How to Raise a Feminist Son

Sonora Jha, PhD, is an essayist, novelist, researcher, and professor of journalism at Seattle University. She is the author of the novel Foreign (Random House India, 2013) and co-editor of New Feminisms in South Asia: Disrupting the Discourse Through Social Media, Film, and Literature (Routledge USA, 2017). Her op-eds and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Seattle Times, the Establishment, DAME, and in several anthologies. She grew up in Mumbai and has been chief of metropolitan bureau for the Times of India, Bangalore, and contributing editor for East magazine in Singapore. She teaches fiction and essay writing for Hugo House, the Hedgebrook Writers' Retreat, and the Seattle Public Library. She is an alumna and board member of the Hedgebrook Writers' Retreat, and has served on the jury for awards for Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, and Hugo House.

How to Raise a Feminist Son is a love story that will resonate with feminists who hope to change the world, one kind boy at a time. From teaching consent to counteracting problematic messages from the media, well-meaning family, and the culture at large, we have big work to do when it comes to our boys. This empowering book offers much-needed insight and actionable advice. It's also a beautifully written and deeply personal story of struggling, failing, and eventually succeeding at raising a feminist son.

Informed by the author's work as a professor of journalism specializing in social-justice movements and social media, as well as by conversations with psychologists, experts, and other parents and boys, this book follows one mother's journey to raise a feminist son as a single parent. Through stories from her own life and wide-ranging research, Sonora Jha shows us all how to be better feminists and better teachers of the next generation of men in this electrifying tour de force.

In How to Raise a Feminist Son, Jha weaves her own fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, and always beautiful story of raising her own feminist son with careful research, insightful interviews, and helpful advice. There were countless times in reading this book where I found myself reevaluating things I had told my own sons and setting new goals for things I would teach them in the future. True love sees you for who you are, and true love holds you to account when you fall short of who you can be, because true love knows what you are capable of. This book is a true love letter, not only to Jha's own son but also to all of our sons and to the parents-especially mothers-who raise them.You can't punish your way to a more feminist world, I've long believed; you have to create, encourage, invent that world, especially in how you raise kids, but that's only one reason Sonora Jha's book is exhilarating and inspiring. It's a beautiful hybrid of memoir, manifesto, instruction manual, and rumination on the power of story and possibilities of family. I can't wait to put it in the hands of everyone raising kids or thinking about how we do it and how it could be different.Essential reading for any parent, loved one, or teacher seeking to raise feminist boys in these times. A strong case for how teaching our boys to show vulnerability, empathy, and remorse can be the path to freedom. Sonora Jha asks, 'Can boys be feminists?' The answer is a resounding YES.Combining the insight of memoir with sound advice, How to Raise a Feminist Son is a glorious map to a better future.Sonora Jha takes on the hardest questions and the most-fraught conversations with nuance and grace. Here, when addressing the deepest anxieties of parents raising boys committed to a fair and just society, her insights are invaluable.We need to grow better men. In this fierce, elegant, necessary book, Sonora Jha tells us how she did just that. Weaving together the personal and the political, Jha fearlessly examines our current moment and how it affects the young men among us. How to Raise A Feminist Son scorches, illuminates, and above all challenges us to do better.A poignant and timely book.The book is replete with accounts of various other single mothers, trans-mothers, LGBT parents, psychologists, counsellors, doctors, colleagues and authors - a wide range of women who have raised their children to be better feminists. The accounts of these women, belonging to different strata, tell us how misogyny has crippled human society across borders and continents.