Women Writers

Find books written by women, largely about women and other underrepresented communities.

‘Liberation’ Opens on Broadway—And Ms. Magazine Is at Its Heart

PUBLISHED 10/30/2025 by

The feminist revolution has taken center stage. Liberation, written by Bess Wohl and directed by Whitney White, officially opened on Broadway on Oct. 28, 2025, at the James Earl Jones Theatre, following a critically acclaimed Off-Broadway run earlier this year.

In an interview with Vogue, Wohl said she was inspired by her mother’s work as an editor at Ms.: “The arc of history is so much longer than we realize. Already in 1970 women were feeling frustrated, like, ‘When is this gonna happen?’ … And I think that that urgency really powers so much of the story of the play.”

Russia Was Once a Revolutionary Feminist Motherland

PUBLISHED 10/22/2025 by

Russia’s hostility to feminism today stems not from its foreignness, but from memory. A century ago, it was Russian women who lit the first sparks of revolution. On International Women’s Day in 1917, factory workers filled the streets of Petrograd demanding bread, peace and equality—an uprising that toppled the Romanovs and pulled the world into modernity. Under the Bolsheviks, women won the right to vote, divorce became accessible and abortion was legalized. For a brief, radical moment, the Soviet experiment made women’s liberation a pillar of the state.

Julia Ioffe’s book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, reminds us that today’s Russia rejects feminism precisely because it once knew what it could do: ignite revolutions, upend hierarchies and reimagine power itself.

September 2025 Reads for the Rest of Us

PUBLISHED 9/3/2025 by and

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

If you’ve read this column before or follow book publishing, you may know that September is a giant month for new releases. Excellent books are being released this month that you won’t see on this list, and you may wonder why we neglected to include them. Most of the time, this is intentional. We will forego a book with a Big Name publisher and lots of marketing power behind it for a book published by an indie label. We may opt to include a debut author instead of someone who’s got a few books to their name. No matter what, we put time and effort into ensuring we choose the right books for the list and you, our readers.  

Let’s get into the 25 books we’ve chosen to highlight for September 2025. 

How Being Slut-Shamed by The New York Times Brought Out the Feminist in Joan Didion

PUBLISHED 7/23/2025 by

In 1984, Joan Didion’s best-selling, critically acclaimed books didn’t stop a respected critic such as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt from presuming he had the right to criticize the publicity photo for her novel Democracy. The black-and-white image, he wrote, “presents the author wading in a skirt and sweater that cling sufficiently to reveal somewhat more of the anatomy than one is accustomed to seeing in a dust-jacket portrait”—then, without providing evidence, that “Miss Didion’s dust-jacket image was thought to be in questionable taste by a number of fastidious observers, including her English publisher.”

Joan Didion’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, wrote a long, fuming, deadly serious and rather hilarious letter to Lehmann-Haupt defending his wife’s honor, arguing he “would stick pasties on the Venus de Milo and call it taste. It is a taste I want no part of.”

Lehmann-Haupt conceded defeat. The New York Times critic responded, “Dear John: Thanks for writing. I guess you’re right.” 

The Audacity of Wanting: Shannon Watts’ Blueprint for Women to Live on Their Own Terms

PUBLISHED 7/7/2025 by

Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, a 13-year-old grassroots organization that advocates for common-sense gun safety laws, knows what it means to take personal and political risks. Her second book, Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age, is part memoir and part inspirational self-help tract. Her goal? To encourage women “to live a life on fire.”

“Too often, as women, we are complicit in our own oppression. We need to ask ourselves the same question each and every day: ‘What do I want?’ If we did this, it would alter family systems and political systems.”

RSVP for Shannon Watts’ book launch celebration at the Ms. magazine offices in Los Angeles on Thursday, July 10.

Why Authoritarians Always Come for Gender Studies First

PUBLISHED 6/26/2025 by

We all know that Trump and the Republican Party are coming for higher education. But, what many don’t know is that in this century, authoritarians come for gender studies first.

I would be nearly hopeless about the future of gender studies in the U.S. if not for a valuable lesson I learned teaching gender studies in Russia: Critical thinking is difficult to destroy. It will fester in the cracks and fissures left behind by the regime. And, when the regime collapses—as all authoritarian regimes eventually do—gender studies will return with the skills and courage to teach about how the world really is, not how many on the far right wish it would be.