500 Great Books By Women discussion

Autobiography

A Bridge Through Time by Laila Abou-Saif
A Mountainous Journey by Fadwa Tuqan
A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story by Elaine Brown
The Abandoned Baobab by Ken Bugul

Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley
Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years by Margaret Mead

Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody
Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells by Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Daughter of Persia by Sattareh Farman Farmaian
Early Spring by Tove Ditlevsen

Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong
Fifty Russian Winters by Margaret Wettlin

The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself by Mary Prince

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala by Rigoberta Menchú
In Silence by Ruth Sidransky
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir by Mamie Garvin Fields
Living My Life by Emma Goldman
Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman

Mountain Charley or the Adventures of Mrs. E. J. Guerin, Who Was Thirteen Years in Male Attire by Elsa Jane Guerin
My Father's House by Sylvia Fraser
My Story by Kamala Suraiyya

Nisei Daughter by Monica Itoi Sone
The Other Mother by Carol Schaefer
Pride of Family by Carole Ione
Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America by Mary Paik Lee

Riding in Cars with Boys by Beverly Donofrio
The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
Road Song by Natalie Kusz
The Roots of Ticasuk: An Eskimo Woman's Family Story by Ticasuk Brown

Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad by Bebe Moore Campbell

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
Two in the Far North by Margaret E. Murie

West with the Night by Beryl Markham
Wild Swans by Jung Chang
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

Additions by Members of Goodreads
Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi

Biography

Alva Myrdal: A Daughter's Memoir by Sissela Bok

Dear Departed by Marguerite Yourcenar
Doc Susie: The True Story of a Country Physician in the Colorado Rockies by Virginia Cornell

Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume One: 1884-1933 by Blanche Wiesen Cook
Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera
In My Mother's House by Kim Chernin

Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography by Vicki Goldberg
Mary, Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser

Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce by Brenda Maddox
Once Upon an Eskimo Time by Edna Wilder

Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe by Laurie Lisle
Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia by Jean Sasson

Additions by Members of Goodreads
The Nature of Alexander by Mary Renault

Diary

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars by Nadezhda Durova
Confessions of Lady Nijō by Lady Nijō

Diary/Letters

Hannah Senesh: Her Life & Diary by Hannah Senesh
Libby: The Alaskan Diaries and Letters of Libby Beaman, 1879-1880, as Presented by her Granddaughter Betty John by Elizabeth Beaman John

Essay(s)

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
A Voice from the South by Anna Julia Cooper
After Henry by Joan Didion
AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag
And the Bridge Is Love: Life Stories by Faye Moskowitz

Dancing on the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places by Ursula K. Le Guin
Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot by Pearl Cleage
Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes by Irena Klepfisz

How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulić

The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg
Living by Water: Essays on Life, Land and Spirit by Brenda Peterson
Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism by Barbara MacDonald,

My Mother's House by Colette

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman's Life by Nancy Mairs

Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991 by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Real-Farm by Patricia Tichenor Westfall

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich
The Straight Mind (and Other Essays) by Monique Wittig

Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black by bell hooks
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color by Cherríe L. Moraga
Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

Women, Culture, & Politics by Angela Y. Davis
Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory by Michelle M. Tokarczyk, Elizabeth A. Fay
The World and the Bo Tree by Helen Bevington
The Writer on her Work, Volume II: New Essays in New Territory by Janet Sternburg

Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism by Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Barbara Smith

Essays/Letters

The Montreal Massacre by Marie Chalouh

Essays/Short Stories

Getting Home Alive by Aurora Levins Morales, Rosario Morales
The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry by Michelle Cliff
Talking Indian: Reflections on Survival and Writing by Anna Lee Walters

Graphic Memoir

Additions by Members of Goodreads
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

History

A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

History/Diaries

Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey by Lillian Schlissel

Journal

Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus by Carolina Maria de Jesus
Daybook: The Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt
The Nocturnal Naturalist by Cathy Johnson
The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L'Engle
Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plains by Linda M. Hasselstrom

Journal/Essays

A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell

Letters

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird
Letters of a Javanese Princess by Raden Adjeng Kartini

