A Long List of Book Recommendations that Explore Womanhood/The Female Experience.

Hello everyone, Happy International Women’s Day 2025!

I haven’t posted on here since October because all inspiration and motivation I once had for writing seems to have forsaken me (I haven’t even been writing privately), but I thought I would *try* and write something for International Women’s Day since I can go on and on about womanhood/the female experience in literature. So that’s what today will be focusing on. Ahead, is a list of book recommendations, both fiction and non fiction, spanning from the late 18th century to the present day, that explicitly explore the female experience.

18^TH – 19^TH CENTURY FICTION:

1. Maria, Or The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1798): No feminist literature list is complete without mention of Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Western feminism. The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously just one year after Wollstonecraft’s death by her husband, William Godwin. This novella reads as a fictional sequel, or expansion, of her seminal text A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as it further explores the subordination of women in the marriage state in 18^th century England. Wollstonecraft does not use subtleties; she was unafraid to address what were considered to be contentious topics. The Wrongs of Woman follows a young woman named Maria, who has been sent to an asylum by her husband who has declared her mad. During her time there, she befriends Jemima, one of the attendants, and the pair share their histories with each other. In the character of Maria, Wollstonecraft addresses the harsh realities of wifehood and motherhood, which were often characterised by the physical and sexual violence that they were forced to endure by their husbands. In the character of Jemima, Wollstonecraft explores the plight of working-class women, as she depicts the abuse and exploitation they would endure from their male employees, and prostitution.

“Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?”

“Men who are inferior to their fellow men, are always most anxious to establish their superiority over women.”

“How I panted for liberty – liberty that I would have purchased at any price, but that of my own esteem!”

“By allowing women but one way of rising in the world, the fostering of libertinism in men, society makes monsters of them, and then their ignoble vices are brought forwards as proof of inferiority of intellect.”

2. Persuasion (1818) by Jane Austen: my favourite Austen. It has, in my opinion, the best and most convincing romance: Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth – not to mention the lovely side romance between Admiral and Mrs Croft. Persuasion is also the most introspective and poignant of Austen’s novels, as seen in its exploration of female education and societal attitudes towards “older” single women – Anne is only 27! Despite its poignancy, it is still full of typical Austenian wit and satire.

“I hate to hear you talking so, like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth waters all our days.” – chapter 8.

“It is perhaps, our [women’s] fate that our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You always have a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.’ – chapter 11.

“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.” – chapter 11.

3. Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë: My favourite novel of all time, written by my favourite writer of all time. Published in 1847, Jane Eyre is indubitably one of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century. It caused a widespread controversy upon its publication from its vivid depiction of ‘the injustices of childhood’ (or girlhood in particular) to its candid delineation of womanhood, mental illness and colonialism. In summary, Jane Eyre is told from the perspective of Jane as we follow her journey from girlhood, to her adolescence spent Lowood School, to her work as a governess at Thornfield Hall, to her eventual marriage to Mr Rochester.

“I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped, for liberty I uttered prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing.” – chapter 10.

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.” – chapter 12.

“I can live alone if self-respect and circumstance require me to do so. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss.” – chapter 19.

“I am no bird, and no net ensnares me. I am a free human being with an independent will, which I will now exert to leave you.” – chapter 23.

4. Agnes Grey (1847) by Anne Brontë: Anne Brontë, my beloved, the most underrated Brontë sister. Agnes Grey, her semi-autobiographical debut novel, is as an exposé of the isolating, degrading, and demoralising conditions of governesses in the early Victorian era.

“He was continually encouraging her tendency to affection (which I had done my utmost to crush), talking about her pretty face, and filling her head will all manner of conceited notions concerning her personal appearance, which I had instructed her to regard as dust in the balance compared with the cultivation of her mind and manners.” – chapter 5.

5. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) by Anne Brontë: Wildfell Hall very may well be considered the first feminist novel. Much like her predecessor Mary Wollstonecraft, Anne Brontë is fearless in her admonishment of the institution of marriage, the inequality of divorce laws that deliberately sought to keep women trapped in abusive marriages, domestic violence, single motherhood, and the primary socialisation of children. Told from the perspective of Gilbert Markham, Wildfell Hall is an epistolary novel that tells the story of Helen Huntingdon – or Graham – through her journal entries that Gilbert features in a letter to a friend. In her diary, Helen details the abhorrent abuse that she suffers from her husband, Arthur Huntingdon. Brontë’s depiction of marital abuse – emotional/mental and financial and alcoholism, set her apart from other Victorian writers. Never before had a woman written so openly about domestic abuse. There are scenes of adultery, compounded by Arthur’s delight in tormenting poor Helen about his conquests and other instances of emotional abuse, and allusions to sexual violence. Upon seeing the impacts that her marriage is having on her son, Helen gains the courage to flee from the home they share with Arthur, and takes refuge at Wildfell Hall…

“I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.” – the preface.

“I would not send a poor girl into the world unarmed against her foes, and ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power, or the will, to watch and guard herself.” – chapter 3.

“I was determined to show him that my heart was not his slave, and I could live without him if I chose.” – chapter 24.

“You may think it all very fine, Mr Huntingdon, to amuse yourself with rousing my jealousy; but take care you don’t rouse my hate instead. And when you have once extinguished my love, you will find it no easy matter to kindle it again.” – chapter 27.

“I am your child’s mother, and your housekeeper – nothing more. So you need not trouble yourself any longer to feign the love you cannot feel: I will exact no more heartless caresses from you – nor offer – nor endure them either – I will not be mocked with the empty husk of conjugal endearments, when you have given the substance to another.” – chapter 33.

6. Villette (1853) by Charlotte Brontë: I have never in my life related to a book more than I relate to Villette. Told from the perspective of the 23-year-old Lucy Snowe, Villette is deeply autobiographical as Brontë draws heavily on the time she spent living in Belgium and her own experience with isolation and depression.

“A ‘woman of intellect’, it appeared, was a sort of ‘lusus naturae’, a luckless accident, a thing for which there was neither place nor use in creation, wanted neither a wife nor worker. Beauty anticipated her in the first office.”

“‘But ours, Lucy, is a beautiful life, or it will be; and you shall share it.’ ‘I shall share no man’s or woman’s life in this world as you understand sharing. I think I have one friend of my own, but I am not sure; and till I am sure, I live solitary.’ ‘But solitude is sadness.’ ‘Yes; it is sadness. Life, however, has worse than that. Deeper than melancholy, lies heartbreak.’”

7. The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: This is a very short yet very impactful semi-autobiographical story that details a nameless woman’s experience with postpartum depression, and her physician husband who essentially gaslights her about her symptoms and experience. Like Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, Gilman draws on her own experiences to write an exposé on the treatment of women, but her exposé focuses on the contemporary medical field and its negligence of women’s health due to it being dominated by men.

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage. [...] You see, he does not believe I am sick!”

“I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time. Of course I don’t when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.”

“I beg of you, for my sake, for our child’s sake, as well as your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fantasy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?”

8. The Odd Women (1893) by George Gissing: For somebody who loves Victorian literature, it is surprising that I only discovered this book last year upon seeing an Instagram post about it! This novel follows the Madden sisters who are left almost destitute after the death of their father. After this incident, they reconnect with an old friend, Rhoda Nunn, (who has since become one of my favourite female literary characters) a single woman who runs a school for women with her friend, Mary Barfoot. In the character of Rhoda, Gissing explores ‘The New Woman’, a feminist concept that emerged in the late nineteenth century to describe women who sever themselves from oppressive gender roles. The word “Odd”, in this context, refers simply to single women. They were “odd” because they were not in a pair, a marriage. Unfortunately, like with many nineteenth century novels, it is clear that “women” means white, so there were a couple of moments I found uncomfortable. In spite of this, I did still find this novel to be fascinating exploration of single womanhood and ‘The New Woman’ in the late Victorian era.

“‘I wish girls fell down and died of hunger in the streets, instead of creeping to their garrets and the hospitals. I should like to see their dead bodies collected together in some open space for the crowd to stare at.’” ‘You mean, I suppose, that people would try to reform things?’ ‘Who knows? Perhaps they might only congratulate themselves that a few of the superfluous females have been struck off.’” – chapter 4.

