Feminist Literature

The Awakening – Kate Chopin
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
The Blazing World – Margaret Cavendish
Book of Dead Birds – Gail Brandeis
The Book of Salt – Monique Truong
Crescent – Diane Abu-Jabar
The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted and Other Stories – Elizabeth Berg
A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen
The Female Man – Joanna Russ
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf – Ntosake Shange
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Fun Home – Alison Bechdel
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
The Great Gilly Hopkins – Katherine Paterson
Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
The House on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This – Robin Black
In the Time of the Butterflies – Julia Alvarez
Leaving Rock Harbor – Rebecca Chace
Like One of the Family – Alice Childress
Living My Life – Emma Goldman
Love and Rockets – Jaime Hernandez
The Magician’s Assistant – Ann Patchett
A Map of Home – Randa Jarrer
Maud Martha – Gwendolyn Brooks
My Bird – Fariba Vafi
My Year of Meats – Ruth Ozeki
Oroonoko – Aphra Behn
Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi
Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi AdicheReading Lolita in Tehran –
The Red Tent – Anita Diamant
The Rose and the Beast – Francesca Lia Block
The Salt Eaters – Toni Cade Bambara
Scottsboro – Ellen Feldman
Speak – Laurie Halse Anderson
Sula – Toni Morrison
A Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Thing Around Your Neck – Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
This Child’s Gonna Live – Sarah Wright
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories – Sandra Cisneros
Woman on the Edge of Time – Marge Piercy
The Women’s Room – Marilyn French

Feminist Literature: authors with more than one title
Maya Angelou
Margaret Atwood
Jane Austen
Aimee Bender
Octavia Butler
Angela Carter
Edwidge Danticat
Tanith Lee
Ursula Le Guin
Audre Lorde
Suzan Lori-Parks
Grace Paley
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Wendy Wasserstein
Jeannette Winterson
Alice Walker
Virginia Woolf

Feminist Authors of Non-Fiction and Fiction
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Nawal El Saadawi
Barbara G Walker
Marina Warner

General Feminist Non-Fiction

Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil – Inga Muscio
Backlash: the Undeclared War on American Women – Susan Faludi
The Body Project – Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Catfight! – Leora Tanenbaum
Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists – Courtney Martin and Courtney Sullivan
Englightened Sexism – Susan J. Douglas
Fat is a Feminist Issue – Susie Orbach
The Feminine and The Sacred – Catherine Clemant
The Feminist Promise – Christine Stansell
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics – Bell Hooks
Feminist Theory from Margin to Center – Bell Hooks
Full Frontal Feminism – Jessica Valenti
He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut – Jessica Valenti
Men and Feminism – Shira Tarrant
The Mermaid and the Minotaur – Dorothy Dinnerstein
No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power– Gloria Feldt
Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi
Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV – Jennifer Pozner
Reasonable Creatures – Katha Pollitt
Sexism in America: Alive, Well, and Ruining Our Future – Barbara J. Berg
Sisterhood Interrupted – Deborah Siegel
Slut! – Leora Tanenbaum
Taking on the Big Boys, or Why Feminism is Good for Families, Business and the Nation – Ellen Bravo
Where The Girls Are – Susan J. Douglas
When Everything Changed – Gail Collins
The World Split Open – Ruth Rosen

A Brief outline about the above General Feminist Non-Fiction:

Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil – Inga Muscio
It’s just called history, asserts Inga Muscio in her newest book. In fact, the controversial author continues, the so-called history we learn in school is no more than a brand, developed by white men who, often unjustly, won the right to spin their stories as hard facts. Now it’s Muscio’s turn and here is the truth about the American history they think they know. Whose country is it? Has democracy ever really existed? Why does our culture celebrate certain figures and ignore others? Do schools teach kids to perpetuate white supremacist ideologies? Muscio delves deep to answer these questions, marveling at how personal history is to everyone, while challenging people to expand their thinking on America’s past and encouraging them to consider how their own histories might read.

