What does it mean to be a feminist today? This is one of the central questions author and educator Marianna Marlowe is attempting to answer and dissect in her new memoir ‘Portrait of a Feminist’ (She Writes Press) out February 2025.
Infused with a passion for justice, this sublime, expansive memoir by the Peruvian American feminist California writer will appeal to fans of ‘Crying in H Mart’ and ‘How to Raise a Feminist Son’.
Through braided memories that flash against the present day, ‘Portrait of a Feminist’ depicts the evolution of Marianna Marlowe’s identity as a biracial and multicultural woman—from her childhood in California, Peru, and Ecuador to her adulthood as an academic, a wife, and a mother.
How does the inner life of a feminist develop? How does a writer observe the world around her and kindle, from her earliest memories, a flame attuned to the unjust?
With writing that is simultaneously wise and shimmering, nuanced and direct, Marlowe confronts her own experiences with the hallmarks of patriarchy. Interweaving stories of life as the child of a Catholic Peruvian mother and an atheist American father in a family that lived many years abroad, she examines realities familiar to so many of us—unequal marriages, class structures, misogynist literature, and patriarchal religion.
‘Portrait of a Feminist’ explores the essential questions of feminism in our time: What does it look like to live in defense of feminism? How should feminism be evolving today?
We were lucky enough to feature an excerpt from the book below, which will certainly leave you wanting more! You can pre-order of a copy of ‘Portrait of a Feminist’ now.
PROLOGUE – Feminist or Not?
(California, 2013)
I scan the formal dining room. Twelve young faces look back at me, expectant. The group is all girls, all of them long-haired and most of them pony tailed, all but one white.
This is a National Junior League meeting a friend of mine asked me to lead. Her daughter, blonde as well as long-haired and pony tailed, sits among the others at the polished mahogany table. I have two hours to teach them about media literacy.
What I’m desperate to teach these girls is how to read the “texts” surrounding them every day and everywhere: the advertisements, romance novels, billboards, songs, and music videos, the movies, television shows, fashion magazines, Super Bowl commercials, and makeup tutorials, the Barbies and dolls and mannequins that all contain coded and uncoded messages about them—how they, young women, should look and behave, what they should want, what they should put up with, why they should be ashamed.
I want them to see the ever-present influences of our patriarchal culture, the ones working their spells, saturating every part of our social ecosystem like powerful dye tainting a bowl of water—or, even more fittingly I think, like toxic bacteria colonizing a host body.
I start by asking the question I used to ask my college classes at the beginning of each semester, “Who here is a feminist?”
Almost immediately, a hand shoots up. It belongs to the stocky, athletic girl at the table. After a moment’s hesitation, during which they see this first girl’s hand in the air, two more
girls, still tentative, raise their hands. My eyes scan the group of young women once again, hoping for another hand. No one else moves.
I sigh—but only on the inside, of course. I’d hoped that in the ten years that have passed since I taught undergraduate courses, the culture would have changed more than it has, much more than three raised hands, two of which are ambivalent.
Regardless, I do what I always do, I do the only thing I can think to do: I launch into the lesson.
Marianna Marlowe is a Latina writer who writes creative nonfiction that explores issues of gender identity, feminism, cultural hybridity, intersectionality, and more. Her short memoir has been published in Narrative, Hippocampus, The Woven Tale Press, Eclectica, Sukoon, and The Acentos Review among others. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can see more of her work on her website.