“I would have no girl, however wealthy her parents, grow up without a profession. There should be no such thing as a class of females vulgarised by the necessity of finding daily amusement. […] I would have girls taught that marriage is a thing to be avoided rather than hoped for. I would teach them for that for the majority of women, marriage means disgrace. […] When all women, high and low alike, are trained to self-respect, then men will regard them in a different light, and marriage may be honourable to both.” – chapter 10.

“I am not chiefly anxious that you should earn money, but that women in general shall become rational and responsible human beings. […] Were we living in an ideal world, I think women would not go to sit all day in offices. But the fact is that we live in a world as far from the ideal as can be conceived. We live in a time of warfare, of revolt. If woman is no longer to be womanish, but a human being of powers and responsibilities, she must become militant, defiant. She must push her claims to the extremity.” – chapter 13.

“Beauty, in the academic sense, he no longer demanded; enough that face spoke eloquently, that the limbs were vigorous. Let beauty perish, if it cannot ally itself with mind; be a woman what else she may, let her have brains and the power of using them!” – chapter 17.

9. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) by Thomas Hardy: This list would be incomplete without mention of poor Tess. Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is an efficacious criticism of Victorian purity culture and gendered double standards around sexuality. The story follows the 16-year-old innocent country girl Tess who is raped by Alec D’Urberville, falling pregnant as a result. Poor Tess’ life is doomed from this act of violence, and Hardy shows how women were forced to endure never-ending punishment and condemnation for violent acts committed against them by men – men whose lives remain unchanged and unscathed and who go unpunished.

“My God! I could knock you out of the gig! Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?” – chapter 12.

“O mother, my mother! How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way, and you did not help me!” – chapter 12.

“A field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she has somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assailed herself within it.” – chapter 14.

20^TH CENTURY FICTION:

10. The Trouble With Happiness & Other Stories by Tove Ditlevsen: Tove Ditlevsen (1917-1976) was a renowned Danish poet and writer in the twentieth century. The focus of her work, from her memoirs to her short stories to her poetry is always girlhood/womanhood in working class Denmark. This beautifully poignant short story collection is split in two parts: The Umbrella and The Trouble With Happiness. When read in its entirety, these stories read as a panoramic study of life in working class Denmark that explore the family, marriage, childhood, and mental illness. One story features a married woman’s obsession with a yellow umbrella, another story features little boy with a tyrant of a father, a woman’s depressed husband, an expecting couple trying to buy a home, a disabled woman’s insecurity at her not being able to dance…

“Things and people were something you reached out for, when they could be useful to a certain end. Either you used them for something, or you risked being used by them.”

“Loving someone couldn’t be helped. It came and went like whooping cough.”

“A hollow melancholy enveloped her with an unmerciful darkness she could not escape. Something had changed suddenly, though she couldn’t say exactly what it was.”

“He has no idea, she told herself. He doesn’t have any idea what I’m going through. And suddenly she perceived him as a complete stranger, a person she just happened coincidentally to be in the room with, and she was able to feel disconnected from him, from her love for him, from her solidarity to him…”

11. The Joys of Motherhood (1979) by Buchi Emecheta: This novel, set in Colonial Nigeria, tells the heartbreaking story of Nnu Ego living in a world that tells her the being a mother is the greatest thing a woman can achieve. She is sent away from her home village to Lagos after “failing” to fall pregnant in her first marriage. In her second marriage, Nnu does become a mother, and she faces the degradation and loneliness that comes from motherhood in a society that undervalues mothers despite telling its women that motherhood is all they should aspire to. (content warning for sexual and domestic violence)

“The more I think about it, the more I realise that we women set impossible standards for ourselves. That we make life intolerable for another. I cannot live up to your standards. So I have to set my own.”

“She was becoming fed-up of this two-way standard. When the children were good, they belonged to the father; when they were bad, they belonged to the mother.”

“God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody’s appendage. […] When will I be free?”

