Best Feminist Philosophy Books To Read

Sisterhood and After is a wonderful book all about the testimonies of the feminist life from the 1950s to today. With personal stories in every chapter, you will feel the emotion and the power of the movement just through the pages, and will really help you to understand the severity of the movement at its time, and why it still has so much of an impact now. History books cannot teach you all the stories, where this one book can teach you everything you need to know.

This anthology of texts on feminist phenomenology has been heralded as a must-read for students, philosophers, and medical practitioners — and for good reason. Women-centred philosophy is oft-overlooked and vastly underrepresented as is, and even more so within the subfields of biomedical ethics. It conceptualizes the oppression of women in medicine in a unique way that is scarcely discussed in feminist circles by focusing on phenomenological topics such as bodily self-experience or the dichotomy between normality and deviance. At Medical Herstory, we know how these lived experiences have concrete effects on our health and wellbeing; understanding the philosophy of the impacts of oppression brings us closer to dismantling it.

Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ was the first feminist book I read during my University years. An interesting and thought-provoking analysis of women’s social inequality and oppression throughout history. The author explores the reasons women occupy certain roles and who are the persons responsible. Interestingly she doesn’t attribute all the blame to the patriarchy. Her work also examines how women have contributed to their own oppression in society. Although written in 1948, ‘The Second Sex’ remains relevant in our world today. A must-read for all genders.

One of the best overview about feminism that anyone can come across. I really like the questions that the author put on the table, it expands the topics’ angles, especially when discussing the definitions themselves such as; the definition of feminist philosophy, what’s the quality exactly, etc. She points out the positive and negative sides of the most important ideas the feminist philosophy and directs you to more eye-opening fields.

Married Women Who Love Women, addresses issues of sexuality, sexual fluidity, and gender and the reasons some women struggle with their identity while others easily embrace their sexuality. And most importantly it helps women to discover why they make the choices they do.