What books written by American women can you name that changed the world? I've listed a few choices myself; I'd love to hear what your choices are.
1. Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel was credited by many, including Abraham Lincoln, for increasing abolitionist sentiment in the North and speeding the end of American slavery.
2. Silent Spring
Rachel Carson's expose of the problems of pesticides was key to the 20th century environmentalist movement. Some would add that the book is also instrumental in creating the possibility of saving the world and humanity from environmental destruction.
3. The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique named the nameless misery of well-educated, suburban, postwar American women, and helped many to decide to change their lives. The feminist revival of the 1960s owes its existence in large part to this book.4. The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story documented the treatment of women in the 19th century by the medical profession. Can you imagine: diagnosing an intelligent woman with a mental problem -- perhaps general depression, perhaps post-partum depression -- and prescribing total abstinence from mental challenge? (online edition of "The Yellow Wallpaper")5. Twenty Years at Hull-House
Jane Addams's own story of the founding of a settlement house gives some details of her social experiment, and some of her theoretical foundation for the project. Her work inspired not only the establishment of more settlement houses, but the founding of social work as a profession and sociology as a serious academic subject of study.6. Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Margaret Fuller's life was cut short when she drowned in a shipwreck with her young child and husband. Her earlier feminist classic was known in many of the more educated American circles of her time.7. On the Equality of the Sexes
Judith Sargent Murray's treatise was published before Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1892) but was forgotten until its revival in the 1960s feminist movement by Alice Rossi. Thus, it didn't really have a large effect on history -- not what Wollstonecraft's work did. I included it more for the "what might have been" factor.
