100 books like The Other Women's Movement

Did you know that until 1974, the job category ‘domestic worker’ was excluded from labor rights that were established in FDR’s New Deal legislation such as the minimum wage and workers’ compensation? Did you know that 1960s union leaders ignored the exploitative labor conditions of domestic work because they considered these workers “unorganizable”?

Historian Premilla Nadasan’s wonderful book tells the story of Black domestic workers’ exclusion from legal rights to which other workers were entitled and their fight to gain those rights beginning in the 1950s and extending through the establishment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974.

Telling this history through the life stories of domestic workers who were leaders in this movement makes this book a particularly compelling and worthwhile read.  

When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) first opened its doors in 1965, sex discrimination had many different meanings to women who wrote in to complain.

Some pointed to the abysmally low pay in “women’s occupations” such as secretarial work, while others described the barriers women faced getting into professions such as management or law. Katherine Turk’s fascinating book shows us how and why this government agency invented an official definition for sex discrimination. 

Importantly too, Turk highlights the consequences this definition came to have for women in a varied occupations and professions. The EEOC’s understanding of sex equality helped improve workplaces for some categories of women workers, but not for most. 

Roxane Gay’s memoir writing is brilliant! So is her collection of personal essays written by women who have experienced sexual harassment and rape.

Gay’s painful introductory piece on learning to understand her own experience of being gang raped at age twelve as “not that bad” illuminates the problem with rape culture. Women learn to blame themselves. 

As the essays by other authors make clear, rape culture is bad and women are often denigrated when they speak out, but they must come together to foment change. Whether the essays focus on workplace harassment or date rape, they all hold key lessons for the importance of women’s sexual autonomy at work.

How can we remedy the fact that wages in predominantly female jobs (e.g., secretaries) have been devalued historically?

For comparable worth advocates, women should be paid a wage equivalent to men who work in a different job with similar skills and experience. But how do we evaluate and rank skills in different occupations to create equivalence? Sociologist Joan Acker takes us through two 1980s comparable worth evaluation processes to answer this question.

Her thought-provoking research demonstrates that the evaluation process itself was laden with gendered assumptions about the value of different skills. It also helps us understand how we can evade this problem in the future and create procedures with more equitable outcomes.  

Many women continue to embrace a radical feminist perspective, and one of the important feminist writers today is the UK journalist and organizer Julie Bindel. Her reporting on sex trafficking has been essential to understanding the worldwide exploitation of women and girls.

She published this book in 2021 to restate the liberatory goals of feminism and critique the impediments created not only by conservatives but also by liberals. Bindel pulls no punches and takes no prisoners—she’s never afraid to confront the powerful and respond to her critics. One of the great experiences of the past year was being interviewed by Bindel for her podcast on men and feminism. Finally, Bindel reminds us that one of the biggest lies about feminists is that they have no sense of humor. 

Kirsten Swinth’s fantastic new book argues that our understanding of feminism as asking women to have it all is deeply misunderstood. The second wave did want women to be able to balance their lives as homemakers and workers, but not by having a double shift. Instead, they wanted women’s household burden to be shared—by their husbands, by employers, by the government, and by society as a whole. Swinth shows how feminists tried to deploy the philosophy that “the personal is political” against the problem of laundry and other household tasks. Wives’ strategies ranged from household labor strikes (Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot! was the motto of the Women’s Strike for Equality) to drawing up their own individual marriage contracts. These homespun contracts delineated a fairer division of household labor between husbands and wives. Swinth shows that despite these measures and some legal successes, women nonetheless mostly retained their… show more.

I loved this atmospheric debut, often described as a collection of interlinked short stories. Set on an isolated group of islands off the coast of Virginia, the stories span more than two centuries of the same family’s history: from the 19th century and far ahead into a post-apocalyptic, post-pandemic future. There are intimations that a supernatural ‘second sight’ runs in the family and the book’s Southern Gothic vibe is nothing short of intriguing. But for all the hints of magic realism, the focus on female characters contending with obstacles of class and gender at different points in history is rooted in an understandable reality. Beautifully written descriptions of the natural environment, poignant characters, and local color all demonstrate Taylor’s imagination to be visionary and impressive. 

When global diplomats formed the League of Nations in 1919, feminists were forced to lobby for women’s rights from outside the halls of power. As a small measure of progress, after World War II six states would appoint women to the 1945 conference charged with drafting a charter to govern the League’s successor: the United Nations. Half of the female delegates were appointed by Latin American nations, and together, the three feministas would lobby tirelessly to ensure that the UN Charter bound the body to promote human rights “without distinction as to race, language, religion, or sex.” Marino’s fabulous book explains why, in the 1920s and 1930s, Latin American feminists came to play such an outsized role in the global quest for sexual equality and human rights.

Unrecognised female labor is also the subject of this captivating non-fiction book by Hochschild, a sociologist drawing upon decades of research with fifty heterosexual couples in the Bay area. Hochschild is well-known for identifying ‘the second shift’ of childcare and domestic chores that working women often perform at home, on top of their professional commitment. This results in a rampant inequality of leisure time, and compounded with unequal pay in the workplace, exacerbates gender injustice in contemporary American society. But Hochschild also provides powerful examples of couples who counter-act this norm, while showing how individual attitudes towards gender and domestic responsibilities are influenced by class, ethnicity, and upbringing. Fascinating and illuminating. 

This book is very dear to me because of the author’s breadth of vision, the creativity with which she approached it, and the radical possibilities for women’s lives and gender relations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that she uncovered.

Taylor demonstrates the importance of radical utopianism in challenging traditional notions of gender relations and marriage and introduces us to fascinating women who were part of that process. Her book shows us how new possibilities were considered for society and makes us realize that women’s marginalization in more mainstream socialist parties was not inevitable. Taylor’s writing is elegant and moving.