12. Annie John (1983) by Jamaica Kincaid: This is a bildungsroman that follows Annie John, a 10-year-old girl born and raised in Colonial Antigua, through her adolescence. As a little girl, Annie worships her mother – the pair are inseparable, but as she grows older and reaches puberty, the relationship Annie has with her mother becomes distant and fragmented. In this fragmentation, Kincaid shows how quickly girls are expected to mature, and are robbed of their innocence as they start to be perceived as women, even by those who love them. Additionally, there is the element of colonialism, which is most potent during Annie’s education where she is taught British history and literature, even reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This ties in with Annie’s strained relationship with her mother because Annie attempts to reject the colonial values pushed onto her via education, whereas her mother wishes for her to assimilate. The the breakdown of their relationship demonstrates the way in which colonialism influences and often damages the family unit.

“Before this young lady business, I could sit and think of my mother, see her doing one thing or other, and always her face bore a smile for me. Now I often saw her with the corners of her mouth turned downwards in disapproval of me.”

13. Cat’s Eye (1988) by Margaret Atwood: Cat’s Eye is my favourite Atwood novel. It is a story of how the friendships forged during girlhood, some of our most formative years as women, can change the trajectory of our lives and haunt us far into adulthood, thus determining our individual relationship with womanhood, motherhood and femininity. This novel uses temporal shift to show the close correspondence between past and future for the protagonist, Elaine. During her childhood, she befriends a girl named Cordelia. Unfortunately, Cordelia turns out to be cunning, manipulative, and malicious, and their toxic relationship troubles Elaine far into adulthood. As a result, Elaine in her early womanhood, develops a severe case of “not like other girls” syndrome, in which she believes that if she surrounds herself with men and alters herself to earn their approval, she will not only never need female friends again, but she will be exempt or protected from misogyny… spoiler alert… she is not. Part of the novel’s culmination is Elaine coming to this realisation as she acknowledges that her past friendship with Cordelia is not indicative of all female friendship, thus allowing her to embrace other women around her.

“Things are being said that I have never consciously thought about before. Things are being overthrown. Why, for instance, do we shave our legs? Wear lipstick? Dress up in slinky clothing? Alter our shapes? What is wrong with us the way we are?”

“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”

“I don’t resent any of this. Instead I think that I am privileged: I am an exception to some rule that I haven’t even identified.”

“I’m not mad because I’m a woman. I’m mad because you’re an asshole.”

“Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without trace.”

CONTEMPORARY FICTION (21^ST CENTURY):

14. All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami (2011): This short novel follows Fuyuko Irie, a woman in her thirties who works as a freelance proofreader. Her life is characterised by her profound loneliness and isolation, but this starts to waver when she forms a friendship with a man named Mitsutsuka. During their friendship, Fuyuko’s traumatic past is revealed as she has to confront her own attitudes about connections and relationships, much of which stems from her being raped as a teenager. Night is a very moving story about female loneliness, repression and the meaning/importance of human connections.

“Some writers are great, but not successful. Then you get some writers who are successful, but not so great. […] We get this all the time as women, right? Like, if you make plenty of money but don’t have any kids, you might get called successful, but unless you have kids, no one will ever call you a great woman. You know what I mean?”

“I’m all alone, I thought. […] Despite the crowds of people and all the different places, and a limitless supply of sounds and colours packed together, there was nothing here I could reach out and touch. Nothing that would call my name. There never had been, and there never would be.”

15. Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami (2019): This novel follows Natsuko Natsume, an aspiring writer. Split in two parts, part one, ‘Breasts’ focuses on female beauty standards, as seen when Natsuko is visited by her sister Makiko who is seeking a breast enhancement. Part two, ‘Eggs’, focuses on single womanhood and motherhood as Natsuko realises that does want to be mother, but she does not want a partner… I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Mieko Kawakami is one of my favourite contemporary writers.

“My monolithic expectation of what a woman’s body was supposed to look like had no bearing on what actually happened to my body. The two things were wholly unrelated. I never became the woman I imagined. And what was I expecting? The kind of body you see in girly magazines. […] People like pretty things. When you’re pretty, everybody wants to look at you, they want to touch you. I wanted that for myself. Prettiness means value.”

