12 Must-Read Nonfiction Books That Are Unforgettably Feminist
Written by historians, memoirists and academics, these titles simultaneously frustrate and inspire hope.
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I discovered one of my favorite books at London's Word on the Water. The bookseller’s name is no joke; Word on the Water is situated on a literal barge behind King’s Cross and is a slice of heaven for bibliophiles. I was browsing inside, rocking back and forth with the low tide, when the U.K. cover of Unwell Women captured my attention: a woman turned away with a tattoo-like skeleton etched on her skin and flowers blooming around her.
I took it to Word on the Water’s dark wood and red-patterned reading nook and found myself immersed in medicine's historical neglect of women. Elinor Cleghorn’s writing immediately captured and vexed me; I'm always looking for more stories told through a feminist lens—with bonus points if I’m learning about a topic wholly unfamiliar to me.
Unwell Women is one of twelve examples of the best women-centered nonfiction books I can confidently and wholeheartedly recommend. In the past (and in the present, too), women have been accused as witches, denied access to and understanding of their own bodies, objectified and denounced for their passions and had their legacies recast by history’s victors. From renowned linguists and historians to memoirists and celebrities, the authors on the list unveil and testify to truths about the collective experience of womanhood.
Whether they investigate the female experience in fifteenth-century aristocratic England; enliven an Old New York abortionist snuffed out by male medicine or recount a writer’s journey pursuing justice for her sister, who died of femicide, each of these must-read feminist books is a call to action, their ferocity and indignation exceeded only by compassion and wit.
- Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn
- Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon
- Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza
- Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick
- My Body by Emily Ratajkowski
- Wordslut by Amanda Montell
- The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm
- Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry
- Royal Witches by Gemma Hollman
- Women and Power by Mary Beard
- Madame Restell by Jennifer Wright
- Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn
Cultural historian Elinor Cleghorn, a victim of medical misogyny, starts her story in ancient Greece, where all female healthcare traced back to the uterus and the erroneous belief that women's ailments could be explained by the mischievous behaviors of an empty womb. She journeys through centuries and suggests that, even while research has refined how we understand our physical selves, the mythology around and misdiagnosis of women’s bodies has ineluctably persisted. Profoundly informative, frustrating and true, Unwell Women is a well-sourced must-read account of what science and medicine have chosen to ignore.
Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon
Ever since reading Frankenstein in high school, I have been fascinated by the mythical, anomalous figure of Mary Shelley. Dual biography Romantic Outlaws alternates chapter-by-chapter between Shelley and her pioneering feminist mother Mary Wollstonecraft, who authored A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Though the two women overlapped for mere days due to Wollstonecraft’s abrupt death, they each forged their own paths in ways that continue to resonate. Entertaining yet educative, Gordon's research unveils secrets and scandals—romantic affairs, family drama and subtle enmities—as she also tackles graver topics like mental illness and grief, all while proving the singularity of these two literary women.
Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza
Both a work of compassionate portraiture and an urgent call to action, this memoir almost reads like a poem. Cristina Rivera Garza’s sister died of femicide in July 1990, but the crime remains unresolved. Rivera Garza interrogates the archive and her memory to elevate her sister's memory and reconstruct her final summer with empathy and imagination. The result is a vivid documentation that frustrates, moves and resonates in a society plagued by gender-based violence.
Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick
This collection of essays by the American novelist, literary critic and New York Review of Books co-founder probes the plights of female writers in densely-packed, precise prose. Joan Didion articulates Hardwick’s thesis statement in her introduction to the collection: “that to express oneself is to expose oneself”—a thread Hardwick weaves through her bite-sized portraits of such writers as the Brontë sisters, Zelda Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Wordsworth. It’s the kind of book that might lay in wait on a nightstand as a reader digests one essay each night before switching off the lamp for bed. (The NYRB Classics edition has a Degas on the cover and is just as gorgeous inside.)
