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Experts Tell Us the Best Feminist Books For Book Clubs

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This article showcases our top picks for the Best Feminist Book Club Books. We reached out to industry leaders and experts who have contributed the suggestions within this article (they have been credited for their contributions below).

We are keen to hear your feedback on all of our content and our comment section is a moderated space to express your thoughts and feelings related (or not) to this article This list is in no particular order.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

This product was recommended by Renee Powers from Feminist Book Club

The book that stimulated the most interesting and robust conversation in our book club was Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor. This is a translated book from a debut Mexican author that made some waves for its gruesome depictions of violence. However, readers will be compelled by the compulsive style of the writing and the striking commentary on misogyny. It’s not a fun read but an absolutely riveting one.


Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office by Lois P. Frankel PhD PhD

This product was recommended by Kate Hutson from Shattered Glass Coaching

This book discusses unconscious mistakes that women make that sabotage their careers. Frankel offers very practical advice on how to overcome these mistakes and create the career you’ve always dreamed of. Not only does she dive into everyday mistakes professional women make, but gives very concrete, realistic steps on how to combat these issues.


You Are a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero

This product was recommended by Kate Hutson from Shattered Glass Coaching

This is a practical guide on how women can transform their money mindset to create a life of abundance. Sincero dives deep into why we have the current money mindset we have and how we can change it. She opens the reader’s mind to new possibilities of money. This book also includes journal prompts, affirmations, and meditations around finances.


Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

This product was recommended by Vans Pat from Gifting Area

Authored by feminist writer Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist is a compilation of essays all about feminism. It has everything from political speeches all the way to competitive Scrabble. This book is filled with tons of insights on the feminist revolution throughout the years. It has a light mood, it is witty, and it is incredibly inspiring.


Daughter of Black Lake by Cathy Marie Buchanan

This product was recommended by Marie Gettel-Gilmartin from Fertile Ground Communications

Daughter of Black Lake was my favorite novel of 2020. Historical fiction all the way back to the Iron Age, this fascinating novel features two powerful women characters…a mother and daughter named Devout and Hobble. I haven’t read a story this old since reading The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Red Tent, and the Bible.


The Sleeping Dictionary, by Sujata Massey

This product was recommended by Marie Gettel-Gilmartin from Fertile Ground Communications

The Sleeping Dictionary is the story of Pom, who lives with her family in a small village by the sea. Her family is very poor, but she feels secure and well loved until a tidal wave wipes out her whole village and her family. Completely alone and helpless in 1930s India, Pom is a survivor. She ends up at a British boarding school, where she is renamed as Sarah and begins working as a maid. Still very young, she next finds herself in the city of Kharagpur, lured into prostitution at a high-class brothel. As an Indian girl without a family, she has few options for survival. She desperately tries to cling to her dignity in the midst of her despair at being forced to sell her body, and she continues to nurture dreams of becoming a teacher. Pom/Sarah/Kamala is a strong, spunky Indian female, and I found myself rooting for her immediately and throughout her story. Faced with desperately difficult choices in her life, she does the best she can with what is given to her. While she is certainly a victim many times in her life, she has no privilege to wallow in misery and self-pity, but time after time she finds ways to rise above her difficult circumstances.


Real American: A Memoir by Julie Lythcott-Haims

This product was recommended by Marie Gettel-Gilmartin from Fertile Ground Communications

My #1 nonfiction read for 2020. Real American is a book, like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, that all people need to read…or even better, listen to, which is how I absorbed this beautiful and heart-breaking memoir. New York Times bestselling author Lythcott-Haims was born to a white (British) mother and a Black American father. All her life she never felt like she fit into either race, beginning in kindergarten when her friend asked, What are you? This is such an important book. I’m featuring Lythcott-Haims on my podcast too! She’s better known for her books How to Raise an Adult and Your Turn, about how to help young people become adults, and about her reflections from working as a dean for Stanford University.


Frontier Grit by Marianne Monson

This product was recommended by Marie Gettel-Gilmartin from Fertile Ground Communications

I loved this collection of badass frontier women! As a fan of Abigail Scott Duniway (Oregon’s suffragette), I was grateful to see her in this collection. Monson curated and told stories of women of color and all sorts of walks of life. It’s a truly intersectional collection of women who were tough, hearty, fearless, and ground-breaking. These stories will make you want to know more about these daring pioneer women and might make you feel tired, looking at your own life!


Unspeakable Acts by Nancy Princenthal

This product was recommended by Hall W. Rockefeller from less than half

Unspeakable Acts is an excellent, well researched dive into the world of feminist art in the 1970s and how pioneering female artists portrayed the near universal experience of sexual harassment and assault in the era of second wave feminism. From Judy Chicago to Adrian Piper, the book explores some of the most radical, shocking artworks of the last century.


A Woman’s Guide to Claiming Space by Eliza VanCort

This product was recommended by Jessica Pellien from Fortier Public Relations

This is a book for women who don’t want to be silenced or sidelined. It is for women who want to claim space without apology and be their own damn superhero-fierce women in control who makes things happen. This hug-kick-thunderclap of a book, with an enclosed discussion guide, introduces your book club to space claiming in five dimensions – physically, emotionally, professionally, collaboratively, and intersectionally. Practical and transformative, it creates conversations around what it means to claim space, how we can best support all women and create opportunities for all to claim space, how we can address self-sabotaging thoughts like impostor syndrome, or how we can deal with microaggressions.


Brotopia by Emily Chang

This product was recommended by Keri Higgins-Bigelow from livingHR

Chang pulls the curtains wide open on the male-dominated Silicon Valley board rooms; an industry that holds extraordinary power over all of our lives. It exposes the harassment and the gender discriminition by women who risked their careers (and some; their lives) to share the truth behind the Silicon door. Chang ends by showing everyone how to end this toxic bro culture for good. A phenomenal read for all women and very much a discussion ignitor.


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