TOP 5 FEMALE AUTHORS TO MAKE YOU THINK…

It’s International Women’s Day today and for me this marks an occasion to consider how we all judge women – both consciously and unconsciously - and how we can all do better. I attended an awesome webinar this morning on Equity hosted by Hult / EF (you can watch it online here), which got me thinking about how we all harbour unconscious bias and thus we can all learn something from listening to another person’s story. Stories help us broaden our horizons, they help us to imagine walking in another person’s shoes and therefore judge others less harshly. Ultimately, I think human stories fuel one of the greatest human superpowers: compassion. When you boil it down, simply acting with more compassion and less judgment can solve a lot of our society’s equity problems and ensure every individual feels a sense of belonging and inclusion. So here I share five books by inspiring women from very different walks of life that transformed my view of the world and made me reassess how I judge other women…

1. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Much has been written about Maya Angelou’s celebrated autobiography – suffice to say she’s a legend and her frank-talking account of her childhood growing up in the American South in the 1930s cannot fail to move even the coldest of hearts or transform even the most stubborn of minds. For me, as a white middle-class girl who grew up in a mostly white little town in Suffolk, Angelou was the first person to truly show me what racism feels like and open my mind to the fact that horrific history of racial abuse has fed the systemic racism we still need to challenge today. Everyone should read this book.

2. Me and White Supremacy by Layla F Saad

After reading everything Maya Angelou had ever written, I was confident that I could never be racist, ever, no matter what the circumstances, no matter who the person… then I read Me and White Supremacy and it was like someone delving into the closet of my mind, pulling out the darkest, messiest of thoughts and holding them up for me to see. This book made me realise that unfortunately racial prejudice can hide in the shadowy corners of your mind in ways you didn’t even realise. Layla F Saad beautifully highlights all the weird ways in which people of colour can be judged and she holds every reader to account quite rightly demanding that we all take responsibility for our unconscious biases and we all work hard to recognise white privilege, combat racism and change the world. I’ll say it again; everyone should read this book (and take the time to do the journal exercises at the end of each chapter).

3. Untamed by Glennon Doyle

“When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible,” Glennon Doyle says, “She becomes free to learn how to please herself.” Indeed there is a beautiful and sweeping freedom to the storytelling in Doyle’s autobiography Untamed. In short, sharp, witty chapters, she shares her moving love story with Abby, how the sight of this woman made her leave her marriage and fly half way across the country for a date even though she’d never formally considered herself gay and how they have created a family together that may not look like the classic 50s-picket-fence dream but is bursting with so much more love and learning, it is inspiration for any modern family.

4. In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park

When I first started reading Yeonmi Park’s account of growing up in North Korea, I had to keep reminding myself that this did not occur in some distant bygone era – she was born in 1993 and the horrific famine she describes occurred throughout the early nineties. She describes a childhood of cold, hunger and poverty in which her father turned to the black market just to feed his family only to be found out and sent to a labour camp. She then fled across the border into China only to fall into a human trafficking ring and face further abuse. It’s a harrowing tale from a truly inspiring woman who has gone on to become an activist for human rights and a voice for the importance of freedom of thought. As she says, “The subversion of critical thinking is so dangerous. It is the mechanism by which humans lose their faculties as individuals and succumb to groupthink, which is a precondition for every totalitarian society on Earth…”

5. American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

From the very first chapter, American Dirt grabs your attention and it won’t let go until you’ve turned the last page. It’s a rollercoaster of a novel about a Mexican bookseller who becomes embroiled in the drama of a drug cartel and after a horrific murder; she is forced to flee Mexico, joining countless people trying to reach the United States. Cummins brings the main character, Lydia’s struggle to light so beautifully, you feel the same tug of motherly love for her son Luca and feel so invested in their story to survive you read through the tears of compassion and sweat of an adrenalin-pumping narrative. There’s been a lot of chat about this book since it’s release in 2020 – some have panned it, some (including Oprah) have hailed it a remarkable feat of writing. For me, it was a stark story that needed to be told in the midst of Trump’s wall-building America.