The best novels with female protagonists disrupting patriarchal authority

I read this book when I was coming of age in the late 1980s, long before it became a bestseller and blockbuster television series. A formative influence, it’s the main reason I keep a “go bag” at the ready, with ID, three+ distinct cash currencies and a sharp knife.

Inspired by the biblical story of Jacob and his two wives, Leah and Rachel (and their handmaids), Atwood only included ‘real’ historical events and only used technology that was available at the time of writing (1984). This story lays bare the Puritan roots of 17th century American colonizing forces, the skeleton structure of America as we know it.

I love how Offred’s confessional narrative hooks readers, drags us through this olden/present/futuristic nightmare and manages to subvert but not overthrow it. This classic tale is terrifyingly relevant today.

I love Miriam Toews’ work and had no clue about this book’s subject matter when I first picked it up. The premise: over the course of forty-eight hours, eight Mennonite women secretly gather to decide the fate of all women and children in their remote colony. Since the women are illiterate, their conversation is recorded (and the book narrated) by gentle misfit August Epp.

We learn with increasing horror what has driven the women to this subversive precipice, and we learn in the book’s forward that Toews is responding, however fictionally, to actual events that transpired at the Mennonite Manitoba Colony in Bolivia between 2005-2009. (Gisèle Pelicot’s recent ordeal proves this particular type of sexual violence is no anomaly).

In this book, Toews’ full humanity is on display: rage, grief, humor, and tender wisdom, which radiates through masterful dialogue, brilliant characterization, and taut scene work. It is a radical work of art that does much more than subvert a patriarchal community; in it Toews rewrites much of the (male) discourse on philosophy, politics, psychology and subjectivity from the perspectives of uneducated, (extra)ordinary women. August writes, “the women in the loft have taught me that consciousness is resistance, that faith is action, that time is running out.”

Okay, technically, the young Black protagonist in this book doesn’t disrupt a tyrannical patriarchal community. She freaking invents her own religion called Earthseed, gathers a ragtag community of diverse sensitives, leads them through (hell) fire while being targeted by murdering psychopaths, towards a hopeful but not promised land.

This is the ultimate Lilith tale re-envisioned by Godmother of science fiction, Octavia E. Butler, herself a former Baptist, may she rest-in-power. Written in 1993 and set in 2024-27, it feels increasingly prescient–wildfires devour the book’s Los Angeles suburb setting as I write, and psychopaths have taken power in the USA. Butler, through her unflappable teen heroine, gifts us genderless, racialized, and radical concepts such as God is Change; Don’t wait for the worst; Create your own destiny. Preach.

People kept telling me to read it, so I finally did–just in time to include it on this list. Rotating narrators–a White missionary’s wife and four daughters from the American South–represent disparate points of view concerning their family’s move to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

One thing I loved is the attention to historical detail and Kingsolver’s ability to include multiple, complex subplots to better frame the colonial history of this particular time/place and to better demonstrate the insidious ongoing brutality of colonization in terms of inequitable global wealth.

Language and religion play a major role in the plundering resource extraction industries, as do political and military interference, apartheid, and so much more. I loved her exploration of language(s): the power held in naming and misnaming. The youngest daughter sums it up best. “My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.” Characters are primarily White Americans, although Kingsolver incorporates the perspectives of several African characters who resist and challenge the status quo. My main complaint is the word count, Barbara! 

It begins with Vern, a Black, Albino teen escaping from Cainland, the cult compound she’s raised in, and giving birth (to twins!) alone in the woods. A refuge for Black American activists in the 1950s, Cainland became a religious stronghold controlled by Reverend Sherman, Vern’s much older husband.

Vern begins to question the anti-queer propaganda, the oppression of girls and women and unearths treachery beneath the compound’s revolutionary surface. Plus her body is changing, growing stronger, monstrous, becoming something altogether new. Hauntings—full-scale hallucinations, or so she thinks—chip away at her sanity and sense of self. Vern is all fight, but must learn to trust, connect, possibly even love or depend on others in order to survive unimaginable hardships, while raising her infants on the land.

A fever dream of alien transformation, as anti-authoritarian as can be imagined, and a truly original queer BIPOC love song, Solomon has written a trippy, vibrant, complex story of mythic proportions.