A Feminist Reading Challenge: A Decade of Books Written by Women

How educational institutions shaped my early reading selections

As a millennial who graduated from the K-12 public school system in 2004 and completed a BA in English in 2008, I've read more than my fair share of literature written by men. During elementary and middle school, I had some freedom in choosing what I read. Still, most of the books available to me through school libraries, teachers' classroom shelves, or rural public libraries were authored by men. Later, as a high school and undergrad student, I had far less choice in what I read, with required readings being drawn almost exclusively from the male-dominated literary canon.

Looking back, it’s clear that I read more literature by women in college than I did in K–12. However, male-authored texts still made up the overwhelming majority of my assigned reading. In college, I remember taking one women’s literature course and can remember reading female authors in 18th and 19th century literature courses. These texts often challenged social expectations and gender norms in ways male-authored texts did not. But for every class that included a woman’s voice, there were twice as many courses that didn’t include a single female author. Despite a handful of meaningful encounters with women writers, it’s clear in hindsight that my formal education presented a narrow, one-sided version of literature—one that centered male voices and perspectives.

The negative impact of male-centered literature

The impact of spending the first twenty-two years of my life reading mostly male-authored texts is something I didn’t fully grasp until much later. From medieval epics to postmodern novels, the majority of what I was assigned in school upheld patriarchal values and treated traditional gender roles as the norm. Unsurprisingly, these narratives shaped my understanding of the world—and my place in it. Over time, I began to believe that books written by men were somehow more important than those written by women and that anything outside the literary canon wasn’t worth my time. 

That mindset stuck with me until I was almost thirty years old. It took me nearly seven years of choosing my own books before I finally started to see things differently. The more I read, the more I realized how many powerful, important works existed outside the traditional literary canon—and how much they deserved my full attention. I realized that women’s writing specifically holds more value for me, not because men’s writing lacks merit, but because the lived experiences of women often mirror my own. Women’s voices have long been overlooked, excluded, or forgotten in literary history, and that absence makes the work that has survived—and the stories being told today—even more powerful. These voices speak to me in ways the canonized classics rarely did.

A feminist reading challenge

At 29, I decided to spend the next decade reading books written almost exclusively by women. I had, after all, spent nearly thirty years reading literature written overwhelmingly by men; I was hungry, starved really, for stories that reflected real women's lives and struggles in the twenty-first century. Now, at 39, I can look back over the past decade and say with confidence: the voices of the women I read carried me through some of the hardest days of my life. 

I’ve been consistently tracking my reading for the past five years of this self-imposed challenge, and here are my results:

Year	The number of books read that were written by women	The number of books read that were written by men
2021	17	3
2022	13	1
2023	16	6
2024	29	4
2025 (from January to July)	14	1

In the past five years, I read 89 books written by women and 15 books written by men. This reading challenge has brought me so much insight, and I hope some of you feel inspired to try something similar, whether that means reading more books by women, exploring voices outside the canon, or simply being more intentional with your reading choices. Looking ahead, I plan to spend another decade reading books written by women and other marginalized communities.

Let me know what you think about this challenge in the comments and whether you’d consider spending a decade reading texts written predominantly by women.