Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work

by Sara Ruddick (Editor), J. Greene (Contributor), A. Walker (Contributor)

Woman's achievements.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Feminism, Anthologies, Womens

349 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1977

Reviews

[Priscilla Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

Working It Out is an iconic book that had an enormous impact on women, including me, when it came out in the 1970s. I recently looked at it again and am amazed at how these personal accounts by accomplished and creative women -- their struggles and choices -- remain relevant today.

[elstaffe]

Reading this 1970s-written book in 2021, it seems almost redundant to say that this was an interesting historical document. But that's what I primarily came away with from reading this—the essays in this book captured a very specific time for a very specific subset of women. It was a little weird reading some of these authors and thinking "oh, I know what's to come in your future, and it's not necessarily all great opinions and choices," but then again, I'm sure that would be the case with any collection of essays of women writing about work now.

I know it's not fair to judge a book published almost 45 years ago by what I want now, which is a similar book with more different voices, and I know the editors set out in the foreword that in some ways, the writers represented in this book are a particularly academic and narrow slice of the world. But, well. That's part of what really makes this feel of a different time to me—not just the different and more overtly misogynist world the writers had to navigate, but which voices were chosen to talk about it.

[Hannah]

Kind of an interesting artifact of feminism—it’s interesting to see how the movement has changed and how it hasn’t. I struggled with the lack of variety in the essayists—almost all of them were full-time creatives or academics—and the quality of the essays themselves varied, but I would say this is a valuable exploration of women’s relation to their work—mostly creative, but also professional and domestic.

[Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Valian’s paper is a banger on how she learnt to work while doing her PhD!

[Imaan Syed · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Anomaly of Women in Physics