A Reading List for Feminist Solidarity

books & essays

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The Women’s Strike for Equality was meant to mark the 50th anniversary of suffrage in the United States, but also form a new feminist coalition. Aug. 26, 1970.Credit...John Olson/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

In the U.S., immigrants are taken from the streets and their homes, sometimes disappeared. Other times, we know they were shipped off to prisons that are reminiscent of gulags and laogai¹. In the UK, the Supreme Court has ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” refer to a “biological woman and biological sex” under UK equality laws this week. Globally, we’re at a thirty-year high in terms of the number of conflicts (wars) being actively waged. Dead children fill our newsfeeds every week, and have been for well over a year. Al Jazeera reported that every ten minutes, a woman or girl is killed by someone she knows.

What’s the connection between these? As bell hooks wrote:

Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.

Feminism opposes misogyny. You could swap misogyny for authoritarianism, colonization or settler-colonization, imperialism, racism, or homophobia/transphobia. All of the tragedies I list above are caused by ideologies of domination.

Here, I’ve complied a list to help you educate yourself about feminism, the ideology against the domination and subjugation of women. When I reach the end of this list, I’ll explain why I think education is crucial in the fight against domination, or its sibling, authoritarianism.

If you want a list of feminist classics, there are plenty out there that should be easy to find. This isn’t it. This list of 31 books and essays focuses on feminist thinking through intersectionality/inclusivity².

Feminism in Asia:

One of the difficulties of accessing feminist texts out of Asia, SWANA, Middle & Southern Africa, and Latin American in the West are translation/language barriers. We only have a handful available from intellectuals and activists working in the West.³

1. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s book Feminism Without Borders. Writing on international feminism: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements.

2. Kumari Jayawardena’s book Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. Feminism as it originated in the Third World (Asia and SWANA only in this book), erupting from the specific struggles of women fighting against colonial power, for education or the vote, for safety, and against poverty and inequality.

3. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, a book edited by Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko. The history and origins of 20th/21st century feminism in China.

   Xiaomeng
   has written an essay here on Substack on the evolution of Chinese feminism.

Feminism in SWANA, South Africa, and Latin America:

1. Verónica Gago’s book Feminist International: How to Change Everything. “A gripping political analysis and a theoretically charged manifesto” that address both feminist and Marxist theory, by a real world activist and leader of #NiUnaMenos movement.

2. Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands/La Frontera are essays from “both sides of the [U.S. - Mexico] border. Anzaldúa was a “Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer”, and much of her book focuses on conceptions of identity.

3. Nawal El Saadawi’s novel A Woman at Point Zero (1977). A novel about the place of women under a patriarchal society.

4. Leila Slimani’s book Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women’s Intimate Lives in the Arab World. “Challenge the culture of silence and taboo around sex and female pleasure.”

5. Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa, book edited by Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon. Essays by South African Black feminist thinkers.

Kitchen Table Press, founded to circumvent bias against lesbian and feminist writers of color in publishing. Photo shows Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, and Hattie Gossett, with shrubbery in the background.

Black American Feminism:

1. Audre Lorde’s book Zami, Or a New Spelling of My Name. A mytho-biography offering a path for female solidarity. Lorde pulled together many intersections: race, class, sexuality, in her feminist writing.

2. bell hooks’ book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. hooks detailed how the "feminist movement", a largely white middle and upper class affair, did not articulate the needs of poor and non-white women, thus reinforcing sexism, racism, and classism. She presents ideas of how to address these issues to create greater inclusivity and participation in feminist movement. I’ve written about it here.

3. Angela Davis’ book Women, Race & Class. A definitive text on the intersection of feminism, race (Blackness), and class. I’ve written about it here.

4. Vron Ware’s book Beyond the Pale:White Women, Racism, and History. The role of white women in the history of racist ideologies in the United States, and how feminism developed under such ideologies.

Classic & International Feminism

1. Andrea Dworkin’s book Right Wing Women. Strong ideas about the forces that keep women complacent and aligned with the patriarchy. I’ve written about the book at length here. Of her books, this one is the strongest.

2. Catharine A. Mackinnon’s book Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Mackinnon’s work on sexual harassment in legal studies is groundbreaking and influential. “Using the debate over Marxism and feminism as a point of departure, MacKinnon develops a theory of gender centered on sexual subordination and applies it to the state.”

3. Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought, a book edited by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, includes a range of international feminist topics, and interviews with feminist intellectuals and activists, including one with Angela Davis on abolition feminism.

4. Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex. The classic that kicked off second-wave feminism.

5. Virginia Woolf’s extended essay A Room of One’s Own. Classic that argues for the education of women and conditions under which women could produce literature, with some lesbian themes.

Indigenous American

1. A Gathering of Spirit, edited by Beth Brant, was the first anthology of works by Indigenous American women edited by an Indigenous American woman.

Photo shows Judy Reif, Fran Winant (smiling, with clenched fist raised), and Martha Shelley of Lavender Menace, at the Second Congress to Unite Women (while excluding lesbians).

