Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination

by Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar

Forty years after their first groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, The Madwoman in the Attic, award-winning collaborators Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar map the literary history of feminism’s second wave.

From its stirrings in the midcentury — when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion — to a resurgence in the new millennium in the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and N. K. Jemisin, Gilbert and Gubar trace the evolution of feminist literature. They offer lucid, compassionate, and piercing readings of major works by these writers and others, including Adrienne Rich, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Sontag, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Toni Morrison. Activists and theorists like Nina Simone, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler also populate these pages as Gilbert and Gubar examine the overlapping terrain of literature and politics in a comprehensive portrait of an expanding movement.

As Gilbert and Gubar chart feminist gains — including creative new forms of protests and changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality — they show how the legacies of second wave feminists, and the misogynistic culture they fought, extend to the present. In doing so, they celebrate the diversity and urgency of women who have turned passionate rage into powerful writing.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, History, Literary Criticism, Womens, Books About Books, Academic

464 pages, Hardcover

First published August 17, 2021

About the author

Sandra M. Gilbert was an American literary critic and poet who published in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. She was best known for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar, with whom she co-authored, among other works, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Madwoman in the Attic is widely recognized as a text central to second-wave feminism. She was Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis.
Gilbert lived in Berkeley, California, and lived, until 2008, in Paris, France. Her husband, Elliot L. Gilbert, was chair of the Department of English at University of California, Davis, until his death in 1991. She also had a long-term relationship with David Gale, mathematician at University of California, Berkeley, until his death in 2008.

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giveaway Win!

I like to enter giveaways, I think you my bookish friends are aware of that by now. I'm cheap so I don't like to buy books or really anything but I do love to shop(I'm a messy bitch). I will enter any giveaway that seems interesting, when it comes to books I of course wanna win books that I've been anticipating but I also like to win books I haven't heard of that sound interesting.

Still Mad is one of those books. This book is actually a sequel to a book called The Madwoman in the Attic. I hadn't heard of it but it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize so I'm definitely adding it to my tbr. Still Mad is a history of how feminist literature has shaped the Women's Movement and broader politics. I got so many book recommendations out of this book, this book covers alot of the more well-known feminist in the literary world like Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, Toni Morrison and Gloria Steinem. But it also brought some other writers to my attention like Claudia Rankine, Gloria Anzaldua, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Going into this book I didn't know how this was gonna go. The authors are white 2nd Wave Feminist and we know how those types can be. But I was pleasantly surprised. This book talked about how Black women, Indigenous women, Immigrant women, Trans women and Gay men fit into the feminist movement. It also more importantly talked about how other women are often the biggest impediments to progress.

I don't know how exactly to review this book because I actually think you should just read the book. My book has so many tabs in it of important passages that this review would have to be pages long to cover. So instead I would just suggest that you read this book if you care about women and when I say women I mean Black women, Latinx women,white women, Indigenous women, Women around the globe, Trans women, Women of every sexuality, Non binary people and anybody I might have left out.

A Must Read!

[Linda Robinson]

There is a line in the Practical Magic movie about the inability to practice the craft while turning your nose up at it. There is that feeling in this book. Supposedly appreciating poet Marianne Moore, while posting some of the bizarre names she delivered to Ford Motor Company in the same paragraph is odd, if not downright middle schoolish. There is an intimation that Sylvia Plath abandoned her children to chase Ted Hughes down in London. Implying what? That she wasn't a very good mother either?

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good follow up to The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. It is worth noting that Gilbert and Guebar do have solid representation African-American writers in the book as well as showcasing intersectionality and the need for it.

[Lisa Farrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading for a women's lit class in grad school. A good history of feminism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but biased at times. With a title like "Still Mad", however, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

[Deedi Brown (DeediReads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

All my reviews live at https://deedispeaking.com/reads/.

I’ve had my eye on Still Mad since it came out, and grabbed a copy in B&N’s hardcover sale earlier this year. I decided to pick it up in March in honor of Women’s History Month, which turned out to be an even more fitting choice than I’d expected.

Based on the title, I think I’d assumed this was an essay anthology. It isn’t. It’s a much more academic analysis of feminist women writers and their work, opinions, and influence dating back from the 50s through today. Think Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Gloria Steinem, Ursula Le Guin, etc.

It turned out to be a perfect read for me, as I didn’t have time in college to take any women’s studies or many English classes. I’m always looking for catch-up materials, and this book really helped me place so many of these famous feminist writers in context in history. But I still think that you might like this if you do have some knowledge of these women’s work, because it was fascinating and super useful to have them framed together against historical events this way.

My only complaint here was that I feel like it was sparse on Black women in the 60s, when I would have expected a little more about women writing in the civil rights movement. I know that part of the problem is who was and wasn’t being published — and there were certainly many more Black women included in more recent history — but that felt like a big gap.

If you are a fan of more academic-style nonfiction that teaches you new things, pick this one up.

[Christy-JC Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Their first book was life-changing for me. They inspired me to be an academic feminist, scholar, and teacher. I was so pleased with his updated text and the title. It did not disappoint. More useful for English class than History, for me, but — a great resource and wise voices.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to confess: I was disappointed by Still Mad. Both "The Madwoman in the Attic" and the 3 volume set, "No Man's Land" were so important to my awakening to new ways of reading and writing that reading and discovering that Dr's Gilbert Gubar's newest book is essentially a summation of the history of feminism Second Wave with some random female authors thrown in to illustrate their points was a bit of a let down. Not to mention, a good many of the writers they "go in depth " have recently or fairly recently had extensive biographies published about them. Most notably, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. I recommend the source material Gilber/Gubar cite extensively. If you're looking for a comprehensive history of the Second Wave, check out Ruth Rosen's "The World Split Open," or Karla Jay's Tales of the Lavender Menace." Revisit "Sexual Politics" or any one of the contemporaneous anthologies by both white and women of color as well as women on what Rich referred to as the Lesbian Spectrum.

