We’ve put together a compilation of hundreds of thousands of words, that echo behind the five we hear louder now than ever; “Text Me When You’re Home”.
Data-Driven inclusive design, women-led political activism, odes to our female heroines, and feminist strategies for man-made cities – This series of books is for every woman who has been told to “fight like a man”, for every catcall, for every misdiagnosis due to medical gender bias, for every dollar in the pay gap, for every friend we called as we walked home at night, for every time we were told to “smile a little”, for every discriminatory law, for every survivor of domestic violence, for every victim yet to come forward.
May these voices resonate in the corners where many are still shouting to get theirs across.
What Works: Gender Equality by Design – Iris Bohnet
“What Works” is built on new insights into the human mind. It draws on data collected by companies, universities, and governments in Australia, India, Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States, Zambia, and other countries, often in randomized controlled trials. It points out dozens of evidence-based interventions that could be adopted right now and demonstrates how research is addressing gender bias, improving lives and performance. “What Works” shows what more can be done often at shockingly low cost and surprisingly high speed.
In Their Shoes – Jamie Windust
Combining light-hearted anecdotes with their own hard-won wisdom, Jamie Windust explores everything from fashion, dating, relationships and family, through to mental health, work and future key debates. From trying on clothes in secret to iconic looks, first dates to polyamorous liaisons, passports to pronouns, Jamie shows you how to navigate the world and your evolving identity in every type of situation.
Invisible Women – Caroline Perez
Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued.
If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you’re a woman.
Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives.
We Should All Be Feminists – Chimamanda Adichie
With humour and levity, here Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century—one rooted in inclusion and awareness. She shines a light not only on blatant discrimination, but also the more insidious, institutional behaviours that marginalize women around the world, in order to help readers of all walks of life better understand the often masked realities of sexual politics. Throughout, she draws extensively on her own experiences—in the U.S., in her native Nigeria, and abroad—offering an artfully nuanced explanation of why the gender divide is harmful for women and men, alike.
Building Inclusive Cities – Carolyn Whitzman
Building on a growing movement within developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, as well as Europe and North America, this book documents cutting edge practice and builds theory around a rights based approach to women’s safety in the context of poverty reduction and social inclusion. Drawing upon two decades of research and grassroots action on safer cities for women and everyone, this book is about the right to an inclusive city.
Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living – Mary Mcleod
One of the most innovative furniture and interior designers of the 20th century, Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) has long been renowned for the tubular-steel chairs she created with Le Corbusier. But she had a rich, diverse career that spanned nearly 75 years and included work in Africa, South America and Asia, as well as Europe. Her independent designs are eagerly sought by collectors. Perriand’s long career embraced Art Deco, machine-age modernism, the organic rusticity of the 1930s, serially produced metal and wood furniture in the ’50s and ’60s, and plastic and prefabricated units in the ’70s. This volume contains texts by leading scholars covering many facets of her work and life, and scores of photographs and drawings.
Hall of Femmes aims to highlight the work of women in art direction and design. The project was founded in 2009 by Samira Bouabana and Angela Tillman Sperandio. It includes lectures, exhibitions, interviews, podcasts and the publication of the Hall of Femmes book series, each book portraying a designer and her work through in-depth interviews and previously unpublished images.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
I write about being a Black American woman, however, I am always talking about what it’s like to be a human being. This is how we are, what makes us laugh, and this is how we fall and how we somehow, amazingly, stand up again
The first and best-known of Maya Angelou‘s extraordinary seven volumes of autobiography is a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer.
Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration.
In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother’s lover.
Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions – Chimamada Adichie
In We Should All be Feminists, her eloquently argued and much admired essay of 2014, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie proposed that if we want a fairer world we need to raise our sons and daughters differently. Here, in this remarkable new book, Adichie replies by letter to a friend’s request for help on how to bring up her newborn baby girl as a feminist. With its fifteen pieces of practical advice it goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century.
A Good Time to be a Girl – Helena Morrissey
In A Good Time to be a Girl, Helena Morrissey sets out how we might achieve the next big breakthrough towards a truly inclusive modern society.
Drawing on her experience as a City CEO, mother of nine, and founder of the influential 30% Club which campaigns for gender-balanced UK company boards, her manifesto for new ways of working, living, loving and raising families is for everyone, not just women. Making a powerful case for diversity and difference in any workplace, she shows how, together, we can develop smarter thinking and broader definitions of success. Gender balance, in her view, is an essential driver of economic prosperity and part of the solution to the many problems we face today.
Her approach is not aimed merely at training a few more women in working practices that have outlived their usefulness. Instead, this book sets out a way to reinvent the game – not at the expense of men but in ways that are right and relevant for a digital age. It is a powerful guide to success for us all.
A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
Published in 1929, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is a key work of feminist literary criticism. Written after she delivered two lectures on the topic of ‘women and fiction’ at Cambridge University in 1928, Woolf’s essay examines the educational, social and financial disadvantages women have faced throughout history. It contains Woolf’s famous argument that, ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ – although Woolf describes this as ‘an opinion upon one minor point’, and the essay explores the ‘unsolved problems’ of women and fiction ‘to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the money’.
Recoding Gender – Janet Abbate
In Recoding Gender, Janet Abbate explores the untold history of women in computer science and programming from the Second World War to the late twentieth century. Demonstrating how gender has shaped the culture of computing, she offers a valuable historical perspective on today’s concerns over women’s underrepresentation in the field.
Good and Mad – Rebecca Traister
Long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women’s March, and before the #MeToo movement, women’s anger was not only politically catalytic-but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates its crucial role in women’s slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it comes from women as opposed to when it comes from men.
An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South – Angela David Nieves
This volume focuses broadly on the history of the social welfare reform work of nineteenth-century African American women who founded industrial and normal schools in the American South. Through their work in architecture and education, these women helped to memorialize the trauma and struggle of black Americans. Author Angel David Nieves tells the story of women such as Elizabeth Evelyn Wright (1872-1906), founder of the Voorhees Industrial School (now Voorhees College) in Denmark, South Carolina, in 1897, who not only promoted a program of race uplift through industrial education but also engaged with many of the pioneering African American architects of the period to design a school and surrounding community. Similarly, Jane (Jennie) Serepta Dean (1848-1913), a former slave, networked with elite Northern white designers to found the Manassas Industrial School in Manassas, Virginia, in 1892.
Design{h}ers: A Celebration of Women in Design Today
DESIGN(H)ERS is a stunning showcase of 30 female talents spanning across a variety of design mediums to highlight the diversity that women bring to their respective fields. With insightful interviews revolving around the thoughts and stories of pioneers who have already made their mark, this book serves to inspire and encourage the creatives of the future.
Feminist City: Claiming Space in the Man-Made World – Leslie Kern
Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world.
We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for woman as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult.
What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities are built into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. And offers an alternative vision of the feminist city.
Engendering Cities – Ines Sanchez de Madariaga
Engendering Cities examines the contemporary research, policy, and practice of designing for gender in urban spaces. Gender matters in city design, yet despite legislative mandates across the globe to provide equal access to services for men and women alike, these issues are still often overlooked or inadequately addressed. This book looks at critical aspects of contemporary cities regarding gender, including topics such as transport, housing, public health, education, caring, infrastructure, as well as issues which are rarely addressed in planning, design, and policy, such as the importance of toilets for education and clothes washers for freeing-up time.
Taking Up Space: The Black Girl’s Manifesto for Change
As a minority in a predominantly white institution, taking up space is an act of resistance. Recent Cambridge grads Chelsea and Ore experienced this first-hand, and wrote Taking Up Space as a guide and a manifesto for change.
FOR BLACK GIRLS:
Understand that your journey is unique. Use this book as a guide. Our wish for you is that you read this and feel empowered, comforted and validated in every emotion you experience, or decision that you make.
FOR EVERYONE ELSE:
We can only hope that reading this helps you to be a better friend, parent, sibling or teacher to black girls living through what we did. It’s time we stepped away from seeing this as a problem that black people are charged with solving on their own.
It’s a collective effort.
And everyone has a role to play.
Featuring honest conversations with students past and present, Taking Up Space goes beyond the buzzwords of diversity and inclusion and explores what those words truly mean for young black girls today.
As we move forward in the twenty-first century, a time of crises the world over, Shami Chakrabarti lays out the huge challenges we face with honesty and clarity. We have not yet done enough to create a more equal world: one where women and men share power, responsibility and opportunity. One that is potentially happier and more peaceful. One where no life is wasted, and everyone has a chance to fulfil their potential. Instead, we’ve been playing around at the edges. What’s needed now is radical change.
From the disparity in the number of births to issues of schooling, work, ownership, faith, political representation and international diplomacy, Of Women outlines what needs fixing and makes clear, inspiring proposals about what we do next, putting women’s rights at the centre of the progressive political agenda.
It has been decades since women of color first turned feminism upside down, exposing the feminist movement as exclusive, white, and unaware of the concerns and issues of women of color from around the globe. Since then, key social movements have risen, including Black Lives Matter, transgender rights, and the activism of young undocumented students. Social media has also changed how feminism reaches young women of color, generating connections in all corners of the country. And yet we remain a country divided by race and gender.
Now, a new generation of outspoken women of color offer a much-needed fresh dimension to the shape of feminism of the future. In Colonize This!, Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman have collected a diverse, lively group of emerging writers who speak to the strength of community and the influence of color, to borders and divisions, and to the critical issues that need to be addressed to finally reach an era of racial freedom. With prescient and intimate writing, Colonize This! will reach the hearts and minds of readers who care about the experience of being a woman of color, and about establishing a culture that fosters freedom and agency for women of all races.
Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights – Helen Lewis
Well-behaved women don’t make history: difficult women do.
Helen Lewis argues that feminism’s success is down to complicated, contradictory, imperfect women, who fought each other as well as fighting for equal rights. Too many of these pioneers have been whitewashed or forgotten in our modern search for feel-good, inspirational heroines.
