Best 100 Nonfiction books on Women

I have two favorite books on/of matters of concern for feminists:

One is with me and mentioned in my LT library: Angeline Goreau's The Whole Duty of a Woman, Female Writers in Seventeenth Century England. It is full of scintillating debate in poem and provides ample primary material (what is sadly missing in most books written in the USA where we are wrongly taught to put everything in our own words and do all the analysis, leaving nothing to the reader). I love it, yet never see it mentioned.

The other, is one of a handful of books about science and women I found and helped translate into Japanese: Sexual Science -- The Victorian Construction of Womanhood: by Cynthia E. Russett. Unlike the other books I served, which had mostly great reviews, almost all the reviews I found were written by feminists furious that Russett had not spelled out how bad the situation was to remain for women. I was thankful she had not done so, for, as an acquisitions editor, I was fed up with repetition and welcomed a book that did not waste my time. I also thought she was extraordinarily attentive to the reasons why people did the misguided things they did (for example the benevolent motives of the phrenologists) and that this was far more important than pegging on harsh criticism of those bad men the reviewers wished for.

Join me, anyone? Let's go to 100, then reconsider.

Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!

Not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for, but I like Marilyn Yalom's books A History of the Wife and A History of the Breast.

ETA: I almost forgot one of my absolute favourites: Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs.

I love Marina Warner's book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. The title is fairly self-explanatory. Warner has a really engaging writing style, in that she phrases things plainly, letting the ideas speak for themselves instead of getting bogged down with rhetoric. Also, she resists the psychoanalytic crutch that seemed to plague feminist theory for so long (at least, film theories).

Also, Carol J. Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover examines the horror genre through a mythological structure and coined the term "Final Girl" (one of the archetypes of the genre). It really ended up opening a lot of doors in horror studies.

Oh, that Carol J. Clover book sounds really interesting! I love books that combine my interests. :)

Here are two books that focus on women and science, 1) Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World by Barbara T. Gates (touchtones are being independent) and Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's daughters and Botany in England 1760 to 1860 by Ann B. Shteir. Gates introduces us to a wide variety of writers and scientists while discussing the changing aesthetics of nature from the 18th to the 19th century which permitted the emergence of a female voice in otherwise male dominated disciplines. Shtier discusses the attempt to professionalize the study of Botany following the mass popularization of linnaeus's classification system (by women of course). Gates and Shteir collaborated on another book Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science 1997, which I have not yet read.

My personal interest in all of this is the development of an aesthetic of landscape that included contributions from women, a development that occurred in the 1830-50's England and has much to thank Jane Webb Loudon (1807-1858) for their inclusion.

I remember being fascinated by For Her Own Good. I took a class called Women, Culture, and Society or something like that, and that was the best text we read.

After seeding this forum, the gift of having a good reader and a good researcher spend much of their time helping me gratis made me concentrate exclusively on finishing a book (the proof comes today) and, not understanding what the "talk" tab meant -- i thought it was chat and hating that never clicked on it! -- so, i confess: i forgot all about this forum! Counting, I see we are just over a tenth of the way to the 100. Had I peeked in I would have immediately clicked on florahistora's name , for her interests are close to mine though it might not show from the 60 bks in my LT library. Thank you for participating everyone and please pardon my long dissappearances (I have never seen a rule that a forum's parent is obliged to stay around, but some meme makes me feel responsible for what i start). As Japanese say, yoroshiku onegaishimasu!

Two favorite classics:

You Just Don't Understand by Deborah Tannen

and

In A Different Voice by Carol Gilligan

How about Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves and Wild Women by the women who writes for writers, not the same as Wild Mind, but her friend

Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Corrects some misconceptions about colonial women, and generally a great read.
Where the Girls Are: Growing up female with the mass media by Susan J. Douglas
Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher
Women, Art and Society by Whitney Chadwick

A few of my faves... (not including books already mentioned or about women's writing).

btw, Carol Gilligan has a debut novel out titled Kyra. It got a good review from Publishers Weekly which is why I picked it up. I've yet to read it though.

