Every year, on Women’s Day, we see our peers advocating and celebrating their love, support, and respect for women. But how much of that support is reflected in our society? Because the numbers tell us something different entirely. During the COVID era, the rates of domestic violence rose terrifyingly high. The extension of support isolated to one particular day in a year shows a staggering disparity in the love women receive on a particular day and how they are treated the other days of the year.
As we celebrate these days, we have a tendency to overlook the essence of the celebration, the foundational struggles and feminist movements that fought for women’s rights and freedom. True political advocacy is not just isolated to one day in a year, feminism is not a performance. These movements were built on resistance, extraordinary courage, and relentless demand for justice.
Feminist writers and their literature contributed to cementing these movements, their works reforming policies, constitutional rights and visibility. Acknowledging these struggles is not enough, we have to read and understand the battles that have been waging for generations. In this list, we are going to take a look at the best feminist writers and their works that have shattered the glass ceiling. These diverse writers have all contributed to the ongoing fight for equality. Read along and add them to your TBR list!
Pioneering Feminist Writers
The cornerstone of feminist movements was the strong-voiced writers that the collective resistance of women visible to the rest of the world. These writers questioned the role of women, and the discourses experienced by them, and relentlessly advocated for women’s rights. Their ideologies continue to invoke the need for collective resistance in young women even today. Let’s take a look at some of these feminist authors
1. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) – The Second Sex
Beauvoir’s revolutionary work, The Second Sex, critiques the social structuring of femininity, that women are not born a woman but molded by societal expectation, an idea that continues to be attributed to gender studies and intersectional feminism.
However, subsequent feminist scholars have critically examined her work for the convenient absence of the intersections of race, class, and colonialism in women’s issues in her works
2. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) – Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson was a rebellious woman who lived her life in solitude but wrote poems that became alive with intensity, curiosity, and death. Many of her poems were way ahead of their time and very experimental and confessional in nature.
The extraordinary grasp of words and the power of poetry dived deep into the themes of grief, death, and loss. poems Because I Could Not Stop for Death and A Narrow Fellow in the Grass are the most popular poems by Dickinson.
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3. Anais Nin (1903-1977) – Delta of Venus
While Anais didn’t personally recognize herself as a contributing figure of the feminist movement in the 20th century, her novels went on to prove otherwise.
Back in her time, erotica written openly by women was rare and Nin’s story collections like Delta of Venus and Little Birds are sensual and rebellious. This literature went on to be undoubtedly hailed as a pioneering example of sex-positive feminist fiction.
4. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) – The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath had a voice that cannot be compared to anyone else, it is raw, brimming with grief and honesty. She was a truly incredible poet and a novelist who battled the extremities of mental illness, which resulted in her losing her life in 1963.
The Bell Jar and The Colossus are her most celebrated works. In 1982, she became the first poet to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for her Collected Poems. Plaths’ work still hits hard, she writes the truth, even when it hurts.
5. Jane Austen (1775-1817) – Pride and Prejudice
She led a relatively inward life, yet wrote some of the best-narrated stories of relationships and marriage in Western literature. Her novels Pride and Prejudice and Emma, are most often painted as romantic from the surface level, but they are actually clever displays of class, gender roles, and everyday disparities that exist in women in marriage. She blended subtle rebellion with sharp commentary that asked the right questions relevant to the time period.
Feminist Writers Who Changed The Literary Landscape
The pioneering writers of feminist literature inspired numerous other writers to contribute to the movement by introducing more critical, liberal, and radical thoughts on gender, race, and class. These writers took the lead in bringing feminist works to the mainstream consciousness. Here are some of the influential writers that drove the movement in the right direction.
6. Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood is a poet, novelist, and literary critic best known for her prose and feminist lens in her writing. Her most popular work, The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian fiction that interrogates the problems of power, gender, and survival of a woman. She visualizes this fiction that is eerily close to our realities of women all over the world where womanhood is capitalized and oppressed.
7. Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) – Tender Buttons
Gertrude Stein was a prominent writer, art patron, and an openly lesbian woman whose work intersects with feminist, queer literary discourses. She lived mostly in Paris with her partner challenging societal norms and smashing patriarchy throughout her life making her a key figure in queer history.
