100 Must Read Books About Women & Religion
In Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” a young woman—capable, brilliant, and an outsider in her Southern community by virtue of these and other traits—feels pity toward a traveling Bible salesman, a fellow obviously of inferior cerebral stock, and lures him to the loft for a bit of sexual/intellectual healing.
The encounter doesn’t go quite as she plans. Her aha moment within it, one of recognition, indignation, and humiliation—”‘Give me my leg,’ she said,”—looms as one of my favorite moments in women’s religious literature. The young woman, a hopeful reformer, discovers that, despite her own hard-earned insights, she has remained blind to how little her knowledge impacts the perspectives of those never inclined to respect her in the first place. Good country people may carry booze in hollowed-out Bibles, but that trick works best if you’re a man. Double-speak, too. And religious men, confronted with their own shortcomings and hypocrisies, are not necessarily poised to extend a hand and help a gal out.
Such is the nature of women’s relationships with religions. Or: that’s part of the story. Traditions tend to be patriarchal; we must either conform or make our own way within them. Or must move outside of them. And women, when we claim religious space as our own, have adapted to, or demolished, constraints in awesome ways.
Below, you’ll find 100 titles in which women take creative, inquisitive, constructive, and critical postures toward religious traditions: those of their birth; those that belong to others, and which they encounter with an open spirit; those that they work to reform; those that they adopt. No two books are the same. All are vibrant; all hold the potential to illumine. Soil ignored, as it turns out, is poised to produce rich fruits, like these diverse women’s spiritual works, a great gift of having had to make our own way.
This celebration of women and religion is, owing to my own background, somewhat heavy on monotheistic perspectives; I would love to hear from those well-read in Eastern traditions as well. What titles would you add?
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Nonfiction
Judaism
1. Miriam’s Kitchen, Elizabeth Ehrlich
2. Women Who Would Be Rabbis, Pamela Susan Nadell
3. Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books, Ilana M. Blumberg
4. House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, Adina Hoffman
5. The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt, Ruth Andrew Ellenson
6. Flying Couch, Amy Kurzweil
7. Black, White & Jewish, Rebecca Walker
8. Standing Again at Sinai, Judith Plaskow
9. Surprised By God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion, Danya Ruttenberg
Hinduism
10. The Song of the Goddess, C. Mackenzie Brown
11. Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, Diana Eck
Buddhism
12. Why is the Dalai Lama Always Smiling?, Lama Tsomo
13. Buddhism After Patriarchy, Rita Gross
14. Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun, Faith Adiele
Christianity
15. The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd
16. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza
17. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, Delores S. Williams
18. Waiting for God, Simone Weil
19. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, Madeleine L’Engle
20. Sundays in America: A Yearlong Roadtrip in Search of Christian Faith, Suzanne Strempek Shea
21. Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline, Lauren F. Winner
22. Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home, Rhoda Janzen
23. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, Anne Lamott
24. Accidental Theologians: Four Women Who Shaped Christianity, Elizabeth A. Dreyer
25. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, Elizabeth Johnson
26. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, Rosemary Radford Ruether
Islam
27. Jewels of Allah: The Untold Story of Women in Iran, Nina Ansary
28. Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women, Jean Said Makdisi
29. Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
30. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Marjane Satrapi
31. Muslim American Women on Campus, Shabana Mir
32. What is Veiling, Sahar Amer
33. The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam, G. Willow Wilson
34. Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, Mona Eltahawy
35. Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay, ed. Amy Levin, Jennifer Zobair, Gina Messina-Dysert
Other Traditions/Interreligious
36. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, Mary Daly
37. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess, Starhawk
38. Traveling With Pomegranates, Sue Monk Kidd & Ann Kidd Taylor
39. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston
40. Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist, One Woman’s Spiritual Journey, Jan Willis
41. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, Kelly Brown Douglas
42. My Journey Through War and Peace, Melissa Burch
43. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker
44. World of the Teton Sioux Indians, Frances Densmore
45. A God that Could be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet, Nancy Ellen Abrams
46. My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem
47. Searching for Zion, Emily Raboteau
48. The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, Karen Armstrong
49. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality, Carol P. Christ
50. Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology, Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ
Poetry
51. The Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich
52. The Little Space: Poems, Alicia Suskin Ostriker
53. Wild Iris, Louis Gluck
54. House of Light, Mary Oliver
55. Fidelity: Poems, Grace Paley
Fiction
56. Like Water For Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
57. The Last Days of Dogtown, Anita Diamant
58. The Festival of San Joaquin, Zee Edgell
59. Paradise, Toni Morrison
60. In the Image, Dara Horn
61. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
62. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
63. The Bell, Iris Murdoch
64. Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
65. The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick
66. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
67. The Family Orchard, Nomi Eve
68. Happiness Like Water, Chinelo Okparanta
69. Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson
70. Three Daughters, Consuelo Saah Baehr
71. The Patron Saint of Liars, Ann Patchett
72. Washing the Dead, Michelle Brafman
73. Gardens in the Dunes, Leslie Marmon Silko
74. Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor
75. Indivisible, Fanny Howe
76. Bread Givers, Anzia Yezierska
77. The Dovekeepers, Alice Hoffman
78. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
79. Moss Witch, Sara Maitland
80. Good Muslim, Tahmima Anam
81. Waterlily, Ella Cara Deloria
82. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
83. Mischling, Affinity Konar
84. Katya, Sandra Birdsell
85. The Girl Who Slept With God, Val Brelinski
86. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
87. One Hundred Philistine Foreskins, Tova Reich
88. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
89. Oedipus in Brooklyn, Blume Lempel
90. Glorybound, Jessie van Eerden
91. The Romance Reader, Pearl Abraham
92. Hagar’s Daughter, Pauline Elizabeth Hawkins
93. A Whistling Woman, A. S. Byatt
94. In The Language of Miracles, Rajia Hassib
95. A Theory of Expanded Love, Caitlin Hicks
96. The Lost Traveller, Antonia White
97. God on a Harley, Joan Brady
98. South of Everything, Audrey Taylor Gonzalez
99. Pope Joan, Donna Woolfolk Cross
100. Coming of Age at the End of Days, Alice LaPlante
