Books on Women's Liberation

The second wave feminist movement, then called "women's liberation," took place mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. I can still remember the excitement of the movement, and of the startling and thought-provoking political/social/ideological/theoretical books coming out of, and contributing to, the movement. Their topics included politics, the law, health, literature, religion, and more. Women's lives and opportunities have substantially improved since that time, largely because of this movement and these books. Yes, there is still a long way to go, absolutely, and yes, these opportunities are far from fairly distributed; race, class, ethnicity, nationality, and other factors still limit the opportunities of so many women. We need to keep fighting the good fight for equity and for better lives for all women. But today I would like to pause for a moment to honor the groundbreaking books of the movement, and to thank their authors for their important insights and for their courage in writing about this topic for which so many people (and laws and practices) had such hostility and disdain at the time. The following books, some of the ones I read/studied/learned from during the 1970s, are representative of all the books by all the brave women writing at that time.

Against Our Will, by Susan Brownmiller (1975)
Beyond God the Father, by Mary Daly (1973)
The Dialectic of Sex, by Shulamith Firestone (1970)
The Female Eunuch, by Germaine Greer (1970)
The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan (1963)
Literary Women, by Ellen Moers (1976)
A Literature of Their Own, by Elaine Showalter (1977)
The Madwoman in the Attic, by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979)
Of Women Born, by Adrienne Rich (1976)
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, by Adrienne Rich (1979)
Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by Andrea Dworkin (1979)
Reinventing Womanhood, by Carolyn Heilbrun (1979)
The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
Sexual Politics, by Kate Millett (1970)
Sisterhood is Powerful, edited by Robin Morgan (1970)
When God Was a Woman, by Merlin Stone (1976)
Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, by Susan Griffin (1979)
Women's Estate, by Juliet Mitchell (1971)