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

The feminist case for happiness

“There’s a subtle radicalism to [Jill] Filipovic’s vision of politicized pleasure … She’s proposing a thorough remodeling of the house that white men built.”

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

BIANCA BAGNARELLI

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

R. GATES / GETTY

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

AP

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.

Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.

Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.