RECOMMENDED READING
Civil rights, Culture, AND History
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The Politics of Women’s Rights: Parties, Positions, and Change
By Christina Wolbrecht
Prior to the 1970s, young Americans may be surprised to learn that the Republican Party was actually slightly more amenable to women’s rights than the Democrats were. But beginning in the 1980s, everything changed as the parties swapped sides and polarized sharply - with women’s rights becoming a key point of differentiation.
Christina Wolbrecht’s The Politics of Women’s Rights examines how this shift occurred with an eye towards how we can use this understanding in the modern era.
Cynical Theories
By James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose
Subtitled, “How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody”, this critique of illiberal critical scholarship asks readers to think (ironically) critically about the identity politics that are being pushed by activist scholars on the left.
Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons
By Megan Sweeney
This book about reading is more than just that. Megan Sweeny artfully uses incarcerated women’s relationship with books as a means to tell a larger story: one about male violence, systems of oppression, and the power and resilience of women despite it all.
This window works both ways, giving us a peek from outside the justice system into what life is like for women on the inside.
At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance — a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
By Danielle McGuire
Rosa Parks is best known for her key role in the Montgomery bus boycotts. But a decade before she refused to give up her seat, the civil rights icon was the key investigator in the rape and murder of a local black mother at the hands of seven white men. This book bravely reckons with the history of white men’s violence against black women.
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
by Zora Neale Hurston,
EDITED BY DEBORAH PLANT
By the acclaimed author of Her Eyes Were Watching God, New York Times bestseller Barracoon tells the story of the Cudjo - one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Through his voice and Zora Neale Hurston’s compassionate perspective, we are left with a haunting portrait of the legacy of slavery on our nation.
The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy
By Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen & Maria Mies
This 1999 polemic provides a harsh rebuke of our current capitalist system, arguing that it depends on the exploitation of women and the environment. Instead, the authors propose a new (or, perhaps, old) way of living - one based on subsistence living.
Swastika Night
By Katharine Burdekin
Our token work of dystopian fiction, Swastika Night was first published in 1937 at the height of Hitler’s rise to power. It imagines a post-Hitler world of extreme patriarchal fascism where women have become completely erased from society, turned into caged cattle that exist only for rape.
Considered a precursor to Orwell’s 1984 or Attwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, the exaggerated universe of this book is the perfect reminder of how much we have to lose.
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2020… The Year We Were All Cancelled!
By Stella Perrett
On a lighter note, this collection of tongue-in-cheek cartoons by canceled artist Stella Perrett is the perfect end to a nightmare of a year. Pick up a copy of her self-published work to support women who have faced economic consequences for standing up for our sex-based rights, and have a good laugh while you’re at it.