To mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act that paved the way to universal suffrage, politicians, activists and writers share the books that changed their lives

Gloria Steinem, writer and activist

There have been many life-saving books, from Louisa May Alcott’s when I was a child, to Alice Walker’s and Robin Morgan’s as a grownup. Overall, what has been most helpful is knowing that patriarchy is not some inevitable part of human nature, that male control of reproduction and thus the bodies of women is what creates “masculine” and “feminine” gender roles as the first step in hierarchy, and these roles are new in human history.



They deprive everyone of being fully human. When divisions of race, caste or class are added, controlling reproduction – and thus female bodies – becomes even more crucial in order to keep categories separate. This is maintained by violence or the threat of violence.

In North America, Native American feminists teach us this wasn’t always so. Languages such as Cherokee have no gendered pronouns – no “he” and “she” – and the group paradigm is a circle, not a hierarchy. Matrilineal cultures of southern India and parts of Africa teach us the same lesson. As Paula Gunn Allen wrote in The Sacred Hoop: “The root of oppression is the loss of memory.”

So I will choose one neglected book, The Mermaid and the Minotaur by Dorothy Dinnerstein. It looks at the way humans lived before patriarchy, and before male control of reproduction was codified into “masculine” versus “feminine” roles. It reports that, in our very long migratory past, both men and women raised children. Men developed empathy, patience, attention to detail and a sense of the value of life – all those qualities now wrongly called “feminine”, because they are necessary to raise children. Just as women become more whole as humans by entering into public life, men become more whole as humans by entering into private life.

So for this reason, I choose Dinnerstein’s political and practical book. It convinced me, and may convince you, that men raising children – boys being raised to raise children – is the key to equality, democracy and world peace.

Mary Beard, classicist

Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch is the top of my list. That is not so much for what it says (though that is important, too); it is more for how she says it, and her particular use of a woman’s voice. It was life changing when I first read it because of the powerful, in-your-face straight talking. I hadn’t realised that you could speak, let alone write, about gender politics or your own body like that without flinching. When I look back to the key books that broke my own silence and loosened my tongue (and yes I was once terribly tongue-tied), The Eunuch still holds pride of place.

Gina Miller, anti-Brexit campaigner

As a woman thrust on to the political stage and baffled by the anger and depth of negative feeling I have been targeted with, Mary Beard’s Women & Power: A Manifesto brought me a sense of solidarity, power and determination.

The book is adapted from two lectures, one given at the British Museum in 2014, and the other in 2017. A renowned intellect, Beard explores complex issues, but is able to make her text understandable. She makes you think about women being silenced, about fear of the female voice. She explores sexual politics and takes a “long view on the culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment”, so that we get beyond “the simple diagnosis of misogyny that we tend a bit lazily to fall back on”.

Beard shows that if we are to find solutions to the problems of misogyny, we need to investigate, examine and find effective ways of combating it.

What I found particularly fascinating was Beard’s classicist approach to the subject. Reading her book in the wake of the today’s sexual harassment scandals – surrounding Weinstein, Westminster, the Presidents Club dinner in London and Trump in the US – I found myself shouting out “Yes!”

I like that she does not want women to wallow in self-pity and promotes the idea of being progressive in changing the very nature of power. She talks of the “decoupling” of power from prestige, a bifurcation that will mean thinking about power as an attribute rather than as a possession, and of the power of followers as well as of leaders. I love her pragmatism, intellectual elegance and energising voice.



Rise is published by Canongate in August.

Reni Eddo-Lodge comes with a fresh perspective and writes with an energy that is exhilarating Diane Abbott

Lucy Prebble, playwright

I found The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf on the shelf of my mother’s bookcase at 11 years old. It was its cover that attracted me – the image of a bound naked woman. I took that to mean it was a dirty book, which clearly highlights the issue. The book is luridly written, and is now recognised to contain absurdly inflated statistics, but it presented a challenge that was new to me. As a child, I’d accepted there were two types of woman I could become: either “beautiful” or “not really a woman”. If I wasn’t attractive in the way the passive, perfect, dead-eyed women in magazines were, I would be a “tomboy” or “more like a guy” or “not a girls’ girl”. After reading this book I realised there was another sort of woman I could be, one who sees what you are doing and won’t hold the shame.



