Feminist Memoirs: 45 Books You Should Add To Your Reading List

Feminist Memoirs: They reveal to us the unique experiences of a person's life. We get to learn their highs and lows and everything that they have been through to reach a place of prominence. Their struggles, griefs and anecdotes can help us gather strength and courage to fight our own battles. Here, we shall look into the feminist memoirs of women raising their voice against wrongdoings and creating an identity of their own.

45 feminist memoirs you should get hold of right now

1. Crazy Brave (Joy Harjo)

Joy Harjo grappled with an abusive father and went through the ordeal of teenage pregnancy and becoming single mother. With time, she found her empowered voice and became a transformative poet. Her memoir tells us how she got there.

2. The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed The Workplace (Lynn Povich)

In March, 1970, Lynn Povich along with 45 of her colleagues filed an Equal Opportunity Commission against the magazine Newsweek. This was because the magazine discriminated against the women who worked there. This memoir essays their journey from being "well-mannered women" to activists. It also demonstrates the power of women uniting and fighting for their right.

3. Saturday's Child (Robin Morgan)

Robin Morgan started off as a child model and television star. She was labelled as "The Ideal American Girl" by the media. Eventually, she discovered her feminist self as a poet, a bisexual, a mother, and a civil rights activist. Morgan tells her story explicitly in the book.

4. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Le Ly Hayslip)

When Le Ly Hayslip was 12 years old, the U.S. helicopters landed in her village in central Veitnam and the violence around her grew. She was appointed as a spy just like many other children. In her book, she recalls being starved, raped, tortured, imprisoned and witnessing the death of several of her family members. Gradually, she understood how her country betrayed her and became a woman determined to make a better life for herself in the U.S.

5. The Woman Who Watches Over the World (Linda Hogan)

The book narrates the author's life story. She is the daughter to an army sergeant, lover to an older man, alcoholic and an adoptive mother. It also explores the emotional history of her Native people and how the devastation of her ancestors informed her future.

6. Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (Misty Copeland)

This is Misty Copeland's story of her unprecedented talent of ballet. It depicts the hard work she put in to dance past her naysayers.

7. The Glass Castle (Jeannette Walls)

In this book, Walls presents her the irresponsibility of her parents, their violence, stubbornness and inability to commit to parenthood. But she finally understands that their imperfections deserve compassion. Her memoir is all about testing the limits of forgiveness, strength, faith, love and power.

8. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (Andrea Dworkin)

Heartbreak reveals the personal side of Dworkin's lifelong journey as an activist and a writer. She tells the story of evolving from a music lover and books in childhood into a college activist. She embraced her role as an international advocate for women and became a maverick thinker at odds with both the liberal left and the mainstream women's movement.

9. Leaving Before The Rains Come (Alexandria Fuller)

The author gives myriad details in her memoir starting from her marriage to the American economy. She also gives us an insight into her understanding of the woman she used to be and the woman she grew up to become.

10. An Autobiography (Angela Davis)

Angela Davis's autobiography drives home the story of her life as a young activist along with the endurance that was needed to keep fighting when it mattered the most.

11. A Fighting Chance (Elizabeth Warren)

The book describes all the hard work the U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren has done so far and a large chunk of the difficulties that it left to be covered.

12. My Life On The Road (Gloria Steinem)

My Life On The Road brings us face to face with the Feminist political campaigner Gloria Steinem's lifelong journey of battling for equality, working for justice and creating bonds of political sisterhood.

13. Sex Object (Jessica Valenti)

Jessica Valenti's Sex Object helps the readers re-navigate their own sexuality and reminds them how sexuality is influenced and informed by the modern-day sexism.

14. Wild (Cheryl Strayed)

Wild is an account of Cheryl Strayed's walking, clawing and fighting her way back to her most empowered self while dealing with a heartbreak.

15. Daring: My Passages (Gail Sheehy)

Daring is a chronicle of Gail Sheehy's trials and triumphs as a path breaking female journalist in the 1960s. She worked as a political profiler and dared to put herself in places dangerous for a woman.

16. Hard Choices (Hillary Rodham Clinton)

It depicts the challenges Hillary Clinton faced as America's Secretary of state and the lessons she learnt. These include making tough decisions, dealing with failure and going high.

17. In the Darkroom (Susan Faludi)

Susan Faludi tells the story of her father in the memoir who came out as transgender and underwent a sex reassignment surgery in his old age. She talks of his past, their 25 years of estrangement and a lot more in the book.

18. Backlash (Susan Faludi)

As is evident by the title, Faludi presents the backlash against women in her memoir by narrating the myths and bias they face.

19. In The Land Of Men (Adrienne Miller)

This memoir is a rich, dazzling story of power, ambition, and identity. It ultimately asks the question, "How does a young woman fit into this male culture and at what cost?" Miller presents an inspiring and moving portrayal of a young woman's education in a land dominated by men with wit and intelligence.

20. Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me (Erin Khar)

21. Recollections Of My Nonexistence: A Memoir (Rebecca Solnit)

Rebecca Solnit in her book describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, where she witnessed an atmosphere of gender violence on the street. It was popular throughout society and women were excluded from cultural arenas

22. Rust, Belt, Femme (Raechel Anne Jolie)

Raechel Anne Jolie's early life was full of race cars, Budweiser-drinking men covered in the grease of car, and women who loved them. Her life changed after father returned home from his third-shift job, took the garbage out to the curb and was hit by a drunk driver.

