Books like Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale — picked by fans

A tour de force! This is an amazing book that takes a historical view to explain the story of women’s exclusion from public life and the physical and epistemic violence they experienced through the witch trials in Europe.

I would never have put these two elements together–bringing witch trials into view to help us understand the exclusion of women from the political economy of everyday life. This, Federici argues, led to the restructuring of household relations and the role of women in them, which in turn reflected the changing needs of society with the rise of capitalism.

I found this book illuminating and inspiring as it also tells us about the struggles of women against the shifts in their roles. 

This is a great book for understanding the concept of social reproduction, the maintenance of life itself.

Many well-known and thoughtful authors have contributed chapters to this book, explaining different aspects of social reproduction–which can be understood as the production and maintenance of life itself–and the consequences of its unequal distribution. 

I enjoyed reading this book, even though, at times, I felt that it needed to broaden its approach to social reproduction to include insights from how this work affects people in the Global South. 

This book shook up the debate on domestic work and the place of women in society.

Da la Costa and James put forward the radical idea that the working class must include non-waged workers in the home, most of whom are women. This was a revolutionary idea which brought to light how the work of women is overlooked in society and the economy. Wages for housework were their symbolic and material answer to this, and this generated a huge debate about how the modern family was created by the development of capitalism, with the care labour of women being a subsidy to capital.

When I first read this book, I felt as if a whole new way of thinking about women’s work had been opened up. 

A friend gave me this book, and I couldn’t put it down. It is Bhowmick’s story–and that of her mother, who was a working mother and exhausted by managing both her professional work and homemaking.

Building on this, Bhowmick maps the lives of middle-class Indian women labouring under this double burden and yet giving hope to their daughters about the promise of the possibility of "having it all"–a fulfilling home life (despite the unequal burden of housework) and an ambitious professional life.

The tone of the book is angry as Bhowmick, a journalist, conveys her frustrations with the patriarchal social order that refuses to see the depleting effects of gendered inequalities in both the public and the private spheres of life for middle-class women in India.

In which I discover that St Paul’s was not a misogynist! It is easy to see why we might think otherwise. His first letter to the Corinthians has had a profound and often negative impact on the place of women in Christianity. And just when I thought there was nothing left to say about it, along comes Lucy Peppiatt, and blows my mind!

I loved the complete left-of-field interpretation she offers and the fact that she turns traditional interpretations on their head. She plausibly argues that Paul was not for forcing women to veil and be silent in church. According to Peppiatt, Paul argued against the domineering men who insisted on such things. Wowza! And, by Jove, she could well be right! Invigorating stuff! (The author’s academic version is her Worship and Women at Corinth)

This book provides outstanding biographies of the female luminaries of the Civil War, such as Clara Barton, Harriet Tubman, and Dr. Mary Walker, while also introducing readers to lesser-known women who made an impact during the great sectional conflict. Beautifully written and full of rare photographs, Women of the Civil War is captivating.

This book is a deeply researched account of one of the most famous women-only hotels, the go-to place for ambitious, aspiring career women from writers like Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath to actresses like Ali MacGraw and Jaclyn Smith. It is my favorite kind of history, a journey through the twentieth century told through the lives of fascinating women.

I love reading stories of how ordinary people achieve extraordinary things by overcoming challenges, believing in their dreams, and not accepting defeat.

The 100 stories of women featured in this book, along with exquisite portraits of each by female artists, start with the words of a traditional fairy tale “Once upon a time…”, but instead of tales of helpless princesses there are inspiring portraits of women with grit, smarts, and tenacity. Heroes in every sense of the word, for all of us, young and old, to admire.

It has been years, and I cannot stop thinking about the visual this book left me with: a young woman sleeping in a makeshift plastic bubble under the sea's surface, tethered to a walkway across the Indian Ocean. I love when a speculative fiction book dives deep into exactly how a futuristic technology looks, feels, smells, integrates into life, and doesn’t just fill a plot point—which is probably why I was left with such a vivid image of this tent-bubble-habitat-material.

I am also an avid camper and know what it’s like to trust techy material in inhospitable circumstances. Take that feeling of trying to sleep while rain pours on a tent you hope is as waterproof as advertised. Now multiply it by 100 and add a violently undulating walkway across the Indian Ocean, and you get why I love this book. 

In classical detective fiction, the story of the crime is like a puzzle, and piece by piece, clue by clue, we arrive at the big picture. Subdivision is, in some ways, a classic puzzle mystery (it even involves a puzzle!)—except it doesn’t start at a crime scene. It starts with a woman arriving at a guesthouse in the surreal and Kafkaesque Subdivision where she now lives. She can’t remember why she is there or really anything from her past.
Unlike more classical detective fiction, she is not a guide; I followed her—tracking, assembling, interpreting—but when certain elements of the real (maybe) slid into focus, they did so mostly despite her. I couldn’t put it down, and notwithstanding its fairly cerebral tone, I cried at the end.