Lesbian Feminism

Many of the feminist writers whose works I included here are lesbians, including Audre Lorde, Andrea Dworkin, Dorothy Allison, Angela Davis, Beth Brant, and bell hooks once said she was queer but celibate.

1. Audre Lorde’s essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House. It powerfully shows the importance of intersectionality within feminist movements, and how American feminism still has a long way to go.

2. Adrienne Rich’s essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. The essay shows how lesbians and Black women were removed from earlier feminist writings, and also how society reinforces heterosexuality. Rich wrote it “to encourage heterosexual feminists to examine heterosexuality as a political institution which disempowers women”.

3. Radicallesbian’s essay Women-Identified Woman. Mimeographed and shared as a response to NOW’s (National Organization of Women) attempts to remove lesbian rights from their agenda. Women-Identified Women focused on how lesbians show women to prioritize themselves, each other, and “not…accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society — the female role.”

4. Charlotte Bunch’s essay, Lesbians in Revolt offers another lesson that feminists can take from lesbians. A quote follows:

   The Lesbian rejects male sexual/political domination; she defied his world, his social organization, his ideology, and his definition of her as inferior. Lesbianism puts women first while the society declares the male supreme.

Trans & Gender-Focused Feminism

1. Jules Gill-Peterson
   ’s book A Short History of Trans Misogyny. A global history of trans misogyny that argues that “trans misogyny wasn’t always with us; it was invented.”

2. Andrea Long Chu’s book Females. From Verso: “genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire.”

3. Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble. A quote from the book: “contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism”

Class Within Feminist Perspectives:

1. Dorothy Allison’s essay A Question of Class. An excellent essay that explores the intersection of class and feminism. “The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal…It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor.”

2. Silvia Federici’s book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body Primitive Accumulation. Federici’s book shows how the “birth of the proletariat required a war against women, inaugurating a new sexual pact and a new patriarchal era: the patriarchy of the wage.” Her earlier essay, Wages Against Housework, was an exploration into the adverse effects of class on women.

Anti-Rape || #metoo

1. Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. When it was published in 1975, nothing else like it had been published before — a comprehensive study of rape in law, war, and history.

   In Women, Race & Class, Angela Davis cited Brownmiller’s racist attitudes toward Emmett Till. I would urge you read Davis’ book (or my essay, where I cover that part of Davis’s book) if you read Brownmiller.

2. Alexandra Brodsky’s book Sexual Justice. Guidance on how to think about sexual assault and (American) law, and considerations for how to address sexual assault within a community/organization.

3. Susan Griffin’s essay Rape: The All-American Crime. “Demolishes myths that blamed women and protected men from responsibility for the ‘all-American crime’ of rape.”

4. Joanne Bourke’s book Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence. An in-depth look at sexual violence across time and place.

The Women’s Strike for Equality, 1970. Credit...John Olson/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

Why I Wrote This Reading List

Educating yourself is one step in building a resistance. Think about it. It’s painfully obvious.

Funding for education, for universities, is being drastically cut and threatened. We have governmental agencies and schools pulling books from libraries. Immigrants — including graduate students and professors — were taken from their homes and universities were speaking up for what they believed in.

These all block in the flow of information that contradict ideas that are thought to be “correct”. Why? An educated, informed population is a dangerous one.

What’s one of the first things that authoritarian governments do? As we saw in Nazi Germany, China’s Cultural Revolution, with Pol Pot and Cambodian genocide, Francisco Franco after the Spanish Civil War, and anti-communist Argentine military dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía…on and on…a wave of anti-intellectualism is followed by a crackdown on universities and public intellectuals. Silencing has always been the first step of curtailing opposition. It’s page one of the authoritarian playbook.

To be honest, I don’t know if we’re at that stage now. But I always believe that Arm yourself with knowledge.

1. One of my formative experiences: in high school, an English teacher was friends with Harry Wu, whom he invited to speak to our class. Mr. Wu spoke about his time in a laogai program, and his escape. After that, I researched and wrote multiple papers on the topic - both in high school and later in college. As well, a philosophy teacher assigned Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. The English teacher was an ex-hippie and very progressive. The philosophy teacher was a Libertarian.

These formed my early thoughts against authoritarian governments. Later, I learned more about the Holocaust and other genocides, read Hannah Arendt, etc…

2. In the interest of inclusivity, I’ve left out the non-intersectional feminists: Mary Wollstonecraft (for advocating only for women who were “rational” and intelligent enough to “deserve” rights), Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton for their philosophies that women’s rights superseded Black & other rights, Betty Friedan for addressing the plight of the white, middle class housewife to the exclusion of others.

3. I speak Hindi (a major Indian language) but cannot read the alphabet. I aspire to learn Mandarin as I have friends who speak it & can help, and I have picked up a little through a deep interest in Chinese tea…hopefully, using these, I can provide more access to materials from the two dominant countries in Asia that aren’t accessible for most of us in the West.