Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic. These are the well-known totems of the feminism, the books that galvanized a movement and defined a generation.

These totemic books are important because they make history. But what about the thousands of books that are not totems? Which books are responsible for more private revelations – for opening an individual mind, for making a writer and for changing the way a writer lives (and writes) feminism?

We asked three women writers to answer these questions.

Rachel Genn

In 1976, when I was six years old, I found a wooden truncheon hidden behind my parents’ wardrobe. It was impossible that it belonged to my father. In their marriage, my father controlled my mother in much the same way as a buoy controls the sea. The truncheon was a trophy, brought home by my older brothers along with a Bobby’s helmet that my sister threw out of the window in a white panic as if it were an unexploded bomb.

To our two brothers, physical supremacy was everything and dangerous situations were sought out to prove just that. They imparted information in a straightforward way. Always punch from the shoulder; never put your thumb into your fist; the head-butt is your friend; spitting can say so much. Instructions were equally unambiguous. Bring me a mirror, I can’t open my eyes. Light the fire then light this fag. Don’t tell Carmel that Pauline rang up. Pass me the Bullworker. Don’t tell Pauline that Carmel rang up. The year 1977 saw me still pretending I had a knob and at one point – in 1978 – I told my classmates that my sister was a stripper.

By the time I read Washington Square it was 1985 and I was no longer pretending I needed a penis. Yet out in the world I found it difficult to reconcile a young woman’s perceptions with the meanings I had borrowed from men; I could no longer explain myself with fighting talk alone. Nevertheless, Catherine Sloper’s plight under the cold grey eye of her father and the extremity of her suffering at the foolish hands of Morris Townsend disturbed me most of all because she didn’t fight either of them.

Morris bent his head and kissed her forehead. ‘When you are quiet, you are perfection,’ he said, ‘but when you are violent, you are not in character.’

The stillness was, and remains for me, unbearable. When Doctor Sloper spoke to his daughter I felt the beginning of a dreadful understanding and saw the cruelty that was possible in restraint. The callousness towards Catherine, etched in miniature, makes very much of what isn’t said. The control is rarely noisy but rather precise; she is at the mercy of the economy of her father’s irony and wit. A vista opened up to me, where the fine art to shutting up a woman seemed infinitely intricate and with the feeling of someone on the edge of a precipice, I felt nostalgic for that old wooden truncheon.

Hannah Gersen

In my sophomore year of college, I was assigned to read Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother. It was the first time I had ever read Kincaid, and I can still remember how unsettled I felt after finishing the book. The novel called into question the values I had been raised with – especially the feminine values of self-sacrifice, modesty and sensitivity. Above all, the novel questioned the worth and meaning of familial ties. I had encountered similar sentiments in books like The Stranger and The Catcher in the Rye, but those narrators didn’t get to me, because I couldn’t help seeing them as privileged young men, whose rebellion against familial duty had no real stakes.

Xuela, the narrator of The Autobiography of My Mother, was different. I wouldn’t say that I identified with her; I wouldn’t even say she’s a character, exactly – at least not in the modern, realist tradition. Xuela’s defining quality, apparent from the novel’s first sentence, is that she is motherless. Her lack of a mother doesn’t define her in the Freudian sense – it doesn’t affect her ability to love or feel. Instead, her motherlessness frees her from the genealogical imperative, so that she can clearly see the self-interested – and occasionally altruistic – motivations of everyone around her. To put it simply, Xuela is someone who doesn’t suffer guilt trips.

To live without maternal guilt trips was a great fantasy of mine, especially at age nineteen, when I was reminded, on a weekly basis, to stop slacking off and ‘being dreamy’ because my tuition was costing a lot of money. I was full of gratitude, but I didn’t know how to express it; my mother was full of pride – and also, I think, a bit of envy. The college I went to was a boys’ school until 1975, which means that my mother could not have attended it when she was college-aged. Her generation had laid the groundwork for the opportunities afforded to mine, and she was bitter about that, refusing to see it as some kind of worthwhile sacrifice. I resented her bitterness, because it made me feel guilty, but reading The Autobiography of My Mother helped me take it less personally. I realized that she was rebelling against a society that asked her to be noble when she was actually pissed off, just as I was rebelling against the notion that I had to be industrious, simply because I had access to resources offered to young men for hundreds of years.