The HBO drama Succession will be broadcast in June.

Diane Abbott, shadow home secretary

In Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge writes about a great many things I already knew and believed. But she comes with a fresh perspective and writes with an energy that is exhilarating. Typical is her dissection of the all too frequent plaintive cry by white liberals that “they don’t see race”. The author is merciless about this cliche. She asserts: “Not seeing race does little to deconstruct racist structures or materially improve the conditions which people of colour are subject to daily. In order to dismantle unjust, racist structures, we must see race. We must see who benefits from their race, and upon whom power and privilege - earned or not – is bestowed because of their race, their class and their gender. Seeing race is essential to changing the system.”

Eddo-Lodge says that feminism was her first love. I would say the same. However her book features an uncompromising analysis of the relationship between feminism and race. While an earlier generation of black political writers were shaped by the patriarchy, Reni writes from an essentially feminist or (as Alice Walker would put it) womanist, perspective. This polemic was never more needed. And the best bit is that, with Reni still in her 20s, there are many more good books to come.

Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland

It is very difficult for me to choose just one favourite political text written by a woman as there are so many. Reading is one of my great passions, and I derive particular enjoyment from historical and political fiction.

My fiction choice would be The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark. Though set in a convent rather than a parliament, this delightful book is intensely political. Full of intrigue and election rigging, it also has echoes of the Watergate scandal that erupted just a few years before the novel’s publication. I first read it as a young student activist and it cemented my love of Spark. Although not as well known as her classic novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I would highly recommend this for anyone looking for a wry, satirical take on the often Machiavellian nature of politics – be that politics in an abbey, a workplace or a parliament.

In terms of non-fiction, my choice would be The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. The ultimate feminist text had a huge influence on me as a young woman, not so much shaping my beliefs as helping me to order and understand them in a historical context. The concept of being “The Other” accurately sums up the experience of many women in the 1940s when De Beauvoir wrote about it. As Mary Beard demonstrates in her excellent recent manifesto, Women & Power, it’s a concept that continues to have relevance to how many women feel today.

I was peering out at the world through false eyelashes but Germaine Greer said I needn’t bother Harriet Harman

Sayeeda Warsi, Conservative peer

Stella Rimington’s autobiography Open Secret was published to mixed reviews just days before the 11 September attacks – sceptics felt Rimington had overstepped the mark as the custodian of secrets at MI5, while others felt she had revealed too little about the secret services.

What fascinated me was that this was a woman who broke both glass ceilings and taboos – who not only became the first woman to head up MI5, but the first chief of MI5 to be named and photographed while in office.

Dame Rimington wrote the book at a time when little was known about the security services. Operating in the shadows of secrecy and misogyny, the book tracks her battles to make MI5 a more transparent and modern institution.

Critics felt the autobiography was a sanitised version of her failures, with some claiming she had overplayed her success; for me, what was profound was that she had written it at all. In the end it became the first of 10 books as she turned her hand to fiction.

It’s an account of history, a memoir of the political challenges of her time and a personal account of her life. The book weaves counter-espionage with tentative meetings with the KGB and the trauma of marital breakdown. A pioneer, a trailblazer but mostly just an ordinary woman.

Sayeeda Warsi’s The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain is published by Penguin.

Harriet Harman, MP

The Female Eunuch was more than just a book. It was a bible, a call to arms, the writings of a woman who pronounced that she, for one, didn’t care what men thought of her. This was revolutionary stuff. I was 20, it was 1970 and, at that time, the summit of a young woman’s ambition was to get a good husband. You needed to be, wanted to be, were expected to be, a woman dedicated to pleasing men. The Women’s Movement was questioning this and growing in strength. And then along came Greer, and shouted about what we were only whispering in quiet meetings. She didn’t seek to persuade men; she just told them. She was outrageous in a way that I longed to be, but would never have dared to be. I was peering out at the world through false eyelashes but she said I needn’t bother. She was loud in an era when women were supposed to be meek. She pronounced what was wrong with men and their anger perturbed her not one bit. I never quite worked out what the cover was meant to depict. But I cherished my battered copy. It was more than just about reading it. To own a copy of The Female Eunuch was to be part of a mighty movement that would change everything - families, work and politics. And we did!

