Extracts from Give Birth like a Feminist, the 2023 edition

An exclusive peek into the brand new chapter

Yesterday was publication day for the brand new paperback edition of Give Birth like a Feminist. Publication day has got to be the best day in a writer’s life - the writing is done, the edits are done, and there is no point in any anxiety any more because the book is published and it’s too late to change anything! And, there are sometimes flowers! Woop!

I’ve been talking about Give Birth like a Feminist since it first came out in 2019, so hopefully some of you are now familiar with it, or have even read it. This edition includes a brand new chapter - ‘What Women Want, What Women Need, What Woman Are’ - in which I’ve written about some of the major events in the world and in my own life since the book was first published, and tried to tie a thread between them all. As I write in the opening pages of the new chapter:

Much has happened in the three years since the first edition of Give Birth Like a Feminist was published. First and foremost, a global pandemic, an unprecedented event that seemed to knock everything we held familiar or took for granted completely off its axis. Secondly, while my own world shrank down to teaching three children maths at the kitchen table, I simultaneously branched out and wrote a book for preteen girls about periods, which enabled me to offer a new and more positive narrative to young girls about their female bodies. During this time there was a third event of note – a distinct increase in temperature in the so-called ‘gender wars’, and a volatile debate about what it means to be a woman, which in 2020 caught me directly in its crossfire.

There is a thread that runs through all three – pandemic, periods and the debates around gender: a sidelining of women and their needs, a kind of collective dismissal of our importance as fully formed, whole humans. This is the same dismissal you have read about again and again in the pages of this book; it is woven through women’s history, and through the experience of childbirth itself.