‘The Bloodless Revolution’: Feminism, Publishing and the Mass Media in Weldon's Big Women (1997)

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Notes

1. Fay Weldon, Big Women, London: Flamingo, 1997. Published in US as Big Girls Don't Cry.

2. Directed by Renny Rye, with a screenplay by Fay Weldon.

3. See Imelda Whelehan, Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism, London: The Women's Press, 2000.

4. Maureen Freely, What About Us? An Open Letter to the Mothers Feminism Forgot, London: Bloomsbury, 1996.

5. Big Women, p. 345.

6. Big Women, p. 299.

7. Big Women, p. 267.

8. See, for example, Elizabeth Gleick, ‘The Women's Room’ in The New York Times, 25 October 1998.

9. 1972–1993.

10. Big Women, p. 156.

11. ‘Women, publishing and power’, Judy Simons interviews Carmen Callil, in Judy Simons and Kate Fullbrook (eds), Writing: A Woman's Business: Women Writing and the Marketplace, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 184.

12. ‘Women, publishing and power’, Judy Simons interviews Carmen Callil, in Judy Simons and Kate Fullbrook (eds), Writing: A Woman's Business: Women Writing and the Marketplace, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 185.

13. To be fair to Callil, Virago published The War of the Words: Politically Correct Debate in 1994, edited by Sarah Dunant, which offers perspectives on the meaning of political correctness in a variety of social settings.

14. Cited on the Virago website http://www.virago.co.uk under ‘About Virago’, accessed 10.04.06.

15. Big Women, p. 192.

16. There are many, but for a recent example, see Zoe Williams, ‘It's all Feminism's Fault (again)’, The Guardian, Wednesday, 28 March 2007.

17. Big Women, p. 156.

18. Published in 1963.

19. Published in 1974.

20. She refers particularly to motherhood and heterosexual sex.

21. Big Women, p. 260.

22. Big Women, p. 149.

23. Big Women, p. 294.

24. Big Women, p. 312.

25. Big Women, p. 342.

26. Big Women, p. 267.

27. Big Women, p. 346.

28. Astrid Henry, ‘Feminism as the “Bad Mother”’ in Andrea O'Reilly and Sharon Abbey (eds), Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment, and Transformation, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, p. 215.

29. Lynne Segal, Why Feminism? London: Polity, 1999, pp. 230–1.