Backlash: the Undeclared War on American Women – Susan Faludi
Far from being “liberated,” American women in the 1980s were victims of a powerful backlash against the handful of small, hard-won victories the feminist movement had achieved, says Wall Street Journal reporter Faludi, who won a Pulitzer this year. Buttressing her argument with facts and statistics, she states that the alleged “man shortage” endangering women’s chances of marrying (posited by a Harvard-Yale study) and the “infertility epidemic” said to strike professional women who postpone childbearing are largely media inventions. She finds evidence of antifeminist backlash in Hollywood movies, in TV’s thirtysomething , in 1980s fashion ads featuring battered models and in the New Right’s attack on women’s rights. She directs withering commentary at Robert Bly’s all-male workshops, Allan Bloom’s “prolonged rant” against women and Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer’s revisionism. This eloquent, brilliantly argued book should be read by everyone concerned about gender equality.

The Body Project – Joan Jacobs Brumberg
From the most private method of sanitary protection to the most intimate place to pierce one’s body, this history of feminine hygiene and fashion records young women’s obsession with looks and how society has channeled and manipulated them to reflect the values of the times. From diaries, journal articles, advertising, and doctor’s records, the author has amassed information about mainly middle-class American girls of the 19th and 20th century that shows how they have been raised first by overprotective, repressive adults to play a submissive role in society and, more recently, to be consumers in an ever-widening marketplace

Catfight! – Leora Tanenbaum
Tanenbaum’s first book (Slut!) examined how social competition causes some female teenagers to attack others for real or imagined sexual behavior. In this follow-up, she branches out, taking on adult women and their struggles to look prettier, land better boyfriends or husbands, be more popular with co-workers and be considered better mothers than other women, sisterhood be damned.

Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists – Courtney Martin and Courtney Sullivan
Compiled by authors Martin (Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters) and Sullivan (Commencement), this volume looks at the catalytic moments when 28 women (and one man) found their way to feminism. Including writers, activists, and educators, contributors provide perspective and personal revelations from all stages of life.

Englightened Sexism – Susan J. Douglas
In a sharp-witted polemic against the media’s stereotyping of females and feminism, University of Michigan communications professor Douglas (Where the Girls Are) parses music, movies, magazines, television dramas, reality TV, and news coverage to demonstrate how the girl power of the early ’90s developed into enlightened sexism: a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. Given women’s progress, enlightened sexism assumes, now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women.

Fat is a Feminist Issue – Susie Orbach
Susie Orbach is an internationally celebrated more or less Britain-based psychotherapist and writer. She is a leading authority on eating disorders, and the author of many books, including Hunger Strike (1986), What’s Really Going on Here?” (1994), Towards Emotional Literacy (1999), and The Impossibility of Sex (1999).

The Feminine and the Sacred – Catherine Clement
Although their discourse is not necessarily about theology, the authors consider the role of women and femininity in the religions of the world, from Christianity and Judaism to Confucianism and African animism. They are the first to admit that what they have undertaken is “as impossible to accomplish as it is fascinating.” Nevertheless, their wide-ranging and exhilarating dialogue succeeds in raising questions that are perhaps more important to ask than to answer.

The Feminist Promise – Christine Stansell
Stansell largely blames the breaks in the long narrative of women’s struggle for equality in America on “historical amnesia” that erased a sense that “the past was backing them up” and left each generation to forge new approaches without a record of prior feminist thought and action. Stansell’s comprehensive history tracks major and minor moments that highlight promise both realized and unmet.

Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics – Bell Hooks
In this engaging and provocative volume, bell hooks introduces a popular theory of feminism rooted in common sense and the wisdom of experience. Hers is a vision of a beloved community that appeals to all those committed to equality, mutual respect, and justice.

Feminist Theory from Margin to Center – Bell Hooks
A fantastic, indispensable book that should be read by everyone who has eyes and half a cerebellum. A great starting point for people who, like me, were interested in feminism but always felt the whole Betty Friedan liberate-the-homemaker aspect they taught us in highschool was a bit shallow, moot, and furthermore nonapplicable to males.

Full Frontal Feminism – Jessica Valenti
Covering a range of topics, including pop culture, health, reproductive rights, violence, education, relationships, and more, Valenti provides young women a primer on why feminism matters.

