📚 Books

Maya Angelou's 1969 autobiography is a milestone work that changed the literary landscape—it not only pioneered how literature discusses issues of racism, sexism, and identity, but more importantly, it redefined our understanding of the autobiographical genre itself. In this work, Angelou explores her experiences growing up in Arkansas until becoming a mother at 16. Though sometimes heavy reading (Angelou's brief narrative of childhood sexual assault runs throughout the book), 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' introduced new ways of writing women's lives to the literary world.

Nearly 200 years after Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was published, it has quite rightly earned the status of a classic feminist novel. If Jane Eyre is a classic, then Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea—the 1966 novel that gives life to the abandoned woman in Brontë's story—is a masterpiece. By re-examining the character of Bertha Rochester and imagining her life before the events of the original novel, Rhys gives agency and dignity to literature's archetypal 'madwoman in the attic'.

A foundational work of the modern feminist movement that profoundly revealed the identity crisis faced by American middle-class women in the mid-20th century, heralded as the spark that ignited the second wave of feminism.

A 20th-century feminist literary classic that reveals the psychological predicament and social oppression faced by women in the 1950s through semi-autobiographical narrative, profoundly exploring the relationship between mental illness and gender constraints.

The most famous 1962 experimental novel by 2007 Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, telling the then-unspeakable facts: women as beings with sexual desires, who suffer from mental illness, who struggle, who climax, who menstruate. Through the perspective of writer Anna trying to integrate her life experiences and creative notes into a unified whole, Lessing explores the unbeautiful aspects of women's lives with love, anger, and a frankness almost unheard of among women writers at the time.

A foundational work of modern feminism that deeply analyzes women's status and situation in society, proposing the famous viewpoint that 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.'

Though Zora Neale Hurston's most famous novel is now considered a cornerstone work of the Harlem Renaissance, Their Eyes Were Watching God received a lukewarm reception when first published in 1937, not being rediscovered until the 1970s. The story follows a Black woman named Janie Crawford's coming-of-age in Florida, from her 'voiceless' teenage years to a more self-possessed adulthood.

A foundational work of feminist literary criticism that explores the material and psychological conditions necessary for women's creative work with poetic and incisive insight, proposing influential theories of women's writing.

A groundbreaking feminist utopian novel published in 1915 that envisions an ideal society composed entirely of women, exploring fundamental questions about gender roles, social organization, and women's potential.

No feminist reading list is complete without this 1899 novella. This early proto-modernist story follows Edna Pontellier, a wealthy New Orleans housewife who begins to contemplate what life might offer beyond her narrow roles as wife and mother.

A groundbreaking 1898 feminist economics work that systematically analyzes the social roots of women's economic dependency and proposes theoretical foundations for women's economic independence. Praised as an important document comparable to Mill's 'The Subjection of Women'.

A classic coming-of-age novel that, through the growth journey of the four March sisters, showcases diverse life choices for 19th-century women, influencing generations of female readers' values and life pursuits.

A groundbreaking work in the history of feminist thought, one of the first to systematically advocate for women's rights and educational equality.