A History of Women in the West, a four volume collection of thematic articles.

Foucault, History of Sexuality

Force of Circumstance, De Beauvoir

The following are all the best of feminist nonfiction I've read so far--every one of these books contained mind-blowing ideas for me.

A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
Still one of the best works I've read, EVER. (ever!)
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Alice Walker (ugh--I apologize: the brackets aren't loading for this one!)
Brilliant and powerful, like all Walker's work
Feminism and Religion, Rita Gross
Really clear explanations of feminism and how the world's major religions treat women, through 2 lenses--dogma/text, and actual practices/traditions
Tapestries of Life, Bettina Aptheker
Amazing exploration of feminist theory and women's art, daily life, and work.
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses
Great overview of how the medical tradition changed to favor men, complex technology, and a culture of authority rather than nurturing, as well as the persecution of alternative medicine, alternative healers, and women.
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality, Susan McClary
McClary, a professor at UCLA, looks at how the western music tradition has evolved a language that reflects "male" modes of thinking and sexuality. It sounds very essentialist but it's much better than I can convey
Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin
I know Dworkin's quite controversial, but I consider it a mark of her greatness :)
This book is a bit uneven, but certain chapters are as amazing and fascinating as anything I've ever read.
The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara Walker
I know Walker's research has been criticized, but she brings up loads of new and fascinating information and viewpoints which could be true or valid. At the very least, she allows us to completely rethink our classic myths and cultural beliefs
Women, Church and State, Matilda Joslyn Gage
One of the first theoretical texts I read. There's some brilliant analysis here as well as fascinating research and contemporary information.
On Lies, Secrets and Silence, Adrienne Rich
Beautifully written, with excellent food for thought
Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to them, Dale Spender
This is the book that finally allowed me to recapture the women's history I didn't even know I'd lost. It profiles tons of great artists, activists, philosophers, and scientists, mostly in Britain and the U.S., throughout history
What are we Fighting For? Joanna Russ
This book must be brilliant, 1)because it's written by Joanna Russ, she of The Female Man, and 2) because it's The Book that sparked my feminist epiphany, the one that finally made me Get It on a visceral level.
Working it out: 23 women writers, artists, scientists and scholars talk about their life and work This one's fascinating just for the "voyeur" in me, who loves to explore other people's lives, especially when feminist theory and activism is brought into it.

I too loved Marina Warner 's From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers -- as well as her books on Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene. And For Her Own Good by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English should be required reading for all women who ever visit a gynecologist -- Although Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story -- it does recount her harrowing experience at the hands of the medical profession at the turn of the 20th century -- and it's central to the thesis of Ehrenreich and English's book.

Adrienne Rich 's Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution was one of the dozens of books I read when I was first pregnant in the late 70s and really important to my experience as a mother of a son.

Of course, there's Mary Wollstonecraft 's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman -- especially the sections on education of women.

And for those of us who came of age in the 60s, Betty Friedan 's The Feminine Mystique liberated us from the somnombulence of suburban wifehood and Simone de Beauvoir 's The Second Sex challenged us to think about place in the world.

I also was intrigued by Elaine Morgan's The Descent of Woman, Elizabeth Gould Davis's The First Sex, and especially Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and Minotaur. As well as Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade and Marija Gimbutas's works including The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe.

I know this list dates me -- I am getting dated -- but it's important for us to keep remembering our mothers, so they don't get lost again!

Seeing the mention of Wollstonecraft's Vindication makes me so sad. If she had twenty or thirty or forty more years to write I feel that she might have had a tremendous influence on European culture. I would gladly give up Mary and her Frankenstein to bring her mother back . . .

And I forget the name of the inexpensive, light green, very fat -- well over 1000 pgs i think -- pb feminist reader where i discovered her and some wonderful passages by Sourjourner Truth and maybe even some of Kingsley in africa (i later bought her book), though that might have come from an anthology of feminist nature essays. Can anyone give us the name of that big reader?

