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Empowering read … Germaine Greer.
Empowering read … Germaine Greer. Photograph: The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images
Empowering read … Germaine Greer. Photograph: The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

The book that made me a feminist

This article is more than 6 years old

In the week that feminism was declared word of the year by a dictionary, writers including Margaret Atwood, Mary Beard, Naomi Klein, Kamila Shamsie, Jeanette Winterson and others champion the books that first empowered them

Margaret Atwood

Grimms’ Fairy Tales and all the Andrew Lang collections: there are a lot of intrepid female protagonists to choose from in these folk tales, which I read voraciously. The odds are stacked against them, but they win through. Sometimes they have magical help; sometimes they use common sense, intelligence and disguise, as in “Fitcher’s Bird”, in which a clever girl bests a maiden-stealing wizard.

Margaret Atwood’s novels The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace were both televised this year.

Mary Beard

Mary Beard. Photograph: Caterina Turroni/BBC/Lion Television Ltd/Caterina Turroni

I think women of my generation tend to divide between those who look back to Greer’s The Female Eunuch as the empowering read, and those who look back to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. I was always a Greer woman, partly because of things she dared to say about being a woman that I had never imagined were sayable (other careful readers of the Eunuch will, I am sure, remember the menstrual blood moment). I have to say, though, that when I reread Sexual Politics after Millett’s death I thought that I had back then rather missed its extraordinary analytical sharpness.

But can I put in a plea for a children’s book? One of my children’s favourites was always Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess, which I have read out loud hundreds of times. There is nothing more subversively empowering than reciting from memory those great last lines, when the enterprising Princess Elizabeth rescues the ghastly and feeble Prince Ronald from the dragon – and then dumps him: “‘You look like a nice guy, but guess what? You are a bum.’ And they didn’t get married after all.” There’s power for you, in a nutshell.

Mary Beard’s most recent book, Women & Power: A Manifesto was published this autumn (Profile).

Sarah Churchwell

Sarah Churchwell. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images

Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, a portrait of the artist as a young woman, was only her third novel, published in 1915. It was markedly autobiographical, the tale of a girl growing up in the American pioneer west who gradually discovers her calling as a singer, and dedicates her life to the pursuit of beauty. It is also markedly feminist: Thea Kronborg – her first name means “gift of God” – is surrounded by men devoted to helping her realise her gifts, who take pride in her accomplishments, who serve her and her vocation. She never marries, believing that her devotion to her art requires single-minded dedication. But Thea does not regard this as a great sacrifice; it is sometimes a pity, but it’s a choice she understands and accepts. Most of the novel concerns her coming of age and growth into self knowledge. “I only want impossible things,” she declares. Cather brilliantly captures her dreams: “It seemed as if her heart were spreading all over the desert,” she writes, describing Thea lying awake by her window, “vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window – or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without.

“There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.” Thea’s “fierce, stubborn self-assertion” that “will stand its ground” is part of that life force, as Cather turns gender expectations on their head, and sends Thea out to conquer the world.

Sarah Churchwell is professorial fellow in American literature at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Reni Eddo-Lodge

Reni Eddo-Lodge. Photograph: PR

“A few years ago, a well-known female writer refused to have her portrait appear in a series of photographs devoted specifically to women writers,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir in the first few pages of The Second Sex. “This denial is not a liberation ... but an inauthentic flight.” De Beauvoir wasn’t to know that her words would ring true repeatedly, the latest iteration being in early 2017, when a well-known female writer of colour took herself out of the longlist for a literary prize open exclusively to authors who were not white.

This prophecy and others, such as the unhealthily reciprocal gender roles of men and women that recreate oppressor and oppressed – “Humanity is male and man defines woman … in relation to himself” – or the societal binds created around successful or sexually experimental women are why the book is a classic. She details the slippery tightrope walked by those who face structural sexism (she also loved to compare, and a fair few of her insights apply to racism). Accepting these discriminations exist and are largely out of your control can feel like a surrendering to other people’s assumptions of your inferiority – you can feel like you want to transcend it all.