My Body by Emily Ratajkowski
After appearing in Robin Thicke’s 2013 “Blurred Lines” music video, Emily Ratajkowski’s climb to fame was swift. Yet the scary truth about being an attractive woman in the spotlight hit her speedily, as she was from then on constantly commodified and objectified. Her 2021 memoir My Body is an act of seizing back power. In one essay, “Buying Myself Back,” which appeared in New York Magazine before this essay collection was released, Ratajkowski details how a photographer unethically published her nude photographs in a book despite her protests. In other essays, she rethinks her adolescence and relationships. It's a quick read—I devoured My Body in one turbulent plane ride—as well as an impactful, candid and incisive exploration of femininity and fame.
Wordslut by Amanda Montell
Why do we apply certain derogatory terms only to women? Or disparage particular female vocal registers and speech patterns? Linguist and reporter Amanda Montell decisively exposes the misogynist underpinnings of quotidian conversation and lexicon in her gently authoritative feminist textbook Wordslut. She time-travels to study the etymological origins of curses, insults and gossip. An author of three nonfiction books that deal with history and pop culture, Montell writes with knowledge and a casual charm, always underlining how important words really are.
The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm
Not many writers can provide a scathing critique of the genre of biography in a work of biographical writing; not many writers are Janet Malcolm. Her masterful exploration of Sylvia Plath’s life—and afterlife—is part reportorial, part critical and part lushly lyrical. Malcolm intends to dispel fantastical conceptions of the famous poet, while discovering a new story through literary study, archival research and interviews. Among her interests in this book is Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband. Their explosive relationship complicated his and his sister’s posthumous treatment of her work as executor and agent of Plath’s literary estate.
Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry
A Raisin in the Sun playwright Lorraine Hansberry has been an enigma since her death from cancer at age 34. Princeton professor Imani Perry revisits Hansberry in this investigation of sorts, filled with archival mining and meditation on Hansberry’s passions, beliefs and sexuality. Indeed, the title is right in positing this book as an act of “looking for”—it seeks to synthesize Hansberry’s biography and probe the corners of her psyche, all while contextualizing Hansberry as an individual both existing and participating in a changing world.
Royal Witches by Gemma Hollman
It’s no surprise that misogyny ran rampant six hundred years ago. But it’s less known that accusations of witchcraft floated around before the seventeenth-century witch trials most of us know well—in part because earlier witch hysteria was more rare. In this vivid work of nonfiction, Gemma Hollman tells four women’s stories, each of them noble and each accused because of their influence on male figures. Hollman has become one of my favorite historians, with a lively monthly newsletter and three published books centered on women in the medieval period. This particular book reads as timely, even while her subjects lived in the 1400s.
Women and Power by Mary Beard
Adapted from lectures, Women and Power is a short text whose cross-cultural and -temporal connections make clear that its author is an expert historian. Cambridge professor Mary Beard substantiates her manifesto with photos, memes and media excerpts to reveal the threads connecting current misogyny to its ancient roots. From the Homeric Penelope to Hillary Clinton, Beard explores women who have been quieted and controlled, not excluding herself; sexist online trolls have frequently bashed Beard for her public speech and writing.
Madame Restell by Jennifer Wright
The story of Madame Restell, an abortionist practicing well over a century ago, is frighteningly timely in our post-Roe America. The titular woman was celebrated and beloved in her time, though history has all but erased her name. Jennifer Wright mines that history for newspaper clippings, indicative statistics, primary accounts and scholarship to revive the defiant and fearless figure, her milieu and the many women she saved. This impeccably researched biography is so riveting that it reads like fiction, though it’s imperative we remember it is not.
Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
This candidly funny and real memoir underlines female friendships and self-regard as profound and important forms of love. Dolly Alderton has become a major authorial voice of the female bildungsroman, and her debut memoir has since been adapted for television. Introspective and hopeful, Alderton mixes list formats and narrative recollections with wit and humor, but never at the cost of a voice that is both confident and complicated, authoritative and still figuring it out. “I am enough,” she famously writes. “My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough.”