“They [men] are on a pedestal from the second they’re born, only they don’t realise it. Whenever they need something, their mums come running. They’re taught to believe that their penises make them superior, and that women are just there for them to use however they see fit. Then they go out into the world, where everything centers around them and their dicks. And its women who have to make it work. At the end of the day, where’s this pain that men feel coming from? In their opinion, it’s us. It’s all our fault – whether they’re unpopular, broke, jobless. Whatever it is, they blame women for all their failures, all their problems. Now think about women. No matter how you see it, who’s actually responsible for the majority of the pain women feel? If you think about it that way, how a man and woman ever see eye to eye. It’s structurally impossible.”

16. Second Place (2021) by Rachel Cusk: The female narrator named M, invites an artist, named L, to stay in her guesthouse, her second place, in an unnamed English coastal region where she lives with her husband, Tony, and her daughter Justine. This is a story that explores ‘older’ womanhood and how a woman’s relationship with femininity and motherhood can change over time, largely due to how society treats older women.

“Thinking this made me feel suddenly tearful, and I had the awful feeling of a deep unravelling inside me. Did Tony not appreciate me as a woman with a female form? Did I go round shapeless clothes these days as a renunciation of sexuality and beauty.”

“One night when Tony and I were going to bed, I flew at him in a rage and said all kinds of terrible things, about how lonely and washed up I felt, and how he never gave me any real attention of the kind that makes a woman feel like a woman, and just expected me to sort of give birth to myself all the time, like Venus out of a seashell. As if I knew anything about what makes a woman feel like a woman!”

17. Acts of Desperation (2021) by Megan Nolan: Follows an unnamed protagonist and her abusive relationship with her boyfriend, Ciaran, whom she meets at an art exhibition. Nolan’s protagonist has a profound – and at times embarrassing – inability to form her own identity outside of the male gaze. Every aspect of her identity and personhood is based on her romantic/sexual proximity to men to the point of self-destruction. I frequently found myself feeling frustrated by her, then I would have to remind myself that the novel’s title is Acts of *DESPERATION* so her often pathetic nature is intentional. This book only reinforced my belief that one of the most important things for a woman is to have an identity of her separate to men and learn to be content with ourselves, rather than using men to fill a void and allowing them to either grant us or deny us our personhood. The protagonist finally realises this at the end of the novel after her 25^th birthday. (content warning for self-harm and graphic sexual violence.)

“I’d thought that a man’s love would make me so full up that I’d never need to eat or do anything to my body ever again. I thought they’d take it over for me. What would I think about, now that I wasn’t thinking about love or sex? That would be the next thing, trying to figure out what to fill up all that space with. But that was all right. That would follow.”

NON-FICTION:

18. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft: This singular text is considered by many to be the very first work of feminist philosophy. It is a treatise on the state of education in which Wollstonecraft addresses previous political theorists who condemned the concept of female education, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wollstonecraft posits that ameliorating the state education for women and girls won’t just benefit them, but their husbands and the next generation that they will be raising. She also attacks marriage, referring to it as ‘legal prostitution’ because it was the only way in which women could achieve real economic stability, but if the state of education were ameliorated, then women would learn to fend for themselves and not have to rely on their husbands, which would actually make for happier marriages.

“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood.”

“I do not wish women to have power over men, but power over themselves.”

“If men be demi-gods, why let us serve them!”

“Men have various pursuits and employments which engage their attention, and give character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts directed to the most insignificant parts of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour.”

“But, alas! Husbands, as well as their helpmates, are often only overgrown children, nay thanks to early debauchery, scarcely men in their outward form – and if the blind lead the blind, one need not come from heaven to tell us the consequence.”

19. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929): Based on two lectures that she delivered at the University of Cambridge, Woolf, in this extended essay, analyses the relationship between women and the literary field, arguing that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’. Throughout, she explains how women being excluded from education that their brothers were entitled to is the reason why women have been unable to flourish in in the literary sphere in the way that men have. To evidence this claim, she provides a hypothetical case of Shakespeare having a sister, named Judith, who is as creatively gifted and passionate as her brother, but is unable to display this, or make a living from this, due to her being confined to home and her domestic duties.

“She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers…”

“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!”

