In the feminist memoir Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life, Stephanie Staal revisits her alma mater to audit a Feminist Texts class now that she has married, turned 30 and become a mother, among other life-altering events.
A reader could well be inspired by Stephanie Staal’s book to delve into the feminist classics. Which “Fem Texts,” as many refer to the course, did Stephanie Staal read for her reexamination-of-feminism project? Here is a list of the classic feminist texts that make the cut to be discussed in Reading Women:
- Adam, Eve, and the Serpent by Elaine Pagels
- A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
- Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonefcraft by Lyndall Gordon
- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- "The Subjection of Women" by John Stuart Mill
- A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
- The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
- Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley
- The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
- "The Politics of Housework" by Pat Mainardi
- The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone
- The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America by Ruth Rosen
- Sexual Politics by Kate Millett
- Only Words by Catharine MacKinnon
- Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy
- Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
- "The Meaning of the Phallus" by Jacques Lacan
- "The Laugh of the Medusa" by Helene Cixous
- Dora: An Analysis of A Case of Hysteria by Sigmund Freud
- In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development by Carol Gilligan
- The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism by Katie Roiphe
- Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler
- Badghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq by Riverbend