Simone de Beauvoir. Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

That was where I was at when I first read The Second Sex, aged 19. I felt I was just as good as anyone else; anything aimed at redressing “discrimination” was special treatment. But reading this book taught me that not only was attempting to transcend not the answer, but that barriers I thought immutable, that I believed I was largely facing alone, were very much within my reach to change, if I worked within a collective.

Reni Eddo-Lodge is the author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, published by Bloomsbury.

Zoë Heller

Zoe Heller. Photograph: Rex Features

I don’t think any book made me a feminist; my formidable mother did that. But two books I read in my teens, Middlemarch by George Eliot and The Female Eunuch, had a large impact on how I thought about women and their relations with men. For a rather plain adolescent girl, who had already begun to notice, gloomily, that female beauty was held in infinitely higher regard than female intellect or wit, Eliot’s novel was both clarification and moral support. Yes, the arrantly silly Rosamond Vincys of the world got all the attention, but homely, clever girls like Mary Garth triumphed in the end. (And some of them, like Eliot herself, got to write novels.) As for The Female Eunuch, it was Greer’s bolshie, outrageous voice, more than her theory, that made the strongest impression.

I was bewildered and a little frightened by some of her ideas – did I really have to knock back tankards of my own menstrual blood in order to prove my feminist bona fides? – but I admired and envied her bravado, her ruthlessness, her indifference to male approval. I still do.

Zoë Heller’s latest novel is The Believers (Penguin).

Jackie Kay

Jackie Kay. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

You can be going along in your life, thinking this, doing that, and suddenly, out of nowhere, a book hits you, changes you, opens the road and offers you something you didn’t know you needed. The poetry of Audre Lorde did that for me. I came across her work when I was just 19. Her voice was unlike anything I had read. She wrote about being black, about being a lesbian, about being from a mixed background: “I am / the sun and moon and forever hungry / the sharpened edge / where day and night shall meet / and not be / one.”

She didn’t just write about her complex, multiple self but about “Brother Alvin” and Emmett Till, the women of Dahomey and the women of New York, of warrior queens and feminists. About power and silence. (I remember reading Tillie Olsen’s Silences around the same time.) She wrote about the importance of naming yourself. And she wrote about survival. “For those of us who live at the shoreline / standing upon the constant edges of decision / crucial and alone.” She was fierce and lyrical. She mixed myth with reality. Real people appeared in her poetry alongside Amazons from the past. She mashed it all up, drawing on an oral tradition and a formal one. She believed poetry was not a luxury, but a necessity, a survival too. The Black Unicorn became a handbook for me, a book to live alongside. She opened us a space and made it possible for me to exist. I guess you could say she took that national animal of Scotland and made it black! (I found out later that she had Scottish ancestors.)

Audre Lorde. Photograph: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

The final words of The Black Unicorn are “May I owe nothing / that I cannot repay”. Reading and rereading Lorde has repaid time and again. Her book is like an old friend that has watched me growing up. With the recent publication of a collection of her essays and poems Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Lorde is receiving great renewed interest. For me, she never went away. She was a true visionary, a pioneer. She was walking on the road up ahead all along.

Jackie Kay’s most recent collection, Bantam, was published this autumn (Picador).

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein. Photograph: Anya Chibis/The Guardian

Fiction by Isabel Allende and Margaret Atwood gripped me in my teens and helped me to imagine myself as a writer. But it was Silent Spring by Rachel Carson that made me believe in the transformative power of non-fiction. I return to it several times a year and am always taken by the many textures: the poetic vignette, the loving observation of the natural world, the deep scientific research and the fierce indignation at the recklessness and greed of the chemical industry. As a former marine biologist, Carson was fearless about mixing academic data with journalism and essay, creating a powerful genre that endures to this day.

