The 48 best feminist books by women

No. 11 on this list. Cassandra · Christa Wolf · 1983

Cassandra is required reading in German literature curricula across European universities and is a standard text in courses on feminist rewritings of classical myth. The data signals return no syllabus figures, but Wolf's status as the defining literary voice of the GDR and her international recognition ensure the book appears on World Literature, Women's Writing, and Postwar European Fiction syllabi consistently. It is not a fixture of Anglophone undergraduate curricula in the way Beloved or The Great Gatsby is, placing it below 80 on canonical status.

No. 12 on this list. The Feminization of American Culture · Ann Douglas · 1977

The book is a standard text in American studies, women's studies and religious history courses. It is a landmark of 1970s cultural history, though it is not itself a literary classic.

No. 13 on this list. Penelopiad · Margaret Atwood · 2005

The Penelopiad appears regularly on feminist literature syllabi, myth-retelling courses, and contemporary women's fiction reading lists, benefiting from its position in the Canongate Myths series and Atwood's towering reputation. It has not achieved the universal curricular penetration of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, placing it in established rather than major canon territory.

No. 14 on this list. So Long a Letter · Mariama Bâ · 1979

Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

So Long a Letter is one of the most taught African novels in Western universities, appearing on syllabi across postcolonial literature, African studies, feminist theory, and world literature courses. Winner of the inaugural Noma Award for Publishing in Africa (1980), it has been translated into more than twenty languages and is routinely included on 'essential African literature' reading lists. Its Wikipedia article exists in over twenty language editions, reflecting its global recognition.

No. 15 on this list. Woman at Point Zero · Nawal El Saadawi · 1975

Firdaus sits on death row in a Cairo prison, waiting to be executed for the murder of a man. She has refused all appeals and refuses to see anyone — until she agrees to speak to a psychiatrist. What follows is her life told in her own voice: a childhood of poverty and violation in a Nile Delta village, an uncle who used her and married her off to an old man, escape to Cairo and the streets, a moment of grace with a woman named Sharifa, and then the long education of a woman who sold her body because every other option had already been sold without her consent. El Saadawi based this novel on a real woman she met while working as a prison psychiatrist. The result reads like testimony — spare, flat, ferocious. Firdaus does not ask for sympathy. She has arrived at a place beyond it. The killing is not a breakdown; it is the one act in her life that belonged entirely to her. The novel is short — under 150 pages — and moves fast, but its structure doubles back: what begins as a case study ends as a reversal, with the psychiatrist shaken and the condemned woman serene. It belongs to the same tradition as Toni Morrison and Frantz Fanon: the examination of what violence and power do to a self, written from inside that experience.

No. 16 on this list. The Story of Zahra · Hanan al-Shaykh · 1980

Major work of Lebanese and Arab women's literature. Widely taught.

No. 17 on this list. I Love Dick · Chris Kraus · 1997

Widely taught in courses on autofiction and feminist writing.

No. 18 on this list. Miss Sophia's Diary · Ding Ling · 1928

It is the founding text of modern Chinese women's writing and is central in Chinese literature and feminist courses. It is less taught in general world literature curricula than the major canon.

No. 19 on this list. Bastard Out of Carolina · Dorothy Allison · 1992

Appears on 253 university syllabi, placing it above many contemporary novels in Southern literature, women's studies and queer studies courses. It is not yet a universal staple like Beloved.

No. 20 on this list. Sexual Politics · Kate Millett · 1970

Millett's doctoral dissertation became one of the founding texts of second-wave feminism by doing something no one had done with such systematic rigor: she read canonical male authors—D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Jean Genet—and showed that their depictions of sex were not just literary but political, encoding and enforcing male dominance over women. Her close readings are devastating: she takes passages that had been celebrated as sexually liberated and demonstrates that they are fantasies of domination, humiliation, and control. But the book goes far beyond literary criticism. Millett provides a theoretical framework for understanding patriarchy as a political institution—a system of power that operates through ideology, biology, socialization, class, economics, force, and anthropological justification. She surveys the history of the sexual revolution, the counterrevolution of Freudian theory (which she argues pathologized female independence), and the Nazi and Soviet responses to feminism. The prose is scholarly but charged with intellectual energy, and the breadth of the analysis—from the bedroom to the state—made Sexual Politics one of the most ambitious feminist works of its era. It demonstrated that the personal is political by showing exactly how politics enters the most intimate aspects of life.

No. 21 on this list. Men Explain Things to Me · Rebecca Solnit · 2014

Men Explain Things to Me (2014) is widely read and assigned in gender studies and essay-writing courses, and its title essay is a modern feminist touchstone. It is a popular essay collection more than an established classic.

No. 22 on this list. Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran · Shahrnush Parsipur · 2004

It is a landmark of modern Persian women's writing, banned in Iran and widely taught in postcolonial and feminist courses in translation. It is less established than the major Western canon.

No. 23 on this list. The Dialectic of Sex · Shulamith Firestone · 1970

One of the key texts of radical feminism. Experiencing a scholarly revival.

No. 24 on this list. Breasts and Eggs · Mieko Kawakami · 2019

Too recent (English translation 2020) to have accumulated syllabus presence, and ReadingRate's own data signals show no syllabus or Wikipedia-language data on file for this title. It has, however, entered contemporary world-literature and translated-fiction reading lists quickly given its reception.

No. 25 on this list. Women · Annie Leibovitz · 2000

It is a well-known photobook that appears in photography and visual culture discussions, not a fixture of literature syllabi. Its standing is established within its field rather than broadly canonical.

No. 26 on this list. Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions · Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2018

It is a recent short essay-book popular in feminist reading lists and book clubs, but it is not yet a staple of university syllabi. Its wider presence comes from its companion to We Should All Be Feminists.

No. 27 on this list. Trash · Dorothy Allison · 2002

Trash is taught in courses on lesbian, Southern and working-class writing, and its story 'River of Names' is widely anthologised. It is less read than Allison's novel Bastard Out of Carolina.

No. 28 on this list. The Beauty Myth · Naomi Wolf · 1991

Wolf argues that as women gained political and economic power in the twentieth century, a new form of social control rose to replace the old ones: the beauty myth. This is the ideology that tells women their worth is determined by their physical appearance—and that they must spend enormous amounts of time, money, energy, and psychological anguish trying to meet standards of beauty that are unattainable by design. Wolf traces how the beauty myth operates across five domains: work (where appearance requirements function as a form of discrimination), culture (where images of ideal beauty are produced and distributed), religion (where female beauty is treated as moral virtue), sex (where women are taught to see their bodies as inadequate), and violence (where cosmetic surgery and eating disorders are normalized). She marshals statistics, advertising analysis, legal cases, and historical examples to show that the beauty myth is not a natural expression of female vanity but a political weapon—a backlash against feminism that functions by keeping women exhausted, insecure, and focused on their bodies rather than their power. The book was a bestseller and helped launch third-wave feminism, though some critics disputed Wolf's use of statistics.

No. 29 on this list. I Who Have Never Known Men · Jacqueline Harpman · 2022

Growing presence in contemporary feminist speculative-fiction courses and reading lists since its 2020s English-language rediscovery.

No. 30 on this list. We Should All Be Feminists · Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2014

One of the most widely distributed feminist texts of the 21st century.