13 Nonfiction Books to Read This Women’s History Month

Women artists made most of the first cave drawings. People with uteruses create life itself. Slumber parties; solidarity; activism; caregiving; discovery; innovation, and evolution. Women, we hold multitudes. And in a world that tries to reduce us, minimize us, silence us, and flatten us into stereotypes—the passive nude subject in paintings throughout art history or the manic pixie dream girl—these authors on this list of nonfiction titles are writing a new narrative, a different kind of story for women everywhere.

This Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating the strength, complexity, and dynamic gifts all women possess—and honoring the intersectional ways of making the future better for womankind. 

Here are our picks for the nonfiction books you need to read this Women’s History Month. 

A Renaissance of Our Own: A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining by Rachel E. Cargle

Published: Ballantine Books, 2023 

Why It Made Our List:  A nonfiction breath of fresh air for the tired feminist, this book reframes the ways we expect ourselves to show up for the cause, transforming the fight for gender equality from a day-to-day struggle into a collective effort made in community and in alignment with our values and resources. Read this book if you’re committed to the good fight for the long haul, but determined to avoid burnout and exhaustion.

Publisher’s Description: There are breaking points in all our lives when we realize that the way things have been done before just don’t work for us anymore, be it the way we approach our relationships, our belief systems, our work, our education, even our rest. For activist, philanthropist, and CEO Rachel E. Cargle, reimagining—the act of creating in our minds that which does not exist but that we believe can and should—has been a lifelong process. Reimagining served as the most powerful catalyst for Cargle’s personal transformation from a small-town Christian wife to an incisive queer feminist voice of a generation.

In A Renaissance of Our Own, we witness the sometimes painful but always inspiring breaking points in Cargle’s life that fostered a truer identity. These defining moments offer a blueprint for how we must all use our imagination—the space that sees beyond limits—to live in alignment with our highest values and to craft a world independent of oppressive structures, both personal and societal. Cargle now invites you to acknowledge ways of being that stem from societal expectations instead of your personal truth, and to embark on a renaissance of your own. She provides the very tools and prompts that she used to unearth her own truth, tools that opened her up to being a more authentic feminist and purpose-driven matriarchal leader. 

Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths And Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1996

Why It Made Our List: A nonfiction book to be savored, Women Who Run with the Wolves is an open, extended palm to the woman seeking a connection to the ancient wisdom inside of her, the untapped energy that transcends time and space. Stories of the wild woman run throughout our culture, and Dr. Estés, a preeminent scholar in mythology, compiled many of these tales into one complete volume, helping us to better understand where our power has been dampened, and even vilified, while also offering a clear path forward to honoring and harnessing the wild woman inside all of us. 

Follow it with Dr. Estés’ series The Dangerous Old Woman for a deeper look at the archetypes assigned to the wise women of middle age and older: the hag, the crone, and the witch.

Publisher’s Description: Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species. For though the gifts of wildish nature belong to us at birth, society’s attempt to “civilize” us into rigid roles has muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls.

In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, many from her own traditions, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine.

Gender Troubles: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler

Publisher: Routledge, 1990

Why It Made Our List:  A fixture of canonical feminist literature (a lineage that also includes Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the latter of which is first to assert that gender is a construct), Judith Butler’s Gender Troubles is a deeply philosophical text with wildly prescient implications on our present world. 

Butler’s seminal work is foundational to queer theory and feminist theory alike, positing that the two cannot exist without one another and expanding the definition of women beyond cis-heteronormativity to rightfully include trans women and gender-diverse people. Follow it with their more recent Who’s Afraid of Gender for a timely, clarifying take on the gender panic in today’s scapegoating of the trans community.

Publisher’s Description: One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, ‘essential’ notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category ‘woman’ and continues in this vein with examinations of ‘the masculine’ and ‘the feminine’. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler’s concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.

Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent.

White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color by Ruby Hamad

Publisher’s Description: Catapult, 2020

Why It Made Our List: In her book White Tears/Brown Scars, journalist and author Ruby Hamad invites white women to understand that by excluding Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women from their version of feminism, they’re not working towards equality at all. She shows how, in fact, white women’s defensiveness and unwillingness to talk about issues of race and class stagnates the feminist cause as a whole.

