March Book of the Month: The Power of Yin, Celebrating Female Consciousness

March is the start of Women's History Month, and we at Cosimo are celebrating by shining the spotlight on three fantastic authors and their book: The Power of Yin, Celebrating Female Consciousness by Hazel Henderson, Barbara Marx-Hubbard, and Jean Houston as our March Book of the Month.

What are the best tactics to take to head off global environmental disaster? Is industrial society in decline, and if so, how should we manage its dismantling? How can humanity better integrate itself into the continuum of evolving technologies that surround us? Three of the most influential feminist philosophers of the 1970s met over two weekends in 1977 and 1978 to discuss the challenges facing society in the late 20th century... and their revelatory, inspiring conversation, reproduced here for the first time, is startlingly fresh and relevant for us today, as we rise to meet the challenges of the new millennium. With an uplifting spiritual perspective on the human experience and a uniquely feminine approach to interacting with the universe, Hazel Henderson, Jean Houston, and Barbara Marx Hubbard-with an able assist from editor Barbara DeLaney-here offer a magnificently feminist, grandly humanist, rousingly hopeful approach to the myriad challenges facing planet Earth and her people today.

The Power of Yin is more than a brilliant conversation. It is an invitation to women and men everywhere to express their own genius and empower their highest values and goals, to seek out others who attract them in this quest for personal development, to form ever deeper friendships, and to join together in spirit and in action to help evolve the human community on planet Earth.

About the Authors
Hazel Henderson is a world-renowned futurist, evolutionary economist, and consultant on sustainable development. Jean Houston is advisor to UNICEF in human and cultural development, and a principal founder of the Human Potential Movement. Barbara Marx Hubbard is president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution and a cofounder of Washington D.C.'s Committee for the Future.

August Classic of the Month: A Vindication of the Rights of Women

In the spirit of Women's Equality Day, (selected to commemorate the 1920 certification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote.) Cosimo's Classic of the Month is A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft as our Classic of the Month.

This 1792 book is one of the earliest works of protofeminist thought and is the first published argument advocating for the societal elevation of women as the intellectual and emotional equals of men. Written during the time of the French Revolution, this revolutionary book reacts against the French Diplomat's, Charles Maurice's, statement that women should be educated only in domestic matters.

Well received in its day and still an important resource for anyone wishing to understand the history of feminism, this extended essay demolishes the sexual double standard of the day, offers a rational defense for the education of girls, and demands merely that women be treated as people.

A Vindication of the Rights of Women is available in hardcover and paperback at leading online bookstores, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

About the Author:
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.