Shall we make a feminist reading list?

And my personal recommendation (and sorry for banging on about this book yet again) would be Demonic Males by Richard Wrangham. It's a study of male violence in all the great apes (including humans), and it really opened my eyes to the scale of the problem. It's somewhat depressing, although it does have a fairly optimistic conclusion.

It's not strictly speaking a feminist book (though Wrangham's analyses are very pro-feminism), but others have recommended the classics in this thread, so I thought I'd chuck in a wild card.

steppemum Girls Will Be Girls by Emer O' Toole is an excellent choice for teenage girls - it's very much about coming of age as a woman in the modern, social media-soaked world.

Thanks for the suggestions, I did get her 'fantastically great women who changed the world', has a couple of pages each of Rosa Parks, Coco Chanel, Emmeline Pankhurst, Mary Seacole etc.

I am encouraging her to select one of those to dress up as next world book day rolls round!

loving the book lists for kids, thank you

This list of books for Bold Girls is great, lots of choice for all age groups - childrensbooksireland.ie/boldgirls/

Some of these might be good
www.scottishbooktrust.com/reading/book-lists/15-picture-books-that-challenge-gender-expectations-3-7

It's for 3 to 7 year olds, but I thnk 'Ninja red riding' and 'goodnight stories' books will still be good for a 9 year old.

Any recommendations for 9 and younger? My eldest is particularly perceptible to the 'boys can do this, girls can't crap' which I am constantly challenging.

Worked my way through the Virago Press books in my local library when I was at school - would never have labelled myself a feminist but so many of the titles made a real impact.

Gone with the Wind. Just amazing.

Women who run with the wolves.

If there are any anyone can recommend suitable for an 11 yr old that would be great....

I've not read many and it's not a feminist book as such but someone on here alerted us when kindle had "The war on women " going for 99p.

It's certainly a good one for people like me who know very little about any thing to highlight just what We are all up against

Just one? Well, since some of my favourites (Female Eunuch, Myth of Mars and Venus - particularly worth it for Cameron's spectacular demolition of the view that "men just find anything short of NO too hard to understand") are already in the list, I'll plump for Susan Faludi's Backlash. As scarily relevant now as it was when it came out.

I was already a feminist before I read any specifically feminist books, but the first one that I did read that really made an impact was Dworkin's Pornography : Men Possessing Women. Read The Beauty Myth at about the same time too, and Merlin Ston'e When God Was A Woman. And then Susan Faludi's Backlash.

(Couldn't pick one, apparently)

And at the more practical end of tge scale, for me Making Babies:Stumbling into Motherhood by Anne Enright was a beautiful eye-opener. Must dig it out. And add some of the suggestions above to my list.

can anyone recommend feminist books for teenage girls?
Most of these are a bit heavy going!

just one is too difficult!

Mine is The Women’s Room, by Marilyn French
mine too *MillicentF

As a linguist, I would choose one of my favourite books on language: Deborah Cameron, The Myth of Mars and Venus. Very readable and insightful.

Can't believe no one has suggested Cunt yet! I enjoyed it, showed different perspectives and it was err interesting.

Alice Walker's 'The Colour Purple'
It was my first A'level text.

“Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.”

“The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something.
What can she become? I asked.
Why, she said, the mother of his children.
But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something."

(At the same time as we were studying this, my English teacher helped me with a form. As we started it, she asked the simple question, 'Do you think your title needs to reflect your marital status whilst John's (also in the class) doesn't?' From that point onwards, if I had to use a title, I have always been Ms. )

Our Bodies Ourselves. Sadly now out of print but at the time was revolutionary.

Ahh...just one!?

OK. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan probably kicked things off for me. I was a SAHM to school age children at the time of reading, I was struggling with whether I should go back to work and wondering how I'd fit everything in if I did. And then bam, read this book and felt my eyes opened to how housework expands to fill the time available, the tiredness I felt everyday stemmed from the drudgery and how advertising had influenced me.