The 93 best feminist books

No. 11 on this list. The Bloody Chamber · Angela Carter · 1979

Taught in schools: OCR GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

The Bloody Chamber is among the most-taught works of feminist fiction in British and American university literature programs, appearing on A-level and undergraduate syllabi across the English-speaking world for over four decades. It anchors feminist fairy tale criticism as a field and appears on most 20th-century fiction retrospective lists. Its canonical standing exceeds Infinite Jest (78) in terms of institutional adoption.

No. 12 on this list. The Yellow Wall-Paper · Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 1892

It is a fixture of American literature and women's studies courses and widely anthologized. Its place sits just below the great canon, and the Open Library record lists it among open syllabus project works.

No. 13 on this list. The Story of an Hour · Kate Chopin

One of the most anthologized American short stories, taught widely in high school and college courses on American literature and feminist writing. It is a fixture of short fiction curricula.

No. 14 on this list. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl · Harriet Ann Jacobs · 1861

It is a staple of American literature and African American studies courses and the best-known slave narrative by a woman. Few narratives are taught as widely, though it stands below the central novels.

No. 15 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. 16 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. 17 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. 18 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. 19 on this list. Quicksand · Nella Larsen · 2002

Quicksand is a standard text in Harlem Renaissance and African American literature courses, and a Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition keeps it in print. It sits below the universal canon but is widely taught.

No. 20 on this list. Female Masculinity · Jack Halberstam · 1998

Ranked by literary regard among eligible works in the current catalogue. This position reflects the available catalogue evidence.

No. 21 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. 22 on this list. The Story of Zahra · Hanan al-Shaykh · 1980

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

No. 23 on this list. I Love Dick · Chris Kraus · 1997

Widely taught in courses on autofiction and feminist writing.

No. 24 on this list. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation · Silvia Federici · 2004

Standard reading across feminist theory, history and political economy.

No. 25 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. 26 on this list. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals · Saidiya Hartman · 2020

Ranked by literary regard among eligible works in the current catalogue. This position reflects the available catalogue evidence.

No. 27 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. 28 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. 29 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. 30 on this list. Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand (SUNY series, Women Writers in Translation) · George Sand · 1991

Sand is widely taught in French and women's literature courses, but this memoir in an abridged English edition is read mainly in specialist courses. It is far less central than her novels.