Hello everyone!
I am often asked by dudes who don’t know where to begin - what can they read to inform them about feminism, and women’s issues? I asked my Twitter followers to send me their favorite books on the aforementioned topics and I threw in a few favorites of my own to make this list. I kept it non-fiction mostly and books written by women.
I included brief descriptions of each book so that you may scroll through and see what specific topic sparks your curiosity. I did not write those descriptions - they are pulled from reviews and such.
I hope that this list keeps on expanding - feel free to share this and add your own favorite books in the comments. Please forgive any exclusion of any kind of feminist or woman - again let’s just keep adding to the list.
I would encourage anyone to look to their favorite local bookstore to find these titles - Indiebound is a good website that can help with that.
In no particular order here is the list that was complied with love and gratitude.
Happy reading everyone! Love, Jen
Feminism
Is For Everybody: Passionate Politics By Bell Hooks
What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, bell
hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate
sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity
and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and
change their lives—to see that feminism is for everybody.
America’s
Women By Gail Collins
America’s
Women
tells the story of more than four centuries of history. It features a stunning
array of personalities, from the women peering worriedly over the side of the
Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and
bridal fairs. Courageous, silly, funny, and heartbreaking, these women shaped
the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America.
Men Explain Things
to Me By Rebecca Solnit
In her comic, scathing essay, “Men Explain Things to
Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between
men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and
wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the
gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. This
updated edition with two new essays of this national bestseller book features
that now-classic essay as well as “#YesAllWomen,” an essay written in
response to 2014 Isla Vista killings and the grassroots movement that arose
with it to end violence against women and misogyny, and the essay “Cassandra
Syndrome.”
Bad
Feminist By Roxanne Gay
In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us
through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking
readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on
the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges
is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to
understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.
We
Should All Be Feminists By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In this personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from her
much-admired TEDx talk of the same name—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award-winning
author of Americanah, offers
readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century, one
rooted in inclusion and awareness. Drawing extensively on her own experiences
and her deep understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics,
here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman
now—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.
Unbought
and Unbossed By Shirley Chisholm
Unbought and Unbossed is Shirley Chisholm’s account of her
remarkable rise from young girl in Brooklyn to America’s first African-American
Congresswoman. She shares how she took on an entrenched system, gave a public
voice to millions, and sets the stage for her trailblazing bid to be the first
woman and first African-American President of the United States. By daring to
be herself, Shirley Chisholm shows us how she forever changed the status quo.
I
Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For
Education and Was Shot By The Taliban By Malala Yousafzai
Instead, Malala’s miraculous recovery has taken her on an
extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of
the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she became a global symbol of
peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Revolution
From Within: A Book of Self Esteem By Gloria Steinem
One of the founding mothers of contemporary feminism has
written a self-help book that utterly transcends the genre. In lucid prose that
is by turns brave and funny and tender, Steinem takes us on a journey of
circles and spirals because, as she says, “If we think of ourselves as
circles, our goal is completion … if we think of work structures as circles
… progress means mutual support and connectedness.” Drawing from
sources that range from Margaret Mead to Chief Seattle (Sealth), from Alice
Walker to the Upanishads, as well as from her own life and the lives of her
friends and colleagues, she provides a series of pathways to self-esteem.
Steinem’s book unfolds like a flower: it offers literature, art, nature,
meditation, and connectedness as ways of finding and exploring the self. Her
message is that it is our very selves that we need to trust, despite
educational and societal pressures that may denigrate the female experience.
Her focus is women, but she is clear that what she has to say is for men, too,
and she is neither strident nor dismissive. Recommended for all collections.
Sister
Outsider: Essays and Speeches By Audre Lordre and Cheryl Clarke
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and
feminist writer Audre Lorde, SISTER OUTSIDER celebrates an influential voice in
twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and
speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and
propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is
incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering
messages of hope.
My
Life on The Road By Gloria Steinem
To women “of a certain age” – a euphemism the author of this
book would surely abhor – the idea that Gloria Steinem is a revolutionary
thinker, a wonderful writer and a practical activist is not, perhaps, news.
