The F Word - Recommendations Library
Continuous education is one of the gifts we can decide to pursue through courses, books, movies, music or other art forms.
Below is our gift to you - all the things that have inspired and helped us educate ourselves along this journey. Our favourite education pieces that we used to create this capsule, challenging us or giving directions along the way.
Have we missed anything? Email us at radicalsignals@gmail.com and we’ll add it to the list!
We recommend sourcing your books from independent stores (like Bookshop.org - not an ad) to support your local communities.
Books
📚 Inferior by Angela Saini
Why should women still have to prove they’re equal?
Inferior dives into the science that shaped — and warped — our understanding of gender. Angela Saini unpacks centuries of biased research used to claim that women are naturally less intelligent, less capable, or just “made for housework.” From neuroscience to anthropology, she tears apart lazy assumptions and shows how patriarchy has been disguised as biology. A must-read that challenges old narratives with hard facts. If you've ever been told that “women just aren’t wired the same,” read this book.
📚 Feminism, Defeated by Kate M. Phelan
Feminism has been defeated. Once a politics, feminism is now a philosophy, an epistemology, a method. Once for women, it is now for everyone. Once in pursuit of liberation, it now seeks only inclusion. In Feminism, Defeated, Kate Phelan traces the depoliticisation and ultimately, the defeat of feminism. She recovers the second-wave view of men and women as sex classes, enemies, political kinds, a view more radical than the contemporary view of men and women as social constructs. She also describes how poststructuralism displaced this view and replaced it with another. In this view, the sex/gender binary constructs men and women, and excludes the gender nonconforming.
As this view replaced the second-wave one, the injustice of men’s oppression of women was replaced by that of exclusion, and the goal of women’s liberation was replaced by that of inclusion. Thus did feminism become the trans-inclusionary movement as we now know it, and Phelan shows that this shift was not the progression of feminism; it was the betrayal of it. In this highly original and persuasive study, she argues that the recent emergence of a new gender-critical feminism presents a moment of opportunity to reclaim feminism’s political project.
📚 My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem - writer, activist, organiser, and one of the most inspiring leaders in the world—now tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of how her early years led her to live an on-the-road kind of life, travelling, listening to people, learning, and creating change. She reveals the story of her own growth in tandem with the growth of an ongoing movement for equality. This is the story at the heart of My Life on the Road.
📚 Hindutva and Violence Against Women by Brinda Karat
In this monograph, one of India’s leading, most committed political and human rights activists examines how women’s safety, dignity and security have been undermined in the decade since the Hindu right rose to near-absolute power. Hindutva, the guiding philosophy of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the rest of the Sangh Parivar, is at its core a majoritarian, militant and regressive thought system that draws inspiration from casteist, communal and misogynistic texts and ideologues. While injustice in cases of violence against India, writes Brinda Karat, the political supremacy of Hindutva since 2014 has changed the nature and extent of this injustice.
📚 Feminist History for Every Day of the Year: 366 Incredible Women, From Boudica To Taylor Swift
From Mary Anning to Simone Biles, Billie Eilish to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Malala Yousafzai to Mary Wollstonecraft, discover the stories of 366 incredible women throughout history. Within these pages, you'll find well-known figures and unsung heroes, key cultural moments and forgotten stories, spanning across the world and through time, from ancient times to the modern day. With a piece of history for every day of the year, this is the perfect book to dip into time and time again. Full of quotes, poems, illustrations and pictures, Feminist History for Every Day of the Year is for all ages, celebrating and championing an inspiring history that is relevant to us all.
📚 How We Get Free by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organisations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organisation and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles.
📚 Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women’s lives.
📚 Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Twelve very different people, mostly black and female, more than a hundred years of change, and one sweeping, vibrant, glorious portrait of contemporary Britain. Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country: ever-dynamic, ever-expanding and utterly irresistible.
Podcasts
🎙️ Women’s Hour by BBC - listen here
Woman’s Hour, presented by Emma Barnett and Anita Rani, reliably shares topical conversations to inform, challenge and inspire.
🎙️ Maiden Mother Matriarch with Louise Perry - listen here
A podcast about sexual politics, hosted by Louise Perry.
🎙️ The Waves Final Episode - listen here
On the last episode of The Waves, senior producer Cheyna Roth and original Waves host June Thomas discuss what feminism means, the historical problems with the word, who should get to call themselves feminist, and so much more.
Wiktoria Bulik
& Agata Bendik
Co-Founders
