The best feminism books

As a young anthropologist thirty years ago, I traveled to a remote village in Papua New Guinea to try to understand why a language dies. I went to Papua New Guinea because, with over 800 different languages, that little country is the most linguistically diverse place on the planet. The people in the village I ended up living in spoke a language unrelated to any other; one that had only ever been spoken by about 100 people.

This is the story of my life in that village, called Gapun. It is a story of how I kept returning, and over the years became inextricably implicated in the villagers’ destiny. It is the story of the impact that Western culture has had on the farthest reaches of the globe, and how I came to realize that the death of a language is about a great deal more than language.

Vibrant, humorous, sexy, and fraught with entanglements, My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning.

As World War I drew to a close, statesmen and diplomats descended on Paris, promising to build a new international order rooted in peace, justice, and democracy. Women demanded they live up to their word. Excluded from the negotiations, female activists met separately and insisted boldly that peace would never be secured to the exclusion of half of humanity. My book follows dozens of remarkable women from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America as they demanded women’s right to dignity, security, and equality in civil, political, and economic life. It shows how, in the watershed year of 1919, nascent feminists from across the world transformed women’s rights into a global rallying cry.

In the 1970s the women’s movement created tremendous changes in the lives of women throughout the United States. Millions of women participated in a movement that fundamentally altered the country’s ideas about how women could and should contribute to American society.

Revolutionizing Expectations tells the story of some of those women, many of whom took part in the movement in unexpected ways. By looking at feminist activism in Durham, Denver, and Indianapolis, Melissa Estes Blair uncovers not only the work of local NOW chapters but also the feminist activism of Leagues of Women Voters and of women’s religious groups in those pivotal cities.

My book is a biography of Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954). Born into slavery during the Civil War, she became a prominent civil rights activist and feminist. Terrell was the first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP who collaborated closely with the likes of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Although she is discussed in many history books, I was amazed to find that Terrell had never been the subject of a full-length biography. Inspired by her life and career, I decided to write her biography. It was an honor to be able to meet Terrell’s family, to read her letters and diaries, and to weave together the joys and struggles of Terrell's personal, private life with the challenges and achievements of her public, political career.

The Short While is a Queer Sci-Fi thriller about attempting to construct a life in the ruins of something larger than yourself. In the case of my book, it's a fallen totalitarian regime that once had the best of intentions. Written and drawn over the last five years, my second book has become a love letter to every attempt, made by myself or someone I love, to build a life with someone else, be it romantic or not. I’ve been referring to it as a story about a haunted house where the haunted house is America and the characters are all the eager young couple who bought something cursed sight unseen, and can’t move out now because they already made the down payment. 

A comprehensive and accessible illustrated guide to lingerie from intimates expert Cora Harrington, founder of The Lingerie Addict, the internet's top intimate apparel blog.

While many love the idea of wearing special underthings, lingerie can be intimidating. How is it supposed to fit? How do you take care of it all? Is lingerie really for me? In this beautiful and empowering guide, lingerie expert Cora Harrington demystifies intimate apparel, making it accessible to all sizes, ages, and budgets. Covering everything from basic bras and panties to special occasion wear, shapewear, hosiery, corsets, and more, this no-nonsense handbook empowers you to confidently buy, wear, and care for the underpinnings of your dreams.

Girl (in Real Life) is a funny and heartfelt novel exploring the highs and lows of online fame from award-winning author Tamsin Winter. Eva's parents run a hugely successful YouTube channel, and Eva is the star of the show. But she is getting sick of being made to pose in stupid mum-and-daughter matching outfits for sponsored posts. The freebies aren't worth the teasing at school. And when an intensely humiliating "period party" post goes viral, Eva is outraged. She's going to find a way to stop the channel, even if she has to sabotage it herself.

“Winter's funny and thought-provoking third novel vividly evokes the sense of powerlessness and exposure on the flip side of viral fame.” The Guardian

An original and innovative exploration of Antigone, femininity, and love. In Antigone’s Sisters, Lenart Škof explores the power of love in our world—stronger than violence and stronger even than death. Focusing on Antigone, Savitri, and Mary, the book offers an investigation into various goddesses and feminine figures from a variety of philosophical, mythological, theological, and literary contexts. 

Drawing on Bracha M. Ettinger’s concept of matrixiality, Škof proposes a new matrixial theory of philosophy and theology of love. With its new interpretation of Antigone and related readings of Irigaray, Kristeva, and Ettinger, Antigone’s Sisters aims to identify some of the reasons for this forgetting of love and to show that it is only love that can bring peace to our ethically disrupted world.

In 2016, a Detroit arts organization grants writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore a free house—a room of her own, à la Virginia Woolf—in Detroit’s majority-Bangladeshi “Banglatown.” Accompanied by her cats, Moore moves to the bungalow in her new city where she gardens, befriends neighborhood youth, and grows to intimately understand civic collapse and community solidarity. When the troubled history of her prize house comes to light, Moore finds her life destabilized by the aftershocks of the housing crisis and governmental corruption.

Part investigation, part comedy of a vexing city, and part love letter to girlhood, Gentrifier examines capitalism, property ownership, and whiteness, asking if we can ever really win when violence and profit are inextricably linked with victory. One of NPR’s Best Books of 2021.