Tess Lynch

My aunt told me a story about a kid who heard that if he stared at a parakeet long enough, blinking little if at all and maintaining a certain threatening eyebrow posture, the parakeet would die of a heart attack. The following week, curious and sceptical, the kid positioned a kitchen chair to face his grandmother’s parakeet Susie. He trained his gaze on the bird, who shifted its spindly feet and chattered nervously before dropping dead half an hour later, landing in a pile of its own feathers with a little pffff. The kid cried and couldn’t eat his dinner due to his murderer’s guilt. There was a formal burial.

‘What’s the point?’ I asked my aunt, who was ruminating, while making dinner, on the question of whether the kid should have been sent away to boarding school, maybe one with military overtones.

‘Don’t be cruel,’ she said, plugging the pork tenderloin with cloves of garlic. ‘You never know what will happen.’

Later, in high school, I would sit outside the admissions building, in a dark and damp alcove, eating my microwaved bagel and eavesdropping on a group of boys who parked themselves on a bench every day. They varied in number but there were always enough to be called a pack, and their conversations almost always revolved around whichever girl happened to be walking down the big cement stairs leading from the lockers to the cafeteria. Sally shouldn’t wear a skirt, with her legs as big as tree trunks; Clara sucks a popsicle like she really knows what she’s doing, har har. Sally shouldn’t wear a skirt, with her legs as big as tree trunks; Clara sucks a popsicle like she really knows what she’s doing, har har. The girls inevitably felt the eyes on them even if they couldn’t hear what was being said, and for the rest of the day they might glance over their shoulders or sneak off to check themselves in the bathroom during pre-calculus class. Why, I wondered, were girls always the parakeet in this scenario?

I re-read Harriet the Spy in tenth grade. It had been sitting on my tomboy/outcast shelf for a while, which is where I kept all of the books that made me feel better about the fact that I spent my free time thinking about the taxonomy of bugs, and I pulled it out without knowing that it would expose the gender dynamics of the high school staircase and call into question the ubiquitous male gaze I’d study in college as an Art History major. Nose in a book and hair in knots, Harriet shrugged off objectification, morphing from an elementary school student who might have grown into a high schooler at whom the boys would have tittered to a powerful and genderless narrator. She refused to perform, instead occupying a kind of director’s chair that most young girls are taught to forgo. It didn’t win her any popularity contests and certainly got her into trouble, but she’d inverted the power dynamic. Suddenly, the parakeet narrowed its eyes and was staring right back, ready for a fair fight. ■

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The latest podcast featuring a conversation between Rachel Cusk, Sigrid Rausing and Taiye Selasi.

Every few weeks we will be showcasing original fiction from an emerging writer, as part of our New Voices feature. The next in our series is ‘Fox Deceived’. Its author, Hannah Gersen, speaks to Roy Robins.

RR: Where are you from?

HG: I was born in Bethel, Maine, but my family only lived there until I was five. I did most of my growing up in Boonsboro, Maryland, a small town in the western part of the state.

When did you start writing? And why?

I started writing when I was nine, around the time my family moved to Maryland. That move made a big impression on me and I felt the need to write about my new surroundings as well as the people and places I had left behind.

How did you come to write ‘Fox Deceived’?

‘Fox Deceived’ is the name of a real house that my mother tried to save from demolition in the early 1990s. The name has always stuck with me, but I’m pretty hazy on all the other details. Writing this story was a way of reconstructing that time in my mother’s life. I fiddled with the time frame so that I could also incorporate contemporary themes.