20. The Second Sex (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir: This one of the most famous and most influential feminist texts in which de Beauvoir intricately examines the subjugation of women throughout history, up until the present day (the late 1940s). She posits that women have historically been considered the “Other” because “humanity is male, and a man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being. […] He is the Subject; he is the absolute. She is the other.’ Women are ‘The Second Sex’ because they are considered second-class citizens under patriarchy. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but it must be kept in mind that some of de Beauvoir’s ideas, particularly those pertaining to sexuality, are quite dated as this book is nearly 80 years old and sociology has progressed. Since this book is nearly 800 pages, there are innumerable excerpts that I could quote, but for now, here are two of them:

“To a great extent, the anguish of being a woman eats away at the female body.”

On abortion: “It must be pointed out that the same society determined to defend the rights of the foetus shows no interest in the child after they are born; instead of trying to reform this scandalous institution called public assistance, society prosecutes abortionists; those responsible for the delivering orphans to torturers are left free; society closes its eyes to the horrible tyranny practised in ‘reform schools’ or in the private homes of child abusers: and while it accepts that the foetus belongs to the mother carrying it, it nevertheless agrees that the child is his parents’ thing: this very week, a surgeon committed suicide because he was convicted of performing abortions and a father who had beaten his son nearly to death has been condemned to 3 months of prison with suspended sentence. […] If this is morality, then what kind of morality is it? It must be added that the men who most respect embryonic life are the same ones who do not hesitate to send adults to death in war.”

“Woman is doomed to immorality because morality for her consists in embodying an inhuman entity […] As soon as she thinks, dreams, sleeps, desires, and aspires without orders, she betrays the masculine ideal. This is why so many women do let themselves ‘be themselves’ except in their husband’s absence.”

21. Childhood, Youth, & Dependency (1974) by Tove Ditlevsen: Also known as The Copenhagen Trilogy, this book is a three-part memoir published between 1967 and 1971. In this profoundly introspective memoir, Ditlevsen speaks frankly about her tumultuous life in Denmark including her struggle with addiction, her four marriages, abortion, and motherhood. Ditlevsen died in 1976 due to an overdose, aged just 58.

“I’ve begun to long for the intimate closeness with another human being that is called love. I long for love without knowing what it is.”

“I feel like I’m a foreigner in this world and I can’t talk to anyone about the overwhelming problems that fill me at the thought of the future.”

“Death is not a gentle falling asleep as I once believed. It’s brutal, hideous, and foul smelling. I wrap my arms around myself and rejoice in my youth and my health. Otherwise my youth is nothing more than a deficiency and a hindrance that I can’t get rid of fast enough.”

“I think that fact that once the most important thing in the world was whether my mother liked me; but the child who yearned so deeply for that love and always had to search for any sign of it doesn’t exist anymore. Now I think that my mother cares for me, but it doesn’t make me happy.”

22. Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis (1981): this seminal feminist text by Dr Angela Davis closely examines women’s history from the transatlantic slave trade to second wave feminism in the 1960s. Davis criticises the early feminist movement that took off in the United States in the mid nineteenth century for its blatant exclusion of Black and Working-Class Women by women such as Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton - the original white feminists. White feminism is a harmful and exclusionary branch of feminism that specifically focuses on and caters to the needs of white women, most often at the detriment of women of colour. The most potent example of this is mentioned in the book, is the 1848 Seneca Falls convention that focused on women gaining the right to vote, as there was not a single Black woman in attendance. Davis highlights the significant, yet often ignored role that Black women played in the women’s suffrage moment. Women, Race, and Class is a *must* read for all.

“The leaders of the women’s rights movement did not suspect that the enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be systematically linked.”

“I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne 13 children and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?” – From Sojourner Truth’s speech delivered at a women’s convention in 1851.

Davis notes how “in her [Sojourner] repeating her question ‘Ain’t I a woman’ no less than 4 times, she exposed the class-bias and racism of the new woman’s movement. All women were not white, and all women did not enjoy the material comforts of the middle class and bourgeoise.”

23. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath: Sylvia Plath’s journals are one of my favourite books on this list. They span from 1950, when Sylvia was just 17, to July of 1962, just eight months before she would take her own life.

“Being born a woman is an awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived, I was doomed to have my whole life rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors, and soldiers, bar room regulars – to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording – is all spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female, always in danger of assault and battery. […] God, I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night….”

“I need a father, I need a mother, I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn’t speak.”

