While feminist dialogue seems to be disappearing from the zeitgeist, the reality is that it’s more necessary than ever that we don’t stop learning and sharing. We know there’s a lot competing for our attention, which, we could argue, might very well be by design. We encourage you to read through this list and pick a book to finish out your summer. We’re truly inspired by these authors and their powerful contributions to this important, still very much needed topic.
Looking for more? You can find our book list for 2023 and 2024 right here!
The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny
By Laura Bates
Bates, the journalist behind the Everyday Sexism Project, spent years inside AI labs, sex robot expos, and manosphere forums to trace how bias gets built into new technology instead of designed out of it. For anyone who keeps hearing “AI is neutral” and wants the receipts, this is the book. (Sourcebooks, September 2025)
No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain
By Rebecca Solnit
From one of our favorite authors, Solnit’s newest essay collection picks up where Hope in the Dark left off, arguing that meaningful change rarely looks like one dramatic win, it’s built from years of unglamorous, overlapping effort. She moves between climate, feminism, and the abuse of power, making the case that despair is often just impatience in a more respectable coat. (Haymarket Books, May 2025)
Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson
By Tourmaline
The first full biography of Marsha P. Johnson, the Black trans activist central to the Stonewall uprising, written by fellow Black trans activist and filmmaker Tourmaline. It became a national bestseller and a spring 2025 pick from The New York Times, and it finally gives Johnson’s story the depth it deserves. (Tiny Reparations Books, May 2025)
Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans
By Kylie Cheung
Cheung, a journalist who covers reproductive rights, argues that the harm coming out of post-Dobbs abortion bans isn’t a side effect, it’s the point. She documents how bans are being used to prosecute, surveil, and control pregnant people, especially those who are already low-income or targeted by police. (Pluto Press, July 2025)
Insurgent Visions: Feminism, Justice, Solidarity
By Chandra Talpade Mohanty
A career-spanning collection from one of the foundational scholars of transnational feminism, pulling together essays on anticapitalist and antiracist organizing from the US-Mexico border to Palestine to Kashmir. Dense in places, but it’s a serious argument for why feminist solidarity has to be built across borders, not just across identities. (Duke University Press, September 2025)
Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore
By Ashley D. Farmer
Audley “Queen Mother” Moore spent nine decades organizing, and she’s largely been written out of the history of Black radicalism she helped build. Farmer’s biography restores her as the person who effectively founded the modern reparations movement and mentored generations of activists who came after her. (Pantheon, November 2025)
For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising
By Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy
Two Iranian journalists, one who joined the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests from inside Iran and one who covered them from exile, tell the story of the uprising sparked by Mahsa Jina Amini’s death in police custody. It was longlisted for the National Book Award, and it’s a powerful look at what it costs to organize under a regime that criminalizes this effort. (Pantheon, September 2025)
No Human Involved: The Serial Murder of Black Women and Girls and the Deadly Cost of Police Indifference
By Cheryl L. Neely
Neely, a sociologist, traces how police departments in cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago have historically coded cases involving Black women and girls as “N.H.I., no humans involved,” and how that classification let known serial killers keep operating for years. It’s a hard, necessary read about who gets protected and who doesn’t. (Beacon Press, January 2025)
We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities
Edited by Rachel Kuo, Jaimee A. Swift, and TD Tso
A joint project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, this anthology brings together organizers, artists, and writers to make the case for cross-racial feminist coalition instead of competition. Useful for anyone doing solidarity work who wants examples that aren’t hypothetical. (Haymarket Books, October 2025)
A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering
By Elinor Cleghorn
From the author of Unwell Women, a history of how mothering, the actual physical and emotional labor of it, has been treated as invisible or automatic across centuries, even as it’s been essential to every society that’s ever existed. Cleghorn traces a throughline from Hildegard of Bingen to Sojourner Truth to today’s unpaid care economy. (The Dial Press, March 2026)
Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe
By Sophie Lewis
Lewis, who also wrote Abolish the Family, argues that femininity itself gets treated as suspect, even inside feminism, and asks what it would look like to take femme-ness seriously as a political stance instead of something to apologize for. Sharp, funny in places, and not an easy read if you’ve internalized any of the femmephobia she’s naming. (Haymarket Books, June 2026)
The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism
By Durba Mitra
Starting in the 1970s, women from newly decolonized countries across South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean built an international feminist movement aimed at authoritarianism and neocolonialism as much as at patriarchy itself. Historian Durba Mitra traces how that organizing reshaped global debates on human rights and development, even though the future those women fought for never fully arrived. (Princeton University Press, March 2026)
By Savala Nolan
Nolan spent a lifetime playing by the rules of agreeable, “good” womanhood and found out none of it protected her the way it was supposed to. These twelve essays, part memoir and part history, dig into what compliance costs women and what’s on the other side of refusing it. (Mariner Books, March 2026)
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
By Sophie Gilbert
Gilbert, a critic at The Atlantic, traces how 2000s and 2010s pop culture repackaged feminism into Girl Power, then sold it back to women as brands, bodies, and content, from the Spice Girls through reality TV to OnlyFans. (Penguin Press, April 2025)
By Caro Claire Burke
Natalie Heller Mills is a tradwife influencer who wakes up one day in what looks like 1855, with no idea how she got there and none of the modern comforts her whole brand is built on. Burke, co-host of one of our favorite podcasts, Diabolical Lies, splits the novel between Natalie’s curated influencer life and her fight to survive in the past. She turns the tradwife fantasy inside out by making someone live it for real. This is the only fiction title on this list! We couldn’t help ourselves. (Knopf, April 2026)
A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides
By Gisèle Pelicot
Pelicot’s husband drugged her for nearly a decade and invited dozens of men into their home to rape her while she was unconscious. She then insisted the trial be held in public, so the shame would land on the men in the room instead of on her. This memoir is her own account of that decision and what came after. This is a heavy and important read. (Penguin Press, January 2026)
By Natasha Walter
Walter argues that mainstream feminism got hollowed out into a marketing pitch, something sold to individual women as personal empowerment instead of built as a collective movement, and that the hollowing out is exactly why it keeps losing ground against authoritarian governments, online misogyny, and climate breakdown all rising simultaneously. She argues women’s liberation has to link up with climate and pro-democracy movements rather than fight its battles alone. This book couldn’t be more timely or relevant. (Virago, May 2026)