(But there is something joyful in the rediscovery of same.) To those who didn’t
know or don’t remember the Steinem story – founding Ms. Magazine, fighting
for reproductive rights, waiting to marry until she was in her 60s! – it might
be a revelation. Long before Sheryl Sandberg leaned in at work, Steinem was
preaching the gospel of empowered women by, among other things, travelling the
country and the world listening to people, gathering stories and insights,
offering support of the intellectual and emotional kind. From the very first
page – in which she dedicates her book to the British doctor who ended
Steinem’s pregnancy, illegally, in 1957 – to the tales of a supposedly shy
woman who admitted she wanted to nail their sloppy husband’s tossed-anywhere
underwear to the floor, Steinem recounts a life well-travelled in every sense.
A
Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir By Daisy Hernandez
In this lyrical, coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández
chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love,
money, and race. Her mother warns her about envidia and men who seduce you with pastries, while one tía
bemoans that her niece is turning out to be “una india” instead of an American. Another auntie instructs that
when two people are close, they are bound to become like uña y mugre, fingernails and dirt,
and that no, Daisy’s father is not godless. He’s simply praying to a candy dish
that can be traced back to Africa. A heartfelt exploration of family,
identity, and language, A Cup of Water
Under My Bed is ultimately a daughter’s story of finding herself
and her community, and of creating a new, queer life.
Women
Race & Class By Angela Davis
A powerful study of the women’s movement in the U.S. from
abolitionist days to the present that demonstrates how it has always been
hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders.
Cunt:
A Declaration of Independence By Inga Muscio and Betty Dodson
An ancient title of respect for women, the word “cunt” long
ago veered off this noble path. Inga Muscio traces the road from honor to
expletive, giving women the motivation and tools to claim “cunt” as a positive
and powerful force in their lives. With humor and candor, she shares her own
history as she explores the cultural forces that influence women’s
relationships with their bodies.
A
Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story
of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France By Caroline Moorehead
They were teachers, students, chemists, writers, and
housewives; a singer at the Paris Opera, a midwife, a dental surgeon. They
distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, printed subversive newspapers, hid resisters,
secreted Jews to safety, transported weapons, and conveyed clandestine
messages. The youngest was a schoolgirl of fifteen who scrawled “V”
for victory on the walls of her lycée; the eldest, a farmer’s wife in her
sixties who harbored escaped Allied airmen. Strangers to each other, hailing from
villages and cities from across France, these brave women were united in hatred
and defiance of their Nazi occupiers.
Ain’t
I A Woman By Bell Hooks
A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain’t I a Woman has become a
must-read for all those interested in the nature of black womanhood. Examining
the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black
womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman’s
involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist
assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this book a
critical place on every feminist scholar’s bookshelf.
The
Woman Warrior By Maxine Hong Kingston
The Woman Warrior is a pungent,
bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in
Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston distills the dire lessons of her
mother’s mesmerizing “talk-story” tales of a China where girls are
worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her
way upward. The author’s America is a landscape of confounding white
“ghosts”–the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost–with equally
rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston
carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in
testimony to and defiance of the pain.
How
To Be a Woman By Caitlin Moran
Caitlin Moran puts a new face on feminism, cutting to the
heart of women’s issues today with her irreverent, transcendent, and hilarious How to Be a Woman. “Half memoir, half
polemic, and entirely necessary,” (Elle UK), Moran’s debut was an instant runaway bestseller in
England as well as an Amazon UK Top Ten book of the year; still riding high on
bestseller lists months after publication, it is a bona fide cultural
phenomenon.