23. Assume Nothing: A Memoir of Intimate Violence (Tanya Selvaratnam)

In her book, Tanya Selvaratnam writes how she fell into an abusive relationship with the former attorney general of New York named Eric Schneiderman. He was a rising political star, a high-profile Trump enemy and an ally of women's causes.

24. How To Be a Bawse: A Guide To Conquering Life (Lily Singh)

Here we meet the Lily who exudes confidence, reaches her goals, gets hurt efficiently, and smiles genuinely after fighting through it all and making it out the other side. To summarise, the book reiterates the message that there is no shortcut to success.

25. This Is Big: How The Founder Of Weight Watchers Changed The World- and Me (Marisa Meltzer)

It is a true story of a cross-generational friendship that led to the first ever breakthrough Marisa Meltzer had in her search for self-improvement.

26. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir Of Women, Addiction and Love (Nina Renata Aron)

Penguin Random House describes this book as, "A scorching memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckoning with psychology and history to understand the nature of addiction, co dependency, and our appetite for obsessive love."

27. Fairest (Meredith Talusan)

Meredith Talusan's Fairest is a story of crossing boundaries of race, gender and convention. In this wise and brilliant memoir, she travels from one side of the globe to the other. More profoundly, she takes us to the centre of her passionate and fiery heart.

28. In Open Country (Rahawa Haile)

Rahawa Haile's In Open Country covers what it means to travel through America and the world as a woman of colour, particularly a Black Woman.

29. The Dragons, The Giants, The Women (Wayétu Moore)

30. Notes On A Silencing (Lacy Crawford)

Crawford's work It portrays how a boarding school at New England tried to silence her at all costs. It is a powerful and scary memoir of a young woman's struggle to regain her sense of self after a trauma.

31. Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir (Natasha Trethewey)

Natasha Trethewey's world turned upside down when her former stepfather murdered her mother. She was 19 years old at that time. In her memoir, she explores how the trauma shaped the artist she became.

32. Being Lolita (Alisson Wood)

In this memoir, a dark relationship evolves between a high school student and her English teacher. The book is basically about a young woman who must learn to rewrite her story.

33. I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (Malala Yousafzai)

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced. She fought for women's right to education. As a result, she was shot in the head and was not expected to survive. Released in 5 parts, the memoir covers the story of her struggles and victory.

34. Infidel (Ayaan Hirsi Ali)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography is an extraordinary document of a highly intelligent and courageous young woman, who contends with widely opposing traditions, at the time of a historical transition. It introduces us to a different culture of childhood and its effects.

35. Becoming (Michelle Obama)

Becoming is an autobiography that details the ups and downs of Michelle Obama's journey from the humble beginning of the South Side of Chicago to the White House. It also gives us a glance into her life as America's first African-American First Lady.

36. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Azar Nifisi)

The memoir describes Azar Nifisi's experiences of living in Iran from 1979 to 1997. The country had undergone a revolution when she returned from schooling abroad in the late 1970s and an oppressive theocracy had taken the place of a western-influenced monarchy.

37. Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation (Karla Jay)

Karla Jay humorously writes of her early days as a feminist and gay liberation activist. She creates a vivid and realistic portrait of the early 1970s feminist and sexual radicalism.

38. Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (Peggy Orenstein)

The book explores the phenomenon of princess culture and particularly how this concept is marketed to young girls.

39. Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (Rachel Moran)

Rachel Moran was born in an unstable family. She left home at an early age of fourteen. Being homeless, she became a prostitute to survive. Through her work, she describes the fears of working on the streets and in the brothels.

40. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Audre Lorde)

a child of Black West Indian parents, Audre Lorde grows up in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. She is legally blind from a very young age. This isolated her even further from her surroundings and a family where she did not receive enough warmth or affection.

41. Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman (Lindy West)

Going by the description of Goodreads, "Shrill provocatively dissects what it means to become self-aware the hard way, to go from wanting to be silent and invisible to earning a living defending the silenced in all caps."

42. Daring To Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening (Manal Al-Sharif)

Daring to Drive is the fiercely intimate memoir of an accidental activist. It is a powerfully vivid story of a young Muslim woman who stood against a country of men and won. Al-Sharif offers a rare glimpse into the lives of women living in Saudi Arabia today through the book.

43. And a Voice to Sing With (Joan Baez)

This book revolves around Joan Baez's career as a musician and power as an artist. She also mentions those who influenced her and the ones she championed.

44. Eating Fire: My Life As a Lesbian Avenger (Kelly J. Cogswell)

 Eating Fire is the first in-depth account of the influential Lesbian Avengers. It reveals the group's relationship to the queer art and activist scene in the early '90s New York. The book also establishes the media-savvy Avengers as an important precursor to the groups like Occupy Wall Street and La Barbe, in France.

45. Bossypants (Tina Fey)

Tina Fey's book Bossypants is a humorous memoir about her life in show business. She describes how it was like to grow up as an awkward, smart-mouthed girl and traces how she entered show business.

Trending Video Right Now