8 Books About Women’s World By Women

On the occassion of the International Women’s Day, I have chosen eight books that best reflect the nature of womanhood and that are penned by celebrated women writers who are concerned about the women issues worldwide.

A little note: International Women’s Day should not be understood as a day in the whole year to gift flowers to women; quite the opposite, 8 March should stand as a disturbing day, a reminder that prompts the situation of women anywhere in the world. This is the day when we should urge solutions for the unsolved problems concerning the women’s rights and conditions around the world, especially in the third world countries.
The writers mentioned here are the women, who have used their pen and courage to communicate what their sensitive souls noticed and what has passed and has been passing unnoticed by many.

1) Mrs.Dolloway by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf remains to be one of the most influential feminist writers in Western Literature. Her unconventional technique of stream of consciousness serves a good deal in entering the mind of her female protagonists. Mrs Dalloway details one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, who tries to arrange a party, goes out to buy flowers, encounter her old love, and go deep in her memories and thoughts. It is a marvellous account of the gulf between a woman’s inner world and her exposed self.

2) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The semi-autobiographical novel is an account of the protagonist's descent into mental illness paralleling Plath's own experiences with bipolar disorder, or clinical depression. Plath committed suicide a month after its first publication. The book mainly deals with the situation of women in the 1950s America, and the codes of social and moral conduct for women.

3) The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on female African - American life during the 1930's in southern America, addressing the numerous issues in the black female life, including their exceedingly low position in black social culture. Because of the novel's sometimes-explicit content, particularly in terms of violence, it has been the frequent target of censors. It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.

4) The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
This novel by the Nobel Prize winner authoress Doris Lessing is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she keeps the record of her life, and her attempt to tie them all together in a fifth, gold-colored notebook. After the opening section, ironically called "Free Women", the book fragments into Anna's four notebooks, coloured black, red, yellow, and blue, respectively. The black is for Anna's memories of her life in Central Africa, the red for her experiences with the British Communist Party; the yellow for a fiction she writes that is based on the painful ending of her own love affair; and the blue for recording her memories, dreams, and emotional life. All four notebooks and the frame narrative testify to women's struggles with the conflicts of work, sex, love, maternity, and politics.

5) Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
The novel is a postmodern and postcolonial response to Jane Eyre, famous British novel by Charlotte Bronte. It is the story of the first Mrs Rochester, Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, a white Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in the Caribbean to her unhappy marriage and relocation to England. Caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which she belongs neither to the white Europeans nor the black Jamaicans, Rhys' novel re-imagines Brontë's devilish madwoman in the attic. As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals largely with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation from the perspective of women.

6) Other Side of the Mountain by Erendiz Atasü
This novel, which features the aspects of matrilineage, tells the story of three generation of women in the time of the foundation of Turkey and Turkish reforms. Parallel to its historical context, it narrates the modernisation process from the perspective of women, their adventure of integration to the new modernised Turkish society. That the story develops in three generations of women help the readers to see what sudden differences the period brought to the woman identity.

7) Memoirs of Halide Edib by Halide Edip Adivar
Halide Edib (1882-1964) was one of Turkey's leading feminists in the Young Turk and early Republican period. In Memoirs, Edib's account of her private life provides a unique example of a woman's individual and personal struggle for emancipation and gender equality. Halide Edip is best known as a Turkish novelist, political activist, and feminist. She lived through the period about which Erendiz Atasü was writing in her abovementioned novel. Halide Edip is maybe the most important and authentic woman in the Turkish modernisation and Turkey’s foundation. Yet, what makes Halide Edib a motif related to feminism should be evaluated within its historical context - nationalist struggle of independence, which required women to step out of their private space and go to the front, entitled them equality before the law, yet forced them back into their own private spaces at the dawn of the independence.

8) The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
An ardent feminist, Elif Shafak populates her novel with women characters of varied nature. This is a book in which women play the central role. An exuberant, dramatic novel that features vigorous, unforgettable female characters, the novel explores issues of gender and cultural identity as well as addressing contemporary political and religious topics in Turkey. When this novel was published in Turkey, Shafak was accused of insulting Turkish identity. The charges were later dropped, and now readers can discover for themselves this bold and powerful tale, one that confirms its author as a rising star of fiction.