Two books I have really enjoyed are Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (touchstones aren't working with the subtitles) and Kathleen M. Brown's Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia.

Hi everyone!

I'm new to LT, but inextricably involved. I think my very favorite feminist author is Carolyn Heilbrun, in particular her book Reinventing Womanhood. For an interesting read on science, try Ruth Bleier's Science and Gender. I also enjoyed reading Powers of Desire for its view on sexuality. For concise, well written theory, I like Essays in Feminism by Vivian Gornick. I invite younger women to share their favorite feminist authors with me.

Wifework by Susan Maushart - a depressingly accurate analysis of work done in the home by married women. Susan Maushart lives and works in Western Australia.

I enjoyed The Meaning of Wife by Anne Kingston although she does largely base her arguments on Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique.

I'm currently reading The Essential Feminist Reader, a collection of essays, speeches, dissertations, excerpts from plays and novels which is fabulously rich and which assembles writers from all over the world (which is rare considering our Western-centric tendencies). It also crosses the ages from the 1400's to the 2000's. I'm enjoying it tremendously and learning tonnes!

I'm surprised Bell Hooks (Gloria Watkins) hasn't been mentioned. I'm not familiar with her work, but I understand it's quite influential.

Just getting started with Library Thing and still exploring, when I saw this thread I just had to mention The Grand Domestic Revolution: a history of feminist designs for American homes, neighborhoods, and cities by Dolores Hayden. It's about 20 years since I read it but I remember it as uplifting and inspiring. So much so that I bought a copy from Amazon earlier this year.

I too am surprised to see that bell hooks is not on the list.

Just to name a few from bell: Feminism is for everybody, Ain't I a woman, and I love what bell teaches us about love...she has a trilogy: All about love, communion: the female search for love, and salvation:black people and love.

Woven into bell's work is also class, culture, and race and most recently place with her newest work belonging: a culture of place. Feminism is beautiful because it can and should include all types of women and aspects of women's lives

Others are In search of our mothers' gardens I have also attended a lecture by Shira Tarrant but haven't had a chance to read her books

I'm glad to see that Adrienne Rich is on the list. I have also just recently discovered Alicia Ostriker Stealing the language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America another text which was amazing by her is Feminist Revision and the Bible
Also Mary daly should definately be on this list!!! Gyn/Ecology and Beyond God the Father
I've got a pile of books to read for after exams, but one author who's not been mentioned is susie orbach fat is a feminist issue which has been highly recommended to me.
Finally I'm currently reading The Feminine Mystique which I am really enjoying.
And, though it's poetry Feminine Gospels Carol Ann Duffy should be suggested too....

There are so many books in this thread that I need to read!

I would add Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, which is an anthology edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti and Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons by Lynn Peril. I'd also recommend Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes by Helen Benedict, though parts of it are outdated now.

As well as feminist theory, I do like women's lives in their own words. A big favourite is Inmost Heart : 800 Years of Women's Letters. A really fascinating read.

Are Women Human? by Dorothy L. Sayers
Lectures on the Psychology of Women by Joan Chrisler
Women Don't Ask (Babcock) and/or Why So Slow? (Virginia Valian)
It's so hard to pick just a few.

And the one that has stuck with me for years - Misogynies by Joan Smith.

Glad to see wifework by Susan Maushart is already on the list of works mentioned...
One of my eye-openers was the creation of feminist consciousness by Gerda Lerner. She shows how women have been deeply hurt by woman-hating ideas, and how they have tried to deal with that by developing their own ideas about their place in the world and their own value as human beings. Again and again she shows how small groups started to re invent themselves, after which they were forgotten, after which a new group started the process all over again, reinventing the wheel so to speak. With the advance of book printing etc it was easier for women to reach a new generation, but in a woman hating world it was never easy.
This book made me value the efforts of women to speak up, be heard, break the silence and assert themselves, no matter the difficulties.