The Good Women of China – Xinran
Xinran worked for eight years as a well-known presenter at a Chinese radio station. As a public figure, she received many letters. Most of them were from women. Moved by the stories she was hearing in the letters, she decided to go in search of more of the truths about Chinese women’s lives. What she found was terrible suffering; women who had endured lengthy sexual abuse during the Cultural Revolution, women whose wretched poverty was made more miserable by the dictates of a male-centred society, women who had had their children taken from them or who had lost them in earthquakes and other natural disasters. And, amid all the suffering, she found their capacity to endure and somehow survive.

He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know – Jessica Valenti
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.

Men and Feminism – Shira Tarrant
Addressing the question of why men should care about feminism in the first place, this book lays the foundation for a larger discussion about feminism as a human issue, not simply a women’s issue, and answers all the questions men have about how and why they should get behind feminism.

The Monstrous-feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis – Barbara Creed
In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualised only as victim. Here Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body.
With close reference to a number of classic horror films including the Alien trilogy, The Exorcist and Psycho, Creed analyses the seven ‘faces’ of the monstrous-feminine: archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator. Her argument that man fears woman as castrator, rather than as castrated, questions not only Freudian theories of sexual difference but existing theories of spectatorship and fetishism, providing a provocative re-reading of classical and contemporary film and theoretical texts.

The Mermaid and the Minotaur – Dorothy Dinnerstein
Continues to astonish us with the depth and wisdom of its psychoanalytic approach even as its major ideas have become as unobtrusively essential to psychoanalytic feminism as the atmosphere.

No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power– Gloria Feldt
As the former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, Feldt (The War on Choice) has years of experience in shepherding feminist causes. In her latest book she examines how women can move past low societal expectations, learn to embrace their ambitions to advance feminism, and achieve equality by addressing power and leadership.

Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi
A moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people’s lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home.

Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV – Jennifer Pozner
An extraordinary gift to critical media literature; this book reminds us that TV is never accidental, but directed to reinforce particular social lessons. This should be required reading for every American girl and woman.

Reasonable Creatures – Katha Pollitt
A collection of witty, enlightening, and highly entertaining essays and social commentary on how events concerning women-the Lorena Bobbit case, the Baby M case, and the William Kennedy Smith trial-are portrayed by the media.

Sexism in America: Alive, Well, and Ruining Our Future – Barbara J. Berg
Contemporary women, Berg says, are encouraged to imitate vapid media darlings instead of breaking glass ceilings (or breaking even) in academia, business and government.

Sisterhood Interrupted – Deborah Siegel
Tells the history of conflicts within feminism without demonizing or blaming. Siegel conveys the excitement of feminism, then and now. She offers an informed and sympathetic perspective on the second wave that will help younger readers understand what it was like to be part of a movement that planned to change the world.

Slut! – Leora Tanenbaum
Absorbing first-person narratives from a wide range of women, including the author, alternate with a somewhat prosaic analysis of the ramifications of being labeled a slut in adolescence. Journalist Tanenbaums first book offers up striking images of the cruelty of teenagers, both male and, more significantly, female, toward the girls whom they have labeled ‘sluts’.’

Taking on the Big Boys, or Why Feminism is Good for Families, Business and the Nation – Ellen Bravo
A longtime player in the women’s labor movement, Bravo makes the case that feminism is not only good for women but also families, business, and the country. She relates stories from business and government that “unmask” the situations that patronize and trivialize women’s contributions to the workplace.

Where The Girls Are – Susan J. Douglas
An insightful, witty, and well-written analysis of the effects of mass-media on women in late 20th-century American culture.

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present– Gail Collins
American women, who once lacked the right to publicly wear pants, now take their place on the presidential campaign trail and the battlefield. New York Times columnist Collins attempts a comprehensive account of the last 50 years of women’s history.

The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America – Ruth Rosen
A thorough introduction to the modern American women’s movement, this is it: a rousing story of the revolution by a history professor who participated in its struggles. Ruth Rosen introduces her book by reminding readers of discriminatory practices that were common in pre-1960s

Feminist Authors of Non-Fiction and Fiction
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Nawal El Saadawi
Barbara G Walker
Marina Warner