Books on Feminism

[AntiqueBooks]

Hello

Please could you recommend your favourites? Classic ones as well as more modern.

Thanks

I really like Laura Bates’ books.

Helen Lewis’s book is excellent - Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

Chimamanda Ngozi. Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Great digestible book.

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Woman Hating by Andrea Dworkin
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
The Gate to Women’s Country by Sherri Tepper
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
Who Cooked the Last Supper?, Rosalind Miles
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker
Circe, Madeline Miller
I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman

Sexed - A history of British Feminism

Susanna Rustin

Thank you all this is super helpful! I will be ploughing through these over winter!

Man Made Language by Dale Spender.

Sexual Politics by Kate Millet
Gyn-ecology by Mary Daly
Misogynies by Joan Smith
Gender Hurts by Sheila Jeffreys

The Rosalind Miles book is also called The Women's History of the World.

Another vote for Invisible Women

One of Helena Kennedy's legal ones - Eve was Framed or the follow up, which covers a lot of similar ground but is more up to date (easy to read though, don'tbe put off it's not complex legal stuff). Or more recently there is Harriet Wisterich's Sisters In Law.

Home Grown by Joan Smith.
Misogynies is good too but dated in terms of references - talks about some figures who were then in the public eye. Worth reading just for the appalling police handing of the discussion of the Peter Sutcliffe "Yorkshire Ripper" in which their misogyny caused significant failures and malpractice.

Recently White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color
Book by Ruby Hamad

You have reminded me, I wanted to read Mother of Invention by Katrine Marcal- might ask for it for Christmas

Fiction that springs to mind
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch
Neon Roses by Rachel Dawson
Have The Men Had Enough? by Margaret Forster

Filia have an online bookshop you might want to browse
https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/filia

If you’re near Manchester there’s a fringe book festival this coming Saturday with speakers like Susannah Ruskin, Victoria Smith, Joan Smith etc

When I studied Feminist political theory at Uni (back in the days before it was renamed Women or Gender Studies) we had a great textbook that was really accessible and that dealt with all the major schools of thought. I found it very interesting to read.

There's an edition available to read at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/FeministThoughtAMoreComprehensiveIntroduction

Audre Lorde - anything by her really

I remember my joy at discovering Andrea Dworkin in my early 20s. She was never on the curriculum of anythign I studied, so she was a kind of guilty pleasure. Of the various books, I'd particularly recommend 'Our Blood' as this is not only a collection of very readable pieces that have stood the test of time but it serves as a kind of key to the rest of her work - she explains what she's trying to do, why she makes the arguments she does and so on.

Oh, and Sheila Jeffreys's 'Anticlimax'.

I've read both Pornography and Right-Wing Women, and they are both very good but also incredibly depressing to read, particularly Pornography.

Just coming back to Dale Spender, mentioned by a PP - she is a very accessible writer, and I think is sometimes overlooked today. 'Woman of Ideas - and what men have done to them' is a great read. The book that really switched me on to feminism was The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer.

Thanks so much guys, this is really helpful. I might start with the textbook recommended upthread and go from there.

Two more that don't get mentioned v often but were formative for me:

Backlash by Susan Faludi

The Trouble & Strife Reader ed. by Deborah Cameron. - fantastic essays from the magazine which ran from 1880s I think.

1980s!

I just mentioned Backlash when I was teaching yesterday! It's a good one.

Lots of the Trouble and Strifes (all of them maybe?) are online. I have the reader though - it's fab.

That's a point - there was a lot of very good feminist writing in magazines. I've got a pile of vintage Spare Ribs from the 80s and 90s upstairs somewhere, which have stood the test of time very well.

Just took a look at http://www.troubleandstrife.org/

it is so awesome! Just the first page sets my brain off.

is there anything equivalent now? Things are more disaggregated across platforms like Medium and Substack I guess and the style/quality of the writing is so different.

Just popping back to say thanks again everyone! This will keep me going a really long time.