From The Second Sex To The Beauty Myth: 10 Of The Best Feminist Texts

Feminism — what a sensitive and complex topic (and one which certainly needn't be controversial or complicated), how much it has changed, developed (and, in some few exceptions, devolved) throughout the years. Those fascinating three waves that sculpted history, who we are and what we do today. The first one starting in the 1830's with the women’s fight for equal contract and property rights was followed by the second wave back in the 60's, focused on workplace, sexuality, family and reproductive rights, and finally the third wave, beginning in the 90’s and continuing to the present day, known as the "micro politics of gender equality,’’ where feminism divided and transformed into so many things, the liberals, the radicals, the academic, the ego-cultural, the electoral, the ones that defend modesty and the ones that fight against it, and so on and on. Never have we had such a big variety of ideas regarding what it means to be empowered, what it means to be a free and independent woman.

We owe the pleasure of this freedom of opinion and diversity of ideas to a long line of extraordinary women; the Suffragettes, Simone De Beauvoir, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others. Many of them wrote beautiful, strong and unbelievably sharp books and essays that shaped the hard and rocky path of the equality movement. These are the ten best.