Thanks to Caitlin Moran’s new book How to Be a Woman, feminism has been the hot topic here at Handbag Towers. And so, we decided we’d round up the best feminist books that you’ll want to read whether you’re searching for personal enlightenment or planning to take up the cause.

How To Be A Woman, Caitlin Moran, £5.99, Amazon.co.uk

While women’s rights is an issue that effects us every day whether we’re aware of it or not, these feminist writers might help you get to grips with what it means to be a feminist in 2011.

Find out why Team Handbag is proud to stand up and say, ‘I’m a feminist’...

Nina Power is fed up with the assumption that women have achieved what they want to in terms of feminism because they now have expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and boyfriends. In One Dimensional Woman she asks, ‘where have all the interesting women gone?’ encouraging new ways of thinking about transformations in work, sexuality and culture in order to support future feminism.

Nina tackles women dressing as porn stars, the obsession with the female appearance, the latest consumer goods, and the obsession modern woman seems to have with finding ‘the one’. Power also takes on Sarah Palin – and wouldn’t we all like to do that.

One Dimensional Woman - Nina Power, £4.91 Amazon.co.uk

Ariel Levy is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, and the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. In the book Levy explains why ‘young women today are embracing raunchy aspects of our culture that would likely have caused their feminist foremothers to vomit.’

Ariel explores how women nowadays see being comfortable with extreme pornography and joining in with wet t-shirt competitions as a symbol of female strength, a concept she is yet to be convinced by. Because, she argues, if Male Chauvinist Pigs were men who regarded women as pieces of meat, women are outdoing them to become Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.

Female Chauvinist Pigs - Ariel Levy, from £6.50 Amazon.co.uk

Delusions of Gender: The real Science Behind Sex Differences was shortlisted for The Best Book of Ideas Prize 2011, and Patrick Kingsley, writing in The Guardian, included the book in his ‘ten years of brain food’ – books that have most influenced thinking over the past ten years.

Cordelia Fine tells us that the idea that gender is responsible for differences in our minds and behaviour is an idea that’s popular, but yet unproven. Fine happily blows alleged brain-based differences between men and women out of the water and leaves you sceptical about the role biology has to play in the paths our lives take. It’s funny, forceful, and eye-opening.

Delusions of Gender - Cordelia Fine, £9.12 Amazon.co.uk

At the heart of The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Men And Women Today, Kat Banyard interviews a diverse range of women who have found themselves affected by gender inequality. These stories show how sexism is interwoven into people’s everyday lives, and how it hurts both men and women.

Banyard draws on her own experiences as well as academic research in this personal and political look at feminism, and even ends the book with a chapter on activism, including tips on how you can get involved in grassroots action.

The Equality Illusion - Kat Banyard , £7.01 Amazon.co.uk

In her 1998 book, The New Feminism, Natasha Walter argued that feminists shouldn’t worry about sexual objectification. In Living Dolls, she’s back to tell us that she was ‘entirely wrong’.

With Living Dolls Walter rejects ‘Biological Determinism’ (the idea that gender differences are physically ingrained, rather than socially constructed) and says they enforce a world where discrimination and inequality are dismissed as reflecting ‘natural’ preferences.

She also takes an in-depth look at our hypersexualised culture, and the fact that women in both the UK and the US are buying into the myth that it’s only sex that makes us valuable.

Living Dolls - Natasha Walter , from £11.01 Amazon.co.uk

Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune don’t think that feminism ever went away. Their book Reclaiming the F Word reflects where we’re at today, how far we’ve come since the radical 1970s’ movement, and how far we still have to travel.

Discover the demands of the new feminist movement, and prepare yourself to be rallied up and inspired to continue fighting your corner for feminism. Each chapter ends with things that you can do as a reader, to change your life for the better of women everywhere.

Reclaiming the F Word - Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune, £8.84 Amazon.co.uk

Whether you’ve spent the last two days or two minutes fretting over how your hair looks, or what you should buy to improve your life, you should read the beauty myth.

Wolf writes that beauty is the ‘last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.’ We’re taught that to be beautiful (as the alternative is an unloved life) we have to look young, thin, hair-free, and beautiful. What follows is a life full of insecurities, and women are kept firmly in their place.

Wolf argues that as we emerged from the shrouds of domesticity, the beauty myth arrived to take its place. The beauty myth, Wolf says, is that women must want to embody it, and men must want to possess women who embody it… none of which is true.

The Beauty Myth - Naomi Wolf , £5.84 Amazon.co.uk

The Women’s Room was a landmark in feminist literature in the 1970s, taking the lid off of a whole host of women’s frustrations, resentments and furies, and declaring that things needed to change.

The book follows the day-to-day musings of Myra, a mother and wife suffocated by her lack of choices during that time. Much has changed but unfortunately, some aspects of the book still have relevance for women in 2011.

The Women’s Room - Marilyn French , £6.69 Amazon.co.uk

At points The Female Eunuch is wholly offensive, Germaine Greer dares suggest that women bring domestic violence upon themselves, but back in the 1970s it was a key text for the feminist movement.

Greer argues that the nuclear family is a bad environment for the raising of children and women. As girls are feminised from childhood, by being taught rules that subjugate them, when they become women they develop a sense of shame about their own bodies, and lose their natural and political autonomy, Greer writes.

Germaine argues that change must come via revolution, not evolution and called for women to taste their own menstrual blood, and give up celibacy and monogamy. Greer didn’t call for us to burn our bras though, “Bras are a ludicrous invention,” she wrote. “But if you make bralessness a rule, you’re just subjecting yourself to yet another repression.”

When The Female Eunuch was released women had to hide it from their husbands in brown paper bags, and arguments and fights broke out at dinner tables because of its subject matter. While it’s not so controversial these days, it’s still a great book for getting to grips with the foundations of the feminist movement.

The Female Eunuch - Germaine Greer , £4.99 Amazon.co.uk

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale explores themes of women in subjugation. Set in the near future in the Republic of Gilead, where a racist, male chauvinist, nativist, theocratic-organised military coup has taken over in response to the degradation of the country and freezes women’s and other ‘undesirables’ bank accounts, and strips them of their rights.

We follow Offred (a patronymic name that means ‘OF Fred’ referring to the man she serves.) Offred is in the class of concubines (known as handmaids) kept for reproductive purposes by the ruling class.

Atwood has explained that The Handmaid’s Tale is a cautionary tale about what could happen if inequality continues to travel down the path it’s on. In a 1998 interview the author said, “This is a book about what happens when certain casually held attitudes about women are taken to their logical conclusion.”

The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood , £4.99 Amazon.co.uk