100 Books Like The Other Women's Movement

Did you know that until 1974, the job category ‘domestic worker’ was excluded from labor rights that were established in FDR’s New Deal legislation such as the minimum wage and workers’ compensation? Did you know that 1960s union leaders ignored the exploitative labor conditions of domestic work because they considered these workers “unorganizable”?

Historian Premilla Nadasan’s wonderful book tells the story of Black domestic workers’ exclusion from legal rights to which other workers were entitled and their fight to gain those rights beginning in the 1950s and extending through the establishment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974.

Telling this history through the life stories of domestic workers who were leaders in this movement makes this book a particularly compelling and worthwhile read.  

When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) first opened its doors in 1965, sex discrimination had many different meanings to women who wrote in to complain.

Some pointed to the abysmally low pay in “women’s occupations” such as secretarial work, while others described the barriers women faced getting into professions such as management or law. Katherine Turk’s fascinating book shows us how and why this government agency invented an official definition for sex discrimination. 

Importantly too, Turk highlights the consequences this definition came to have for women in a varied occupations and professions. The EEOC’s understanding of sex equality helped improve workplaces for some categories of women workers, but not for most. 

Roxane Gay’s memoir writing is brilliant! So is her collection of personal essays written by women who have experienced sexual harassment and rape.

Gay’s painful introductory piece on learning to understand her own experience of being gang raped at age twelve as “not that bad” illuminates the problem with rape culture. Women learn to blame themselves. 

As the essays by other authors make clear, rape culture is bad and women are often denigrated when they speak out, but they must come together to foment change. Whether the essays focus on workplace harassment or date rape, they all hold key lessons for the importance of women’s sexual autonomy at work.

How can we remedy the fact that wages in predominantly female jobs (e.g., secretaries) have been devalued historically?

For comparable worth advocates, women should be paid a wage equivalent to men who work in a different job with similar skills and experience. But how do we evaluate and rank skills in different occupations to create equivalence? Sociologist Joan Acker takes us through two 1980s comparable worth evaluation processes to answer this question.

Her thought-provoking research demonstrates that the evaluation process itself was laden with gendered assumptions about the value of different skills. It also helps us understand how we can evade this problem in the future and create procedures with more equitable outcomes.  

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. 

Kirsten Swinth’s fantastic new book argues that our understanding of feminism as asking women to have it all is deeply misunderstood. The second wave did want women to be able to balance their lives as homemakers and workers, but not by having a double shift. Instead, they wanted women’s household burden to be shared—by their husbands, by employers, by the government, and by society as a whole. Swinth shows how feminists tried to deploy the philosophy that “the personal is political” against the problem of laundry and other household tasks. Wives’ strategies ranged from household labor strikes (Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot! was the motto of the Women’s Strike for Equality) to drawing up their own individual marriage contracts. These homespun contracts delineated a fairer division of household labor between husbands and wives. Swinth shows that despite these measures and some legal successes, women nonetheless mostly retained their… show more.

I grew up in a family of all brothers and male cousins and with a second-wave feminist mother who marched with Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug. So while my role models of feminine badassery were clear growing up, they were also few. Feeling like I was missing out, I often sought them out in my professional life and in my reading for fun. 

Lillian Hellman was as bad ass as they came. The author of a dozen plays, three memoirs, holder of six or so honorary degrees, blacklisted during McCarthyism who, to my amazement came roaring back with this book, among others to wow little me, who grow up rather ordinary in a rather ordinary midwestern college town. I was not romantically partnered with the greatest detective novelist in American history like Ms. Hellman was with Dashiel Hammett. I did stare down a hostile government trying to ruin my life… show more.

This book is a typical first-person account of a student in a program (medical, in this case) who encounters some discrepancies between the idealistically-drawn portrait of how a medical school is supposed to operate and the actual realities in which jealousies, territoriality, and the ongoing scramble to acquire and defend power within the institution play a major role. The main character is naïve to such considerations until they are made apparent to him. 

This book not only inspired me to explore the world of memoirs but also pushed me to confront my own fear of honesty on the page.

It is easy to hide behind fiction, yet confronting the culture tied to your own trauma is another challenge entirely. This book left me shocked, tearful, joyous, and empowered, and I returned to it often during my writing process for its sheer bravery.

The societal changes brought by the movements of the sixties had a different effect on women.

The sexual revolution promised freedom but didn’t plan for jealousy or conflicting ideas of “free.” The anti-war movement and even the civil rights movement saw women’s role as making the sandwiches and lettering the placards. 

Rosen chronicles women’s rising fed-up-ness from the 1950s to the unfinished business left at the book’s publication in 2000.