Best Books About Gender and Feminism: Essential Reading
The best books about gender and feminism — from A Room of One's Own and The Handmaid's Tale to Bad Feminist and We Should All Be Feminists. Essential reading.
By Aisha Patel
Books about gender and feminism span the spectrum from canonical political philosophy to personal essay to dystopian fiction — the best of them do what all serious literature does: make visible what has been invisible, and make the familiar strange enough to be examined. The books below are the essential starting points, covering the foundational texts of feminist thought, fiction that dramatises gender’s consequences, and contemporary essays that address the ongoing project.
The Foundational Texts
A Room of One’s Own — Virginia Woolf (1929)
The most beautiful argument for women’s intellectual equality ever written — a sustained meditation on the material conditions (money, privacy, time) that have been systematically denied to women, and the relationship between those conditions and women’s creative achievement. Woolf’s prose makes the argument inescapable: she demonstrates, even as she argues, that women can think as well as any man. The most essential text in feminist literature.
Men Explain Things to Me — Rebecca Solnit (2014)
Solnit’s collection of essays on gender, power, and the systematic silencing of women — beginning with the essay that coined the concept of ‘mansplaining’ and extending to essays on violence against women, marriage equality, and the relationship between storytelling and power. Short, sharp, and essential.
We Should All Be Feminists — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2014)
Adichie’s case for feminism, adapted from her TED Talk — a short, direct argument for why the existing gender imbalance harms everyone, delivered with her characteristic warmth and clarity. The most accessible introduction to contemporary feminism and the best starting point for readers new to the subject.
Feminist Fiction
The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood (1985)
The most influential feminist dystopia — a theocratic future America in which women have been stripped of all rights and assigned rigid reproductive roles. Atwood’s genius is that everything in Gilead has historical precedent: the novel is as much a work of history as of imagination. The most politically urgent novel on this list and the one most widely read in secondary schools and universities.
Kindred — Octavia Butler (1979)
Butler’s time-travel novel about slavery and survival — a Black woman from 1970s Los Angeles pulled back repeatedly to antebellum Maryland, where she must save the life of her enslaved ancestors’ enslaver. The novel uses its science fiction premise to make viscerally immediate both the experience of slavery and the question of how people survive — and what survival costs — under extreme oppression. The most formally inventive novel on this list.
Lives of Girls and Women — Alice Munro (1971)
Munro’s only novel — a young woman growing up in small-town Ontario, navigating the narrow expectations placed on women in the 1940s and her own determination to be a writer. The most novelistically complete treatment of female ambition and its obstacles in Canadian literature.
Personal Essays
Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay (2014)
Gay’s witty, wide-ranging collection of essays on feminism, pop culture, race, and the contradictions of trying to live a feminist life in a world that makes it difficult. The most readable book on this list and the most honest about the gap between feminist principles and feminist practice.
Reading Order
Start accessible: We Should All Be Feminists → Bad Feminist → A Room of One’s Own.
Fiction focus: The Handmaid’s Tale → Kindred → Lives of Girls and Women.
Complete: A Room of One’s Own → The Handmaid’s Tale → Kindred → Men Explain Things to Me → We Should All Be Feminists → Bad Feminist.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best feminist book to start with?
A Room of One's Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf is the foundational text — the argument that a woman needs money and a space of her own if she is to write fiction, delivered in the form of an extended essay that is also one of the most brilliant pieces of prose in the English language. We Should All Be Feminists (2014) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the most accessible and contemporary starting point — adapted from her TED Talk, it is a short, clear argument for why feminism matters now, for both women and men. Bad Feminist (2014) by Roxane Gay is the most readable — a collection of essays covering everything from popular culture to race to gender, written with wit and self-awareness about the contradictions of living a feminist life.
What is A Room of One's Own about?
A Room of One's Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf is an extended essay based on two lectures Woolf delivered at Cambridge in 1928, arguing that women have been prevented from writing great literature not by lack of talent but by lack of money and privacy — the material conditions that make sustained intellectual work possible. Woolf examines the history of women's exclusion from universities, the literary marketplace, and public life; she invents the figure of Shakespeare's sister (a woman as talented as Shakespeare but born female, who would have been destroyed rather than celebrated by the world into which she was born). The most elegant and influential argument for women's intellectual equality.
What is Kindred about?
Kindred (1979) by Octavia Butler follows Dana, a Black woman living in 1970s Los Angeles, who is repeatedly pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland to save the life of Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner — and her own ancestor. Each time she returns to the past she stays longer, becoming more deeply implicated in the plantation's violence. Butler uses the science fiction device of time travel to make visceral and immediate the experience of American slavery, and to explore the complex question of how people survive under conditions of extreme oppression — what they do, what they become, and what it costs.
What is The Handmaid's Tale about?
The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood is set in the near-future Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, in which a theocratic government has stripped women of all rights — property, employment, reading, freedom of movement. Offred is a Handmaid — a fertile woman assigned to a Commander whose wife cannot conceive, required to bear his children. The novel is told as Offred's record of her daily life under this regime. Atwood's novel is a dystopia constructed entirely from historical precedents — everything that happens to women in Gilead has happened to actual women in actual societies — making it both a work of political imagination and a work of history.
