Earlier this month, The Little Book of Feminist Saints was released from Random House. Written by Julia Pierpont and illustrated by Manjit Thapp, this inspiring collection honors one hundred exceptional women throughout history and around the world.
The Rumpus wanted to celebrate this wonderful book and Women’s History Month, so we invited Julia Pierpont to share a list of books with us related to the new collection. Julia selected seventeeen titles, all written by the world-changing women who appear in The Little Book of Feminist Saints. And, of course, we’re kicking off the list with the new collection itself!
Stay tuned next week for our editors’ picks for Women’s History Month!
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The Little Book of Feminist Saints by Julia Pierpont, illustrated by Manjit Thapp
In this luminous volume, New York Times bestselling writer Julia Pierpont and artist Manjit Thapp match short, vibrant, and surprising biographies with stunning full-color portraits of one hundred secular female “saints”: champions of strength and progress. These women broke ground, broke ceilings, and broke molds. Open to any page and find daily inspiration and lasting delight.
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling. In this classic essay, she takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a fixed income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.
The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou by Maya Angelou
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published to widespread acclaim in 1969, and Maya Angelou garnered the attention of an international audience with the triumphs and tragedies of her childhood in the American South. This soul-baring memoir launched a six-book epic spanning the sweep of the author’s incredible life. Now, all six celebrated and bestselling autobiographies are available in this one-volume edition.
Gender Gap: Bella Abzug’s Guide to Political Power for American Women by Bella Abzug
Bella Savitzky Abzug was an American lawyer, US Representative, social activist, and a leader of the Women’s Movement. In 1971, Abzug joined other leading feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedan to found the National Women’s Political Caucus. Here, the former congresswoman details the make-up of the women’s vote and its importance in the then-upcoming presidential election.
Infinity Net by Yayoi Kusama
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is one of the most talked-about artists working today. This remarkable memoir reveals her to be a fascinating figure, channeling her obsessive neurosis into an art that transcends cultural barriers. Kusama describes arriving in New York in 1957 as a poverty-stricken artist and later becoming the doyenne of an alternative art scene. She tells of her relationships with Georgia O’Keeffe, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, and the reclusive Joseph Cornell. She candidly discusses the obsessive visions that have haunted her throughout her life; returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama admitted herself to the psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she lives today, and from which she has produced the seemingly endless stream of artworks and writings that have won her acclaim across the globe.
Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly
Nellie Bly, whose given name was Elizabeth Jane Cochran, was a pioneer of investigative journalism. Of her many exposé assignments for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, her voluntary (and undercover) journey into the “lunatic asylum” on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island is perhaps the most well-known. She, without much difficulty, fooled various doctors and authorities into deeming her insane and admitting her to the asylum, from which she reported.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde’s philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.
The World I Live In & Optimism: A Collection of Essays by Helen Keller
These poetic, inspiring essays offer insights into the world of a gifted woman who was deaf and blind. Helen Keller relates her impressions of life’s beauty and promise, perceived through the sensations of touch, smell, and vibration, together with the workings of a powerful imagination. The World I Live In comprises fifteen essays and a poem, all of which originally appeared in The Century Magazine. ”Optimism,” written while Keller was a college student, offers eloquent observations on acquiring and maintaining a sense of happiness. These essays reflect the author’s remarkable achievements, as expressed in her honorary degree from Harvard, the first ever granted to a woman: “From a still, dark world she has brought us light and sound; our lives are richer for her faith and her example.”
It’s Up to the Women by Eleanor Roosevelt
“Women, whether subtly or vociferously, have always been a tremendous power in the destiny of the world,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in It’s Up to the Women, her book of advice to women of all ages on every aspect of life. Written at the height of the Great Depression, she called on women particularly to do their part—cutting costs where needed, spending reasonably, and taking personal responsibility for keeping the economy going. Whether it’s the recommendation that working women take time for themselves in order to fully enjoy time spent with their families, recipes for cheap but wholesome home-cooked meals, or America’s obligation to women as they take a leading role in the new social order, many of the opinions expressed here are as fresh as if they were written today.
The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait by Frida Kahlo
The intimate life of artist Frida Kahlo is wonderfully revealed in the illustrated journal she kept during her last ten years. This passionate and at times surprising record contains the artist’s thoughts, poems, and dreams—many reflecting her stormy relationship with her husband, artist Diego Rivera—along with seventy mesmerizing watercolor illustrations. The text entries in brightly colored inks make the journal as captivating to look at as it is to read. Her writing reveals the artist’s political sensibilities, recollections of her childhood, and her enormous courage in the face of more than thirty-five operations to correct injuries she had sustained in an accident at the age of eighteen.