A Woman’s Work is published in paperback by Penguin.

Shami Chakrabarti, Labour peer

Eleanor Marx: A Life by Rachel Holmes is a political book by a political woman, about another political woman. In it, one of our leading biographers raises the dead in the form of one of the greatest and too-long forgotten radical figures of the 19th century. This British-born daughter of suspect refugees was a founder of new trades unionism (organising “unskilled” workers including women). She was a socialist before the existence of the Labour party (and involved in initiatives that lead to its birth), a feminist before the suffragettes, and an internationalist and anti-racist more than half a century before the establishment of the United Nations and post-1945 liberation struggles. She is an example to subsequent generations that feminism cannot be a “non-political”, single-issue or ethnocentric pursuit.

In this moment of Labour revival under Jeremy Corbyn, it has become fashionable to unearth the “Marxist menace”. Yet Karl’s youngest daughter was both a passionate democrat and her father’s most direct political heir. In Phoenix Park, Dublin, in 1891, while supporting parliamentary representation to further the cause of working people, she abstained from a resolution for “manhood suffrage” because (according to the Irish Times), “she wanted to see women having their share in the ordering of their lives”.

Yet the ultimate beauty of this book lies in the exquisite telling of Eleanor’s story. I am not the first to notice how much this compelling history reads like a novel and that it is both gripping whodunnit and moving family drama. And the talent for combining great writing with politics worked as well for Marx in 1890 as it does for Holmes and others in more recent times. The first mass May Day gathering was not in Glastonbury but Hyde Park. Eleanor called for legislation for an eight-hour working day and ended with a stanza from The Masque of Anarchy: “Shake your chains to earth like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you – / Ye are many – they are few.”

Like the underlying values, it still works.

In Flight Behaviour, Kingsolver’s words come alive in ways that climate scientists and politicians can only dream of Caroline Lucas

Jess Phillips, MP

Every week I would push my buggy to my mum’s house and steal her Saturday paper. She and I were fans of Caitlin Moran’s weekend column – we had our own version of the big feral West Midlands family that Moran describes so well. So when How to Be a Woman came out, she bought me a copy straight away.

I inhaled the text, the story was so familiar. I was no stranger to feminism: as a child I’d been to a women’s liberation playgroup and made murals for Greenham Common, and at the time of the book’s publication, I was working in Moran’s native Black Country in a women’s refuge. But I was new to feminist theory that could reach so well into my existence. With its descriptions of grubby sexual encounters, rubbish boyfriends, sweaty gigs, andbeing a young, ill-equipped mother, the narrative was inclusive, funny, dirty and relatable. It captured the way in which feminism had punctuated my existence and how patriarchy had punctured it.

After my angry feminist activism eventually led me to Westminster, in one of the first speeches I ever made, I challenged my colleagues to do as Moran suggests and stand on the green benches and shout: “I am a feminist!” Feminist writing, much like Westminster, was in need of humanising and a bit of rowdy chair stomping.

My mother had been making me declare my feminism all my life, just as Moran demands in the book. She died weeks after the book came out and before I had finished it. Her final gift to me was this account by an honest, filthy, funny Midlands feminist. Nothing could have been more fitting.

Everywoman by Jess Phillips is published by Hutchinson.

Caroline Lucas, Co-leader of the Green Party

Barbara Kingsolver’s powerful novel Flight Behaviour is as much about personal transformation as it is about politics – but it’s a book that has stuck with me, and informed my politics. The power of the book comes from its vivid description of a world being transformed by a changing climate, as hoards of bright orange monarch butterflies suddenly arrive in small town Tennessee. The image of the insects, so numerous on the trees that every “bow glow[s] with an orange glaze”, is at once stunning and mystifying.