Like Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (which began life as a short story), ‘Fox Deceived’ offers the interior perspectives, ideas and ideals of a middle-aged woman over a single day, as she prepares for an evening celebration. The story’s protagonist, Sandra, feels entirely authentic. How did you settle on the character of Sandra? How did you find the story’s voice?

Sandra is loosely based on my mother, so I built the character from the things I know about her and other women in her generation. I think of the story as having a comic premise — with Sandra as a neurotic character who has turned this simple choice about strawberries into a major ethical dilemma. I think that kind of self-delusion is funny and endearing.

You are currently working on a novel. Short fiction and novels are entirely different in conception, structure and scope. Which form do you prefer?

I prefer the novel, because the process is so long and unpredictable and there’s the potential, throughout it, to surprise yourself. Short stories, on the other hand, are more controlled: you’re aware of the frame the whole time you’re writing. But it’s very satisfying to write short stories because it can be a kind of game — to see how much can be revealed with just a few thousand words.

Who are the writers that have shaped your literary sensibility?

Jamaica Kincaid, Andrea Lee, Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson are writers whose voices inspire me. Whenever I read them I have the urge to get to work and start writing.

Every few weeks we will be showcasing original fiction from an emerging writer, as part of our New Voices feature. The next in our series – ‘Fox Deceived’. Read an interview with the author, Hannah Gersen, here.

Fox Deceived

Sandra was stuck at the traffic lights where route forty hit the turnpike. She was thinking about strawberries. The ones she had bought were not good enough. They were fat and red, beautifully ripe, but they were hothouse berries and most likely tasteless. Del wouldn’t complain, and neither would the girls, but she would know she could have done better. And this knowledge would spoil Sandra’s dessert — perhaps even the entire meal. Unlike Del, she could lie awake all night worrying about things: McCain or Iran or maybe just the groundhogs in the backyard — they were tearing up her flowerbeds, she was going to have to trap them. She supposed that her husband’s learned calm, his unruffled mind, was the thing that made him a good leader. When they had arrived in western Maryland ten years ago, his first act as school superintendent had been to fire fifty-three untenured teachers — the middling ones, as he put it. He hadn’t cared who was related to whom, or which tie-clipped County Commissioner had an ear with the School Board President. There was an uproar. For his sake, Sandra had kept herself pinned to the local gossip, tuning into the AM radio shows that stoked the local chatter. This was before the Internet was much of anything, thank God. They think you’re aloof, she would warn him, you have to show them that you’re not an elitist. Instead her husband had begun a ‘Campaign Against Mediocrity’. There was a slogan, borrowed from one of his management books: ‘Good Enough is the Enemy of Excellence’. Her daughters found it hilarious, they would use the phrase when their father flubbed the household chores, holding up stained wine glasses and pointing to dust bunnies in the corners of the living room. They were smart, pretty girls, though Sandra was careful not to let them know just how smart and pretty. She didn’t want anyone calling them stuck-up.

The light changed and the car behind Sandra beeped as if she hadn’t noticed. It was her grey hair – she shouldn’t wear it in a bun – they thought there was an old lady behind the wheel. She was heading home after a long morning of grocery shopping. Today was Del’s fifty-eighth birthday and her daughters were coming home for the occasion. She was going to cook a nice dinner: grilled vegetables and sausage, warm potato salad, green beans, homemade bread. For dessert they would have strawberry shortcake, which was Del’s favourite.

The more she thought about it, the more she knew the strawberries were going to be a problem. They were the centrepiece of the dessert — no, the very reason for the dessert’s existence — and so their quality couldn’t be overlooked. But there was nowhere local to buy good strawberries. While the organics movement had swept the rest of the country, Sandra’s corner of Maryland had somehow been neglected. She was lucky there were still so many farms; it was easy for her to buy fresh produce that way. But strawberry season was over and none of the roadside stands were selling them anymore. Sandra yearned for co-ops and boutique groceries that more cosmopolitan regions boasted; they would sell the strawberries she wanted. The closest equivalent was a Whole Foods in Frederick, but that was a ninety-minute drive away, and that couldn’t really be justified. Not with gas prices being what they were. Not with global warming being what it was.

