Books

Spotlighting books that tell important feminist stories.

Tools of the Patriarchy: What Book Bans Take From Women and Girls

PUBLISHED 10/9/2026 by

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.

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.

Another gendered aspect of the censorship story: the people expected to absorb the backlash. 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.”

Why Does Getting Menopause Care Still Require So Much Work?

PUBLISHED 10/8/2026 by

Around her 50th birthday, Oprah Winfrey began having heart palpitations so frightening she thought she might die. She went to five doctors; none connected her symptoms to menopause.

She happened to pick up a book that finally gave her a possible explanation. “Heart palpitations and sleeplessness were indications that The Change was coming,” Winfrey writes. “But no one, including my trusted doctors, had warned me (did they even know?), and when my symptoms showed up, we looked for the most dire explanation—heart disease—instead of the most likely.”

Later, a friend’s experience prompted Oprah to ask her doctor about getting on an estrogen supplement. “After I started hormone therapy, the world returned to technicolor. … For the first time in years, I was sleeping the whole night through.”

That sequence—doctor, book (or article), friend, doctor again—will sound familiar to many women who have had to assemble their own understanding of this major health transition that remains underfunded and underdiscussed, despite affecting 51 percent of the world’s population.

It also runs through two new books arriving this month: Jennifer Weiss-Wolf’s When in Menopause: A User’s Manual and Citizen’s Guide and The Book of Menopause: Real Talk, Real Science, Real Strategies for Your Next Chapter, from the editors of Oprah Daily.

You Deserve Better Menopause Care. Here’s How to Demand It.

PUBLISHED 10/5/2026 by

“As women we have become way too comfortable with suffering,” said menopause expert Dr. Sharon Malone, MD, at a New York City book launch event for Jennifer Weiss-Wolf’s When in Menopause. “Menopause is just the last on the long train of suffering stops we’ve had.”

Weiss-Wolf’s new book makes the case for changing that, from demanding better care in the doctor’s office to fighting for policies that take women’s health seriously. As she put it during the conversation: “We’re saying we demand to be seen. We demand to be heard.”

In the following excerpt, Weiss-Wolf offers practical guidance for becoming your own best champion and receiving informed, respectful midlife healthcare.

When in Menopause: A User’s Manual and Citizen’s Guide is out Tuesday, Oct. 6, from Sheldon Press.

October 2026 Reads for the Rest of Us

PUBLISHED 10/2/2026 by

Each month, Ms. provides readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.

I love autumn in the Midwest. It’s cooler, the leaves are turning and change is in the air. I also love reading horror and watching scary movies at this time of year, so you know I’ve included a couple spooky stories this month—and a couple nonfiction titles I think are particularly terrifying.

There’s memoir and history, stories and essays. Even the scariest are packaged in lovingly written prose that educates and entertains. And there’s a first: I don’t think I’ve ever featured the new releases of both a mother and a daughter in a single month. So there’s that. 

With further ado, here are the 13 titles I’ve chosen for the month. Read, reflect, learn, enjoy, resist and repeat.

Whitney Houston Was Always the Artist Behind Her Own Stardom

PUBLISHED 9/29/2026 by

In 1983, Whitney Houston appeared on The Merv Griffin Show to sing “Home.” The performance reveals the bright, complex selfhood Whitney sought to express even in spaces that were framed for her, not by her.

Whereas hosts today speak with artists themselves, not their male chaperones, the segment begins with Merv introducing not Whitney but Clive Davis, the head of her label, Arista, whom he praises as “a giant of a man, probably the most knowledgeable man the record business has ever known.”

The gesture was likely meant to secure the gentleman’s agreement, whereby Clive would break new Arista artists on the show.

Their exchange was as good a point of origin as any for the mythology always ready to spring up around the female artist: She is the raw material, the spark of gold, that the great man discovers and shapes.

Black women are often commandeered in this way, their rise attributed to some power beyond themselves, and to the men who recount their own crucial role to whomever will listen.

September 2026 Reads for the Rest of Us

PUBLISHED 9/1/2026 by

Hello, feminist reader friends! Each month, I provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups. The aims of these lists are threefold:

I want to do my part in the disruption of what has been the acceptable “norm” in the book world for far too long—white, cis, heterosexual, male;

I want to amplify indie publishers and amazing works by writers who are women, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, APIA/AAPI, international, queer, trans, nonbinary, disabled, fat, immigrant, Muslim, neurodivergent, sex-positive or of other historically marginalized identities—you know, the rest of us; and

I want to challenge and encourage you all to buy, borrow and read them! 

This month, it’s back to school and back to heavy book-publishing schedules. I can’t wait for you to check out the 15 other books I’m recommending this month. So get to it.  

Nine Books by Black Women About Travel, Belonging and the Search for Home

PUBLISHED 8/19/2026 by

Over the years, I’ve immersed myself in the stories of other Black women, not only as literary models, but as encouragement that the world might actually want to hear my story, my lessons and my truth. These books reminded me I am part of a long lineage of brave Black women who decided to leave home in search of adventure and themselves. The following memoirs, anthologies and novels explore movement across borders while grappling with history, race, identity, belonging, faith, joy and ultimately, home.

Skye Perryman on How We Turn ‘Anger and Sorrow’ Into ‘Action’

PUBLISHED 8/14/2026 by

“I know how you feel—because I’ve been there there too. On a bad day, and there are many bad days, our nation’s backslide from democracy into autocracy accelerates … Untrained, masked federal agents are running roughshod in our streets, terrorizing communities. Peaceful protesters have been killed. The government has been weaponized, and the Supreme Court feels stacked … It’s almost impossible to keep up; even harder to know what to do.”

So begins Skye Perryman’s sobering but hopeful and practical new book, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times. Though this handbook for hard times is elevated by a we’re-all-in-it-together spirit, Perryman, an attorney and president and CEO of Democracy Forward, doesn’t sugarcoat what we’re all facing.

“We have to acknowledge that there is no cavalry coming to protect us,” she writes. “No knight in shining armor to save us from the situation we are in. It’s up to us. We are the people who decide what happens next.” And while daunting, she says “it can also be empowering to know how essential we are in the fight for freedom and our democracy.”

Perryman fervently believes that action is antidote. By “reclaiming our collective power,” and by using the “tools that ordinary people have used in extraordinary times before us,” she insists that together we can “fight for freedom today, build for a better tomorrow.”

My Hysterectomy Was a Gift. Dr. Kemi Doll Shows Why Women Need to Share Our ‘Womb Stories’

PUBLISHED 8/8/2026 by

Determined to prevent uterine cancer deaths, Dr. Doll published A Terrible Strength: The Hidden Crisis of the Black Womb and Your Survival Guide to Healing in May. Both comprehensive and compassionate, the book focuses on individuals of African descent, showing how everyone will benefit.

Upon finishing A Terrible Strength, I took its message to heart: One need not have a womb to prioritize womb health. We can all join Kemi Doll’s Womb Sisterhood through the “deliberate telling and sharing” of “womb stories” with “our true friends.” 

Fortunately, women have already started talking. Personal testimonies changed health outcomes in the 1970s and ’80s—and they’re doing the same now. Earlier generations suffered through perimenopause in silence, but today, women in their 20s, 30s and 40s hear about not only hot flashes but also itchy ears and frozen shoulders. And, as a woman in my early 50s, I’m not completely in the dark about hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

Nevertheless, deadly silence remains.

I am childfree by choice, so pregnancy never fueled my concerns, but I became preoccupied with gynecology in 2017. Fibroids were wreaking havoc in my life, and I pursued a hysterectomy to end my suffering. As Doll puts it, this “definitive treatment” is “welcomed by some and mourned by others.” Though I very much welcomed a hysterectomy, I couldn’t secure one until May 2021, despite my best efforts. 

From now on, I will participate in the “deliberate telling and sharing” of “womb stories.” Doing so is difficult but necessary. As Doll explains, sharing our experience requires us to “shift away from a strength that withstands suffering, silence and pain.” It requires, in her words, “a strength that embraces our vulnerability and can demand better care from the larger world.”