At its core the book is, as the main character Dellarobia calls it, about “the climate thing”. It’s about how human life is changing our planet - and how those changes could take on biblical proportions in the near future. As Ovid, the scientist who arrives to examine the butterflies and eventually convert Dellarobia to the climate cause, says: “This is a biological system falling apart along its seams … Unseasonable temperature shifts, droughts ... Everything hinges on the climate.”

There is so much to learn from Flight Behaviour – Kingsolver’s words come alive on the page in ways that climate scientists and politicians can only dream of. She has an expert way of batting away the myth that poor people, like Dellarobia, are somehow responsible for environmental damage because of their shopping habits.

Perhaps the greatest lesson in the book is for those of us who try to communicate climate change. In one excruciating passage a climate activist tells Dellarobia to “bring Tupperware to restaurants for leftovers”, fly less and eat less red meat. The incredulous response – from a woman who can’t afford to eat out, who comes from a family of people who have never set foot on a plane and who doesn’t eat much red meat – is a reminder of the desperate need for climate activism to break out of its bubble.

I’ve read more books about the environment than I can remember, but none match Flight Behaviour for the feeling it left me of both the damage we’re doing to our precious world, and the urgent need to change the way we live.

Anarchism is usually seen as idealism or nihilism. But in The Dispossessed, Le Guin makes it pragmatic Natasha Walter

Lucy Worsley, historian

The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (1666) is an uncategorisable book written by Margaret Cavendish, scientist, author, feminist and – perhaps surprisingly incompatible with all that – duchess and courtier. When Cavendish turned up at the Royal Society to discuss her scientific work, they all laughed at her. Sometimes called the first work of science fiction, sometimes called a feminist utopian fantasy, The Blazing-World evokes an “empress” (really the author herself) who flies magically above the mansions and estates of her wealthy husband and imagines a better world through a blaze. I came across this book when I was researching a PhD thesis on Margaret’s husband, and sort of came to realise I’d devoted four years of my life to the wrong half of the couple. A crazy, difficult and totally admirable woman.

Natasha Walter, writer and activist

Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed first grabs the reader as a glorious journey through imaginary worlds, but gradually reveals itself as a carefully grounded exploration of the possibility of anarchism. Le Guin tracks the physical and emotional repercussions of the loss of authority and property, right down to small linguistic resonances. “You can share the handkerchief that I use,” a child on Anarres, the planet of anarchism, says to the hero at one point. “Take mine,” a man on Urras, the planet of capitalism, says at another.

So although The Dispossessed is a novel, it works as politics, drawing you along by its ideas as much as by plot and character. As you read it, you are constantly thinking, Could this work? Has it been tried? Will it be tried?

Anarchism is usually seen as flimsy idealism or destructive nihilism. But Le Guin makes it densely pragmatic, and often derails the narrative in favour of detailed expositions about work rotas and food distribution. These may slow down the plot, but they heighten our sense that this society is a real possibility.

And she nails feminism alongside anarchism on Anarres. Even though the protagonist is a man, The Dispossessed is peopled by women who work and live at full throttle, released by a society in which sexism has gone the way of all power relations.

But this is no simple manifesto. Rather than proselytising for the anarchists all the time, there is something too drably stern about poor old Anarres, something temptingly lush about naughty Urras. There is ambiguity here, and the space for failure.

I read it as a teenager; and when more than 30 years on, I read it again last summer, I found it even more prescient. I hope that in the aftermath of Le Guin’s death more people revisit this extraordinary book. Because while it is so tempting – and often so necessary – to keep within the limits of the real in our politics, to keep plugging away at what will make things a tiny bit better here and now, we also need to keep flexing that muscle called hope. In times when inspiration seems to be running dry, we need to dip into the reservoir of the imagination. As Le Guin says, in her protagonist’s words: “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution.”