Emma Watson is a woman who knows her mind.
So, when the Hollywood star launched a digital book club dedicated to empowering reads for women last year, we were all ears.
Our Shared Shelf features a combination of seminal feminist works and more obscure yet influential tomes.
The 27-year-old launched The Book Fairies project in London this March, as she distributed books by women's activist voices such as Caitlyn Moran and Maya Angelou on the underground for International Women's Day.
The reads included a handwritten note from the Beauty and the Best actor, in an initiative that spread to 26 countries.
Here are three landmark books Emma recommends to kickstart your foray into feminist literature:
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Emma says: The Handmaid’s Tale is a gripping read, but it won’t make you feel comfortable. It is set in a dystopian future where a society (which was once clearly the USA) is ruled by a fundamentalist religion that controls women’s bodies.
Because fertility rates are low, certain women – who have proved they are fertile – are given to the Commanders of the ‘Republic of Gilead’ as ‘handmaids’ in order to bear children for them when their wives cannot. The novel purports to be the first-person account of a handmaid, Ofred, who describes her life under this totalitarian regime.
Flashbacks to her past, when she took it for completely for granted that she could be a working mother and have an equal relationship with her husband, show how easy it was for women’s rights to be revoked once a period of social chaos arose. As tension builds, the reader desperately hopes that the underground resistance will come to Ofred’s aid and rescue her.
Women Who Run With The Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Emma says: When Women Who Run With The Wolves was first published in 1993, it created a furore about the idea of the Wild Woman archetype and how women had lost our connection to our natural, instinctual selves. Jungian psychoanalyst, poet, and keeper of old stories Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book went to sell over 2 million copies, but today her fascinating book is rarely discussed. Estes’ ideas are both ancient and completely new. She points to storytelling, our ancient narratives, as a way for women to reconnect to the Wild Woman all women have within themselves, but have lost.
As a young girl growing up in northern Michigan, Estes felt most at home in the woods where she often heard wolves howling. Instead of scaring her, the animals’ cries comforted her in a way she was later able to express in this book. Wolves and women share many qualities: playfulness, strength, curiosity, bravery, they are adaptive, and each care deeply for their young. But both wolves and women have suffered a similar fate of being hounded, harassed, exhausted, marginalized, accused of being devious and of little value. How does one reconnect with our deepest, most true selves when today’s world demands us to conform to ridiculous expectations?
The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler
Emma says: This book isn't strictly just a book - it's a play that became a political movement that became a world-wide phenomenon. Just say the title T_he Vagina Monologues_ and, even now, twenty years after Eve Ensler first performed her ground-breaking show, the words feel radical. I'm very excited about spending the months of January and February reading and discussing a book/play that has literally changed lives.
The first person's life it changed was the feminist playwright Eve Ensler's. She says she didn't so much 'write' her play as act as a conduit for other women's stories. She had become fascinated by how the word 'vagina' was never spoken, and how the vagina itself was kept in the dark as if it was something shameful to discuss. So she started interviewing women about their vaginas - getting them to open up to her. Once women started talking, the stories came thick and fast, and Eve put them together into a series of monologues to be performed on stage.
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