Figuring out what to read on International Women’s Day (and afterwards) is a lot of fun. It’s going to be my new annual tradition.

Updated in April 2018

It’s easy to get bogged down in what ‘feminism’ is and who it’s for. A lot of people get very upset by it. Often those arguments go around and around in circles, focusing on the semantics of feminism. People always try to win political arguments, which means they want the other side to lose. Let’s side step all that. For one day — and particularly for men — the best thing to do is get out of the way of the debate and start listening and reading to other viewpoints.

You already have a something to listen to. You’ll have a great time hearing from all the people we reached out to, great voices from tech, business, media and advocacy.

It has been a big 12 months for feminism. Even if culture isn’t radically changing right now, it’s clear that some sort of reckoning is upon us, at least in certain high profile industries. That’s worth diving into. And there’s no way us three middle class white guys who usually speak through most of the episodes were the right people to dive into it. Believe me, I’ve never been so happy not to hear my own voice.

Instead, we got eight interesting women to tell us what they thought about the state of feminism, #metoo and #TimesUp, how feminism might be changing, how men might be able to help and much much more.

The participants

Áine Mulloy — co-founder of Girl Crew, a social media app for women and girls (Twitter: @AineMulloy @GirlCrewHQ App: bit.ly/2EYw8y3)

Genista T‑A — works in publishing, book-worm, has views on important stuff, friend of the pod (Twitter: @geninldn @Bloomsburybooks)

Jasmine Andersson — investigations journalist at ( LGBTQ +) Pink News, and co-founder of The 2 nd Source tackling harrassment in media (Twitter: @the__chez @PinkNews @The2ndSource)

+) Pink News, and co-founder of The 2 Source tackling harrassment in media (Twitter: @the__chez @PinkNews @The2ndSource) Jennifer Riggins — tech marketer, and work-at-home first-time mum of a baby boy (Twitter: @jkriggins)

Jo Osborne — Founder of SciApps and SkinNinja, an app uncovering ingredients in women’s skincare products (Twitter: @thisisJoOsbourne @SkinNinjaApp, App: skinninja.com/)

Season of the Bitch — Socialist Feminist Podcast from the USA

(Twitter: @seasonoftheB, Site: www.seasonoftheb.com/).

From ‘The Coven’ we were joined by Laura (Twitter: @socialistwillow) and Kellen (Twitter: @hellenkeniford)

(Twitter: @seasonoftheB, Site: www.seasonoftheb.com/). From ‘The Coven’ we were joined by Laura (Twitter: @socialistwillow) and Kellen (Twitter: @hellenkeniford) Sophie Yates Lu — Fundraising and Events for Positive Money, and the What Women Want 2.0 survey (Twitter: @sophieyateslu @positivemoneyUK @WhatWomenWantXX)

Towards of the end of the episode, you also get a lot of great recommendations. Personally, I was happy to hear shout outs to people I already admired like the Notorious RBG and Rosa Luxembourg, but there were also a whole raft of new names and books that are going to guide my reading and thinking for the next few months.

Start with this list of books from the episode

For the last year, I have been going down a rabbit hole of books written by pioneering female adventurers in the late 19th and early 20th century. The writers are pre-feminist in many ways. They are often insensitive and brusque, they use language that would be regarded as terrifically non-PC now. But times were different and what they did was astonishing. They were feminist in their actions, not words.

I want to close out this blog by shining a spotlight on three more amazing women and their works.

Martha Gellhorn. One of the great war correspondents, she became famous for focusing on the civilian experience of war. She reported on the Spanish Civil War, WWII, Vietnam, and even various Central American civil wars in the 1980s, when she was in here 70s. She married and divorced Ernest Hemingway because she “didn’t want to be a footnote in somebody else’s life” and wrote perhaps the greatest travel book ever written. A genuine inspiration.

Recommended reading: Travels With Myself and Another

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Freya Stark. A rather wayward child of even more wayward parents, she bounced around Europe as a child, learning languages and falling in love with the literature and culture of what was then called The Orient. As an adult, she explored some of the most alien landscapes she could possibly have sought out. She took three long treks through western Iran, a semi lawless wilderness that was then home to the hashashins. She spent years wandering southern Arabia, the first Westerner to do so and most certainly the first woman. Her books recounting these journeys are not only beautifully written, but they give glimpses to people and cultures as they were before the world became so inter-connected. Best of all, she is free of prejudice, full of admiration for the lives she encounters and uses her writing to implore better understanding and more acceptance.

Recommended reading: A Winter in Arabia

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Beryl Markham. Markham grew up on a remote farm in the Kenyan highlands in the early 20th century. She raised racehorses with her father and became the first female racehorse trainer in Africa when she was 18. She was one of the earliest pilots operating in Africa and was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west in 1936. She also wrote a spectacularly beautiful memoir in which she talks about these adventures and hints at all the high profile affairs she conducted, scandalizing contemporaries.

Recommended reading: West With the Night

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We had the new economics superstar Kate Raworth on the show to talk about her vision of economics that fits the 21st century. It was a great conversation that is well worth a listen. Towards the end of that interview, she namechecked some books that really inspired her, all three of which were written by women.

Janine Benyus — Biomimicry. How innovation drawn from nature can push society forwards without negatively impacting the environment around us.

Donella Meadows — Thinking In Systems. The key primer to understanding systems dynamics, which is a vital area for the interconnected problems that now present the planet’s biggest challenges (as we spoke about ).

Marjorie Kelly — Owning Our Future. Exploring new forms of ownership for the post-growth age, where maximizing financial returns is not the be all and end all of success.

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Got any other recommendations? Please let us know.

You know the drill:

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