The Second Sex
1949 · 832 pages
One is not born a woman, Beauvoir argues, but becomes one. She works through biology, history, myth, marriage, and old age to prove it, and modern feminism begins in these pages.
★ 8.7
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
A Room of One's Own
1929 · 112 pages
Give a woman five hundred a year and a room with a lock and she will write, Woolf argues, then invents a gifted sister for Shakespeare and follows her to a terrible end.
★ 8.0
Selected Stories
1996 · 412 pages
Munro set her stories in Ontario towns where a woman's life can turn on something said at a kitchen table. She fits more into forty pages than most novelists get into a novel.
★ 7.7
The Book of the City of Ladies
1405 · 283 pages
Christine de Pizan, the first woman in Europe to live by her pen, answers centuries of learned misogyny by building an allegorical city whose every stone is the life of a woman.
★ 6.5
Sula
1973 · 174 pages
Nel stays in her Ohio town and marries. Sula leaves for ten years, returns, and the town settles on her as its evil. Morrison makes their friendship the deepest bond either will know.
★ 6.5
Fierce Attachments
A Memoir
1987 · 203 pages
Gornick walks Manhattan with her widowed mother, arguing the argument they have had since the Bronx tenement of her girlhood. Writing programs teach it as how a memoir is built.
★ 6.4
The Woman Warrior
Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
1976 · 209 pages
Kingston's aunt drowned herself in the family well, and no one may say her name. Out of that silence and the legend of a woman warrior, Kingston remade what American memoir could do.
★ 6.2
So Long a Letter
1981 · 96 pages
Widowed after thirty years, a Senegalese teacher writes to her closest friend about the husband who took her daughter's teenage friend as a second wife. It won the first Noma Award.
★ 6.1
The Bloody Chamber
1979 · 176 pages
Carter opened the old fairy tales and took out what was always inside: appetite, blood, and women who want things. Her Bluebeard is a French Marquis, and her Beauty walks toward the tiger.
★ 5.8
The Collected Stories
1994 · 386 pages
Paley wrote as people talk, in the Bronx Yiddish and Greenwich Village argument of women raising children alone, and got more life into three slim collections than most novelists manage in a career.
★ 5.5
Virginia Woolf
1996 · 944 pages
Lee refuses the fragile madwoman of legend and gives back a working writer: funny, ambitious, hard on her friends. She holds the breakdowns and the novels together and lets neither explain the other.
★ 5.3
Bread Givers
1925 · 240 pages
Sara Smolinsky's father studies Torah in a Lower East Side tenement while her mother takes in boarders and he marries her sisters to men they dread. She leaves at seventeen for night school.
★ 5.2
Out
1997 · 400 pages
Four women pack boxed lunches on a Tokyo night shift. One strangles her husband, the others take the body apart, and the invisibility that shrank their lives turns out to protect them.
★ 4.9
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Selected Stories
2015 · 432 pages
Berlin cleaned houses, worked emergency rooms, raised four sons, and drank. Forty-three stories out of that life, Alaska to Mexico City, written so plainly and fast you miss how much is inside them.
★ 4.8