AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

Terrible Virtue

Ellen Feldman · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

My Notorious Life

Kate Manning · 439 pages

An evocative tale based on the life of a controversial Victorian New York City midwife features plucky orphan Axie Muldoon, who recounts her apprenticeship and establishment of a thriving practice that is threatened by a censorious zealot.

Reproductive HealthFeminismHistorical FictionFemale Lead
❤️

The Red Tent

Anita Diamant · 321 pages

Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood--the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers--Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--the f

Reproductive HealthFeminismHistorical FictionFemale Lead
❤️

The Birth House

Ami McKay · 387 pages

An arresting portrait of the struggles that women faced for control of their own bodies, The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare—the first daughter in five generations of Rares.As apprentice to the outspoken Acadian midwife Miss Babineau, Dora learns to assist the women of an isolated Nova Scotian village through infertility, difficult labors, breech births, unwanted pregnancies, and unfulfillin

Reproductive HealthFeminismHistorical FictionFemale Lead
❤️

Looking for Jane

Heather Marshall · 400 pages

Reproductive HealthFeminismHistorical FictionFemale Lead
❤️

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

Ann Fessler · 358 pages

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler bril

Reproductive HealthFeminismFemale Lead
❤️

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood · 352 pages

Reproductive HealthFeminismFemale LeadCharacter-Driven
🙂

Letter to a Child Never Born

Oriana Fallaci · 99 pages

Reproductive HealthFeminismFemale LeadCharacter-Driven
🙂

Midwives

Chris Bohjalian · 312 pages

Sibyl is a respected midwife, accused of murder after she performs a caesarian on a mother whom she believes to have died of a stroke during a long and difficult labour. A trial ensues to decide whether Sibyl has committed murder. The story is told from Sibyl's daughter's viewpoint.

Reproductive HealthFeminismFemale LeadFirst Person Narrator
🙂

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution

Jonathan Eig · 408 pages

Immersed in radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes, this is the fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century.

Reproductive HealthFeminismBiography
🙂

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

Reproductive HealthFeminism
🙂

How to Be a Woman

Caitlin Moran · 313 pages

Though they have the vote and the Pill and haven't been burned as witches since 1727, life isn't exactly a stroll down the catwalk for modern women. They are beset by uncertainties and questions: Why are they supposed to get Brazilians? Why do bras hurt? Why the incessant talk about babies? And do men secretly hate them? Caitlin Moran interweaves provocative observations on women's lives with l

Reproductive HealthFeminismFemale Lead
🙂

Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe

Dawn Tripp · 336 pages

FeminismHistorical FictionFemale LeadCharacter-Driven
🙂

Loving Frank

Nancy Horan · 380 pages

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction

FeminismHistorical FictionFemale LeadBiography
🙂

The Personal Librarian

Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray · 352 pages

In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collectio

FeminismHistorical FictionFemale LeadCharacter-Driven
🙂

Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story

Peter Bagge · 72 pages

Portrays the life of Margaret Sanger, a birth control activist and advocate for female reproductive rights, in graphic novel format. Includes an 18 page section at the back ("Who's who and what's what" with photographs of those concerned).

Reproductive HealthFeminismBiography
🙂

Ties That Bind, Ties That Break

Lensey Namioka · 157 pages

Ailin's life takes a different turn when she defies the traditions of upper class Chinese society by refusing to have her feet bound.

FeminismHistorical FictionFemale LeadCharacter-Driven
🙂

Forever . . .

Judy Blume · 208 pages

There's a first for everything. When you build up something in your mind -- really imagine it, wish for it -- sometimes, when it actually happens, it doesn't live up to your expectations. True love is nothing like that. Especially not for Katherine and Michael, who can't get enough of each other. Their relationship is unique: sincere, intense, and fun all at the same time. Although the

Reproductive HealthFeminismFemale Lead
🙂
Reproductive HealthFeminismFirst Person Narrator
🙂

The Mad Wife

Meagan Church · 352 pages

FeminismHistorical FictionFemale LeadCharacter-Driven
🙂

Not Funny Ha-Ha: A Handbook for Something Hard

Leah Hayes

"Not Funny Ha-Ha is a bold, slightly wry graphic novel illustrating the lives of two young women from different cultural, family, and financial backgrounds who go through two different abortions (medical and surgical). It does not address the events leading up to the pregnancy, or even the decision-making before choosing abortion as an option. It simply shows what happens when a woman goes through

Reproductive HealthFeminismFemale Lead
🙂

A Well-Behaved Woman

Therese Anne Fowler · 400 pages

FeminismHistorical FictionFemale LeadCharacter-Driven
🙂
Reproductive HealthFeminism
🙂

Climbing the Stairs

Padma Venkatraman · 256 pages

FeminismHistorical FictionFemale LeadCharacter-Driven
🙂
FeminismHistorical FictionFemale LeadCharacter-Driven

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.