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