Memoir

A Mom's Life by Kathryn Grody
A Woman's Civil War by Cornelia Peake Mcdonald
Alicia: My Story by Alicia Appleman-Jurman
All But the Waltz: A Memoir of Five Generations in the Life of a Montana Family by Mary Clearman Blew
Annapurna: A Woman's Place byArlene Blum

Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir by Jean Said Makdisi
Black Ice by Lorene Cary

Changes in Latitude by Joana McIntyre Varawa
Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute
Claiming Breath by Diane Glancy
Christabel by Christabel Bielenberg
The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet

Exile in the Promised Land by Marcia Freedman

The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley
Floreana: A Woman's Pilgrimage to the Galapagos by Margret Wittmer

Grey Is the Color of Hope by Irina Ratushinskaya
Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea

Half-breed by Maria Campbell

Journey into the Whirlwind by Evgenia Ginzburg

The Loony-Bin Trip by Kate Millett

Limbo: A Memoir About Life in a Nursing Home by a Survivor by Carobeth Laird
Memoirs of a Korean Queen by Lady Hyegyeong

One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens
One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty
Out of Africa by Karen Blixen

Plain and Simple by Sue Bender

Still Loved by the Sun: A Rape Survivor's Journal by Migael Scherer
Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood by Judith Ortiz Cofer

Talking to High Monks in the Snow by Lydia Minatoya
Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento and Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman
Tracks by Robyn Davidson

Walls: Resisting the Third Reich, One Woman's Story by Hiltgunt Zassenhaus
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole

Additions by Members of Goodreads

Blue Nights by Joan Didion
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Memoirs/Essays/Short Stories

Elizabeth Bishop: The Collected Prose 1937-1970 by Elizabeth Bishop

Memoirs/Folktales

Stradbroke Dreamtime by Oodgeroo Nunukul

Nonfiction

A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War by Susan Griffin
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman
A Midwife's Story by Penny Armstrong, Sheryl Feldman
A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape by Susan Brownmiller
An Imagined World: A Story of Scientific Discovery by June Goodfield
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins
The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan
Burmese Looking Glass: A Human Rights Adventure and a Jungle Revolution by Edith T. Mirante

Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson
Dumba Nengue: Run for Your Life: Peasant Tales of Tragedy in Mozambique by Lina Magaia
Fruit Fields in My Blood: Okie Migrants in the West by Toby F. Sonneman
Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Women's Sourcebook by Paula Gunn Allen
How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
Italian Days by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin
Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives by Carolyn Steedman
Loving in the War Years by Cherríe L. Moraga

Man Made Language by Dale Spender
May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India by Elisabeth Bumiller
More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave by Ruth Schwartz Cowan

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America by Lillian Faderman
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich

Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Greene
Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family by Pauli Murray

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams
River Time: The Frontier on the Lower Neuse by Janet Lembke
The Road Through Miyama by Leila Philip

Scraps of Life: Chilean Arpilleras, Chilean Women, and the Pinochet Dictatorship by Marjorie Agosín
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Silences by Tillie Olsen
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Spiritual Narratives by Sue E. Houchins

Women in the Resistance by Margaret L. Rossiter
Women of the Shadows: The Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy by Ann Cornelisen
The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness by Stephanie Golden
Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind by Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, Jill Mattuck Tarule
Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South by Shirley Abbott
Writing a Woman's Life by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Additions by Members of Goodreads
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Hélène Cixous
War's Unwomanly Face by Svetlana Alexievich

Novels/Plays/Poems/Letters

Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works by Aphra Behn

Oral History

A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman by Ning Lao T'ai-T'ai
Forged Under the Sun/Forjado bajo el sol: The Life of María Elena Lucas by María Elena Lucas
Magic Eyes: Scenes from an Andean Girlhood by Wendy Ewald
Rosie the Riveter Revisited by Sherna Berger Gluck

Why Not Me? The Story of Gladys Milton, Midwife by Wendy L. Bovard,

Additions by Members of Goodreads
The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices by Xinran

Short Story/Nonfiction

Sultana's Dream and Selections from The Secluded Ones by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain