Book bans do more than remove titles from shelves. They narrow the stories women and girls can use to understand their bodies, choices and experiences—while the overwhelmingly female library workforce is left to absorb the backlash.
Tools of the Patriarchy is a column on the tools that establish men’s dominance in society, or, in other words, uphold the patriarchy. Whether or not these tools are used intentionally, they contribute to a world in which women are not equal to men.
Every fall, Banned Books Week (Oct. 4-10, 2026) arrives with a familiar visual language: stacks of novels wrapped in caution tape, displays of frequently challenged classics and lists inviting readers to discover what someone, somewhere, did not want them to read. This year’s theme—“Let Books Be. Protect the Freedom to Read”—comes amid another record-breaking year of school censorship.
There is something almost fun about reading a banned book when censorship is presented this way. But the current wave of book bans in the United States is harder to romanticize.
PEN America recorded 11,982 school book bans affecting 7,370 unique titles during the 2025-26 school year, the highest number since the organization began tracking bans in 2021. Among the books banned for the first time were Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World, Lessons in Chemistry and Jane Eyre.
The books disappearing from shelves are not random. Censorship campaigns continue to sweep up stories about women’s sexuality, sexual violence, reproductive autonomy and girls coming of age, alongside books about LGBTQ+ people and people of color.
Stories are also one of the places girls first encounter women who leave, resist, desire, survive, refuse motherhood, question authority or name the harm done to them.
On a recent episode of Smithsonian magazine’s podcast There’s More to That, former librarian of Congress Carla Hayden recalls the suspicion surrounding romance novels in the late 19th century: They might give women ideas about marriage and lives beyond their prescribed roles. The vocabulary has changed, but the fear of what women might learn from reading is hardly new.
Hayden, the first woman and first Black person to lead the Library of Congress, was abruptly dismissed by President Donald Trump on May 8, 2025, nearly nine years into her 10-year term.
Who Gets Called ‘Inappropriate’?
Some of the most commonly banned books of 2025-26 make that pattern difficult to ignore.
- Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak follows a teenage girl struggling to tell anyone she was raped.
- Patricia McCormick’s Sold centers on a 13-year-old girl trafficked into sexual slavery.
- Ellen Hopkins’ Identical confronts incest and sexual abuse.
- Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a society built around the political control of women’s bodies and reproduction.
The justifications offered for censorship do not always match what is actually in the books. PEN America’s analysis of 3,743 unique titles banned during the previous school year found that only 10 percent contained on-the-page consensual sexual content.
But 19 percent depicted sexual violence, including rape, sexual assault or sexual abuse. Researchers from PEN America warn that labeling stories about sexual violence as “pornographic” mischaracterizes both the books and the experiences of survivors who may recognize themselves in them.
Thirty-nine percent of the titles in the same analysis featured LGBTQ+ people or characters, illustrating how quickly identity itself can be folded into debates over supposedly “sexual” material.
Women and girls have long been asked to make accounts of their own suffering palatable, to disclose without being too angry, describe violence without being too graphic and tell the truth without making anyone else uncomfortable
As early as 2022, book bans were disproportionately targeting LGBTQ+ writers, writers of color and books addressing race, gender and sexuality.
Today, the scale has changed, but so has the infrastructure behind the challenges. The American Library Association reports that 92 percent of book challenges in 2025 were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and other decision-makers, while fewer than 3 percent originated with individual parents.
Parents, of course, can decide that their own child is not ready for a particular book. But that is different from deciding that every other child should lose access to it. As the National Coalition Against Censorship explains, schools already have procedures allowing parents to guide their own children’s reading without imposing those choices on everybody else.
When Survivors’ Stories Become ‘Sexual Content’
Perhaps nowhere is the problem clearer than in the treatment of sexual violence as “sexual content.”
Making sexual violence speakable has been central to feminist activism for generations. Terms such as sexual harassment, marital rape and date rape gave people language for experiences that had long been minimized, normalized or left unnamed. Naming violence does not create it; it makes it harder to hide.
Literature can do something similar. In Speak, Melinda’s silence after rape is not incidental to the story; it is the story. Sold forces readers to confront the exploitation of a girl rather than look away.
Treating such stories as dangerous because they describe sexual violence confuses the discomfort of confronting abuse with the danger of abuse itself.
For girls, that distinction matters. Young women are already encouraged to question whether an uncomfortable encounter was “bad enough,” whether they misunderstood someone’s intentions or whether talking about it will make other people uncomfortable. Once “sexual content” becomes broad enough to include sexual violence, the survivor’s account can become the offensive material. Women and girls have long been asked to make accounts of their own suffering palatable, to disclose without being too angry, describe violence without being too graphic and tell the truth without making anyone else uncomfortable. Censorship can reproduce that expectation at scale.
When a Feminized Profession Becomes a Political Target
Another gendered aspect of the censorship story: the people expected to absorb the backlash.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 84.9 percent of librarians and media collections specialists are women. When book-ban campaigns descend on libraries, the workers answering complaints, reviewing challenges, explaining collection policies and sitting through contentious board meetings are disproportionately women.
Librarians are trusted to help children find books and create welcoming spaces until their professional judgment includes a book about queer identity, reproductive autonomy or sexual violence. Then the helpful librarian can quickly become an “activist.”
For Louisiana librarian Amanda Jones, speaking against censorship at a public library board meeting turned her into a target. She was accused online of promoting pornography to children and subjected to harassment and threats. Her experience shows how quickly a librarian defending access to books can be recast as the danger herself—especially when a woman in a feminized profession refuses to quietly enforce someone else’s definition of what is “appropriate.”
… The workers answering complaints, reviewing challenges, explaining collection policies and sitting through contentious board meetings are disproportionately women.
The Freedom to Read Is a Feminist Issue
The freedom to read is also the freedom to encounter ideas that challenge the roles women are expected to occupy. For girls and young women, access to books can mean access to language for autonomy, abuse, desire, resistance and lives that fall outside traditional expectations. That is what makes censorship more than a literary issue; it is a feminist one.
A girl can encounter a character who refuses to stay quiet, recognize an experience she has never been able to name or imagine a life she did not know was available to her. A queer teenager can discover that people like them have histories, romances and futures. A survivor can learn that silence is not the only possible response.
The question at the center of Banned Books Week is therefore bigger than whether a particular title stays on a particular shelf—it is about who gets to decide which lives people are permitted to see, which experiences they are allowed to name and which possibilities they are allowed to imagine.
That is why censorship belongs in the patriarchal toolbox. Control the stories people can access, and you begin to narrow the boundaries of what they know to be possible.
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A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need.
Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. What’s your reproductive freedom story? Add your voice. Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
