Eleanor Marx's biographer Rachel Holmes picks works, from Jeanette Winterson to George Bernard Shaw, that address 'the greatest global injustice'
Life-saving … Jeanette Winterson. Photograph: David Levene
Six years writing the life of Eleanor Marx made me review everything I've read about fighting injustice against women and the arrested development left to men by patriarchy. Living with her and her radical friends brought an intimacy to my relationship with the trailblazers of feminism. I rather hope that Tussy – as Marx was known to her friends – might enjoy my choices.
What makes a great feminist text? The right values for sure. But it also needs sufficient wit, wisdom, energy and eloquence to inspire change beyond its time, perhaps beyond the imagination of its author. My list includes fact and "non-fact" – as I sometimes think of fiction – poetry, original English and translated writing. Two male authors have made the cut, though I could easily have included more.
Gender-based inequality remains the greatest global injustice and the struggle against it spans millennia and continents.
These books make us more impatient for change, but they may also be turned to in dark hours when it feels change might never come. Feminism is no impulse or outcome of modernity. As these books show, it has been around for centuries. We don't need to re-invent the wheel, or number what "wave" we are now riding; we need to harness an atomic rocket to it.
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What makes a great feminist text? The right values for sure. But it also needs sufficient wit, wisdom, energy and eloquence to inspire change beyond its time, perhaps beyond the imagination of its author. My list includes fact and "non-fact" – as I sometimes think of fiction – poetry, original English and translated writing. Two male authors have made the cut, though I could easily have included more.Gender-based inequality remains the greatest global injustice and the struggle against it spans millennia and continents.
These books make us more impatient for change, but they may also be turned to in dark hours when it feels change might never come. Feminism is no impulse or outcome of modernity. As these books show, it has been around for centuries. We don't need to re-invent the wheel, or number what "wave" we are now riding; we need to harness an atomic rocket to it.
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