Best Feminist Books

Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pinkall shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and Im not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the jou...

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 the...

What does “feminism” mean today? That is the question at the heart of We Should All Be Feminists, a personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from her much-viewed TEDx talk of the same name—by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. With humor and levity, here Adichie offers readers a unique defini...

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...

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 translatio...

Before The Testaments, there was The Handmaids Tale: an instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction (New York Times).The Handmaids Tale is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was...

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....

I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday.When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She ...

Sylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanityEsther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going undermaybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown wit...

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...

Featuring forty trailblazing black women in American history, Little Leaders educates and inspires as it relates true stories of breaking boundaries and achieving beyond expectations. Illuminating text paired with irresistible illustrations bring to life both iconic and lesser-known female figures of Black history such as abolitionist Sojourner Tru...