5 Books To Have Read in Women’s History Month

What does it mean when women take acts of defiance against their societies? In celebration of Women’s History Month last month, it’s necessary to understand what drives women to do so.

While reading a book about the challenges of being a woman, you feel a space unfolding within you with each page as you absorb the vulnerability and courage of the characters. This space, in fact, is also for your own inner growth as your reading experience starts to revolve more around sisterhood and self-revelation.

Here are five books to have read in Women’s History Month:

1. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf:
   This book is a collection of lectures Virginia Woolf gave about women and fiction in 1928. She talked about how women had the capability to become independent creators, but to be able to do that, they must have a fixed income and a room of their own. She imagined if Shakespeare had an equally talented sister – would she have been granted the same environment to flourish? Although this comparison might seem outdated, women are still fighting against inequality and misogyny.
2. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi: A Memoir in Books:
   A true story about Azar when she was a university professor in Tehran. Azar decided to pick seven of her most dedicated female students to start a book club in her house. While reading this book, we learn that although the sources of their unhappiness were relatively the same, the versions of themselves they aspired to be were vastly different. This emphasizes that it’s impossible to have a one-size-fits-all mold for women.
3. Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami:
   The first half of the book focuses on how women view their bodies through the topic of breast implants as well as the unfamiliarity with one’s body during puberty. The second half switches to the dilemma of being a single mother in Japanese society. We’re also introduced to several women expressing their concerns and true feelings about motherhood.
4. Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 by Cho Nam Joo:
   Since the name Kim Ji-young is one of the most common names of the protagonist’s generation, her story echoes the life of an ordinary Korean woman at every stage, starting from her birth when her mother apologized to her mother-in-law for having a girl, to having been filmed secretly in the bathroom at work and having to quit her full-time job to have her baby.
5. Black Milk by Elif Shafak:
   Elif has always talked about women in her novels, but Black Milk remains an especially exceptional work of hers as she writes about a personal experience. After the birth of her child, she suffered from postpartum depression. She compares the cutting of the umbilical cord to the loss of her ability to write. While reading, you’ll feel like you’ve been invited to a tea party hosted by Elif, where you meet other amazing women writers like Anaïs Nin, Toshika Tamura, Sylvia Plath, and many more. It feels as if they are generously sharing their thoughts on womanhood, motherhood, what a patriarchal society expects of women, and the role of women in fiction. And towards the end of this gathering, Elif says, “There is no social change without linguistic change. Women need to break their silence. They need to write.”