Books like The creation of patriarchy by Gerda Lerner

Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay argues for women writers’ rightful place in a patriarchal literary tradition, using both fictional narrative and lecture recordings.

Judith Butler’s seminal text challenges essentialist views of sex and gender, proposing that identity is constructed through repeated social performances.

Beyond Power explores how power shapes gender relations, drawing on anthropology, history, political science, law and theology to uncover the roots and consequences of patriarchy.

Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 book, *The Dialectic of Sex*, argues for a feminist revolution and is celebrated as a clear, bold presentation of radical feminism.

While women's experience encompasses all that is human, while women have participated in history and the making of history through all time, until very recently they have been largely excluded from the writing of that history. Most of what we know of the past experience of women comes to us largely through the distorting lens of men's reflections and observations. In the now classic The Female Experience, Gerda Lerner describes history as seen by women, as colored by their values. What she creates is fascinating narrative of the lives and history of ordinary women, a book that provides a new framework for the study of their past experience. If women's history is now a healthy and ever-growing discipline, we have in a large part this award-winning author to thank. Avoiding the traditional chronological periods by which U.S. history is most often studied, Lerner groups her sources--many taken from manuscripts previously unknown, and others only available in research libraries--according to the lifecycle of women, their roles in a male-defined society, in the workplace, in politics, and finally in the contemporary world where feminism is creating an altogether new consciousness. From "runaway wives" in eighteenth-century America, through an anonymous account of a mother's death during childbirth, to appeals in our century for freedom of sexual preference, The Female Experience recounts history from the woman's point of view, and goes a long way toward reconstructing a female past and analyzing it with appropriate concepts. In the general introduction and chapter essays Lerner offers commentary that not only knits these disparate primary sources together, but also interprets them in an innovative way.