Tender Buttons was an experimental writing that defied conventional systems occupying space for queer literature. However, her works received backlash due to the fact that her success was achieved because of her privilege as a white woman gaining her access to elite circles in literature and art.
8. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Half of a Yellow Sun
Adichie has an extraordinary way of writing. With her rare blend of hope and pain, she narrates powerful themes like civil war, political strife, immigration issues, race cultural differences but she does it with such grace and clarity that any reader would be completely invested. She has earned recognition and many awards, including a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008.
In her most recent work, Americanah, the story tells the disparity between her life in the US and her longing to move back to Nigeria thereby capturing the messiness of belonging, identity, and love.
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9. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) – A Room of One’s Own
She was a quiet storm, both fierce and revolutionary. With her fluid stream-of-consciousness style of writing, she slips right into her character’s mind. Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are about fleeting moments, memories, and inner lives that we are usually shy to expose.
Among her best-known works is the 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own exploring Woolf’s creative freedom. A reminder that women need room for themselves to write, think, and exist on their own terms, both literally and figuratively.
10. Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) – Little Women
Alcott was known for the widely read classic novel Little Women. She carried dreams of becoming an actress and exploring the world but was forced to work because of poverty throughout her life. The release of her book, Little Women, gained popularity since it drew influence from her life experiences, her bond with her sisters, and their collective transition from childhood to adulthood, and each of them navigated through them.
Alcott was a feminist advocate and an abolitionist who remained single her entire life. She dedicated her life to contributing to movements that strived for women’s suffrage.
Modern and Contemporary Feminist Writers
As feminism evolved, the subsequent literature bore its effects as well. These feminist books brought up new realities and discussed these dilemmas in the literary world. Beyond addressing and documenting the struggles faced by women, they demand reform, accountability, and action.
Books from these writers look further into the structure for root causes addressing gender, race, sexuality, and hierarchies. These writers help us uncover a deeper trench of issues that concern women.
11. Harper Lee (1926-2016) – To Kill A Mockingbird
The author of the legendary To Kill A Mockingbird draws the consequences of systematic injustice and racial discrimination in society. Harper Lee’s book was so powerful and influential that it captured public interest and media attention that some of the schools had adopted her novel in their syllabus. The ability to capture young audiences into a very deep-rooted oppression.
12. Jhumpa Lahiri – Interpreter of Maladies
Lahiri is one of the most widely known writers of Indian literature, her works centering on the diasporic reality of migrant Indians.
The plight of confronting difficult choices for women has been the subtext of most of her writing. Her work Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000, her stories have revolutionized the way women write about their dilemmas, and opened up to the world.
13. Kamala Das (1934-2009) – My Story
Kamala Das’s style of writing has produced one of the finest, most beautiful prose in Malayalam and English. The rare honesty, sensitivity, and confessional poetry method in the writing has captivated a lot of women.
Her book, Her Story openly embraces womanhood, individuality, and the necessity of acknowledging female desires and sensuality. She has inspired young women to come forward and talk about their sexuality, their bodies, and female desires while breaking the ceiling of patriarchy and domestic oppression.
14. Anita Desai – Fire on the Mountain
A recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award in the year of 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, Anita Desai is a novelist and a short story writer who has been also shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Her work talks about marital discord, domestic violence, isolation, and alienation of women in patriarchal societies.
She unpacks the psychological complexities of the female characters to understand the necessity of desire and autonomy in women’s lives. Presently, she is a professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
15. Roxanne Gay – Bad Feminists
Roxanne Gay is an academic lecturer, essayist, and writer who debuted her first collection of autobiographical essays titled Bad Feminists. In a Time Magazine interview she said, “In each of these essays, I’m very much trying to show how feminism influences my life for better or worse.
It just shows what it’s like to move through the world as a woman. It’s not even about feminism per se, it’s about humanity and empathy”. Her work puts forward the idea that being a feminist is being a person with empathy.
