The Books Briefing: <em>Gender Equality</em> Is Valuable but Vague

📚 The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness, by Jill Filipovic

A timely, dynamic examination of women and power

“The Female Persuasion is about graduating from college and finding one’s way in the world … It’s also about … learning how to be a feminist now, in the 21st century, when the old barriers to women’s success have been broken down but no one understands quite what has replaced them.”

📚 The Female Persuasion, by Meg Wolitzer

Ida B. Wells’s uncompromising view of suffrage

“Wells’s work is a striking example of not only what [women’s political] anger can accomplish, but also the resistance—to the point of historical erasure—that it can provoke.”

📚 Ida: A Sword Among Lions, by Paula J. Giddings

The confidence gap

“Our experience suggests that the power centers of this nation are zones of female self-doubt—that is, when they include women at all.”

📚 The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know, by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman

(Chinnapong / Shutterstock)

The fight to include more women in teaching materials

“Women’s-history pioneers … saw unearthing and integrating women’s stories as a gateway to better understand the laws, institutions, systems, and movements that are most familiar to Americans—and to correct and complicate them.”

📚 All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, by Patricia Bell-Scott, Akasha Hull, and Barbara Smith

📚 Proud Shoes, by Pauli Murray

The Reference Desk

(New York Public Library)

Write to the Books Briefing team at booksbriefing@theatlantic.com or reply directly to this email with any of your reading-related dilemmas. We might feature one of your questions in a future edition of the Books Briefing and offer a few books or related Atlantic pieces that might help you out.

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Rosa Inocencio Smith. The book at the top of her reading list is Minor Feelings, by Cathy Park Hong.

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Rosa Inocencio Smith is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.