Publisher’s Description: Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep “ownership” of their slaves, through the centuries of colonialism, when they offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women’s active participation in campaigns of oppression. It offers a long overdue validation of the experiences of women of color.

Discussing subjects as varied as The Hunger Games, Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, the viral BBQ Becky video, and 19th century lynchings of Mexicans in the American Southwest, Ruby Hamad undertakes a new investigation of gender and race. She shows how the division between innocent white women and racialized, sexualized women of color was created, and why this division is crucial to confront.

Along the way, there are revelatory responses to questions like: Why are white men not troubled by sexual assault on women? (See Christine Blasey Ford.) With rigor and precision, Hamad builds a powerful argument about the legacy of white superiority that we are socialized within, a reality that we must apprehend in order to fight.

Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2014

Why It Made Our List:  In this fourth wave of feminism, it’s easy to feel pressure to be perfect: in our morals, in our forward-thinking, and in our ability to uphold the wins that our foremothers fought for. Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist is a collection of nonfiction essays that looks beyond the ideal ways for us to think and behave and on the truth, exploring all the relatable ways that she—and we—may come up short. 

Publisher’s Description: In these funny and insightful essays, Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.

Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better, coming from one of our most interesting and important cultural critics.

Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2015

Why It Made Our List: In a world where a woman’s duty was once to serve as a vehicle for a man’s pleasure, we’re finally putting women’s sexual satisfaction at the forefront Clinical researchers like author Emily Nagoski, Ph.D, alongside education platforms like OMGYES and porn sites like Bellessa, that are by and for women, are ushering in a new age for women in the bedroom (or on the kitchen table, etc.), shifting the culture to recognize the reason that some women may not enjoy sex, or have even found it anxiety-inducing, has nothing to do with them at all. And therein lies the problem. 

Come As You Are centers on women’s experiences and the emotional aspects of physical intimacy with a proactive, approachable, and science-backed lens.

Publisher’s Description: For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, women’s sexuality was uncharted territory in science, studied far less frequently—and far less seriously—than its male counterpart.

That is, until Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which used groundbreaking science and research to prove that the most important factor in creating and sustaining a sex life filled with confidence and joy is not what the parts are or how they’re organized but how you feel about them. In the years since the book’s initial publication, countless women have learned through Nagoski’s accessible and informative guide that things like stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it—and that even if you don’t always feel like it, you are already sexually whole by just being yourself. This revised and updated edition continues that mission with new information and advanced research, demystifying and decoding the science of sex so that everyone can create a better sex life and discover more pleasure than you ever thought possible.

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? By Linda Nochlin

Publisher: Thames & Hudson, 2021

Why It Made Our List: Our conception of what makes an artist worthy of our reverence has largely been defined along gender lines, with a disregard for themes more often present in a woman’s work, themes akin to femininity itself, such as introspection and making the private public. We’re quick to assign the term “genius” to male artists, but why do we not afford the same glory to women artists? It’s not that great women artists haven’t existed; it’s that nobody’s been paying attention. 

Originally published as a cover story in the January 1971 issue of ARTnews, this essay-turned-manifesto has been interminable in its effect on the current state of women’s representation in the art world and the systems that uphold the exclusion of women artists from commercial success. Through the powerful words and transformational insights of the late great artist Lydia Nochlin, we’re called to challenge and redefine what we consider excellence in art. 

Publisher’s Description: The fiftieth-anniversary edition of the essay that is now recognized as the first major work of feminist art theory―published together with author Linda Nochlin’s reflections three decades later.

Many scholars have called Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. In her revolutionary essay, Nochlin refused to answer the question of why there had been no “great women artists” on its own corrupted terms, and instead, she dismantled the very concept of greatness, unraveling the basic assumptions that created the male-centric genius in art.

With unparalleled insight and wit, Nochlin questioned the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art history. And future freedom, as she saw it, requires women to leap into the unknown and risk demolishing the art world’s institutions in order to rebuild them anew.

In this stand-alone anniversary edition, Nochlin’s essay is published alongside its reappraisal, “Thirty Years After.” Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as well as queer theory, race, and postcolonial studies, “Thirty Years After” is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art with unmatched precision and verve. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates across culture and society. In the 2020s, Nochlin’s message could not be more urgent: as she put it in 2015, “There is still a long way to go.”

