The Feminist and the Cowboy: An Unlikely Love Story

The bestselling author of The Dirty Girls Social Club returns with a provocative and controversial memoir about how a sexy cowboy turned her feminist beliefs upside down.

Feminism was a religion in Alisa Valdes's childhood home, and her hippie Marxist parents raised her to believe that she was meant for better things than playing with Barbies. Instead, she read Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. At twenty-two Valdes was named one of the top feminist writers under thirty.

Yet despite her professional success, Valdes hit forty-two bitter, divorced, and a serial dater of inadequate men in tweed jackets. Realizing that her upbringing had sabotaged her personal happiness, she embarks on a soul-searching journey and ends up falling head over spurs in love with the Cowboy, a conservative rancher who drives a pickup with a pistol under the front seat.

From their first date the Cowboy makes her pulse race, and she discovers that “when men . . . act like men rather than like emasculated boys, you as a woman will find not only great pleasure in submitting to them but also great growth as a person.”

This controversial book will spark heated national debate, but Learning to Submit will also delight the many readers who made The Pioneer Woman a bestseller—not to mention every woman who dreams of being swept away by a rugged cowboy.