Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
bell hooks · 1981
The foundational text of Black feminist thought in the US. The site's anchor citation — almost every leadership essay here cites hooks somewhere.
Reading list
The shelf the networks share.
The books that come up in every network, every mentor session, every late workshop conversation. Substance, not lifestyle — Black women writing about their own lives, leadership, and ideas. The links go to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores.
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Curated shelf
The full shelf lives on Bookshop.
Every book here, plus more from the Black-feminist canon and leadership writing, is curated under our Bookshop shop. Browsing there supports independent bookstores and helps cover the cost of running africanwo.men.
All About Love: New Visions
bell hooks · 2000
hooks reframing love as an ethic and a practice, not a feeling. Required reading in the site's relationships-and-leadership track.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Audre Lorde · 1984
The Lorde canon — silence, anger, the master's tools — quoted across the network discussions and the strong-Black-woman critique.
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
Patricia Hill Collins · 1990
Standpoint epistemology applied to Black women's lives. The theoretical spine of the leadership curriculum on the site.
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
Brittney Cooper · 2018
Reclaiming rage as an analytical tool. Direct match to the site's respectability-politics critique — and to anyone tired of performing calm.
Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement
Tarana Burke · 2021
Movement memoir by the woman who started #MeToo a decade before it broke nationally. The leadership-without-fanfare text on this list.
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
Mikki Kendall · 2020
Working-class Black feminism's critique of mainstream feminism. The class-lens text the networks return to whenever inclusion comes up.
Thick: And Other Essays
Tressie McMillan Cottom · 2019
Sociology of beauty, status, education, and Black women's bodies — direct relevance to the site's class-and-race coverage and to the motherhood essays.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
Saidiya Hartman · 2019
Hartman's accessible work recovering early-20th-century Black women's lives from archival silence. Scholarship that reads like narrative.
Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen: The Emotional Lives of Black Women
Inger Burnett-Zeigler · 2021
A clinical psychologist on Black women's mental health, intergenerational trauma, and the cost of strength. The site's wellness-and-leadership bridge.
Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More
Janet Mock · 2014
Mock's memoir of growing up Black and trans in Hawaii. The identity-and-leadership shelf-anchor for the site's trans-women and inclusion threads.
We Should All Be Feminists
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2014
Short, sharp, exported globally. The on-ramp essay for the African-side of the conversation — and the gift the networks buy in bulk.
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2017
Daughter-raising letter format. The practical companion to the larger essay — used constantly in the motherhood circles.
Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga · 1988
Zimbabwean coming-of-age novel on colonialism, gender, and education. The African-side literary canon the site cites when the conversation turns to identity and the continent.