I’m skeptical of canon projects generally, but I admit that I find them fascinating all the same. I stumbled across this list of “50 Essential Feminist Books” (not necessarily law-related) on the UK-based Stylist blog. It’s what the editors call “50 essential feminist reads, spanning the first, second and third waves of feminism.”
- Sophocles, Antigone
- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
- George Eliot, Middlemarch
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
- Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex
- Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
- Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
- Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
- Valerie Solanas, Scum Manifesto
- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- Kate Millett, Sexual Politics
- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex
- Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
- Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape
- Nancy Friday, My Mother My Self
- Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
- Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies Ourselves
- Luce Irigaray, Key Writings
- Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue
- Alice Walker, The Color Purple
- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- John Irving, The Cider House Rules
- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
- Fannie Flag, Fried Green Tomatos at the Whistle Stop Cafe
- Andrew Dworkin, Intercourse
- Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
- Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
- Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
- Guerrilla Girls, The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art
- Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women
- Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stoller (eds.), The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order
- Annie Leibovitz and Susan Sontag, Women
- Inga Musco, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
- bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody
- Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future
- Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work
- Beverly Donofrio, Riding in Cars with Boys
- Guerrilla Girls, Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls’ Illustrated Guide to Female Sterotypes
- Maureen Dowd, Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide
- Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs, Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
- Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism
- Tracy Emin, Strangeland
- Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, Yes Means Yes
- Tina Fey, Bossy Pants
- Sylvia Walby, The Future of Feminism
- Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman
Most of these would be great for a literature, history or Women’s Studies course, but some (I’m thinking of hooks, Levy, Valenti, Friedman & Valenti, Baumgardner & Richards, Walby, Moran) could be folded in to enrich a Feminist Legal Theory course.
-Bridget Crawford
