Trying to Feel Inspired Instead of Demoralized


In my egotistical youth, I thought I was well read. As if I needed further evidence to the contrary, I saw this list by the Women's National Book Association of 75 books by women that have changed the world. My friend Chichimama posted the list, boldfacing the ones that she read. Then she ever so gently nudged her readers to do the same. I was thisclose to not posting my own boldface items because there are so few of them. But then I decided to do it since there's nothing wrong with admitting my ignorance, and doing so might be a good impetus to read some of the neglected books. Also, it's Friday evening and I have nothing better to do.

So here we go:

Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture
Boston Women's Health Book Collective Staff, Our Bodies, Ourselves
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will
Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Willa Cather, My Antonia
Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Fannie Farmer, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
Francis Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake
Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist
Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
Emma Goldman, Living My Life
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
Edith Hamilton, Mythology
Betty Lehan Harragan, Games Mother Never Taught You
Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying
Frances Moore Lappe, Diet for a Small Planet
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party
Beryl Markham, West with the Night
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa
Golda Meir, My Life
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems
Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
Marianne Moore, Complete Poems of Marianne Moore
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Lady Shikibu Murasaki, The Tale Genji
Anais Nin, The Early Diary
Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories
Zoe Oldenbourg, The World Is Not Enough
Tillie Olsen, Silences
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels
Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born
Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography
Sappho, A New Translation
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror
Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
Phyllis Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phyllis Wheatley
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own