In honor of Women’s History Month, we are celebrating the lives and legacies of inspiring women that played path-breaking roles in shaping philosophy and literature. This reading list features five books that amplify the achievements of these women who were either overshadowed by men, or subject to hierarchical thinking. As we work to accelerate action for gender equality these five biographies show a defiance against systemic barriers and biases faced by women, both in personal and professional spheres. From the engrossing biographies of famous literary authors, to the eye-opening accounts of female thinkers who were silenced by the social norms of the times, these books are sure to inspire action, equality, and inclusion.
1. The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman by Andrew Janiak
Just as the Enlightenment was gaining momentum throughout Europe, philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Within a few short years, she became famous. This was not just remarkable because she was a woman, but because of the substance of her contributions. However due to the threat that she posed, the men who created the modern philosophy canon (primarily Voltaire and Kant) eventually wrote Du Châtelet out of their official histories – her ideas were suppressed, or attributed to the men around her, and for generations afterwards, she was forgotten.
2. Bright Circle by Randall Fuller
Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism—a submerged counternarrative—that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally-assigned roles as women. Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Very Short Introduction by E.J. Clery
Mary Wollstonecraft is widely hailed as the mother of modern feminism. The book that made her famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a work of worldwide renown. Yet the range of her achievements as a thinker and writer reaches far beyond this text. She was a multi-faceted author, and although the condition of women was a constant preoccupation throughout her life, she wrote on a wide variety of topics and in a range of literary forms, some of which she created herself. This Very Short Introduction examines the conditions for Wollstonecraft’s emergence as a feminist, but also her status as an educator, a political thinker, and a romantic.
4. Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse by Chi-ming Yang
The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place. Drawing on previously unknown archival research, this volume illustrates how Butler’s development as a writer was tied to her extraordinary resourcefulness and self-awareness growing up as an awkward, bookish Black girl in segregated, Cold War Pasadena. She persistently re-visited and revised her early writings on teenage angst, Martians, Westerns, and racial politics. In one way or another, her supernatural characters defied the constraints of gender, race, and class with equine-inflected resilience.
5. Marion Milner: On Creativity by David Russell
The British essayist, artist, and psychoanalyst Marion Milner thought deeply about how reading, drawing, and getting better related to each other. The guiding question of Milner’s life was of how people come to feel alive in, and feel creatively responsive to, their own lives. In pursuit of this, Milner explored fields as diverse as anthropology, folklore, education, literature, art, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology. She became one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary thinkers about creativity. Key to all her writing is her search for creative practices of attention and how the interplay of past and present selves, allows us to find new ways of looking at, and experiencing, the world.
For more titles, you can also view our extended list on Bookshop:
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