Just browsing through my tags, here's some books that I think haven't been mentioned, in no particular order.

Women, race and class by Angela Y. Davis
The subjection of women by John Stuart Mill
Backlash, Stiffed, and The terror dream by Susan Faludi
Our bodies, ourselves, in its various editions, by The Boston Women's Health Book Collective
It's a jungle out there by Amanda Marcotte
Dragonslippers by Rosalind B. Penfold (graphic-novel-style memoir about an abusive relationship)
The dialectic of sex by Shulamith Firestone
The beauty myth by Naomi Wolf
The hearts of men by Barbara Ehrenreich
Bitches, bimbos, and ballbreakers by The Guerrilla Girls
Cunt by Inga Muscio
A midwife's tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Transforming a rape culture by Emilie Buchwald and others

Lessons from the fat-o-sphere by Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby
The purity myth by Jessica Valenti

In Row My Book's list, I saw The Beauty Myth.

I recall seeing the NYT rview when i was a book-scout in japan.

It told me that the NYT was no longer worth reading.

What I mean is that there was an excellent bk called Face Value (the damn touchstones are worthless!!! -- it was by robin lakoff and rachel somebody but hell if i know who is kathleen baird-murray and others?) written by two feminists a decade earlier and it was not mentioned. I hate it when reviews fail to mention older books. The review indirectly told me that the NYT no longer had a past and as far as i was concerned, a future.

I must admit that I am tempted to post my essay on the luckiness of the fat as opposed to us skinny folk who have far less choice . . .

The Library of Congress has a wonderful collection of papers: VOTES FOR WOMEN: Selections from The National American Women Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/naw/nawshome.html

Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier is definitely at the top of any list like this for me.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century by Margaret Fuller
--I just found out about her in a class I'm taking on the American Renaissance. She was incredibly ahead of her time in her thinking about a lot of things.

Feminist Thought by Rosemarie Tong
--A good introduction, each chapter covering a different major branch of feminist thought.

I don't think I've seen anyone mention The Vagina Monologues. The Good Body is another one I liked by Eve Ensler.

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (brackets not working for her for some reason.)
--Her work introduced me to the concept of intersectionality, which has informed my perspective on the world ever since.

Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti

Colonize This! is a great anthology by young women of color.

Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation is another one I love.

rowmyboat #29: glad to see Kate and Marianne's book mentioned.

SUMMARY LIST. I didn't count and I didn't get every title. I left out poetry and fiction. Additional titles listed by the same author is noted with "Additional titles listed". I'm was getting a little lazy.... (and forgive me for not even attempting touchstones on this list).

Angier, Natalie. Woman: An Intimate Geogrpahy.
Aptheker, Tapestries of Life
Babcock, Linda. Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide.
Benedict, Helen. Vrigin or Vamp: How the PRess Covers Sex Crimes
Bleier, Ruth. Science and Gender.
Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia.
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art and Society.
Chrisler, Joan. Lectures on the Psychology of Women.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father.
Davis, Angela. Women, Race and Class.
Davis, Elizabeth Gould. The First Sex.
de Beauvoir, Simone. Force of Circumstance
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex
Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur.
Douglas, Susan J. Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media
Dworkin, Andrea. Intercourse.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women.
Eisler, Riane. The Chlaice and the Blade.
Ensler, Eve. The Vagina Monologues.
Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Freedman, Estelle, ed. The Essential Feminist Reader.
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
Gage, Matilda Joslyn. Women, Church and State.
Gimbutas, Marija. The Goddessess and Gods of Old Europe.
Gornick, Vivian. Essays in Feminism.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique.
Freidman, Jaclyn,ed. Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape.
Gates, Barbara T. Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice.
Goreau, Angeline The Whole Duty of a Woman
Gross, Rita. Feminism and Religion.
Harding, Kate. Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere
Hayden, Dolores. The Grand Domestic Revolution: a History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, NEighborhoods, and Cities.
Heilbrun, Carolyn. Reinventing Womanhood.
Hooks, Bell. Feminism is for Everybody.
Hooks, Bell. Ain't I a Woman.
Hooks, Bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. (other titles listed)
Kenyon, Olga, ed. 800 ears of Women's Letters.
Kingston, Anne. The Meaning of Wife.
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness
Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider.
Maushart, Susan. Wifework.
McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest.
Morgan, Elaine. The Descent of Woman.
Muscio, Inga. Cunt.
Orbach, Susie. Fat is a Feminist Issue.
Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. (other titles listed)
Pantel, Pauline Schmitt. History of Women in the West
Peril, Lynn. Pink think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons.
Pipher, Mary. Reviving Ophelia
Rich, Adrienne. Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.
Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets and silence.
Russ, Joanna. What are We Fighting For?
Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women's Writing.
Russett, Cynthia E. Russett. Sexual Science:Victorian Construction of Womanhood
Sayers, Dorothy. Are Women Huma?
Shteir, Ann B. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's daughters and Botany in England 1760 to 1860
Spender, Dale. Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them.
Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don't Understand
Tong, Rosemarie. Feminist Thought.
Valenti, Jessica. full Frontal Feminism.
Walker, Barbara. The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and secrets
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (other titles)
Valenti, Jessica. The Purity Myth.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own.
Yalom, Marilyn. A History of the Wife
Yalom, Marilyn, A History of the Breast