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women By Susan Faludi
When it was first published, Backlash made headlines for puncturing such favorite media myths
as the “infertility epidemic” and the “man shortage,” myths that defied
statistical realities. These willfully fictitious media campaigns added up to
an antifeminist backlash. Whatever progress feminism has recently made,
Faludi’s words today seem prophetic. The media still love stories about
stay-at-home moms and the “dangers” of women’s career ambitions; the glass
ceiling is still low; women are still punished for wanting to succeed; basic
reproductive rights are still hanging by a thread. The backlash clearly
exists. With passion and precision,
Faludi shows in her new preface how the creators of commercial culture distort
feminist concepts to sell products while selling women downstream, how the
feminist ethic of economic independence is twisted into the consumer ethic of
buying power, and how the feminist quest for self-determination is warped into
a self-centered quest for self-improvement. Backlash is a classic of feminism, an alarm bell for women of
every generation, reminding us of the dangers that we still face.
The
Feminine Mystique By Betty Friedan
Landmark, groundbreaking, classic―these adjectives barely do
justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963,
it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the
insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their
intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the
average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students
dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and
thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim
their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with
fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to
inspire.
For
Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf By Ntozake Shange
Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant
to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975,
when it was praised by The New Yorker for
“encompassing … every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered
suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for
generations to come.
The
Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist
Vegetarian Critical Theory By Carol J. Adams
The Sexual Politics
of Meat
is Carol Adams’ inspiring and controversial exploration of the interplay
between contemporary society’s ingrained cultural misogyny and its obsession
with meat and masculinity. First published in 1990, the book has continued to
change the lives of tens of thousands of readers into the second decade of the
21st century.
A
Room of One’s Own By Virginia Woolf
In A Room of One’s
Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—a sister
equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is
radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her
own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues
Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling. In this
classic essay, she takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to
dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her
message is a simple one: women must have a fixed income and a room of their own
in order to have the freedom to create.
The
Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine By Somaly Mam
Written in exquisite, spare, unflinching prose, The Road of Lost Innocence recounts the
experiences of her early life and tells the story of her awakening as an
activist and her harrowing and brave fight against the powerful and corrupt
forces that steal the lives of these girls. She has orchestrated raids on
brothels and rescued sex workers, some as young as five and six; she has built
shelters, started schools, and founded an organization that has so far saved
more than four thousand women and children in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and
Laos. Her memoir will leave you awestruck by her tenacity and courage and will
renew your faith in the power of an individual to bring about change.
The
Beauty Myth By Naomi Wolf
In today’s world, women have more power, legal recognition,
and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of
the women’s movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by
a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as
restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It’s the beauty
myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an
endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to
fulfill society’s impossible definition of “the flawless beauty.”
The
Second Sex By Simone de Beauvoir
Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first
time, Simone de Beauvoir’s masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western
notion of “woman,” and a groundbreaking exploration of inequality and
otherness. This long-awaited new edition reinstates significant portions
of the original French text that were cut in the first English translation.
Vital and groundbreaking, Beauvoir’s pioneering and impressive text remains as
pertinent today as it was sixty years ago, and will continue to provoke and
inspire generations of men and women to come.
Redfining
Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More By Janet Mock
With unflinching honesty and moving prose, Janet Mock relays
her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and trans in America,
offering readers accessible language while imparting vital insight about the
unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood
population. Though undoubtedly an account of one woman’s quest for self at all
costs, Redefining Realness is a
powerful vision of possibility and self-realization, pushing us all toward
greater acceptance of one another—and of ourselves—showing as never before how
to be unapologetic and real.
Bi:
Notes For A Bisexual Revolution By Shiri Esner
The research Eisner has done for this book is clear from the
beginning and the result is an incredible historical review of the bisexual
movement from a whole host of perspectives and views, as well as clear ideas
for revolutionizing it from here on out. With chapters on bisexuality,
monosexism and biphobia, privilege, feminism, women and men, trans*,
radicalization and what Eisner calls the “GGGG movement,” or the
Gay-Gay-Gay-Gay movement, readers are exposed to the major issues that have
impacted bisexuals over the years and those that are affecting us today.”
