Published in 2019
342 pages
Jude Doyle (formerly Sady Doyle) is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. In 2008. They founded Tiger Beatdown, a pioneering blog in the “3,500-word-long rants about Tina Fey’s career” space. While at Tiger Beatdown, they led several successful social media awareness campaigns, including #MooreandMe and #MenCallMeThings, and won the Women’s Media Center Social Media Award in 2011. Jude Doyle has been a staff writer at In These Times Magazine since 2011. They were also one of the original staff writers at Rookie Magazine (their pieces can be found in Rookie: Yearbook One and Yearbook Two) and they contributed several pieces to the bestselling Book of Jezebel. In addition to all of the above, they’ve spoken at Harvard, SXSW, and Netroots Nation. Their pieces have appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Awl, Buzzfeed, and all across the Internet.
What is this book about?
Women have always been seen as monsters. Men from Aristotle to Freud have insisted that women are freakish creatures, capable of immense destruction.
Maybe they are. And maybe that’s a good thing….
This author is hailed as “smart, funny and fearless” by the Boston Globe, and takes readers on a tour of the female dark side, from the biblical Lilith to Dracula’s Lucy Westenra, from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park to the teen witches of The Craft. They illuminate the women who have shaped our nightmares: Serial killer Ed Gein’s “domineering” mother Augusta; exorcism casualty Anneliese Michel, starving herself to death to quell her demons; author Mary Shelley, dreaming her dead child back to life.
These monsters embody patriarchal fear of women, and illustrate the violence with which men enforce traditionally feminine roles. They also speak to the primal threat of a woman who takes back her power. In a dark and dangerous world, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers asks women to look to monsters for the ferocity we all need to survive.
