I really enjoyed looking back on some of my favourite fiction audiobooks, so I thought I’d also pull together a list of audiobooks with a feminist flavour that I recommend.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

This was riveting and frankly horrifying. Criado Perez shows how our cities, medicine and societies are built around a model that only takes account of a default male participant and how the staggering gender data gap impacts on women all around the world. From toilets to transport, it left me enlightened and enraged and - oddly - relieved in some ways to understand to what an extent this world is not designed for me. Gobsmacking and essential.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

This is a spectacularly good audiobook, narrated by Elisabeth Moss. I read The Handmaid’s Tale when I was around fourteen but it is infinitely more chilling, on every possible level, to me now. Because: life and also: the world. I now picture the scenes of the book in a way that’s entirely informed by the excellent television series - and hearing Elisabeth’s narration reinforced that - but it was so brilliantly done I can live with that. Compelling, astute and terrifying.

The Witches by Stacy Schiff

I am absolutely fascinated by witch trials and Stacy’s masterful non-fiction study of the events in Salem is a great deep dive (although it is long, be warned!) It’s read well by Eliza Foss and really delves into the complex power balances of the story. In a puritan society in which women were restricted and impotent on so many levels, a group mostly composed of teenage girls managed to send Salem spinning - with the majority of the trials’ victims also being women.

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

The chapter about feminism in this seminal book was a wake-up call for me on intersectionality. Reni offers a concise history of how women of colour have often found themselves excluded from feminist movements and underlines why feminists cannot ignore other structural inequalities, including that of race, when campaigning for equality.

More than A Woman by Caitlin Moran

Aimed squarely at middle aged mums, this hit the mark so acutely for me. There’s lighthearted stuff - I have switched to knee socks at her recommendation and it’s a game changer - but also plenty of moving and serious material about ageing and parenting, particularly about her daughter’s difficult teenage years. The acknowledgement of unseen work done by women felt both buoying and somewhat (yes, still!) revolutionary. I loved it. Sign me up for Hag Club, I say.

Difficult Women by Helen Lewis

This was a really interesting listen, which filled me in on some formidable women and campaigns I hadn’t been aware of. I also found myself gasping often at how recently various shockingly oppressive laws had been repealed. Difficult Women covers marriage, sex, work and politics and it’s lively as well as informative.

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

I was inspired to listen to this seminal 1963 book by watching the excellent Mrs America on iPlayer. The ‘feminine mystique’ was the idea sold to American women of the 1950s that their ultimate fulfilment would come from devoting themselves entirely to their homes and families. Women were actively discouraged - by legislation, social pressures, advertisers, educators and the male-dominated media - from taking up careers themselves. Some of her conclusions feel dated (the chapters on sex, especially) but it remains shocking, acute and deeply researched. It’s a very interesting piece of feminist history with elements that still feel shockingly relevant over half a century later.

She is Fierce

Finally and cheekily, there is a splendid audiobook of She is Fierce, which I edited, read by Adjoa Andoh (who appears in my current obsession Bridgerton as Lady Danvers) utterly beautifully. Although many of the women from previous centuries wouldn’t recognise our idea of feminism, collecting these verses and those in She Will Soar felt like a feminist project to me - especially when I researched the poets and found out how much was stacked against women writers of the past, which explains what a wall to wall sausage-fest the literary canon is.

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