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Three books by women
Apr. 15th, 2026 12:37 pmI was reading three books at once, and they're all non-fiction books, written by women who are older than me, published recently (two in 2023 and one in 2026) and each includes discussion about what sexism did in the past and how feminism is making it better, but otherwise these three books couldn't be more different.
Bitch: On The Female of the Species by Lucy Cook, 2023
I bought this one during independent bookstore day on 2025, and it's been enlivening my bookshelf since. I started reading it in March, but then decided that I wanted to read and review Solnit's new book, before I finished a book that's been out for years now. Lucy Cook went to undergraduate and graduate school in biology a few decades before I did, and her experience was one of being one of the only women, and of the theoretical biology being really sexist. I had a very different experience in college: one of the "new" books Cook refers to is "Promiscuity" by Tim Birkhead, published in 2000, which I read while I was an undergraduate. It felt a little embarrassing, at the time, to be reading a book designed for a general audience instead of a biology audience, but it had good biology in it, and it was a fantastically fun read.
So it's really great to read another general audience book, over twenty years later, telling me about how much sexism in evolutionary biology I'd missed, and really highlighting what's changed.
Bitch is also a fantastic book to read if you want people to come up and talk to you. The cover is amazing: it's got a female hyena biting off the "i" in the word bitch, and more people have commented on what I'm reading than with any other book I've ever read.
How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. Deb Chachra 2023
Chachra is an Indian Canadian American engineering professor, she's using an explicitly feminist and worldwide perspective to think and talk about how our infrastructure impacts us, how it creates both peace and destruction, and both makes our lives easier and less equal. She writes quite a lot about climate change, unpaid women's labor, and so many other things about a equality and diversity.
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Rebecca Solnit. 2026
This is the only one of these three books I've finished so far, and I know a lot more about Solnit than I do about Chachra or Cook. This short book is one long essay, which I've already reviewed here, and has a much narrower focus than either of the other two books. It exists to convince leftists and progressive that change is possible, because significant change has already happened. The retrenchment is real, but so is the progress, and we must keep fighting to sustain an advance that progress.
Half of the world's humans are women, but when I was in school, the majority of books were written by men. I just googled it, and apparently that's not true anymore! Solnit is right: we are making a lot of real progress.
I just listened to a NPR story about how men need a little DEI, to get them into the caring professions like nursing, because men are apparently being employed at at lower rates than women, in part because the feminized professions are hiring more people than many of the masculinized professions, which no longer employee as many people as they used to.
It takes a while for my old brain to catch up to the changing present: as I was writing this, I was assuming that men still write more books than women, because that was true when I was younger, and I didn't hear or remember the news when it changed.
So maybe, in the future, I'm going to continue reading more books written by women than by men. That's a future I look forward to!
