Books like Outercourse by Mary Daly

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

Betty Friedan’s 1963 classic uncovers the invisible barriers that kept women confined to domestic roles, sparking a cultural awakening that reshaped ideas about equality and personal fulfillment in the United States.

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

A memoir that celebrates Black women’s anger as a source of strength, echoing the legacy of Audre Lorde.

An interdisciplinary study of how diverse societies across time have regulated women's bodies and sexuality, examining practices such as Indian sati, Chinese footbinding, African genital mutilation, and European witchburning.

Explores the psychological themes and literary influence of six pioneering women writers – Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.

A striking biography of Roxanne Dunbar‑Ortiz, a working‑class, part‑Indian pioneer of the 1960s women’s liberation and anti‑war movements, detailing her radical activism and outspoken challenge to mainstream feminism.

Drawing on an impressive body of new research - including Friedan's own papers - Horowitz traces the development of Friedan's feminist outlook from her childhood in Peoria, Illinois, through her wartime years at Smith College and Berkeley, to her decade-long career as a writer for two of the period's most radical labor journals, the Federated Press and the United Electrical Workers' UE News. He further shows that even after she married and began to raise a family, Friedan continued during the 1950s to write and work on behalf of a wide range of progressive social causes. By resituating Friedan within a broader cultural context, and by offering a fresh reading of The Feminine Mystique against that background, Horowitz not only overturns conventional ideas about "second-wave" feminism but also reveals long submerged links to its past.