Books to Inspire on International Women's Day

Shrill - Lindy West

‘Women are told, from birth, that it’s our job to be small: physically small, small in our presence, and small in our impact on the world. We’re supposed to spend our lives passive, quiet, and hungry. With this book, I want to obliterate that expectation.’

Bad Feminist - Roxane Gay

‘I am just one woman trying to make sense of this world we live in. I’m raising my voice to show all the ways we have room to want more, to do better.’

The Hate Race - Maxine Beneba Clarke

‘I wrote this book because I believe stories like these need to be written into Australian letters. Stories like mine need to be heard, and seen, both by those outside of them and those with similar tales.’

Bossypants - Tina Fey

‘…my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this person in between me and what I want to do?’…Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.’

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl - Carrie Brownstein

‘[About Bikini Kill song ‘I Feel Blind’] To me, that perfectly summed up being a young girl. It was the first time someone put into words my sense of alienation, the feeling that all these institutions and stories we’d been taught to hold as sacred often had very little to do with my own lived experiences’

Lab Girl - Hope Jahren

‘I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman…Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along.’

The Bletchley Girls - Tessa Dunlop

‘The Bletchley Girls featured here were just that, girls. Very young, with simple classroom skills…It was young girls who operated the unwieldy machinery, made sense of wireless sound waves, and sorted the decoded messages that would eventually help lead the Allies to victory and the world into the information age.’

Queen Bees - Sian Evans

‘Between the wars these six singular women chose to collect, to cultivate and to influence prominent people in the diverse fields of British society where they hoped to make an impact. It is important to assess their legacy, their achievements and their failures, to understand how they changed society and to appreciate the motivations that drove them.’

I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb

‘Peace in every home, every street, every village, every country - this is my dream. Education for every boy and every girl in the world. To sit down on a chair and read my books with all my friends at school is my right. To see each and every human being with a smile of happiness is my wish.’