Feminist Reads

Books dedicated to feminist history and ideals.
Updated September 30, 2022
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The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan
Paper Book
Landmark, groundbreaking, classic--these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women...
Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women’s Movements
Dorothy Sue Cobble
Paper Book
Eschewing the conventional wisdom that places the origins of the American women's movement in the nostalgic glow of the late 1960s, Feminism Unfinished traces the beginnings of this seminal American social movement to the 1920s, in the process creating an expanded, historical narrative that...
Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger
Rebecca Traister
Paper Book
***NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*** ***BEST BOOKS OF 2018 SELECTION BY*** * WASHINGTON POST * People * NPR * ESQUIRE * ELLE * WIRED * REFINERY 29 * "In a year when issues of gender and sexuality dominated...
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
Mikki Kendall
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The fights against hunger, homelessness, poverty, health disparities, poor schools, homophobia, transphobia, and domestic violence are feminist fights. Kendall offers a feminism rooted in the livelihood of everyday women." --Ibram X. Kendi,...
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir
Paper Book
Newly translated and unabridged in English for the first time, and brilliantly introduced by Judith Thurman, Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpiece weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to analyze the Western notion of “woman” and to...
Sex Object: A Memoir
Jessica Valenti
Paper Book
No longer maligned as a fascistic movement of man-haters or declared dead on national magazine covers, feminism is now the zeitgeist. Beyoncé calls herself a feminist in forty foot lights; democratic candidate Hillary Clinton stumps for women's rights on the 2016 campaign trail; and...
We Should All Be Feminists
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The highly acclaimed, provocative essay on feminism and sexual politics--from the award-winning author of Americanah "A call to action, for all people in the world, to undo the gender hierarchy." --Medium<...
Women, race & class
Davis, Angela Y.
Paper Book
From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women's liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. "Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard."-The New York...
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft
Paper Book
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) The first great manifesto of women's rights, published in 1792 and an immediate best seller, made its author the toast of radical circles and the target of reactionary ones. Writing just after the French and American revolutions, Mary...
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Audre Lorde
Paper Book
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. "[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive,...
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
bell hooks
Paper Book
In this classic study, cultural critic bell hooks examines how black women, from the seventeenth century to the present day, were and are oppressed by both white men and black men and by white women.Illustrating her analysis with moving personal accounts, Ain't I a Woman is deeply critical of the...
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
Sandra M. Gilbert
Paper Book
An analysis of Victorian women writers, this pathbreaking book of feminist literary criticism is now reissued with a substantial new introduction by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of their revolutionary realization in the 1970s that "the personal was the political, the...
The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions
Paula Gunn Allen
Paper Book
This pioneering work, first published in 1986, documents the continuing vitality of American Indian traditions and the crucial role of women in those traditions.
Bad Feminist: Essays
Roxane Gay
Paper Book
"Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there."  -- Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be...
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf
Paper Book
"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." 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...

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