How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (And Other Parents) by Hettie Judah

Publisher: Lund Humphries, 2023

Why It Made The List: This nonfiction title is a radical reimagining of how society and the art world can holistically support women artists. When so often, women are the caregivers, to aging parents, to their partners, and to their children, Hettie Judah is constructively minded in her approach to solving the issue many women artists face: how can they continue to create when they don’t have the time or resources to look after their children? 

Judah’s work makes it so women artists can maintain, and reclaim, their position as equal contributors to our culture. Pair it with Judah’s 2024 book, Acts of Creation, for further reading on the subject of how, in this colonial and patriarchal world, motherhood has been depicted throughout art history.

Publisher’s Description: For too long, artists have been told that they can’t have both motherhood and a successful career. In this polemical volume, critic and campaigner Hettie Judah argues that a paradigm shift is needed within the art world to take account of the needs of artist mothers (and other parents: artist fathers, parents who don’t identify with the term ‘mother’, and parents in other sectors of the art world).

Drawing on interviews with artists internationally, the book highlights some of the success stories that offer models for the future, from alternative support networks and residency models, to studio complexes with onsite childcare, and galleries with family-friendly policies.

Some artists have described motherhood as providing them with renewed focus, a new direction in their work, and even inspiration for a complete change of career. Other artists choose to keep their domestic and creative lives compartmentalized. All are placed at a disadvantage by the art world as it is currently structured. This book argues that by making changes and becoming more sensitive to the needs of artist parents, the art world has much to gain.

Modern Manners: Instructions for Living Fabulously Well from The Gentlewoman

Publisher: Phaedon, 2021

Why It Made Our List: From Phaedon comes The Gentlewoman’s instruction manual for everyday living, tailored to the woman who aims to carry an air of refinement—one that’s been redefined for today’s age. 

The U.K. literary magazine known for its features on celebrity women emphasizing their individual character and taste, has brought together writers who each responded to queries any contemporary woman worth their salt will eventually face, like how to dine alone, how to be a good house guest, how to be anonymous online, and how to forgive. Read it for a laugh, but also to learn how to navigate this ever-changing world with panache and glamour.

Publisher’s Description: With contributions from a roster of The Gentlewoman’s impeccably engaging contributors and readers, including Ann Friedman, Eva Wiseman, Otegha Uwagba, Caroline Roux, Susan Irvine, and Joan Juliet Buck, this thoughtful, stylish collection of essays is an essential guide to navigating today’s world. Individually arresting and unexpected, with advice on subjects ranging from the classic topics of manners and social behavior (tipping; arriving alone; godparenting; hosting) to totally contemporary matters (the best legal drugs; the benefits of a menstrual cup; the art of regifting; and crafting the perfect out of office reply), and tips and opinions galore from fun friends of the magazine from Miranda July and Hilary Mantel to Kylie Minogue and Honey Dijon, together these essays form a singular perspective on modern life: that of The Gentlewoman. 

Hysterical: A Memoir by Elissa Bassist

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2022

Why It Made Our List: A bold, audacious memoir, Hysterical blends author and humorist Elissa Bassist’s personal experience with deep insight into the cultural poison that is the patriarchy. Dark, hilarious, and widely encompassing, Hysterical lets out a guttural, full-throated scream at the systems and norms designed to silence women, inviting readers to do the same. 

For any woman who has ever felt like a crazy psycho bitch because the world just isn’t made for you, read this book to feel, if not better, then at least like you’re not alone.

Publisher’s Description: Between 2016 and 2018, Elissa Bassist saw over twenty medical professionals for a variety of mysterious ailments. She had what millions of American women had: pain that didn’t make sense to doctors, a body that didn’t make sense to science, and a psyche that didn’t make sense to mankind. Then an acupuncturist suggested that some of her physical pain could be caged fury finding expression, and that treating her voice would treat the problem.

It did.

Growing up, Bassist’s family, boyfriends, school, work, and television shows had the same expectation for a woman’s voice: less is more. She was called dramatic and insane for speaking her mind. She was accused of overreacting and playing victim for having unexplained physical pain. She was ignored or rebuked (like so many women throughout history) for using her voice “inappropriately” by expressing sadness or suffering or anger or joy. Because of this, she said “yes” when she meant “no”; she didn’t tweet #MeToo; and she never spoke without fear of being “too emotional.” She felt rage, but like a good woman, she repressed it.

