A few weeks ago I went to the local Waterstone’s to pick up a new book to read for my 12 book challenge. Inspired by this post by actress and director Olivia Wilde and the comments on it, I had set off to buy Tara Westover’s Educated. Being there anyway I decided I to look for another book I have been meaning to read, Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, as well. After some searching, I found it in a section dedicated to feminist scholarship. A collection of all sorts women writing about the female experience. Looking at the books there I was struck by how little I had actually read or even heard of before. I have grown up with a mother who lives and breathes feminism, but we never really talked about the scholarship that is at its core. Picking up Gay’s book I decided then and there to to focus my next couple of readings on feminism.
I picked out a few by important women that I remembered from doing a Mass Education Course on the British suffragette movement in connection with the 100-year anniversary, and some more contemporary authors to get started. I settled on short form versions of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman first published in 1792 and Extracts From My Own Story by Emmeline Pankhurst first published in its entirety in 1914. For the more contemporary angle I picked up Gay’s book and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists from 2014.
I can’t wait to get started on this journey of discovery and exploration. I would love to hear if any of you have suggestions of feminist literature that I could explore in the future.
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SASHA KIRSTINE 