Joan Kirner

What do women want and how can they get it? These questions were at the heart of second wave feminism. The Women’s Power Handbook focuses on the second of these queries. The idea for the book was born when Moira Rayner and Joan Kirner met touring Victoria with Naomi Wolfe. On their travels they were struck by the questions that young women asked. Most of these related to practical issues about power. How to get it and, more important, how to use it without compromising integrity. According to the authors, no feminist tracts were providing young women with the answers that they needed, and this is what they set out to do in The Women’s Power Handbook.

Janine Haines’s book, Suffrage to Sufferance is a good read. For women who are in public life and who insist on equality, it is a realistic and often humorous read. For those women who aspire to public life or simply equal rights, it is an entertaining – lost journalistic – account of where women’s aspirations might lead them. For men who understand or want to understand women’s drive for equality, there is an idea of the barriers, seen and unseen, that women face. And there is some sense of women’s struggle for political influence and recognition.