She knew of one place where she might find the strawberries she wanted — a new ‘gourmet market’ called Horizons. But the store was located in a strip mall that Sandra had vowed to boycott. This was a private vow, but a heartfelt one, and she had kept it for almost four years. It had always been an easy promise to keep: Every time she passed that vulgar building she thought of the beautiful farmhouse that had once stood in its place. The property developers had razed it in the middle of the night. That was the detail that always got to her — that they had wanted the cover of darkness. What had they been afraid of? Had they thought she would chain herself to a tree? Lie down in front of bulldozers? She and the other protestors had actually planned to do nothing. By then they were worn out. They had only wanted to watch, to say goodbye. She could still recall her despair she felt when she found the site empty — a loved one buried before she could identify the body. And in the weeks that followed she would continue to mourn, feeling a sharp pinch of grief each time she noticed that a new phase of construction had begun. They built it quickly and then there was an exultant grand opening with hundreds of red, white and blue balloons bouncing in the air. Each of the stores had stretched a plastic banner across its windows; Sandra had counted four misplaced apostrophes. This was before Horizons had taken up residence in the building — the first comers were all tacky franchises. It was painful to remember what had been there before — the simple stone farmhouse with its melancholy eaves, the row of abiding, shade-giving beeches. One look at those trees and you couldn’t help thinking of Willa Cather, who had written so beautifully about the native beeches. At one phase of their negotiations, when they had given up on saving the farmhouse, Sandra had argued for the preservation of those beeches. Surely the parking lot could be designed to accommodate them? Had she actually quoted Cather’s words? It was so hard to know what would be deemed pretentious. This was the hardest part about being an outsider: no one believed your tears. It didn’t matter how much she loved that farmhouse; she was from somewhere else, therefore she was a fetishist.

And yet, this farmhouse had warranted special attention. For one thing, it had a name: Fox Deceived. According to local legend, the property had once been a chicken farm. When a greedy fox began to terrorize the area, the farmer gave up on poultry and started to keep cows instead. The fox disappeared and the switch was deemed a victory. To mark the occasion, the farmer had named the house Fox Deceived — a reference to the Uncle Remus stories popular at the time. Like many of the farmhouses in the region, Fox Deceived had often had a public as well as private use. During the Civil War it had been a church and later, a hospital. It was rumoured that President Lincoln had once visited and had delivered a consoling speech to the soldier-invalids there, but this had never been proved.

Sandra had fallen in love with the property on her first trip to the region, when she travelled with her husband for his final interview. That last meeting had been a formality; the real test was to see if Sandra would be willing to move to such a rural area. After seeing Fox Deceived and a half-dozen farmhouses like it, Sandra decided that she could. The romance of all those old buildings seduced her; they were so magnificent and unusual, and she couldn’t help thinking that if they’d been located in more prosperous regions, they would have fetched three times the price. They had actually put a bid on Fox Deceived but when the counter-offer came they didn’t match it because by then they had honed in on another farmhouse — the one they lived in now.

Sandra was approaching the mall now and still worrying over her strawberry problem. She looked for excuses to go to Horizons. If Del were celebrating his sixtieth birthday she could say, ‘You only turn sixty once!’ Fifty-eight got her nowhere. It was true that Horizons was the kind of store she should be patronizing. That is, she wanted it to be successful. She wanted it to expand, to open new outlets in less offensive locations. Of course Horizons wouldn’t franchise itself, because it wasn’t the kind of store that did that kind of thing. But perhaps other stores like Horizons — other stores from more affluent counties, other stores that carried different ‘other’ things such as, say, organic strawberries shipped down from New York or New Hampshire or wherever it was that strawberries were in season right now — perhaps these other stores would see the success of Horizons and say, There is untapped potential in western Maryland! ‘Untapped potential’ was one of Del’s phrases. Sandra realized that she was imagining the proprietors of these progressive groceries to be social reformers like Del. In reality they were all confirmed capitalists with gunmetal hearts.