Wow, thank you, ava!

Lavendar... I just bought Woman: An Intimate Geography a couple weeks ago, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet. What did you like most about this book?

I agree about bell hooks, as in: Teaching community: a pedagogy of hope

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Community-A-Pedagogy-Hope/dp/0415968186/ref=sr_1_...

We don't seem to have touched on a major subject area of feminist literature, that of the crone. See for example, The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom, and Power by Barbara G. Walker. The Crone is a work of astounding scholarship (although some of Walker's work has been criticized). It is also a consciousness-raising walk through the very dark side of feminine suppression that has gone on in the world since shortly after the timeframe described in Language of the Goddess, the magnum opus of Marija Gimbutas (praised as such by Joseph Campbell), emeritus professor of archaeology at UCLA until her death in 1994.

If you doubt, for example, that upwards of half a million women were suppressed (executed) from the 15th thru the 18th centuries ostensibly because the Malleus Maleficarum helped "prove" that they were witches, a number of authoritative histories have documented those numbers. Half a million women ...

Noted explorations into the archetype of the crone include The Power of the Crone by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Goddesses in Older Women: Archetypes in Women over 50, by Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian analyst, and the body of work created by Deena Metzger, most recently in Feral, but also in Writing For Your Life: Discovering the Story of Your Life's Journey, a guide to journal writing.

The unique perspective of the crone is to have the intellect and endurance to bear witness to all, and then to have the inspiration to begin healing it all.

About to start reading The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. It was recommended by a friend years ago, and has been in my must read pile for almost as long!

#39 I loved The Beauty Myth when it was first published and, sadly, I suspect it's more relevant than ever today.

#40 - I'm getting that impression reading it.

Here is an audiobook on the crone experience, read by the author herself -- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD: The Dangerous Old Woman: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype

http://www.amazon.com/The-Dangerous-Old-Woman-Archetype/dp/1591799716/ref=sr_1_1...

Also narrated by Dr. Estes, The Power of the Crone: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype was recorded in 2011:

http://www.amazon.com/Power-Crone-Clarissa-Pinkola-Estes/dp/1604074329/ref=sr_1_...

Wow, this is a great list. Sorry I'm a bit late but I'd like to add:
Femininity by Susan Brownmiller
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
Putting Women in Place

These are fantastic lists. Thanks for sharing! They will prove very useful.

A grandaughter in college interested in women, women's health, sex trading and the social policy of third world women. Also interested in becoming a doula! All this began with a thin book written by Virginia Woolf in the 70's!

>5 florahistora: Touchstone should be Jane Webb Loudon