“Life has been a combination of fairytale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”

“I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike, but please. Don’t ask me who I am. ‘A passionate fragmentary girl’, maybe?”

“I can never read all of the books I want; I can never be all of the people I want and live all of the lives I want. And what do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

“Nothing is real except the present, and already I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago lived as I do. She is dead and I am the present, but I know I too, shall pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.”

24. The Beauty Myth (1991) by Naomi Wolf: In this text, Wolf examines the insidious nature of the beauty / cosmetic industry and how women and girls are essentially groomed into believing that their beauty is their most focal asset. Wolf posits, quite correctly in true Wollstonecraftian fashion, that beauty is a weapon of patriarchy that is yielded to perpetuate women’s subordination. By forcing women to incessantly look inwards at themselves and obsess over their appearance, they remain vulnerable and easy to manipulate, as patriarchy thrives on female docility. Additionally, obsessing over beauty causes women to compete with one another, and thus create enemies of each other, which distracts them from the true enemy: patriarchy.

“Because ‘beauty’ lives so deep inside the psyche, where sexuality mingles with self-esteem, and since it has been usefully defined as something that is continually bestowed from the outside and can always be taken away, to tell a woman she is ugly can make her act ugly, act ugly, and as far as her experience is concerned, *be* ugly in the place where beauty keeps her whole.”

“Female sexuality is turned inside out from birth, so ‘beauty’ can take its place, keeping women’s eyes lowered to their own bodies, glancing up only to check their reflections in the eyes of men.”

“A misogynistic culture has succeeded in making women hate what misogynists hate.”

“If women suddenly stopped feeling ugly, the fastest-growing medical specialty would be the fastest dying.”

25. Everything I Know About Love (2018) by Dolly Alderton: This is a memoir that focuses on Alderton’s relationship with her lifelong best friend, Farly. I enjoyed this book much more than I expected to. Prior to reading it, I had assumed, quite erroneously, that it would primarily explore romantic love, but that was not the case at all. The overarching message of the memoir is that romantic love is often overvalued - or rather that friendship is undervalued - and that sustaining strong female friendships is essential to thriving as a woman. While I did think that some of the points in here regarding romantic love were quite obvious, and are things you should probably know before the age of 25, overall it is a good read and it touched me more than I expected.

“Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learnt in my long term friendships with women.”

“Years later I would discover that constantly behaving in a way that makes you feel shameful means you simply will not be able to take yourself seriously, and your self-esteem will plummet lower and lower. Ironically, my teenage one-woman mission to be a grown up through excessive drinking left me feeling more like a child than any other of my actions in life.”

26. Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women White Feminists Forgot (2020) by Mikki Kendall: This wonderful book analyses the feminist movement via an intersectional feminist lens in order to highlight the pernicious nature of mainstream feminism, or more specifically white feminism, for women of colour and working-class women. Kendall discusses the unjust sexualisation that Black girls are subjected to in their girlhood, which as she explains, is just one of many examples of adultification: ‘the racist practise of seeing children of colour as significantly older than they are’, consequently removing ‘the possibility of innocence for Black girls’. Kendall also discusses important topics such as educational disparities, poverty, gun violence, rape culture, eugenics, reproductive healthcare, and the alarmingly high maternal mortality rate for Black mothers. This book is another *must* read.

“Even though women technically got the right to vote in 1920, realistically, prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, states used poll taxes and literacy tests to stop Black and Indigenous people from voting.”

There is of course a myriad of other texts that I could have included in this very long list, but I am conscious of length, and this ended up being much longer than I anticipated. I did try to include some lesser-known works and writers such as Buchi Emecheta, and Tove Ditlevsen which is some more obvious examples such as The Bell Jar and The Handmaid’s Tale are not mentioned. Of course there are many famous texts included in this list, but as I said, I am conscious of length! I guess I will just have to do a part two some time soon… In the meantime, here are some very deserving honourable mentions: Passing by Nella Larsen, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed For Men by Carolina Criando-Perez, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Housseini – this is actually one of my favourite books of all time but for some reason I did not realise that I forgot to include it until the end! I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman – as I write this, I am kicking myself for not including it! Part two…part two…

Well, thank you so much for reading. Until next time! <3