Sexual
Politics By Kate Millett
A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics
documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Beginning in
1830 and targeting four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman
Mailer, and Jean Genet—Kate Millett builds a damning profile of literature’s
patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and
politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize
inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in
all facets of life.
Girls
To The Front By Sara Marcus
Girls To the Front is the epic,
definitive history of Riot Grrrl—the radical feminist
uprising that exploded into the public eye in the 1990s and included incendiary
punk bands Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and Huggy Bear. A dynamic
chronicle not just a movement but an era, this is the story of a group of
pissed-off girls with no patience for sexism and no intention of keeping quiet.
Elizabeth
Cady Stanton: An American Life By Lori D. Ginzberg
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a brilliant
activist-intellectual. That nearly all of her ideas—that women are entitled to
seek an education, to own property, to get a divorce, and to vote—are now
commonplace is in large part because she worked tirelessly to extend the
nation’s promise of radical individualism to women. In this subtly crafted
biography, the historian Lori D. Ginzberg narrates the life of a woman of great
charm, enormous appetite, and extraordinary intellectual gifts who turned the
limitations placed on women like herself into a universal philosophy of equal
rights.
Against
Our Will: Men, Women and Rape By Susan Brownmiller
Rape, as author Susan Brownmiller proves in her startling
and important book, is not about sex but about power, fear, and subjugation.
For thousands of years, it has been viewed as an acceptable “spoil of war,”
used as a weapon by invading armies to crush the will of the conquered. The act
of rape against women has long been cloaked in lies and false justifications.
Femininity By Susan Brownmiller
Writing with great passion, warmth, and wit on a subject
that’s never been explored in these terms before, Susan Brownmiller draws on
the many manifestations of femininity through the ages, and demonstrates in
beautiful and telling detail the many powerful nuances of that one word.
Shock
Treatment By Karen Finley
Finley’s Shock
Treatment is more than just ‘art.’ It remains a searing and necessary
indictment of America, a call to arms, a great protest against the injustices
waged on queers and women during a time in recent American history where
government intervention and recognition was so desperately needed. Twenty-five
years on, Finley’s work continues to shock and provoke readers and audiences,
demonstrating the powerful cultural and political impact her work has had on
modern American art and performance art.
Unbending
Gender By Joan C. Williams
In Unbending Gender,
Joan Williams takes a hard look at the state of feminism in America. Concerned
by what she finds–young women who flatly refuse to identify themselves as
feminists and working-class and minority women who feel the movement hasn’t
addressed the issues that dominate their daily lives–she outlines a new vision
of feminism that calls for workplaces focused on the needs of families and, in
divorce cases, recognition of the value of family work and its impact on
women’s earning power.
When
Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the
Present By Gail Collins
A comprehensive mix of oral history and Gail Collins’s keen
research–covering politics, fashion, popular culture, economics, sex,
families, and work–When Everything
Changed is the definitive book on five crucial decades of progress. The
enormous strides made since 1960 include the advent of the birth control pill,
the end of “Help Wanted–Male” and “Help Wanted–Female”
ads, and the lifting of quotas for women in admission to medical and law schools.
Gail Collins describes what has happened in every realm of women’s lives,
partly through the testimonies of both those who made history and those who
simply made their way.
Sex
Among The Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution
1730-1830 By Clare A. Lyons
Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations in
Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, Clare A. Lyons uncovers a world where runaway
wives challenged their husbands’ patriarchal rights and where serial and casual
sexual relationships were commonplace. By reading popular representations of
sex against actual behavior, Lyons reveals the clash of meanings given to sex
and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its
subversive potential.
Witches,
Midwives, & Nurses: A History of
Women Healers By Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre
English
Witches, Midwives,
and Nurses, first published by The Feminist Press in 1973, is an
essential book about the corruption of the medical establishment and its
historic roots in witch hunters. In this new edition, Barbara Ehrenreich and
Deirdre English have written an entirely new chapter that delves into the
current fascination with and controversies about witches, exposing our fears
and fantasies. They build on their classic exposé on the demonization of women
healers and the political and economic monopolization of medicine. This quick
history brings us up-to-date, exploring today’s changing attitudes toward
childbirth, alternative medicine, and modern-day witches.