Naomi Klein’s latest book, No Is Not Enough (Allen Lane), was published this year.

Jacqueline Rose

Jacqueline Rose. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

I first read Sigmund Freud’s 1905 Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, best known as “the Case of Dora”, as a graduate student living in a tiny maid’s room overlooking the rooftops of Paris. I knew it had changed my life for ever. It may seem an odd choice for a feminist since it is written by a man, worse the infamous patriarch of Vienna.

Well, yes and no. Freud was a Jew and to be a Jew in antisemitic Austria at the turn of the 20th century was, according to one stereotype, to be viewed as the hysterical woman that Dora herself was meant to be. And while Freud unquestionably orchestrates the analysis, in the tug-of-war cum love affair between the two of them, it is her voice that resonates.

Freud gets it completely wrong. Dora finally gives him two weeks’ notice of dismissal, treating him like a servant girl. What Freud spectacularly misses is that, instead of being conveniently in love with the husband of her father’s mistress, she was in love with the mistress herself. The desires of women, she taught him, are multifaceted and will not be adapted to the requisite social norms. It was an emancipatory vision even if she did not get to fulfil it in her own life. Dora showed me that the struggle for freedom is rooted in the deepest anguish of the human heart, and that we need to pay attention to both.

It is a lesson that has fuelled my feminism ever since.

Jacqueline Rose is professor of humanities at the Birkbeck Institute.

Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer

When I first started to read Ismat Chughtai it was the autobiographical pieces that most appealed to me because of the iconoclastic, sardonic personality they revealed. I knew that her claim to being one of Urdu’s greatest writers lay with her short stories, but I needed to grow up a little before I could properly appreciate why. Now those stories seem more extraordinary.

Ismat knew that her own freedoms were due to a combination of her liberal Muslim family, her education and her own headstrong disposition. But in fiction she often fixed her gaze on women without these advantages. In these stories, Ismat doesn’t cast the women as victims, even while she is clear-sighted about gender-based power structures. She is interested in women’s sexuality, their relationships with other women and with men, internal lives, class positions – and in writing about these she highlights how unedifying it is to construct a category of “oppressed women” in a world in which all women – including Ismat – have to contend with patriarchy. It’s a lesson we still seem to need to learn, along with the lessons of daring to be unpopular that her life teaches.

I’m delighted that Lifting the Veil, a combination of her autobiographical and fictional pieces, will be available in the UK in February. It combines many of the works I most love, though I can’t help thinking she would roll her eyes at those who’ll read the title literally, even though Ismat herself said the real danger to women was the internalised patriarchal norms that lead to a “purdah of the mind”.

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fires (Bloomsbury) was longlisted for the Man Booker prize this year.

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

I was at Oxford in 1980 studying English. There were only four women on the course – the Brontës, George Eliot and Jane Austen. Virginia Woolf was not taught – and because I had been plodding through English Literature in Prose A-Z since I was about 12, at the Accrington public library, I hadn’t reached W.

Then I found A Room of One’s Own – but that didn’t hit the button back then – probably because I had been living in a Mini of My Own and a Tent of My Own.

Instead I found Adrienne Rich’s early poems, The Will to Change – and because they moved me so much, I started to read her essays – there is a great one about her winning the Yale Younger Poets prize and being patronised by WH Auden (women just write about themselves … blah blah), and suddenly I understood about women’s voices, creativity, silence. Crucially in the opening Thatcher era of the individual, I realised that patriarchy is a collective problem – a structural problem.

Thirty years later, filming part of a BBC2 Imagine about me, at my college, an old tutor went out of his way to insult me. The same sneer. The same contempt. And in the sting of it, I remembered that at 16 I had reached N – Nabokov – and that perhaps feminism for me had started there, in that canonised classic about serial child rape and the coercive control over the woman HH marries so that he can fuck her daughter. That was on our reading list, of course.

Jeanette Winterson’s Christmas Days is out now (Jonathan Cape).

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