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115 Banned Books by Brave Women: A Reading List


Like many other writers and book-enthusiasts, I believe in the power of words. Words can describe both the beautiful and the horrific. The mystical and the reality. The truth and the imaginative. Words give voice to the voices that cannot necessarily be vocalized. They can create new worlds and change the worlds we already live in. Words hold weight and for generations, words have been celebrated and criticized for their power. It is this power that has led to the censorship of thousands of literary works.

In celebration of banned book week—a week in which rebellious book-readers rowdily read and quietly celebrate banned or challenged books—I wanted to compile a list of all the censored works written by women. I knew ahead of time that I would never be able to find every questionable read written by a woman. There are too many reported and much more undocumented incidents of challenged literature. So I stopped searching after filling up six notebook pages of challenged works.

Looking at all of these censored works by other women made me realize how dangerous censorship is to representation. Writing can give women and other minority groups a voice in a society that has historically devalued their opinions. We must continue to read women’s literature as well as advocate its legitimacy. Women’s voices have been silenced or ignored in history and the arts for hundreds of years. By reading women’s writing, we are making women apart of the cultural conversation. Representation and artistic authority is important and it’s time to give women that privilege.

*I did not discriminate in this list: There are authors of many backgrounds, writers of classics and YA fiction, and books that I love and books that I wouldn’t be caught dead with. There is also

not order in how these books are listed.

1. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

2. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

3. The Awakening, Kate Chopin

4. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle

5. Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat

6. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

7. Beloved, Toni Morrison

8. Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling

9. The Color Purple, Alice Walker

10. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

11. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

12. Letty Fox, Christine Stead

13. Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh

14. The Lottery and Other Stories, Shirley Jackson

15. Gentleman’s Agreement, Laura Z. Hobson

16. The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall

17. The Lonely Bones, Alice Sebold

18. Our Bodies, Ourselves, The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective

19. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Herston

20. Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson

21. The Woman Rebel: No Gods No Masters, Margaret Sanger

22. The World is Full of Married Men, Jackie Collins

23. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beachier Stowe

24. My Father’s Daughter, Hannah Pool

25. The Lonely Girl, Edna O’Brien

26. Little Black Sambo, Helen Bannerman

27. Lajja, Talima Nasrin

28. I Didn’t do it for You, Michela Wrong

29. Fifty Shades, E. L. James

30. The Stud, Jackie Collins

31. The County Girls, Edna O’Brien

32. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart

33. Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer

34. Big River, Big Sea, Lang Ying-tai

35. It Stops with Me, Charleen Touchette

36. Cracking India, Bapsi Sidhwa

37. My Brother Has AIDS, Deborah Davis

38. July’s People, Nadine Gordimer

39. Revolutionary Voices, Amy Sonnie

40. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

41. The Upstairs Room, Johanna Reiss

42. The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, Carolyn Machler

43. What Mother Doesn’t Know, Sonya Sones

45. I Am Malala, Malala Yousafzai

46. Black Looks: Race and Representation, Bell Hooks

47. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir

48. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

49. Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich

50. Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen

51. The Miseducation of Cameron Post, emily m. danforth

52. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

53. The Giver, Lois Lowry

54. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume

55. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

56. Flowers in the Attic, V. C. Andrews

57. Twilight, Stephanie Meyer

58. Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson

59. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

60. My Antonia, Willa Cather

61. Blubber, Judy Blume

62. Black Beauty, Anna Seawell

63. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Michell

64. Go Ask Alice, Beatrice Sparks

65. Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison

66. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Flannery O’Connor

67. The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende

68. Orlando, Virginia Woolf

69. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter

70. My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult

71. Vampire Academy, Richelle Mead

72. Jazz, Toni Morrison

73. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

74. Twisted, Laurie Halse Anderson

75. The Great Gilly Hopkins, Edith Patterson

76. The Madame Paul Affair, Julie Doucet

77. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

78. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton

79. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

80. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

81. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

82. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolfe

83. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

84. Forever…, Judy Blume

85. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Neffeuegger

86. Awful Disclosures, Maria Monk

87. Heather has Two Mommies, Leslea Newman

88. Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder

89. The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, Beatrix Potter

90. Gloria Goes to Gay Pride, Leslea Newman

91. A Friend of the Family, Lauren Grodstein

92. Love is One of the Choices, Norma Klein

93. Tipping the Velvet, Sarag Waters

94. Not Funny Ha-Ha, Leah Hayes

95. Annie On My Mind, Nancy Garden

96. City of Bones, Cassandra Clare

97. Forever Amber, Kathleen Wiasor

98. Peyton Place, Grace Metalions

99. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Anne Rice

100. Little Women, Lousisa May Alcott

101. The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler

102. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Annie Bronte

103. Story of O, Pauline Reage

104. Halloween ABC, Eve Merrian

105. The Kitchen House, Kathleen Grissom

106. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin

107. 22’s Diary, Maitresse P.

108. Rise Up and Salute the Sun, Suzy Kussen

109. It’s OK if You don’t Love Me, Norman Klein

110. Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran, Shahrnush Parsipur

111. Journey to Jo’burg, Beverley Naidoo

112. My Year Without Eleanor, Noelle Hencoch

113. The Education of Harriet Hatfield, May Sarton

114. Till Dawn Tames the Night, Meagan Mckinney

115. Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman, Hedy Lamarr

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The Fox's Journal

A blog by Alyssa Dearborn
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