Our
Bodies Ourselves By Judy Norsigian
America’s best-selling book on all aspects of women’s health
With more than four million copies sold, “Our Bodies, Ourselves” is
“the” classic resource that women of all ages can turn to for
information about every aspect of their well-being.
Delusions
Of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences By Cordelia Fine
This is a vehement attack on the latest pseudo-scientific
claims about the differences between the sexes - with the scientific evidence
to back it up. Sex discrimination is supposedly a distant memory. Yet popular
books, magazines and even scientific articles increasingly defend inequalities
by citing immutable biological differences between the male and female brain.
Why are there so few women in science and engineering, so few men in the
laundry room? Well, they say, it’s our brains. Drawing on the latest research
in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and social psychology,
“Delusions of Gender” rebuts these claims, showing how old myths, dressed
up in new scientific finery, help perpetuate the status quo.
Making
Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras:
Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color By Gloria Anzaldua
A bold collection of creative pieces and theoretical essays
by women of color. New thought and new dialogue: a book that will teach in the
most multiple sense of that word: a book that will be of lasting value to many
diverse communities of women as well as to students from those communities. The
authors explore a full spectrum of present concerns in over seventy pieces that
vary from writing by new talents to published pieces by Audre Lorde, Joy Harjo,
Norma Alarcón and Trinh T. Minh-ha.
Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights By Katha Pollitt
Forty years after the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, “abortion” is still a word that is
said with outright hostility by many, despite the fact that one in three
American women will have terminated at least one pregnancy by menopause. Even
those who support a woman’s right to an abortion often qualify their support by
saying abortion is a “bad thing,” an “agonizing decision,”
making the medical procedure so remote and radioactive that it takes it out of
the world of the everyday, turning an act that is normal and necessary into
something shameful and secretive. Meanwhile, with each passing day, the rights
upheld by the Supreme Court are being systematically eroded by state laws
designed to end abortion outright. In this urgent, controversial book, Katha
Pollitt reframes abortion as a common part of a woman’s reproductive life, one
that should be accepted as a moral right with positive social implications.
Governing
Girls: Rehabilitation in the Age of Risk By Christie L. Barron
Recognizing the significant media hype and moral panic over
assaults and violent crimes perpetrated by young women in recent years, this
investigation reveals how Canadian governmental response to control crime
overall and provide citizen protection has taken various—and often
contradictory—forms. The current research agenda is explored, revealing how it
focuses on risk assessment for controlling youth violence while ignoring the
very concept of “risk” as a sociocultural phenomenon.
Feminist
Theory: A Reader By Wendy Kolmar
Feminist Theory: A
Reader
represents the history, intellectual breadth, and diversity of feminist theory.
The selections are organized into six historical periods from the 18th century
to the late 2000s and include key feminist manifestos to help readers see the
link between feminist theory and application. The collection presents feminist
through from its inception as the province of women of different races,
classes, nationalities, and sexualities in order to demonstrate the continuity
in feminist theory discussions.
Manifesta: Young
Women, Feminism and the Future By Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy
Richards
In the year 2000, girl culture was clearly ascendant. From
Lilith Fair to Buffy the Vampire
Slayer to the WNBA, it seemed that female pride was the order of the
day. Yet feminism was also at a crossroads; “girl power” feminists
were obsessed with personal empowerment at the expense of politics, while
political institutions such as Ms. and NOW had lost their ability to speak to a
new generation. In Manifesta,
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards brilliantly revealed the snags in each
feminist hub, all the while proving that these snags had not imperiled the
future of the feminist cause. The book went on to inspire a new generation of
female readers, and has become a classic of contemporary feminist literature.
Sister
Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black
Women in America By Melissa V. Harris-Perry
In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses
multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory,
focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply
black women’s political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and
gender images. Not a traditional political science work concerned with
office-seeking, voting, or ideology, Sister
Citizen instead explores how African American women understand
themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing.
