As part of our ongoing series on “Things every college woman should know,” I sat down with Laurie Finke, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies to ask her what she thinks are the top 5 feminist works every woman should read before she graduates. Read on for Professor Finke’s informed recommendations!
- Simone de Bouvoir, “The Second Sex.”
“In many ways that’s the text that really started what we often call second wave feminism…Feminism as it emerges in the 1960s. It’s a pretty accessible read. In some ways it’s dated but it’s a classic piece. The first part of it looks at women through a series of theoretical lenses, including biology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. And the second half she gives a kind of phenomenological presentation of a woman’s life cycle, being with childhood through adolescence into adulthood. It’s a text that’s been badly translated into English, so that can be kind of a problem, but it’s definitely a must-read.”
2. Boston Women’s Book Health Collective, “Our Bodies, Ourselves”
“It is mainly a kind of reference book so you might only read it if you were interested in a particular topic in it. But it is a really important book on women’s health, and probably one of the best ones. And interesting theoretically for so many reasons.”
3. Alice Echols, “Daring to be Bad.”
“It’s an oral history of the radical feminist movement from 1967-1975, which is a period that often gets written out of feminist theory and feminist histories. It’s a useful book to read to get a better sense of a group of thinkers who we don’t know like Ellen Willis and Cathy Seranchild, and others no one’s ever heard of because they’ve largely been written out of the history. So I think that’s a very useful book.”
4. bell hooks, “Feminism is for Everybody” (or anything by her)
“Her premise [in “Feminism is for Everybody”] is basically why you should be a feminist. But anything by her is wonderful. She’s written so widely, she’s an extremely prolific writer, she published her first work as an undergraduate. She’s a writer who’s written about the intersection of feminism and race, and she’s one of the most widely read, important voices in thinking through issues of both race and feminism. She’s very much a public academic…she’s been one of the most successful crossover writers: she doesn’t just do academic writing, she really tries to write for popular audiences.”
5. Chandra Mohanty, “Feminism Without Borders”
“This makes an argument for a more global approach to thinking about feminism. One of the things that early 20th century or mid 20th century versions of feminism tended to do was think about feminist issues as being common throughout the world. Mohanty argues for [a] more localized [approach]…that women in different parts of the world have very different needs and issues. So she argues for examining things more comparatively, more cross culturally, more globally.”