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
Of the nine books of lyrics the ancient Greek poet Sappho is said to have composed, only one poem has survived complete. The rest are fragments. In this miraculous new translation, acclaimed poet and classicist Anne Carson presents all of Sappho’s fragments, in Greek and in English, as if on the ragged scraps of papyrus that preserve them, inviting a thrill of discovery and conjecture that can be described only as electric—or, to use Sappho’s words, as “thin fire… racing under skin.”
Barbara Jordan: Speaking the Truth with Eloquent Thunder edited by Max Sherman
Revered by Americans across the political spectrum, Barbara Jordan was “the most outspoken moral voice of the American political system,” in the words of former President Bill Clinton, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994. Throughout her career as a Texas senator, US congresswoman, and distinguished professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, Barbara Jordan lived by a simple creed: “Ethical behavior means being honest, telling the truth, and doing what you said you were going to do.” This volume brings together several major political speeches that articulate Barbara Jordan’s most deeply held values.
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Published in 1963, The Feminine Mystique gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and sixty percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire.
My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem had an itinerant childhood. When she was a young girl, her father would pack the family in the car every fall and drive across country searching for adventure and trying to make a living. The seeds were planted: Gloria realized that growing up didn’t have to mean settling down. My Life on the Road is the moving, funny, and profound story of Gloria’s growth and also the growth of a revolutionary movement for equality—and the story of how surprising encounters on the road shaped both. From her first experience of social activism among women in India to her work as a journalist in the 1960s; from the whirlwind of political campaigns to the founding of Ms. magazine; from the historic 1977 National Women’s Conference to her travels through Indian Country—a lifetime spent on the road allowed Gloria to listen and connect deeply with people, to understand that context is everything, and to become part of a movement that would change the world.
Pussy Riot!: A Punk Prayer for Freedom by Pussy Riot
On February 21, 2012, five members of a Russian feminist punk collective Pussy Riot staged a performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Dressed in brightly colored tights and balaclavas, they performed their punk prayer, asking the Virgin Mary to drive out Russian president Vladimir Putin from the church. After just forty seconds, they were chased out by security. Three members of the collective, Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, known as Masha, Nadya, and Katya, were later arrested. As their trial unfolded, these young women became global feminist icons, garnering the attention and support of activists and artists around the world. Pussy Riot! is an essential document of this galvanizing historical moment. It includes letters from prison, courtroom statements, defense attorney closing arguments, poems, the infamous punk prayer, and tributes by Yoko Ono, Johanna Fateman, Karen Finley, Justin Vivian Bond, Eileen Myles, and JD Samson.
Unbowed: A Memoir by Wangari Maathai
In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya’s forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country. Infused with her unique luminosity of spirit, Wangari Maathai’s remarkable story of courage, faith, and the power of persistence is destined to inspire generations to come.
White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Brenda Wineapple
White Heat is the first book to portray the remarkable relationship between America’s most beloved poet and the fiery abolitionist who first brought her work to the public. As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldiers. When Dickinson sent Higginson four of her poems he realized he had encountered a wholly original genius; their intense correspondence continued for the next quarter century. In White Heat, Brenda Wineapple tells an extraordinary story about poetry, politics, and love, one that sheds new light on her subjects and on the roiling America they shared.
Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad translated by Sholeh Wolpe
For the first time, the work of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad is being brought to English-speaking readers through the perspective of a translator who is a poet in her own right, fluent in both Persian and English and intimately familiar with each culture. Sin includes the entirety of Farrokhzad’s last book, numerous selections from her fourth and most enduring book, Reborn, and selections from her earlier work and creates a collection that is true to the meaning, the intention, and the music of the original poems. Farrokhzad was the most significant female Iranian poet of the twentieth century, as revolutionary as Russia’s Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva and America’s Plath and Sexton. She wrote with a sensuality and burgeoning political consciousness that pressed against the boundaries of what could be expressed by a woman in 1950s and 1960s Iran. She paid a high price for her art, shouldering the disapproval of society and her family, having her only child taken away, and spending time in mental institutions. Farrokhzad died in a car accident in 1967 at the age of thirty-two. Sin is a tribute to the work and life of this remarkable poet.