I Know Why The
Caged Bird Sings By Maya Angelou
I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of
bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s
debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity By Judith Butler
One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the
past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as
celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong
to look to a natural, 'essential’ notion of the female, or indeed of sex or
gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman’ and continues in this
vein with examinations of 'the masculine’ and 'the feminine’.
Female Chauvinist
Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture By Ariel Levy
Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig—the new brand of “empowered
woman” who wears the Playboy bunny as a talisman, bares all for Girls Gone
Wild, pursues casual sex as if it were a sport, and embraces “raunch culture”
wherever she finds it. If male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women
as pieces of meat, Female Chauvinist Pigs of today are doing them one better,
making sex objects of other women—and of themselves. They think they’re being
brave, they think they’re being funny, but in Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy asks if the joke is on them.
The New Feminist
Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution For
Women, Work, And Family By Madeleine Kunin
Feminists opened up thousands of doors in the 1960s and
1970s, but decades later, are U.S. women where they thought they’d be? The
answer, it turns out, is a resounding no. Surely there have been gains. Women
now comprise nearly 60 percent of college undergraduates and half of all
medical and law students. They have entered the workforce in record numbers,
making the two-wage-earner family the norm. But combining a career and family
turned out to be more complicated than expected. While women changed, social
structures surrounding work and family remained static. Affordable and
high-quality child care, paid family leave, and equal pay for equal work remain
elusive for the vast majority of working women. In fact, the nation has fallen
far behind other parts of the world on the gender-equity front. We lag behind
more than seventy countries when it comes to the percentage of women holding
elected federal offices. Only 17 percent of corporate boards include women
members. And just 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies are led by women.
The Hidden Face of
Eve: Women in the Arab World By Nawal El Saadawi
This powerful account of brutality against women in the
Muslim world remains as shocking today as when it was first published, more
than a quarter of a century ago. It was the horrific female genital mutilation
that she suffered aged only six, which first awakened Nawal el Saadawi’s sense
of the violence and injustice which permeated her society. Her experiences
working as a doctor in villages around Egypt, witnessing prostitution, honour
killings and sexual abuse, inspired her to write in order to give voice to this
suffering. She goes on explore the causes of the situation through a discussion
of the historical role of Arab women in religion and literature.Saadawi argues
that the veil, polygamy and legal inequality are incompatible with the just and
peaceful Islam which she envisages.
The Vagina
Monologues By Eve Ensler
A poignant and hilarious tour of the last frontier, the
ultimate forbidden zone, The Vagina
Monologues is a celebration of female sexuality in all its complexity
and mystery. In this stunning phenomenon that has swept the nation, Eve Ensler
gives us real women’s stories of intimacy, vulnerability, and sexual
self-discovery.
He’s a Stud, She’s
a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know By Jessica Valenti
In 50 Double
Standards Every Woman Should Know, Jessica Valenti, author of Full
Frontal Feminism, calls out the double standards that affect every woman. Whether
Jessica is pointing out the wage earning discrepancies between men and women or
revealing all of the places that women still aren’t equal to their male
counterparts—be it in the workplace, courtroom, bedroom, or home—she maintains
her signature wittily sarcastic tone. With sass, humor, and in-your-face facts,
this book informs and equips women with the tools they need to combat sexist
comments, topple ridiculous stereotypes (girls aren’t good at math?), and end
the promotion of lame double standards.
Full Frontal
Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters By Jessica Valenti
Full Frontal Feminism is a smart and
relatable guide to the issues that matter to today’s young women. This edition
includes a new foreword by Valenti, reflecting upon what’s happened in the
seven years since Full Frontal
Feminism was originally published. With new openers from Valenti in
every chapter, the book covers a range of topics, including pop culture,
health, reproductive rights, violence, education, relationships, and more.
