Books like The Feminine Mystique

01

The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir · Philosophy

The Second Sex is Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 examination of the situation of women — why they have been defined as "Other" throughout human history, how that otherness is constructed and maintained, and what it would mean to be free of it.

02

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's second book proposes a reframing of American racial hierarchy: rather than thinking of racism primarily as prejudice, she argues that the United States has operated as a caste society, with Black Americans at the bottom of a rigidly maintained hierarchy similar in its structure — though different in its specific mechanisms — to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.

03

Becoming

Michelle Obama · Memoir

Becoming is Michelle Obama's account of how a girl from a modest house on Chicago's South Side became one of the most recognized people in the world — and what that journey cost and revealed.

04

Educated: A Memoir

Tara Westover · Memoir

Educated is Tara Westover's memoir about growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and eventually earning a PhD in history from Cambridge University.

05

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Charles C. Mann · History

Charles Mann's 1491 sets out to correct a widespread misconception: that the Americas before Columbus were a mostly empty wilderness populated by small, isolated bands of hunter-gatherers living in gentle harmony with an untouched nature.

06

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Charles C. Mann · History

Where 1491 ends, 1493 begins.