International Women's Day reading list!

To celebrate International Women's Day and the third International Women's Strike, we bring you this feminist reading list.

The International Women’s Strike is a network of women in more than 50 different countries that emerged through planning a day of action for March 8th, 2017. It is organised by and for women who have been marginalized and silenced by decades of neoliberalism directed towards the 99% of women: working women inside and outside of the home, women of color, Native women, disabled women, immigrant women, Muslim women, lesbian, CIS, queer and trans women.

This International Women's Day, we are publishing Feminism for the 99%, from three of the organizers of the International Women’s Strike: a manifesto for when “leaning in” is not enough.

The women workers of Verso will be joining the strike on March 8! Read more here. We've also donated to the Women's Strike Fund, which helps offset the costs of women leaving work and attending the strike. The nation-wide strike fund will enable women to continue to resist and organise. Please donate here, if you are able to! http://gf.me/u/q9w28p 

The Women’s Strike in Britain began with women coming together to explore our visions of the red feminist horizon – what it could look like and how, crucially – how we could get there. The argument that we want to make is that the Women’s Strike is not a one-day event set to coincide with International Women’s Day each year – it’s not an activist campaign or a “women’s” project... We are not asking for our fair share under capitalism, we have zero desire for an equality that promises nothing more than being equal to a wage slave: instead we are seeking to destroy altogether the system that by its very design – divides, harms and exploits us. We already know women’s liberation to be at the heart of the struggle. But just so we are clear: there will be no revolution until women’s lives and our labour are central to every political question.

From three of the organizers of the International Women’s Strike: a manifesto for when “leaning in” is not enough.

How the law harms sex workers—and what they want instead.

Rather than looking at surrogacy through a legal lens, Lewis argues that the needs and protection of surrogates should be put front and center. Their relationship to the babies they gestate must be rethought, as part of a move to recognize that reproduction is productive work. Only then can we begin to break down our assumptions that children “belong” to those whose genetics they share. 

A pocket colour manifesto for a new futuristic feminism.

A powerful document of theday-to-day realities of Black women in Britain.

A feminist movement clashing with China’s authoritarian government.

A lyrical debut novel from a musician and artist renowned for her sharp sexual and political imagery.

Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo examines the role of race and the recurrent image of the black rapist, the omission of male victims, and what we mean when we talk about “rape culture.” Sanyal takes on every received opinion we have about rape, arguing with liberals, conservatives, and feminists alike.

A graphic novel of the dramatic life and death of German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. 

With race and the police once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America’s giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power.

An extraordinary memoir of transition and transgender politics and culture.

A passionate call to rediscover the political and emotional joy that emerges when we share our lives.

A founding text of transnational feminism.

A groundbreaking attempt to theorise the feminist subject.

“An important contribution to debates around sex and work ... deserves to be read.” – Nina Power

Groundbreaking examination of the birth, development and impact of Feminist consciousness.

“This book is a school of thought.” – Frigga Haug, Das Argument

Classic work of black feminism.

Sensitive but uncompromising socialist-feminist critique of the nuclear family.

An examination of how mainstream feminism has been mobilized in support of racist measures.

“A moving defence of the pleasures and pains of human solidarity.” – Melissa Benn, Guardian

The transatlantic story of six radical pioneers at the turn of the twentieth century.

Inside This Place, Not of It reveals some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States.

Feminism for the 99%

by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser

Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, healthcare, climate change, border policing; not the issues you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But don’t these issues impact the vast majority of wome...

Revolting Prostitutes

by Juno Mac and Molly Smith

How the law harms sex workers - and what they want insteadDo you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justi...

Full Surrogacy Now

by Sophie Lewis

"Rooted in historical, site-based, narrative, and political accounts, Full Surrogacy Now is the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for. This kind of gestation depends on...

The Xenofeminist Manifesto

by Laboria Cuboniks

The Xenofeminist Manifesto is an attempt to articulate a feminism fit for the twenty-first century. Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, exploring both oppressive and emancipatory po...

Heart Of The Race

by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe

Introduction by Lola Okolosie

Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting...

Betraying Big Brother

by Leta Hong Fincher

On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary C...

Paradise Rot

by Jenny Hval

Translated by Marjam Idriss

"As intriguing and impressive a novelist as she is a musician, Hval is a master of quiet horror and wonder."Chris Kraus, author of I Love DickJo is in a strange new country for university and havi...

Rape

by Mithu Sanyal

From Title IX cases on campus, to #metoo and #timesup, rape is a definitive issue at the heart of feminism, and lately, it’s barely out of the news. Cultural critic Mithu Sanyal is picking up where...

Red Rosa

by Kate Evans

A giant of the political left, Rosa Luxemburg is one of the foremost minds in the canon of revolutionary socialist thought. But she was much more than just a thinker. She made herself heard in a wo...

If They Come in the Morning

by Angela Davis

The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Ange...

Trans

by Juliet Jacques

Afterword by Sheila Heti

In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery—a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to ...

Radical Happiness

by Lynne Segal

Why are we so obsessed by the pursuit of happiness? With new ways to measure contentment we are told that we have a right to individual joy. But at what cost? In an age of increasing individualis...

Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World

by Kumari Jayawardena

Foreword by Rafia Zakaria

For twenty-five years, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World has been an essential primer on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of women’s movements in Asia and the Midd...

Constituting Feminist Subjects

by Kathi Weeks

Kathi Weeks suggests that one of the most important tasks for contemporary feminist theory is to develop theories of the subject that are adequate to feminist politics. Although the 1980s modernist...

Playing the Whore

by Melissa Gira Grant

The sex industry is an endless source of prurient drama for the mainstream media. Recent years have seen a panic over "online red-light districts," which supposedly seduce vulnerable young women ...

Woman's Consciousness, Man's World

by Sheila Rowbotham

A groundbreaking contribution to debates on women's oppression and consciousness, and the connections between socialism and feminism. Examining feminist consciousness from various vantage points - ...

Women's Oppression Today

by Michèle Barrett

Foreword by Kathi Weeks

Women’s Oppression Today is a classic text in the debate about Marxism and feminism, exploring how gender, sexuality and the “family-household system” operate in relation to contemporary capitalism...

Invisibility Blues

by Michele Wallace

First published in 1990, Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace’s considerations of the black experience in America include ...

The Anti-Social Family

by Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh

Despite much talk of its decline, the nuclear family persists as a structure central to contemporary society, a fact to be lamented, according to the ideas of Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh. T...

Separate and Dominate

by Christine Delphy

Translated by David Broder

Feminist Christine Delphy co-founded the journal Nouvelles questions féministes with Simone de Beauvoir in the 1970s and became one of the most influential figures in French feminism. Today, Delp...

Making Trouble

by Lynne Segal

What happens when angry young rebels become wary older women, ageing in a leaner, meaner time: a time which exalts only the ‘new’, in a ruling orthodoxy daily disparaging all it portrays as the ‘ol...

Rebel Crossings

by Sheila Rowbotham

In a feat of extraordinary archival research Sheila Rowbotham uncovers six little-known women and men whose lives were both dramatic and startlingly radical. Rowbotham tells a story that moves from...

Inside This Place, Not of It

by Voice of Witness

Foreword by Michelle Alexander

Inside This Place, Not of It reveals some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States. In their own words, the thirteen narrators in this book recount ...

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