[Virginia Arthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I started reading Lawrence O'Donnell's book, Deadly Force, the killing of George Floyd took place a few days after. When I started this book, the next day, the Supreme Court draft ruling on abortion was leaked. What I learn is a book that you think chronicles the past in America--doesn't anymore. While Ukraine fights for its life, Americans wage their own war--against one another. We are a sick country. It's obvious guns are the most important thing to Americans. A civilization moves at the rate of its lowest mentality, not it's highest. It doesn't matter if we can cure cancer. Our society is ultimately sits at its lowest level. Until we can bring it up, this is where we be.

But this is supposed to be a review of the book. This book explores the American literary history of feminist writing. For many of us Gen X'ers and older, we will recognize the names. Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath (of course), Toni Morrison, Gloria S., more, because we read them growing up into who we are now. In this sense, it's a reminder of how important these women were/are to how justice for American women has evolved. The book selects the more East Coast-NYC influential writers (this is tiresome, NYC's self-obsession) and provides a general biography for each one, some of it re-worn (Plath). It's important to know what forces contributed to the evolution of these women as writers and feminists and here we go again? Really? Even as I type this, I am absolutely stunned that we are back in the past of the patriarchy, a former President who gleefully admitted to grabbing women at the crotch, an American Precedent. This is not the review I wrote originally never thinking in a million years, I would be writing one saying this book is actually the PRESENT. AGAIN. We are back at the agony expressed by so many of these women. Issues we thought were if not resolved, on their way to being resolved. America is not ten steps forward, two back. America is ten steps forward, 200 back. I recommend it now not as a venue into the all important women's right past but as a perspective on the present because the past is one again in America, the present and what a tragedy and waste of potential of this great nation that constantly strives to shoot itself in the foot, shoot low, or just shoot.

[B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won a copy of this one in a Goodreads Giveaway. While the early and later parts of the book have too much Trump B.S. for my tastes - so sick to death of hearing about that lardass idiot, the central part of the book that doesn't deal with the immediate past, is well written and well researched. I desperately wish that the authors had decided to forego that corpulent orange pile of dung. If they had, I might have kept the book. As it is, it's not one that I will be keeping. This could have been a great book, but they really jumped the gun including the immediate present and immediate past.

[Laurie Lisle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This overview of women's lives through their writings from the 1950s to the present is fascinating. After living in New York City from the late 1960s, through the 1970s, and into the 1980s, chapters covering those years were intensely reminiscent for me. They reminded me of the explosion of feminist writing--including the so-called "demon texts"--and all the excitement and, yes, the disappointments of those years. It's well worth a read for those in and out of the classroom to understand the profound influences of second and third-wave feminism.

[Mattschratz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The literary history here is good and it's always nice to see all of these interesting women writers brought together. The literary analysis is good so far as it goes--since there's so many people here, and the book is only half as long as The Madwoman in the Attic, it's a little brief or thin. The political analysis, of people like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, reads like it is from the version of Time Magazine that they give to elementary schools.

[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

G&G still got it!

I love this tour through 20th and early 21st century feminism via the biographies of creative women: writers, singers, activists.

As always, their writing is very accessible and interesting with a clear sense of authorial voice; none of that pretending to be an objective, disembodied, academic robot.

Highly recommended.

[Agnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

"While the marchers of the seventies felt themselves to be advancing into a brave new world, the plaintiffs of 2017 were gazing at a fallen world, dominated by a corrupt figure both infantile and demonic."

Filled with writers I love and a few I need to check out.

Nice to be reminded of where we were, but still so far to go.....

[Catherine]

Goodreads Giveaway

[Kate Merolla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this was a reminder to stay fired up, & to keep being a learner.

[Katey Donaldson · Rating 4 out of 5]

incredibly informative and inspiring, a longer read for use of academic language

[Tiffany · Rating 2 out of 5]

Their previous books meant so much to me in the 1990s, I wanted to love this one. But I just didn't. I guess I didn't really connect with many of the writers they chose to highlight.

[Christa Sigman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate this book for the way it connected many dots between women and literature I had heard of but was not familiar with. A very helpful and informative time.

[Valerie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admire/regret their restraint here bc this book could've been 900 pages and I'd have inhaled it. They didn't go quite as deep here as they did in Madwoman, but this was insightful and cathartic.

[Vanessa Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

My reading list grew once again whilst reading this book.

We've come a long way; and we have still further to go.

[B Smith]

Read with Madwoman in the Attic

[CMYKHEBE · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d rather read this book as a feminist critique of American literature—more of a literary index than a strictly historical one. It’s a solid reference. But why is the Chinese version title "依然疯狂(crazy)" instead of “依然愤怒(angry)”? I don’t see the waves of feminism, rising and falling, as "crazy." They are simply fighting back, staying angry in a deeply sick America. Maybe the title was meant to echo The Madwoman in the Attic and its sense of "madness." Reading this book in 2025 feels both despairing, as conservatism and Trumpism make their comeback, and perplexing, as institutions remain weak and history keeps repeating itself.

我更愿意把这本书当作女性主义美国文学评论来读，是一本不错的文学索引而非严格意义上的历史索引。但是为什么中译本书名是《依然疯狂》而不是《依然愤怒》。我并不觉得女性主义此即彼伏的浪潮是“疯狂”的，她们只是在病态的美国保持愤怒情绪去抗争。或许是为了对应此前《阁楼上的疯女人》的”疯“感。在2025读这本书，会因为保守主义和民粹主义卷土重来而绝望，又会因制度的懦弱和重蹈覆辙而困惑。