Books like Letters from a War Zone

Lorde’s landmark collection of essays amplifies ways of living and knowing long familiar to women and other marginalized groups. Her exploration of eroticism—a fully vivacious, embodied experience of life—as a source of women’s knowledge, wisdom, and power is yet unmatched in American letters.

Essential reading for anyone who has felt unsatisfied or unseen by the narratives handed down by the white, heteronormative, patriarchal powers that continue to hold our imaginations in a vice grip. 

When I first read this book on feminist philosophy in the late 1980s, I was nervous about both feminism (because I wasn’t sure what it meant for me) and philosophy (because I wasn’t sure I was smart enough to understand it).

Marilyn Frye’s book helped me realize that I had been raised in a male-dominated and deeply sexist culture without knowing much about it, making feminism essential to my education. She also demonstrated that philosophy written in plain language was for everyone rather than an esoteric endeavor for specialists.

Frye was a scholar-in-residence at the university where I did graduate studies, and she sat in on our reading group. It was a real treat to sit across the room and hear her think out loud.

I first encountered the feminist critique of the sexual exploitation industries (prostitution, pornography, stripping, etc.) in the late 1980s, my first step in learning to analyze our patriarchal society. It also helped me rethink my own life and commit to change. 

Sadly, the critique was rejected or ignored, not only by most people in the dominant culture but even by many feminists. This book came at a crucial time, bringing together activists, survivors, and scholars to challenge men’s sexual use and abuse of women.

I was proud to contribute a chapter, “Blow Bang and Cluster Bombs: The Cruelty of Men and Americans,” and I am grateful that one of the editors, Rebecca Whisnant, remains a colleague and friend. 

Many women continue to embrace a radical feminist perspective, and one of the important feminist writers today is the UK journalist and organizer Julie Bindel. Her reporting on sex trafficking has been essential to understanding the worldwide exploitation of women and girls.

She published this book in 2021 to restate the liberatory goals of feminism and critique the impediments created not only by conservatives but also by liberals. Bindel pulls no punches and takes no prisoners—she’s never afraid to confront the powerful and respond to her critics. One of the great experiences of the past year was being interviewed by Bindel for her podcast on men and feminism. Finally, Bindel reminds us that one of the biggest lies about feminists is that they have no sense of humor. 

This book should be compulsory reading in every Secondary School–its message is more important today than ever. 

Andrea Dworkin was the archetypal American radical feminist, and over the years, I have come to really value her ungarnished message about men, power, and male sexuality. If you’ve ever gotten off to porn, then read this book because it is a definite libido shrinker.

Dworkin’s hard-edged radical feminism went out of fashion during the Thatcherite eighties, but it is back in style today, and this book shows why. Dworkin wrote some compelling, in-your-face works, but this book probably ranks No.1 among them. I defy you to read her explicit descriptions of sexual acts done to women by men and find them sexually arousing. If you do, then get some help. 

I read this book before I’d found words to describe the impact on my teenage self of living in a patriarchal world that didn’t allow me to do things I wanted to because I was a girl—and that insisted I do things I didn’t want to. I read it before I’d heard the word feminist used other than as an insult. But the essentially feminist spirit of the novel touched me deeply. 

I raced through the book, hoping that this single mother who’d fled an alcoholic and abusive husband with her child would make it out alive, that she’d find her people, and that she’d get justice. Years later, I saw the book described as the first feminist novel, and for good reason—written in Victorian England, no less. 

The more I learned about the social structures and constructs that perpetuate violence against women, the more I saw how deeply rooted the ideas are in the stories that we tell—the stories that we’ve been telling for centuries. Why aren’t women believed? Where do the misogynistic tropes come from?

This book shows how our culture’s origin stories have been shaped by men, and as Lesser writes, “embedded in the stories are the values and priorities we live by, and what we believe about women and men, power and war, sex and love.” What I love about this book is that it reimagines if women had been the storytellers, and empowers readers to redefine women and power. 

Radical Sisters does for the 1970s what I tried to do for the nineteenth century—to show that while Black and white women activists usually worked separately and embraced different and often opposing priorities, some women forged interracial alliances to address shared concerns. Valk also reminds us that divisions among white feminists and among Black liberationists could be as contentious as those between the two groups. By focusing on Washington, D.C., the population of which was over 70 percent Black in 1970, Valk ensures the centrality of race to every issue she analyzes. Providing in-depth case studies of anti-poverty movements, welfare rights, lesbian separatism, anti-sexual violence, and reproductive rights, Valk shows how these movements shaped each other as well as the limits of and possibilities for forging truly interracial coalitions. 

This book was one of my first reads where a woman disguised herself as a man to perform a traditionally male role.

Her strength and bravery were an inspiration to me as she traded places with her brother Thom. Her secret and success as a knight were aspirational. From making allies to dealing with enemies, I could revel in her battles and victories. I felt empowered to enter my own fray and fight for justice.  

I had been designing and delivering gender training for many years and was researching it for my Phd when this book came out. Its publication was akin to finding an oasis in a desert. Even though gender training has become, as the editors Maria Bustelo, Lucy Ferguson, and Maxime Forest point out in their introduction to this collection of essays, the most widely used tool for gender mainstreaming worldwide, remarkably little has been written about it.

This smart and expertly curated book is one of the first to fill this gap. Featuring writing by both professionals involved in gender training and academics researching it, it shows that the concerns of feminist pedagogy reach beyond formal education, into spheres of public policy through adult learning and training practices.