Nine novels about women fighting for a just society

Claire Boyles is a writer, mom, and former farmer who lives and writes in Colorado on the traditional, ancestral, and stolen lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. She received my MFA from Colorado State University in May of 2018. Her new short story collection is Site Fidelity. She has a novel on the way, too. Boyles's writing has appeared in VQR, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, and Masters Review, among others. She writes movies for the Hallmark Channel and is a proud member of the WGAW.

At Electric Lit Boyles tagged nine novels about women activists, including:

Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth

Barn 8 is a novel about a direct-action protest in which a group of activists—including Janey and Cleveland, both auditors for the American egg industry—try to liberate all of the chickens on a single egg farm in one night. The story is told by a variety of narrators, some central to the plot, some more peripheral, allowing a wide range of perspectives and judgments including those of the chickens themselves, whose consciousness and eventual transformation outlasts the human fallibility the botched heist reveals.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue