100 Books Like The Movement

This book gripped me with a host of difficult questions and sorrowful insights into women’s health, racism, science, and medical systems in the USA. It reveals the impact of a previously unknown woman, Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951, and whose cervical cancer cells were taken without her consent, and then, without any acknowledgement, used by researchers and laboratories to develop numerous treatments, drugs, and experiments.

It made me confront hard questions about class, race, gender, medical ethics, profit, and confidentiality. It is a brutal and detailed read, enhanced by the involvement of her family story, as they later discovered the theft and were to confront her immortality. A must-read by a plucky author. 

This book takes you inside the tactics of the British Suffragettes in such vivid detail that I had to wonder what role I would have played on that issue, time, and place? The question is real for me as the movement began in Manchester, where I was born, and it is highly likely that some of the activists are distantly related.

The details of the risks taken by thousands of women, the suffering endured in prolonged hunger strikes, and deaths in protests are breathtaking and inspiring for any activists facing political and judicial oppression today. I certainly would have worked for this cause and taken to the streets. But I still wonder–would I have gone on a hunger strike in a prison for days or weeks or months on end? This book put me in Britain 120 years ago, fighting for the vote, but made me reflect on… show more.

This book artfully introduces the real and important backstory of Lorraine Hansberry, whom I had previously known only as the author of A Raisin In The Sun, a play about a Black middle-class family in Chicago. I was surprised, impressed, and thoroughly educated about Lorraine–a lesbian, Black, radical feminist and socialist, who died of cancer at the age of 34 in 1965.

I was amazed to learn about her ideas, her courage, her ability to maintain a simultaneous activist preoccupation with race, gender, and class throughout her life, and her tight three-party friendship with James Baldwin and Nina Simone. I had an intriguing, intimate, and important view of a world of 1960s USA Black intellectual and activist life, opened up wide for me by a talented author. 

This book turned me into an activist. Mary Daly walked me through a riveting cultural history of various forms of misogyny and talked me through how they are all connected to the patriarchy. She managed to link up Suttee, Chinese Foot Binding, Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting, Witch Burnings, and American obstetrical practices in one theme- the patriarchy acting out its misogyny, and deconstructed language, mythology, and Christianity in the process.

This book was the most important book I have ever read (and re-read) for sorting out thinking about why women are subjected to things, globally, and clearly indicated no culture is left out, and no culture is much better than any other on this count. Challenging is an understatement. A brilliant, complex book.

The definitive book for understanding today’s social justice movements, and what needs to change for them to be successful. The brilliant women of color of INCITE come from a background of organizing and scholarship, and together they show the systemic flaw in left movements today, showing the ways that organizations become accountable to wealthy funders rather than the people they say they wish to serve. Read this book to learn what can be done to challenge this dynamic and build a better world.

I am recommending this book because it is a beautifully written, originally argued overview of women’s rights long history. Stansell organizes her compelling history of women’s rights around the shift from mothers’ perspectives (nineteenth-century feminism) to daughters’ perspectives (twentieth century). She writes beautifully and sweeps over this long tradition without minimizing the disagreements, shifts, and changes, all the while emphasizing the consistent theme of women’s individual freedom and collective struggle.

This book features 70 stories of women and nonbinary people who are making a difference in the world. I was delighted by the vast array of people covered in the book, which begins with a foreword by Canadian pop duo Tegan and Sara. Teens will be excited to find leaders from every part of society profiled in the book: performers, politicians, professors, and more. I could start name dropping, but I won’t—because it’s much more fun for you to dig into the book and be surprised by how many really famous people are working hard to change the world.

This one is for girls who want to know more about tomboys in the here and now. Davis essentially asks “how did we get to this time of transgender and nonbinary identity?” She interrogates the term “tomboy” as a way of understanding how our understanding of gender norms has changed and remained unchanged—at the same time.

I, like Garbes, was a pandemic mom who lived through the brief moment in 2020 and 2001 when it seemed our culture was finally about to recognize that the world runs on unacknowledged work by women. Garbes writes from her experience as a mother of young kids and a descendant of mass migration of nurses out of the Philippines, to open a window into what a world that valued care work would look like.

I love how Garbes sees that giving care its due would require a radical, almost spiritual change, but also how the solutions she sees go beyond the symbolic. She seamlessly blends the agenda of “mothering for social change” with the agenda of supporting the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance’s fight for fair working conditions for paid domestic workers. This book is a really special blend of mom lit and feminist politics.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what life after #girlboss looks like, and Benjamin’s book plants the seed of an answer. Benjamin opens the book with a meditation on the system that celebrates “exceptional” youth of color and how this system functions more to prop up the myth of colorblindness than to create a world in which all of us can thrive. The key to getting from that world to this one is to radically redistribute the power to imagine—so that we live in a world where it is not only the visions of tech billionaires that are shaping our future.

This might sound abstract, and it is, but the book is full of lovely exercises in liberating our power to envision the world otherwise. For example, Parker Brothers paid feminist Elisabeth Magie $500 in 1903 for a game intended to portray unrestricted capitalism as a dystopian nightmare… show more.