writes Sally Cline, "in a genitally fixated society, in which the only sexual activity considered freakish is NO sexual activity; in which anyone who professes a lack of interest in sex is deemed to be in need of a cure, alongside a cosmetic surgery industry geared to persuading women that it is healthy to be starved, snipped, and stitched in pursuit of a prolonged sexual shelf life." Given this oppressive climate, it is not surprising that women are deciding to abandon the sexual treadmill and look for other, more fulfilling ways to express themselves. Today's celibates are neither virgins-in-waiting nor the reluctantly single. They are women: married and single, heterosexual and lesbian, who have found in their passion for celibacy the freedom and autonomy to redefine and celebrate their sexuality. "Through celibacy," writes Cline, "a woman learns to take risks, to grow up, to make decisions, to live on her own, to value other women...It's about simplicity. It is about freedom from sexual anxiety and beauty problems. It is about regaining or taking control of one's life. It is about nongenital passion. It is about spiritual growth." Passionately argued, controversial, iconoclastic, and inspirational, Women, Passion &amp; Celibacy will become required reading for any woman who has ever felt that her body is not her own.

Women, Passion & Celibacy

Clarkson/Potter

Zelda Fitzgerald, along with her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald, is remembered above all else as a personification of the style and glamour of the roaring twenties - an age of carefree affluence such as the world has not seen since. But along with the wealth and parties came a troubled mind, at a time when a woman exploiting her freedom of expression was likely to attract accusations of insanity. After 1934 Zelda spent most of her life in a mental institution; outliving her husband by few years, she died in a fire as she was awaiting electroconvulsive therapy in a sanatorium. Zelda's story has often been told by detractors, who would cast her as a parasite in the marriage - most famously, Ernest Hemingway accused her of taking pleasure in blunting her husband's genius; when she wrote her autobiographical novel, Fitzgerald himself complained she had used his material. But was this fair, when Fitzgerald's novels were based on their life together? Sally Cline's biography, first published in 2003, makes use of letters, journals, and doctor's records to detail the development of their marriage, and to show the collusion between husband and doctors in a misdirected attempt to 'cure' Zelda's illness. Their prescription - no dancing, no painting, and above all, no writing - left her creative urges with no outlet, and was bound to make matters worse for a woman who thrived on the expression of allure and wealth.

Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Faber and Faber

Radclyffe Hall was the pen-name of Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness, which on its publication in 1928 became the centre of a trial for obscenity and was banned in Britain until 1949. The novel itself openly discussed lesbian relationships and challenged contemporary ideas about lesbianism.Radclyffe-Hall's life as well as her novel flouted convention, and Sally Cline's biography, first published in 1998, explores her other literary works, as well as her relationships and politics, which were often at odds.

Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John

Radclyffe hall a Woman Called John

Toronto, ON, Canada: Hushion House Publishing Limited

434p hardback, decorative dustjacket, b/w photographs in centre, fine condition, index

Radclyffe Hall: a woman called John

John Murray

Legend views Zelda Fitzgerald as the mythical American Dream Girl of the 1920s, later as the Southern Belle whose brilliant husband Scott remained loyal despite her frequent breakdowns and final madness. The Zelda that Sally Cline reveals was a serious artist: a painter of extraordinary and disturbing vision, a talented dancer and a witty and original writer whose work Scott often used in his own novels but never acknowledged. Hitherto untapped sources, including medical evidence and interviews with Zelda's last psychiatrist, suggest that her insanity may have been less a specific clinical condition than the product of her treatment for schizophrenia and her husband's behaviour towards her. Cline shows how Scott's alcoholism, too, was as destructive of Zelda and their marriage as it was of him. Zelda's vivid and tragic life was lived at the height of the Jazz Age. Her circle included Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Sally Cline evokes that gilttering group and also, perhaps more significantly, the Deep South from which Zelda longed to escape but from which she could never free herself.

Zelda Fitzgerald : Her Voice in Paradise

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Argues that women are brought up to boost men's egos, discusses the psychological differences between men and women, and looks at drug abuse, the obsession with weight loss, and family life

Reflecting Men: At Twice Their Natural Size

Spender, Dale

Seaver Books

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