Women Speaking Up

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For Slate, Amanda Hess reports on a boom in the publication of personal essays about women’s issues like rape, abortion, or an eye-poppingly grotesque parasite infection that we’d rather remain ignorant of:

These stories are emotionally electric, politically relevant, and powerfully told. They’re also first-person confessionals about women’s reproductive issues—the type of taboo tales typically churned out in quick-fire online essays and given the as-told-to treatment in women’s magazines, where they are often embedded in the celebrity gossip cycle.


Dawn Pier is a developmental editor who blogs at the Rumpus, the travelogue Baja.com, and Dawn Revealed, a personal blog about her adventures surfing and living in Baja. She is working on a memoir about moving to Mexico to learn to surf and save a coral reef. More from this author →