Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking

Lydia Cacho · 271 pages

Illegal, inhuman, and impervious to recession, there is one trade that continues to thrive, just out of sight. The international sex trade criss-crosses the entire globe, a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, willfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless hapless women and children. In this ground-breaking work of investigative reportin

The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

Melinda Gates · 288 pages

Bad Feminist

Roxane Gay · 360 pages

A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. "Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink, all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once l

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Susan Faludi · 592 pages

*Skillfully Probing the Attack on Women's Rights* "Opting-out," "security moms," "desperate housewives," "the new baby fever"--the trend stories of 2006 leave no doubt that American women are still being barraged by the same backlash messages that Susan Faludi brilliantly exposed in her 1991 bestselling book of revelations. Now, the book that reignited the feminist movement is back in a fi

Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

Peggy Orenstein · 319 pages

Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World

Katherine Zoepf · 265 pages

"For more than a decade, Katherine Zoepf has lived in or traveled throughout the Arab world, reporting on the lives of women, whose role in the region has never been more in flux. Only a generation ago, female adolescence as we know it in the West did not exist in the Middle East. There were only children and married women. Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and a few are begin

We Should All Be Feminists

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 64 pages

In this essay -- adapted from her TEDx talk of the same name -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award-winning author of Americanah, offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century, one rooted in inclusion and awareness. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author's exploration

A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery

E. Benjamin Skinner · 366 pages

There are more slaves in the world today than at any time in history. In this account of contemporary slavery, journalist Skinner travels around the globe to personally tell stories that need to be told--and heard. With years of reporting in such places as Haiti, Sudan, India, Eastern Europe, The Netherlands, and, yes, even suburban America, Skinner has produced a moving reportage on one of the gr

Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery

Siddharth Kara · 320 pages

"Across eighteen countries and six continents, Siddharth Kara has witnessed firsthand the sale of human beings into slavery, interviewed more than five hundred slaves of all kinds, and confronted some of those who trafficked and exploited them. In this book he draws on his background in finance and law to provide the first ever business and economic analysis of contemporary slavery worldwide, focu

Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men

Mara Hvistendahl · 325 pages

"Lianyungang, a booming port city, has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls. These numbers don't seem terribly grim, but in ten years, the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. By the time those children reach adulthood, their generation will have twenty-four million more men than women. The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bl

The Underground Girls of Kabul

Jenny Nordberg · 350 pages

An award-winning foreign correspondent who contributed to a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series reveals the secret Afghan custom of disguising girls as boys to improve their prospects, discussing its political and social significance as well as the experiences of its practitioners.

Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

Kate Harding · 261 pages

"From Congressman Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" gaffe to the high school rapists of Steubenville, Ohio, to the furor at Vanderbilt, sexual violence has been so prominent in recent years that the feminist term "rape culture" has finally entered the mainstream. But what, exactly, is it? And how do we change it? In Asking for It, Kate Harding answers those questions in the same blunt, bullshit-free v

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

Hallie Rubenhold · 352 pages

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Barbara Ehrenreich · 240 pages

The author's experience holding low-wage jobs in three parts of the U.S. in the late 1990s.

Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

Angela Garbes · 256 pages

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

Susan Brownmiller · 480 pages

"A 'history of rape, including psychological, sociopolitical, and legal perspectives ... The material is well documented and compellingly presented.'" Choice.

The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan · 410 pages

Landmark, groundbreaking, classic―these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average

The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence

Gary A. Haugen, Victor Boutros · 309 pages

A plague of everyday violence lies beneath the surface of the world's poorest communities. Common violence-- like rape, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, police abuse and other brutality-- has become routine and relentless. Basic public justice systems in the developing world have descended into a state of utter collapse. Haugen and Boutros offer a searing account of how we got here-- a

The Beauty Myth

Naomi Wolf · 348 pages

In the struggle for womenʼs equality, there is one hurdle that has yet to be fully cleared-the myth of female beauty. It challenges every woman, every day, by seeking to undermine psychologically and covertly the material freedoms that feminism has achieved for women. And, fueled by new technology in media and medicine, its ravages are reaching epidemic proportions. The Beauty Myth cuts to the roo

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf · 129 pages

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the m

The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

Arlie Russell Hochschild, Anne Machung · 318 pages

"When The Second Shift was first published in 1989, it was hailed as "a scream in the dark" and "a brilliant, urgently needed analysis ... of the working woman who has it all". Now, in the twenty-first century, The Second Shift remains as important and relevant as when it was first published. As the majority of women entered the workforce, sociologist and Berkeley professor Arlic Hochschild was on

Transforming a Rape Culture

Emilie Buchwald, Pamela R. Fletcher, Martha Roth · 412 pages

The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices

Xinran · 243 pages

"During the 1990s, a period of relative openness in China, Xinran hosted a radio call-in show, inviting Chinese women to speak with her on the air about their lives. Broadcast every evening, "Words on the Night Breeze" became famous throughout the country for its unflinching portrayal of what it means to be a woman in modern China." "In this remarkable book, Xinran devotes each chapter to an indiv

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

Madhumita Murgia · 320 pages