Mighty Be Our
Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer & Sex Changed a Nation At War By Leymah Gbowee & Carol Mithers
In a time of death and terror, Leymah Gbowee brought
Liberia’s women together–and together they led a nation to peace. As a young woman,
Gbowee was broken by the Liberian civil war, a brutal conflict that tore apart
her life and claimed the lives of countless relatives and friends.
A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman By Mary Wollstonecraft
In an era of revolutions demanding greater liberties for
mankind, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an ardent feminist who spoke
eloquently for countless women of her time. Having witnessed firsthand the
devastating results of male improvidence, she assumed an independent role early
in life, educating herself and eventually earning a living as a governess,
teacher and writer.
Outrageous Acts
& Everyday Rebellions By Gloria Steinem
Outrageous Acts and
Everyday Rebellions–a phenomenal success that sold nearly half a million
copies since its original publication in 1983–is Gloria Steinem’s most diverse
and timeless collection of essays. Both male and female readers have acclaimed
it as a witty, warm, and life-changing view of the world–“as if women
mattered.”
The Will to
Change: Men, Masculinity & Love By Bell Hooks
Everyone needs to love and be loved – even men. But to know
love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them
from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving.
In The Will to Change, bell
hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions
that are a fundamental part of who they are – whatever their age, marital
status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
Colonize This!
Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism By Daisy Hernandez
Daisy Hernandez of Ms. magazine and poet Bushra Rehman have
collected a diverse, lively group of emerging writers who speak to their
experience—to the strength and rigidity of community and religion, to borders
and divisions, both internal and external—and address issues that take feminism
into the twenty-first century.
The Feminist
Utopia Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future By Alexandra Brodsky & Rachel
Kauder Nalebuff
In this groundbreaking collection, more than fifty
cutting-edge voices, including Melissa Harris-Perry, Janet Mock, Sheila Heti,
and Mia McKenzie, invite us to imagine a truly feminist world. An abortion
provider reinvents birth control, Sheila Bapat envisions an economy that values
domestic work, a teenage rock band dreams up a new way to make music, Katherine
Cross rewrites the Constitution, and Maya Dusenbery resets the standard for
good sex. Combining essays, interviews, poetry, illustrations, and short
stories, The Feminist Utopia Project
challenges the status quo that accepts inequality and violence as a given—and
inspires us to demand a radically better future.
Asking For It: The
Alarming Rise of Rape Culture & What We Can Do About It By Kate Harding
In Asking for It,
Kate Harding combines in-depth research with an in-your-face voice to make the
case that twenty-first-century America supports rapists more effectively than
it supports victims. Drawing on real-world examples of what feminists call
“rape culture"—from politicos’ revealing gaffes to institutional
failures in higher education and the military—Harding offers ideas and
suggestions for how we, as a society, can take sexual violence much more
seriously without compromising the rights of the accused.
The Woman in the
Body By Emily Martin
A bold reappraisal of science and society, The Woman in the Body explores the
different ways that women’s reproduction is seen in American culture.
Contrasting the views of medical science with those of ordinary women from
diverse social and economic backgrounds, anthropologist Emily Martin presents
unique fieldwork on American culture and uncovers the metaphors of economy and
alienation that pervade women’s imaging of themselves and their bodies.
Dirty River: A
Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina
In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ran away from
America with two backpacks and ended up in Canada, where she discovered queer
anarchopunk love and revolution, yet remained haunted by the reasons she left
home in the first place. This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of
dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance
nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of color and abuse survivor
navigates the dirty river of the past and, as the subtitle suggests,
"dreams her way home.”
Black Feminist
Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment By Patricia Hill Collins
In spite of the double burden of racial and gender
discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual
tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill
Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as
those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive
framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela
Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde.
Everyday Sexism By Laura Bates
In 2012 after having been sexually harassed on London
public transport, Laura Bates started a project called Everyday Sexism.
Astounded by the response from all over the world, she quickly realized that
the situation was far worse than she’d initially thought. In a culture that’s driven by social media,
for the first time women are using this online space, now in 19 countries, to
come together and to encourage a new generation to recognize the problems that
women face.