I mostly try to avoid talking politics on this little blog about books and travel and small joys. But I do have opinions that I’ve occasionally been unable to keep in. This past week has been a hell of a week – I think that’s probably not a controversial statement, right? (I hate it in this timeline, by the way. How do we leave?) Whether you’re happy with the rulings that have come out of SCOTUS over the past seven days or not, it’s been an onslaught of news and think pieces and I am exhausted. What it all boils down to, for me, is this: the patriarchy sucks and must be smashed. In the meantime, here are some books about how terrible the patriarchy is, if you needed to be reminded. Solidarity, sister.

Everyone already knows how boundary-pushing Charlotte Bronte was – Jane Eyre is recognized as one of the foremost pieces of feminist literature of all time, and Shirley, which I am reading now, features a protagonist who unashamedly calls herself “Captain” and occasionally uses masculine pronouns. (Yes, really!!) What is not always recognized is that Charlotte’s younger sister Anne Bronte was just as boundary-pushing, maybe more. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, my favorite Bronte novel of all, features a woman who escapes an abusive husband in a time when divorce was unheard-of. It’s a moving, galvanizing, unsettling read.

Again, everyone already knows about The Handmaid’s Tale and its profound, maybe (hopefully not) prophetic influence. Less well-known is Margaret Atwood‘s fictionalized account of a real-life murder case: Alias Grace. In 1843, Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper were victims of a gruesome murder. Two of Kinnear’s other servants, Grace Marks and James McDermott, were convicted of the crime – but the evidence against Grace was flimsy and based on unreliable recollections and narratives. Alias Grace is Atwood’s re-imagining of the crime, during the writing of which she revised her opinion of Grace Marks and her story. It’s a deeply alarming account of what happens when women are not believed.

For something more recent, the brilliant Natalie Haynes explores a group of people whose voices have been silenced for millennia – the women of Homer’s epics Iliad and Odyssey. A Thousand Ships is a tragic, violent, often gruesome, sometimes inspiring but usually devastating, look at the quiet background characters who were ignored in favor of Achilles’ tantrums and Agamemnon’s bloodlust and Odysseus’ refusal to pull over and ask directions. Read it with a box of tissues. Because the patriarchy sucked then and it sucks now.

DOWN WITH THE PATRIARCHY.