Now she was getting very close to Horizons; she could see its tongue-red roof, its souped-up sign, the font some faux-naif Helvetica. She had always wondered what the place looked like inside. She’d heard there was a cheese counter, an aisle just for olive oil, and special shelves for foreign imports — biscuits from the UK, sardines from the coast of Spain. Once, she and Del had gone to stay with a friend in the south of France. There had been other guests, one of them a man who was dying of cancer. The man had eaten strawberries every day, big bowls of them, crème fraiche getting in his moustache — they had teased him about that. As it turned out, he survived. Sandra had always thought it was the strawberries. But it was sentimental to remember this story now — it meant she was grasping. She must not go to Horizons. It had been razed it in the middle of the night. She had not been allowed to say goodbye.

Sometimes she wondered what it would have taken to save Fox Deceived. A cynical part of her believed that if just one local person had been part of the protest, there would have been at least a compromise. But all the protesters had been outsiders. Some had been as green as Sandra, but most were people who had moved here in early adulthood, lured in for the usual reasons: marriage, jobs, real estate. They had found their place in the community and were respected. And yet they were always from somewhere else. They carried this fact with them, like a talisman — its meaning changing depending on the situation. Sometimes it was a point of pride, sometimes a chip on the shoulder. Sometimes it was nothing at all — or rather, it was overshadowed by other, more important facts. Del, for instance, never really felt it. He was the boss of so many people; he was used to being set apart. And the girls; they didn’t feel it, either. They had moved on now and, when they had lived at home, there had been school, where the rules were different.

She had passed Horizons. Temptation was behind her. But now she was thinking of Del. Her husband loved dessert and he deserved something special on his birthday. He’d been the sole provider for over twenty years now; had never complained, never searched for his soul. Was he not owed a decent pint of strawberries? It made no sense for her stuck-up ethics to get in the way of his strawberry shortcake; he shouldn’t suffer because of her foolish pride. Before she could change her mind, Sandra pulled over to the side of the road and turned her car around. She would go to Horizons just this one time. It would be a kind of sacrifice.

Sandra cautiously pulled into the parking lot; there was the danger that she would run into an acquaintance, with someone who knew of her protests on behalf of Fox Deceived. Sandra scanned the other cars. Nothing to worry about but she should be quick. She parked near a row of scrawny bushes — of course they were suffering here, any living thing would. For a moment she hesitated, thinking back to those Cather-like beeches, but it was too late; she had already caught sight of the produce displayed out front, piled high on to tiered wooden racks. The variety was overwhelming: Apples, blueberries, apricots, limes. Corn in its sheaves and tomatoes on the vine. Scarlet peppers and deeply purple plums. Above them, hidden in voluptuous awnings, were misting sprinklers, keeping everything fresh. The strawberries were in a corner, nesting in green cardboard containers. Their sunny, spicy fragrance brought to mind innocent summer pleasures: mint tea, picnics, badminton. She took the first pint that caught her eye and went inside to purchase them.

It was past six. Sandra was in the kitchen, fussing with the potato salad and waiting for Del to come back from the train station with their youngest daughter. The older one was in the living room, sipping at a glass of wine and reading one of her tawdry magazines. Sandra glanced at the clock on the stove — a quarter after. They should have been home twenty minutes ago; she couldn’t understand what was taking them so long.

Her strawberries were in a white bowl on the counter, washed but uncut. She would wait until after dinner to prepare dessert – she liked to have the biscuits warm from the oven. Sandra had so far resisted tasting the berries but now, out of nervousness, she popped one into her mouth. Delicious. She quickly covered the bowl with a checked tea cloth to avoid further temptation. Everything about the strawberries seemed sinful. Thinking about serving them to her family she felt almost guilty — as if she were making them complicit in her betrayal. But at the same time, she felt she was protecting them: they would never have to know what had gone into the dessert they were about to enjoy.