In her witty and incisive debut, Bassist explains how girls and women internalize and perpetuate directives about their voices, making it hard to “just speak up” and “burn down the patriarchy.” But then their silence hurts them more than anything they could ever say. Hysterical is a memoir of a voice lost and found, a primer on new ways to think about a woman’s voice—about where it’s being squashed and where it needs amplification—and a clarion call for readers to unmute their voice, listen to it above all others, and use it again without regret.

Survivor Injustice: State-Sanctioned Abuse, Domestic Violence, and The Fight for Bodily Autonomy by Kylie Cheung

Publisher: North Atlantic Books, 2023

Why It Made The List:  Dispatch from the Paste metaverse: Jezebel staff writer Kylie Cheung spent years researching why gender-based violence is so prevalent in our society, bringing us wisdom and perspective on the topic in her book Survivor Injustice. Engaging in its tone, though somewhat difficult to digest in its subject matter, the book helps us confront why, for so long, women’s bodies have been disproportionately subjected to mistreatment and abuse. 

Publisher’s Description: Incisive, urgent, and written exactly for our post-Roe times, Survivor Injustice is the feminist frame-changing read we need now–for each of us, and for all that’s at stake.

With an abolitionist lens, journalist and Jezebel staff writer Kylie Cheung shows how domestic abuse and state violence are systemic and interconnected. She shatters the harmful and convenient narrative that abuse is a “private matter” perpetrated by individual bad actors–and situates popular understandings of domestic abuse in an indictment of the racism, misogyny, and carcerality baked into U.S. culture and politics. Cheung explores:

The links between capitalism and domestic abuse: how late-stage capitalism colludes with the state to incentivize forced birth and reproductive coercion

• Intimate partner violence as a tool of political silence and social control
• America’s tacit acceptance of sexual assault, from the home to the White House
• The interplay of race, power, gender, and sexuality in state-based violence
• How the United States runs on carcerality, and what that means for victims
• The way we view survival crimes, and our complicity in defining which acts are “violent” and whose actions are “criminal”
• How white feminism and carceral feminism fail us all

Cheung plainly names all that goes unsaid when we, as a culture, talk about abuse: How state and society criminalize women, girls, and gender-oppressed people of color. That what happens behind closed doors affects whose voices we hear at the ballot box. What it means when we put predators–from every party–up for vote. That sex workers are more likely to be victimized by law enforcement than “saved” by them. That this is all by design. And that ultimately–with organizing, abolition, and beyond-the-ballot action–we can change it all for good.

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, And The Meaning Of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts

Publisher: Vintage, 1998

Why It Made Our List: Much of white feminism focuses solely on the right to choose and a rather narrow definition of liberation. However, it often fails to look at how America’s long, dark history of population control over Black communities is directly related to the policing of Black women’s reproduction; Any conversation on reproductive justice would be bereft without a detailed look at the disproportionate measures enacted on Black child-bearing bodies.

Publisher’s Description: In 1997, this groundbreaking book made a powerful entrance into the national conversation on race. In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the Black Body exposed America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. From slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the degradation of Black motherhood—and the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas.

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years–using a black feminist lens and the issue of  the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare “reform” on black women’s–especially poor black women’s–control over their bodies’ autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives. It gives its readers a cogent legal and historical argument for a radically new, and socially transformative, definition of  “liberty” and “equality” for the American polity from a black feminist perspective.

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon

Publisher: Knopf, 2023

Why It Made Our List: A tome of a nonfiction book that tackles centuries of myths citing evolution as the reason for women’s position in society. Research Cat Bohannon, a Ph.D in narrative and cognitive evolution, sets her sights on dispelling these myths, while simultaneously explaining why women’s bodies look and function the way that they do compared to men’s. She also explores where, in the history of evolution, women have surpassed men in certain aspects of development. 

Dive in for a well-researched journey throughout human history, with its sights set on explaining how evolutionary differences were exploited to form the basis of the patriarchal society we currently live in. 

Publisher’s Description: How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? Why do women live longer than men? Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s? Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? Is sexism useful for evolution? And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause? 

These questions are producing some truly exciting science – and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: “We need a kind of user’s manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don’t, it’s not just feminism that’s compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So it’s time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs—all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is.”

Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.