RU Women’s Studies Recommends … Books

At the beginning of the Spring Semester, I almost fainted when a student asked me to recommend some feminist literature.  If that wasn’t shocking enough, another student emailed me at the end of the semester to ask me to recommend books for her summer reading list.  One would think on a college campus that this would happen all the time, and, while I am in the English department and this should be the norm, I don’t teach English majors, I teach 100-level CORE classes in written and oral communication and women’s studies.  The majority of my students have no qualms about telling me – an English teacher! – that they hate to read.  For this reason, I signed up to be a book giver on my college campus for World Book Night USA.  So, between fainting spells caused by my two students who like to read and want to do more of it, my son and I gave out 19 free copies of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred.  

I chose Kindred because I’m a fan of Octavia Butler and because I have taught the novel before, on this same campus, and the students in my American Literature class – also not English majors – seemed to enjoy it.


Which gets me to the whole point of this post: recommending some good feminist reads.  In case you missed it, Octavia Butler’s Kindred is one, I also enjoy(ed) her speculative/dystopian novel The Parable of the Sower (students in several of my classes have seemed to like it, too).  Another  book that I have taught a few times and students have nearly unanimously loved is Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven.  I never tire of reading it.  If I’m going to mention Kindred and/or books I never tire of, then I’ll have to mention my favorite: Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  I don’t teach this one often because I love it too much and I tend to get angry if students don’t also want to carry it with them everywhere, always.  


Another couple of books that are with me always, at least metaphorically, are Virginia Woolf’s non-fiction pieces A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.  Phrases from these always seem to pop in my head like those bad 80’s songs you hear on the radio for 90 seconds and then find yourself singing all day, but, these are not bad, they are really, really good.  A book that I taught in the class with the two students who like to read is Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi.  The suffering the protagonist must endure is a bit over the top, but lots of great second wave feminist fiction is like that: The Color Purple, for example, which was the first book I recommended to student #1, after I picked myself up off the floor, that is. 

So that this post did not just end with me scanning my book case and writing about every other book that my eyes alighted on, I asked the members of the RU Women’s Studies Committee to also recommend some good reads.  Some responded via email, and others – we hope! – will respond via comment after this post goes up.  For Fiction, Leigh Kelley, from Media Studies recommends Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (a “prequel” to Jane Eyre) because it “was one of the required texts for my undergraduate course on Caribbean Women Authors. It made me rethink the canon; I still have my copy.” For Non-fiction she recommends Personal History, “the Pultizer Prize-winning memoir of Katharine Graham, who led The Washington Post Co. after her husband’s suicide.” Alyssa Archer from the McConnell Library, “a big Barbara Kingsolver fan” suggests this blogpost from the New York Public Library for Essential Texts in Feminist Theory & Feminist Thought and, I concur.  If nothing here strikes your fancy, you can check out Kathy J. Whitson’s Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature from the RU Library, or, if you’d like a preview, you can try your hand at "First Lines of Feminist Fiction".


And, please, share with us some of your favorites in the comments below :-)