It’s time to reclaim the history of feminism as a history of difficult women. In this book, you’ll meet the working-class suffragettes who advocated bombings and arson; the princess who discovered why so many women were having bad sex; the pioneer of the refuge movement who became a men’s rights activist; the ‘striker in a sari’ who terrified Margaret Thatcher; the wronged Victorian wife who definitely wasn’t sleeping with the prime minister; and the lesbian politician who outraged the country.
Taking the story up to the present with the twenty-first-century campaign for abortion services, Helen Lewis reveals the unvarnished – and unfinished – history of women’s rights. Drawing on archival research and interviews, Difficult Women is a funny, fearless and sometimes shocking narrative history, which shows why the feminist movement has succeeded – and what it should do next. The battle is difficult, and we must be difficult too.
Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo
Teeming with life and crackling with energy – a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood.
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.
Work Like a Woman – Mary Portas
By most people’s standards I would say I’ve had a pretty good career. I’ve reached the top of the `ladder’ and been lucky enough to have had a damned good life. But at what cost?
At the cost of who I truly was. I played the business game for years, where the rules were set by men for men. I was tough and aggressive. I put in long hours, was competitive and resilient. But I suppressed my natural energy, sensitivity and instinct. I worked like this until I couldn’t any more. And then I changed.
My team and I rebuilt my business on the values that matter: collaboration, empathy, instinct and trust. Values not always associated with leadership or winning, but which have made every one of us feel good. Now I want to share what I’ve learned through my own experiences, and am still learning, to change the way you work so that female energy and power will be seen as the most valuable currency in today’s new world of work. It’s time to create an unstoppable force for change. A feminine force. It’s time to #WorkLikeAWoman.
The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women – Alice Malone
The term “male gaze” was first coined in the 1970s to describe what happens to all of us when the majority of our entertainment has been created by men. The viewer is forced to see female characters through a male lens, which distorts how all of us see women, and even how women see themselves.
Typically, the keepers of film history and writers of film criticism have also been men. Yet, since the very birth of cinema, women have been making movies. So, what does the world look like through the “female gaze”? This is the question bestselling author and film reporter Alicia Malone poses, as she presents The Female Gaze―a collection of essays on fifty-two movies made by women. These films encompass various eras, nationalities, and stories, yet each movie is distinctly feminine. Joining Alicia Malone is a variety of established and aspiring female film critics, who write about their favourite film made by a female director.
Looking at lists of the greatest speeches of all time, you might think that powerful oratory is the preserve of men. But the truth is very different – countless brave and bold women have used their voices to inspire change, transform lives and radically alter history.
In this timely and personal selection of exceptional speeches, Yvette Cooper MP tells the rousing story of female oratory. From Boudica to Greta Thunberg and Margaret Thatcher to Malala, Yvette introduces each speech and demonstrates how powerful and persuasive oratory can be decidedly female. Written by one of our leading public voices, this is an inspirational call for women to be heard across the globe.
A ground-breaking visual survey of architecture designed by women from the early twentieth century to the present day
‘Would they still call me a diva if I were a man?’ asked Zaha Hadid, challenging as she did so more than a century of stereotypes about female architects. In the same spirited approach, Breaking Ground is a pioneering visual manifesto of more than 200 incredible buildings designed by women all over the world. Featuring twentieth-century icons such as Julia Morgan, Eileen Gray and Lina Bo Bardi, and the best contemporary talent, from Kazuyo Sejima to Elizabeth Diller and Grafton Architects, this book is, above all else, a ground-breaking celebration of extraordinary architecture.
Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn’t, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.
Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-made Environment – Leslie Kanes Weisman
Discrimination by Design is a fascinating account of the complex social processes and power struggles involved in building and controlling space. Leslie Kanes Weisman offers a new framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of gender and race as well as class. She traces the social and architectural histories of the skyscraper, maternity hospital, department store, shopping mall, nuclear family dream house, and public housing high rise. Her vivid prose is based on exhaustive research and documents how each setting, along with public parks and streets, embodies and transmits the privileges and penalties of social caste. In presenting feminist themes from a spatial perspective, Weisman raises many new and important questions. When do women feel unsafe in cities, and why? Why do so many homeless people prefer to sleep on the streets rather than in city-run shelters? Why does the current housing crisis pose a greater threat to women than to men? How would dwellings, communities, and public buildings look if they were designed to foster relationships of equality and environmental wholeness? And how can we begin to imagine such a radically different landscape? In exploring the answers, the author introduces us to the people, policies, architectural innovations, and ideologies working today to shape a future in which all people matter.
This Bridge Called My Back – Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua
This ground-breaking collection reflects an uncompromised definition of feminism by women of color. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as co-editor Cherríe Moraga writes, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of colour oppression and liberation.”
Women’s Health and the World’s Cities – Ataf Meleis
Women’s Health and the World’s Cities illuminates the intersection of gender, health, and urban environments. This collection of essays examines the impact of urban living on the physical and psychological states of women and girls in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States. Urban planners, scholars, medical practitioners, and activists present original research and compelling ideas. They consider the specific needs of subpopulations of urban women and evaluate strategies for designing spaces, services, and infrastructure in ways that promote women’s health. Women’s Health and the World’s Cities provides urban planners and public health care providers with on-the-ground examples of projects and policies that have changed women’s lives for the better.
