Each year, the United States celebrates Women’s Equality Day on August 26th in recognition of the anniversary of women’s suffrage. This is an excellent opportunity to reflect on the strengths and shortcomings of women’s movements in the U.S. through the lens of intersectionality, which calls on us to understand the interweaving impact of all of our identities on how we experience the world. (For more on the history of the term intersectionality, see this article). While some of the books below, such as Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, may be more academic in nature, others such as Trans-Galactic Bike Ride are celebrations of what embracing intersectional feminism can look like. Whatever style of writing you’re looking for, this list has got it - so pick an eBook below to round out your summer reading!
- Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement - Wendy L. Rouse. “This book explores how queer women led the suffrage movement while challenging heteronormative concepts of domesticity, family, space, and death in both subtly subversive and radically transformative ways. This book also highlights the alliances that queer suffragists built and the innovative strategies they developed to protect and preserve their most intimate relationships.”
- Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot - Mikki Kendall. “In her searing collection of essays, Mikki Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, along with incisive commentary…Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux.”
- Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption [AUDIO] - Rafia Zakaria. “An American Muslim woman, attorney, and political philosopher, Rafia Zakaria champions a reconstruction of feminism in Against White Feminism, centering women of color in this transformative overview and counter-manifesto to white feminism’s global, long-standing affinity with colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist ideals.”
- Black Trans Feminism - Marquis Bey. “Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender non normativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each, conceiving of black trans feminism as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power.”
- How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. “In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the [Combahee River Collective] and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.”
- Abolition. Feminism. Now. [AUDIO] - Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie. “In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century.”
- White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color - Ruby Hamad. “Called “powerful and provocative" by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist, this explosive book of history and cultural criticism reveals how white feminism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women, and women of color.”
- Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities - Susannah B. Mintz. “The first critical study of personal narrative by women with disabilities, Unruly Bodies examines how contemporary writers use life writing to challenge cultural stereotypes about disability, gender, embodiment, and identity.”
- Trans-Galactic Bike Ride: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories of Transgender and Nonbinary Adventurers - edited by Lydia Rogue. “Take a ride with us as we explore a future where trans and nonbinary people are the heroes. In worlds where bicycle rides bring luck, a minotaur needs a bicycle, and werewolves stalk the post-apocalyptic landscape, nobody has time to question gender. Whatever your identity you'll enjoy these stories that are both thought-provoking and fun adventures.”
- Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity - Chandra Talpade Mohanty. “This collection highlights the concerns running throughout [Mohanty’s] pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements.”