10 Essential Women’s History Month Reads for Everyone

​March is a time to honor women and learn more about the feminist perspective. Here are some new(er) essential reads to check out in honor of Women’s History Month, for every kind of person.

For the Bibliophile:
Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar
Forty years after their first groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, The Madwoman in the Attic, award-winning collaborators Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar map the literary history of feminism’s second wave. From its stirrings in the midcentury―when Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan, and Joan Didion found their voices and Diane di Prima, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde discovered community in rebellion―to a resurgence in the new millennium in the writings of Alison Bechdel, Claudia Rankine, and N. K. Jemisin.

For the Explorer:
Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews
Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson’s daughter Elizabeth Carter—who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England—to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury. Offering a beguiling view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing—of being—articulated by these ten pathfinding women.

For the History Buff:
Woman: The American History of an Idea by Lillian Faderman
Award-winning gender and sexuality scholar Lillian Faderman, traces the evolution of the meaning from Puritan ideas of God’s plan for women to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its reversals to the impact of more recent events like #metoo, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and the election of Kamala Harris as vice president. This wide-ranging 400-year history chronicles conflicts, retreats, defeats, and hard-won victories in both the private and the public sectors and shines a light on the often-overlooked battles of enslaved women and women leaders in tribal nations.

 For the Renegade:
Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes from a Trap Feminist by Sesali Bowen
Growing up on the south side of Chicago, Sesali Bowen learned early on how to hustle, stay on her toes, and champion other Black women and femmes as she navigated Blackness, queerness, fatness, friendship, poverty, sex work, and self-love. Her love of trap music led her to the top of hip-hop journalism, profiling game-changing artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, and Janelle Monae. But despite all the beauty, complexity, and general badassery she saw, Bowen found none of that nuance represented in mainstream feminism. Thus, she coined Trap Feminism, a contemporary framework that interrogates where feminism meets today's hip-hop. Bad Fat Black Girl offers a new, inclusive feminism for the modern world.

For the Romantic:
The Soul of A Woman: On Impatient Love, Long Life, and Good Witches by Isabel Allende
“When I say that I was a feminist in kindergarten, I am not exaggerating,” begins Isabel Allende. As a child, she watched her mother, abandoned by her husband, provide for her three small children without “resources or voice.” Isabel became a fierce and defiant little girl, determined to fight for the life her mother couldn’t have. As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the second wave of feminism. Among a tribe of like-minded female journalists, Allende for the first time felt comfortable in her own skin, as they wrote about women’s issues. She has seen what the movement has accomplished in the course of her lifetime. And over the course of three passionate marriages, she has learned how to grow as a woman while having a partner, when to step away, and the rewards of embracing one’s sexuality.

For the Techie:
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans
The history of technology you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers--but from Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in the Victorian Age, to the cyberpunk Web designers of the 1990s, female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation. In fact, women turn up at the very beginning of every important wave in technology. They may have been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize, but they have always been part of the story.

For the Movie Lover:
The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History by Nathalia Holt
Few fans know that behind Disney’s groundbreaking films were an incredibly influential group of women who fought for respect in an often ruthless male-dominated industry and who have slipped under the radar for decades. Bestselling author, Nathalia Holt, tells their dramatic stories for the first time, showing how these women infiltrated the boys' club of Disney's story and animation departments and used early technologies to create the rich artwork and unforgettable narratives that have become part of the American canon.

For the Healer:
Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine by Olivia Campbell
Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges—creating for the first time medical care for women by women.

For the Music Lover:
Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop by Danyel Smith
A weave of biography, criticism, and memoir, Shine Bright is Danyel Smith’s intimate history of Black women’s music as the foundational story of American pop. Smith’s detailed narrative begins with Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who sang her poems, and continues through the stories of Mahalia Jackson, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, and Mariah Carey, as well as the under-considered careers of Marilyn McCoo, Deniece Williams, and Jody Watley. Shine Bright is an overdue paean to musical masters whose true stories and genius have been hidden in plain sight—and the book Danyel Smith was born to write.

For the Activist:
Badly Behaved Women: The History of Modern Feminism by Anna-Maria Crowhurst
The illustrated story of the women's movement, Badly Behaved Women is a compelling and entertaining journey through the four waves of feminism and beyond. Featuring rare photographs and paraphernalia, reading lists, playlists and timelines, Anna-Marie Crowhurst's new history of an ongoing battle captures the pop culture and politics that have shaped modern feminism, and where the fight for equal rights will take us next.

Compiled by Jess Hardin