Intersectional Feminist Writers
Feminism cannot be seen as a linear movement. The struggles and brutalities faced by women in numerous numbers from different intersections mold these into a multi-pronged instrument These works guide the faction to be more expansive, ensuring inclusivity, especially in marginalized communities. Here are some brilliant intersectional writers:
16. Maya Angelou (1928-2014) – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou significantly wrote works that discuss Black womanhood, their survival, and the trauma around it. Her relentless work alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm highlights her presence in the African American movements.
The book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings challenged the conventional norms by exploring themes of racism, sexism, and women empowerment.
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17. Meena Kandasamy – The Gypsy Goddess
Ilavenil Meena Kandaswamy is a PhD scholar in sociolinguistics and the author of Touch, Ms. Militancy, and The Gypsy Goddess, Her most recent work When I Hit You Or, A Portrait Of The Writer As A Young Wife is a powerful, provocative lens into domestic violence.
Her works center themselves in a prominent space in the feminist and caste literary discourses. Meena Kandaswamy is a voice so loud that it holds the system accountable, fiercely with truth.
18. Bell Hooks (1952-2021) – All About Love
Bell Hooks was a groundbreaking author, feminist scholar, and cultural critic who exposed the mainstream feminism often caused by the deep-rooted white supremacist systems through her books Ain’t I a Woman?, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and All About Love.
Her writing sought to dismantle the interconnected system of oppression faced by black women, also revolutionizing discussion relevant to race, class, and gender. The critical writings not only addressed the problems but also advocated for the power of love and education to dismantle these hierarchies.
19. Toni Morrison (1931-2019) – Beloved
Toni Morrison explored the barbarity faced by an African American woman depicting the prevalence of racism and gender discrimination by white supremacy and patriarchy.
Morrison’s style of storytelling puts the lens on the generational trauma and patriarchal structures of racism while celebrating black culture, their language, and the movements of resistance. Her prominent work Beloved which addresses slavery won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is considered a relevant piece of writing in history.
20. Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991) – Lihaaf (The Quilt)
Ismat Chughtai was bold, unapologetic and way ahead of her times. This rebellious Indian Urdu author was known for the daring topics she explored which women of those times were not allowed to speak about.
Themes of Female desire, class, gender, and sexuality were fearlessly discussed in her books. Her most popular and controversial work Lihaaf (The Quilt) focused on the theme of female sexuality and won widespread recognition along with an equal amount of retaliation for its progressiveness.
Feminist literature is a tool for change, it’s an instrument of resistance and evidence of the resilience of women across the globe. These works highlight the importance of strong defiance against systematic oppression. Reading feminist writers is the most reliable way to learn, address, and amplify the call for action. These are the feminist writers everyone should read who played an indispensable role in solidifying women’s right to equality and shaping an empathetic, kinder world.
FAQs
Some of the most essential reads are All About Love by Bell Hooks, Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandaswamy, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sing by Maya Angelou, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and so on are some of the books by feminist writers everyone should read, all these literature are of different styles or different intersectional themes, so you can pick your choice!
There is no one single famous feminist writer, there are feminist writers that you can name depending upon the time period and geographical location of the work. Each of these feminist writers, across genres and intersectionalities, has brought their own perspective to feminist discourse, so picking one amongst them as the most famous feminist writer would do injustice to their collective contribution.
Over the course of time, you can see feminist literature diversifying and integrating intersectional themes in their work. Meena Kadaswamy’s work centers on feminism while challenging caste and class discrimination, Maya Angelou’ and Bell Hooks’ work as black feminist writers has rigorously tackled racism and celebrates Black culture. Similarly you can find a consistent evolution in feminist literature across regions.
4. What is the best feminist literature?
The best feminist literature is a subjective judgment, it depends upon the style of writing, the resonance level with the readers, the relevance of the issue being addressed, and so on. If you’re looking into classic literature Emily Dickinson, Lousie Ann Alcott, and Jane Austen are some of the best ones, if you’re looking into intersectional feminism, the books of Bell Hooks, Maya Angelou, and Simone de Beauvoir are the best place to start for african american feminist writers.
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