Gender PoliticsBooks

A chilling investigation into the 1990 murder of Keri Sullivan, exploring the cultural obsession with violence against women, the failures of the justice system, and the psychological toll on survivors and investigators.

Veteran financial journalist Josie Cox's groundbreaking work telling the story of how women have fought for financial freedom and the social and political hurdles that have kept them from equality. From WWII 'Rosies' to the investor who broke into the New York Stock Exchange boys' club, this work chronicles centuries of women's relentless struggle for money and power, while revealing challenges women still face today.

Emmy Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Flock's groundbreaking investigative work exploring what few dare to confront: the role and necessity of female-led violence when institutional protections completely fail. Through three immersive narratives of real women who fought back, this book challenges us to rethink what justice, self-defense, and women's safety truly mean.

Culture writer Marcie Bianco boldly argues that 'equality' is a racist, patriarchal ideal that perpetuates women's systemic oppression and limits the possibilities of feminism - with a plan to transform the movement.

Award-winning science journalist Angela Saini's groundbreaking exploration challenging assumptions that male dominance is natural to the human species. Through archaeology, scientific research, and global cultural histories, this book reveals how patriarchy emerged around 7,000 years ago, spread through colonialism, and why understanding this history is crucial for achieving genuine gender equality.

Louise Perry challenges a sexual liberalism that treats consent and choice as a complete ethic, foregrounding gendered risk while inviting scrutiny of her biological essentialism, marital prescription, and limited engagement with queer and sex-worker perspectives.

Six interlocking essays move from rape allegations, pornography, desire, and teacher - student relations to the carceral state and capitalism, refusing to reduce sexual politics to the claim that consent alone settles every question.

Virginie Despentes' 'King Kong Theory' is a punk-rock manifesto of modern feminism. Part memoir, part critical theory, it is a raw, angry, and undeniably powerful examination of gender, sexuality, and violence. Despentes writes from the margins - as a former sex worker, a rape survivor, and a punk artist - challenging the sanitized, respectable versions of feminism to embrace the 'ugly', the 'unfuckable', and the dangerous.

Mar Hicks traces how British institutions classified women’s computing expertise as low-status labor, then built a prestigious field that excluded the workers on whom it depended.

Using cases from Nazi Germany, Serbia, and ISIS, Laura Sjoberg asks how wartime sexual violence by women is sensationalized while perpetrators’ agency, accountability, and legal position remain obscured.

A feminist reading of Latin American case law on reproductive autonomy, property, violence and queer family recognition - and the limits of judicial equality.

Ifi Amadiume’s study of Nnobi society separates social roles such as daughter and husband from anatomical sex, while tracing how colonial rule narrowed women’s political and economic authority.

Laura Sjoberg offers an accessible but rigorous account of how gender orders shape the causes, conduct, narration, and aftermath of war.

Laura Sjoberg’s feminist theory of war shows how gender shapes what counts as conflict, who is imagined to act, and whose lives are treated as expendable.

Janet Abbate traces the historical shift from women’s high participation in computing work to the formation of masculinized professional identity.

Edited by Laura Sjoberg and Sandra E. Via, these seventeen feminist essays examine how military institutions, wartime violence, peacebuilding, and public memory reproduce gendered power.

Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry analyze how violent women in global politics are explained away through gendered stories of motherhood, monstrosity, or sexuality.

Judy Wajcman connects factories, homes, cyberspace and design to ask who defines technological problems, holds expertise and carries the labor.

Edited by Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux, this Latin American history collection traces how property, civic ritual, war, and family policy reshaped women’s rights and state power.

Cynthia Cockburn examines women’s cooperative projects in Belfast, Israel/Palestine, and Bosnia-Herzegovina to ask how democracy can cross conflict without erasing difference.

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí questions how ‘woman’ became a universal category, tracing Western gender theory through Yoruba history, language, and colonial knowledge-making.

Lois M. Smith and Alfred Padula trace how Cuba’s revolution changed women’s education, health, work and family life - and why state-backed equality did not end patriarchy or unpaid care.

Jean Bethke Elshtain examines the myths of men as just warriors and women as beautiful souls in Western political imagination.

In this 1882 Marathi polemic, Tarabai Shinde turns public blame over widowhood into a challenge to men's unequal claims to moral authority and freedom.

Judith Butler questions sex, gender, and the category “women,” tracing how repeated norms make gender appear stable and unsettle fixed identities and universal feminist subjects.

Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias’s edited volume examines how nationalism, state formation, family policy, and women’s political roles shape one another.

This groundbreaking work challenges male-centric theories of moral development, proposing an alternative model of moral reasoning based on care, relationships, and responsibility. By listening to women's voices, Gilligan discovered the 'ethics of care' as a different moral voice, fundamentally transforming psychology's, ethics', and feminist theory's understanding of moral development.

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's 1905 feminist science-fiction story turns gendered access to education, public space, and science into a speculative experiment - and asks whether knowledge will serve everyday life or militarized power.