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7 novels about women fighting for a just society

TIMESOFINDIA.COM | Last updated on - Jul 5, 2021, 08:00 IST
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1/8

​7 novels about women fighting for a just society

Despite all the oppression, injustice, and abuse towards them, women have always managed to fight back and raise their voices against the patriarchal society. Being always considered as the ‘lesser’ sex, women across the world face challenges, bias, and sexism the very moment they start to voice their ideas and opinions. All these efforts have been put in for a very basic right - to be treated as an equal human. Even today when we are sitting comfortably in our homes, women across the world are fighting for their rights. To shed more light on this, here are 7 novels about women fighting for a just society.

2/8

​'In the Time of the Butterflies' by Julia Alvarez

The novel is based on actual events, and evokes the horror of the Dominican Republic under dictator General Trujillo, as three sisters die in a jeep "accident". It explores the cost of living under and resisting a repressive dictatorship brimming with torture, disappearances, and political murders.


Pic credit: Turtleback Books

3/8

​​'My Story' by Kamala Das

An autobiography in nature, the book narrates "the author's intensely personal experiences in her passage to womanhood and sheds light on the hypocrisies that informed traditional society." Das offers her readers an insight into many relevant issues that continue to be central to the lives of women in India.


Pic credit: HarperCollins

4/8

​'The Awakening' by Kate Chopin

As per the book's blurb, "this sensuous book tells of a woman's abandonment of her family, her seduction, and her awakening to desires and passions that threatened to consume her." This novel is all about a woman in search of self-discovery who turns away from convention and society.


Pic credit: RHUS

5/8

​'Libertie' by Kaitlyn Greenidge

The novel centers on a Black girl in Brooklyn after the Civil War, who, in the course of the novel, tries to figure out what freedom actually means to a Black woman. As per critics, the book is "a soaring exploration of what "freedom" truly means ... an elegantly layered, beautifully rendered tour de force that is not to be missed."


Pic credit: Serpent's Tail

6/8

​'A Life Less Ordinary' by Baby Halder

The autobiography revolves around Baby Halder, who was abandoned by her mother and left with a cruel, abusive father. She became a mother herself at the age of fourteen. She fled with her three children to Delhi, to work as a maid. The book is a look inside the world of poverty and how different it is for men and women.


Pic credit: Harper Perennial

7/8

​'Women Talking' by Miriam Toews

As per the novel's blurb, it "centers on eight women, all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their colony and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in. They meet secretly in a hayloft with the intention of making a decision about how to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm. They have two days to make a plan, while the men of the colony are away in the city attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home."


Pic credit: Faber & Faber

8/8

​'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' by Maya Angelou

In this first volume of her six books of autobiography, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American south of the 1930s. It’s her own uncensored account of growing up as a young black girl in the South during the Depression, raised by strong women in a racially divided country and facing poverty, rape, segregation, and discrimination.


Pic credit: Virago

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