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Satan Wants You---A documentary about Satanic Panic in the 80s
I have always been fasinated with the human mind---and find it disturbing how people are able to deeply believe in things that are complete lies. This movie talks about the orgins of Satanic Panic and how this religious psychatrist and his patient basically encouraged the world to believe that satanists were torturing children in secret. i never understood how people could be so unskeptical, and gullible that they could actually believe in the absolute nonsense that was Michelle Remembers. The movie does a very good job intereviewing family of both the psychatrist, Lawrance Pazdar and Michelle Smith as well as police officers and psychologists. But I really hated how the movie really glossed over what a prediator Pazdar was and seemed to more place the blame on Michelle Smith---who was obviously an extremely mentally ill woman. They also placed a lot of the blame on the church---who does deserve a lot of the blame...but again glosses over the role of psychatrists, and therapists who were going on talk shows and writing books about how satanic abuse was absolutely real. It also all but ignored the fact that these kids were often not lying---they were coerced into saying that these things happened to them by therapists that were goading them. Michelle Smith was a mentally unwell woman, who was abused by her dad and had a miscarraige. Lawrance PAzdar kept goading her on and on to think that her nightmares were ritualistic abuse, it was seriously upsetting hearing these recordings of her saying she wasn't sure what is real and unreal. Only ONE police man spoke out about he holds Pazdar to blame for all of this-----literally everyone else in the movie acted like Michelle Smith was a homewrecker who made up a story to trap this poor innocent psychatristeyeroll
They connected the Satanic Panic to Pizzagate very briefly then just went back to people wondering how all of this could have happened, instead of actually delving into psychology and why we are a so eager to believe. They could have also mentioned the whole Elizabeth Holmes fiasco and how so many people fell for an obvious lie and pretended that her device was actually working. But then we would have to acknowledge that sometimes science is shady as hell too---not just religion.
I have a book created in the 1970s by Blance Wiesen Cook I bought at a yard sale, Women and Revolution. It puts together the writings of Crystal Eastman who was active in the early years of the 20th century.
It's fascinating, because it has essays which address the kind of quarreling feminists have always been doing with each other and also the kind of support and sisterhood there has always also been when bad things happen. One essay talks about their views on women working night shifts, where some in the group wanted laws to stop women having to work nights because of the extra physical danger for them and others worried about the fact that women would then be less likely to be hired at all and wouldn't be able to earn as much.
But it has many other interesting essays, too. I have never seen it discussed so I have no idea how important Eastman was.
Off the top of my head, Crystal Eastman was a pretty well known progressive and sister of Max Eastman, also a progressive. What an amazing yard sale find!
It was an amazing find! I felt the book found me rather than the other way round.
The one you just posted! :D Gilman's Dress of Women is another favorite. Alice Duer Miller's Are Women People? contains some hilarious poems.
On the other side of the pond, I found Lady Constance Lytton's Prisons and Prisoners particularly moving, and there's a fine anthology, Literature of the Women's Suffrage Campaign in England, edited by Carolyn Christensen Nelson.
The Awakening was my personal favorite.
I loved it, too. I should check my bookshelves as I bought a bunch of books on the same day when I bought that one, and I believe they are all from the same era. Will add them here tomorrow.
Some classics, in no particular order:
Charlotte Perkins Stetson, 1898. Women and economics: A study of the economic relation between men and women as a factor in social evolution.
Josephine E. Butler, 1896. Personal reminiscences of a great crusade.
Jennie Anderson Froiseth, editor, 1887. The Women of Mormonism, or, the story of polygamy, as told by the victims themselves.
Victoria Woodhull, 1870-1896. The Victoria Woodhull Reader.
Jane Addams, 1914 (reprint of 1912 book). A new conscience and an ancient evil.
Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard, 1864, Marital Power Exemplified; 1868, The Prisoners' Hidden Life.
Sarah M. Grimké, 1837. Letters on the equality of the sexes, and the condition of woman. Addressed to Mary S. Parker, President of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. IN Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké, 1835–1838. On slavery and abolitionism: Essays and letters.
Josie Washburn, 1909. The underworld sewer: a prostitute reflects on life in the trade, 1871-1909.
Margaret Sanger, 1931. My fight for birth control.
Also, Annie Besant wrote some stuff, including an autobiography. She was involved in publishing birth control information and was active against sex trafficking before she went New Age.
These are all books I've read. I'm not sure if any of them count as "best", but that may be a personal thing, too.