She decided she would wait outside; it was starting to cool off now, and there was a nice breeze. She settled on to one of the wing chairs on the side porch, breathing in sweet honeysuckle air. She’d planted the vine herself, when she first moved in, and now it grew up and around the porch’s thick, white columns. Above this porch was another one, identical but screened in, with sliding glass doors. Her daughters called it a ‘double-decker’, but it was known officially as a ‘Maryland porch’. Sandra thought it was the house’s best feature. It might even have been what convinced her to buy the place. But it was hard to say what made you pick one house over another. It was like choosing a husband. You had to go with your gut instinct.

She heard them in the driveway, pebbles crunching, two car doors slamming shut, and went to the front walk to greet them. They were both overburdened, not wanting to make two trips from the car, her daughter carrying a conspicuously large paper bag — a present for her father, Sandra guessed.

‘Sorry we’re late,’ he said. ‘We had to stop to get some ice cream.’

‘Ice cream?’ Sandra repeated. This made no sense. He knew they were having shortcake, had already complimented her on the gleaming strawberries.

‘It’s for the cake,’ her youngest daughter said, holding up the brown paper bag. It was then that Sandra noticed the emblem on its side: Benny’s Bakery.

‘Apparently it’s the best cake in Baltimore,’ Del said. His smile alluded to their daughter’s promiscuous use of the phrase ‘the best’. But Sandra couldn’t find it funny, not at that moment. She was thinking of her shortcake; how that sturdy brown bag had usurped its throne. Her dessert was now irrelevant; its ingredients would languish in her refrigerator.

Her daughter was oblivious. She was hugging Sandra now, and describing this party-crashing cake of hers. It was three layers, chocolate, and infused with something new and flamboyant. There was mint involved.

‘We should chill it,’ her daughter said, going into the kitchen. ‘The frosting is already starting to melt.’ She opened the refrigerator and then began to rearrange its contents to make room for her gift. Soon the countertop was crowded with miscellaneous condiment jars and other awkwardly sized containers. Among them was the pint of heavy cream. What on earth would she do with that now? And what of the strawberries? They would have them at breakfast, with plain yogurt; they would be thought of as healthy and wholesome. No one would notice their pedigree, their luxury.

‘Don’t forget the ice cream,’ Del said.

‘We should put that downstairs,’ Sandra said. They had a freezer in the basement, which was an indulgence — especially now that it was just the two of them.

‘I’ll take it.’ Del began to head toward the back stairs.

‘No, it’s your birthday,’ Sandra said, happy for a reason to excuse herself.

The basement stairs creaked as Sandra walked down and she remembered that she’d been thinking of having them replaced. Once she had thought she would redo the entire basement, but over the years she had become attached to its soft dirt floor and the strange, cobwebby smell of the woodpile in the corner. There was an old hearth down here, notable because it was original to the house. It didn’t work anymore, the flue had been stopped up for decades, but there was a kettle inside — a cauldron, the girls once called it — and a heavy iron poker. At the other end of the basement was a door that led straight to the backyard. Sandra liked to imagine the women who must have used that back entrance, going from sunny yard to basement shade and back again, carrying with them baskets of potatoes and squash, carrots and pumpkins. She felt a mysterious connection to these women, as if they were distant relatives. Perhaps this was what people meant when they said they believed in ghosts. Her thoughts naturally returned to Fox Deceived and it occurred to her that the demolished farmhouse must have had a basement like this one, and with it, a host of ghostly women. Then she imagined these women, wandering through Horizons, searching for their ancestral home. They were blue-lit and transparent, like movie ghosts. They would have seen her buying her strawberries, they would have bit their blue ghost lips in agitation; it was them she had truly betrayed. She was filled with new strains of remorse, and as she put the ice cream away, she reflected guiltily on her weak nature. Of course she had gone to Horizons — she couldn’t even give up her extra freezer. She wanted to stay down there in the cool, damp darkness and atone in some way, but she knew her daughters would soon call to her. And what would she say when they asked, What took you so long? That she was thinking about strawberries?