Need a Get-Psyched Reading List of Bad-Ass Women Protagonists?
I’ve got your back.
We were driving to the hospital for chemotherapy to help beat the cancer I was fighting, and we were blasting Fort Minor’s “Remember the Name.” It was 2014. That relentless determination and unapologetic power of that song boiled in my blood as I shouted the chorus. That boiling converted my fear into rage and strength. Miraculous.
Some years later, clear of the disease and focused on a final year of competition to win a contract with NASA to fly a deep-space robotic probe, with hundreds of people’s future jobs and dreams on the line, I looked for more inspiration.
Now, I wanted to read about strength in novels, to have the protracted inspiration of unbeatable female protagonists.
Turns out, they were hard to find.
Well, it was hard to find strong women protagonists. I love Spenser, and Jack Ryan, and Jack Aubrey and Steven Maturin. But if the story is only about men, and women’s characters are just sketched in, I feel alienated instead of strengthened. So many strong women protagonists, it turns out, are girls. I needed to see other people’s conceptions of courage and toughness for grown women, to inspire me. Why were they so hard to find?
I want a novel that more than passes the Bechdel test (The piece must have at least two female characters, they must both have names, and they must talk to each other about something other than a man.). I want the whole scenario, women and everyone fighting together against long odds, main topics of conversation the strategy, the leadership, the team, and scenes where women absolutely kick ass, in whatever format most appropriate to the plot and not limited by gender.
First stop: Google, of course. I collected lists of books with strong women protagonists. Inevitably, I started a spreadsheet so I could analyze what I was finding.
I wasn’t the only one struggling with this topic. Kelsey McKinney, writing in The Atlantic on July 9, 2013 in her article “It’s Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel That’s Not About Love,” says, “Of the 100 Best Novels Compiled by Modern Library, only nine have women in the leading role, and in only one of those books — The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark — do their leading women strive to do more than find a husband or raise their children.”
Awesome to have a husband and children. But I needed the kind of adrenaline that comes from a battle.
I ended with eleven lists* published between 2013 and 2023 of books with strong women protagonists. I avoided lists that covered only specific sub-disciplines of fiction, and I also excluded non-fiction. In the case of very long lists, I added only the top ten to my list.
DISCLAIMER: This is not a scientific study, and I have not read all the books myself.
The cumulative list from these eleven includes 105 books. Many books appeared on only one list, but several were repeat favorites, notably Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, which appeared on six of the lists. The only other book to appear on six lists? Louise May Alcott’s Little Women. I worried that we were in some trouble. I wanted women to fight for love, but even more, I wanted them to be fighting bad people, aliens, fighting for justice, for themselves, and for all of humanity.
The publication dates of the books range from 1748 to 2018, with an average of 1987. Five of the books actually have main protagonists who are male. The demographics of the protagonists, though, were what really caught my eye.
Forty-five percent of the books are considered Young Adult fiction, but even the adult fiction books skew young: 68% of the female protagonists are under 18 years old. Only 26% are people of color. I’m all for showing the strength of white teenaged girls, but why is that the top demographic? Is it hard to really imagine a grown Black mother fighting and winning? Of course it isn’t. But how many examples do we have to read about?
Well, I will tell you one: The #1 top rated book of the whole list is Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. The Help bumped Hunger Games to #2.
Here’s how I rated them. First, I averaged their ratings from all the lists each book appeared in, and then ranked them based on that score. Then, I ranked them by their rating on Goodreads, often more critical than other rating sites. Finally, I averaged those two rankings, and then levied a penalty of 10 points if the main protagonist was male.
Here are the top ten:
The whole list can be found in this downloadable pdf.
Now I’ve got my get-psyched reading list, and you do, too. I was prepared to be outraged, but the stats were better than I had feared. There are a lot of books with adult women taking on the world. Lots of models to consider, and take the best from. About a third of them are categorized as fantasy, so there are also many models of reality to choose from.
Happy reading, all. May your blood boil at just the right times.
*The lists used in this analysis are:
Strong Female Protagonist Books on Goodreads.com, https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/strong-female-protagonist
Buzzfeed’s “29 Awesome Books With Strong Female Protagonists” by Jarry Lee, Mar 23 2015, https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/86210.Buzzfeed_29_Awesome_Books_With_Strong_Female_Protagonists
Up Journey “20 Best Books with Strong Female Leads and Characters” Brookes May Jan 5 2022 https://upjourney.com/best-books-with-strong-female-leads-and-characters
Pulptastic’s “35 Brilliant Books with Strong Female Protagonists [updated March 3, 2022],” https://pulptastic.com/35-books-strong-female-protagonists/
Badass Female Leads! on Goodreads.com, https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/badass-female-characters
Bustle’s “33 Books That Every Badass Woman Should Read” by Emma Oulton, Jun 12 2015, https://www.bustle.com/articles/89474-33-books-that-every-badass-woman-should-read
Kelsey McKinney, The Atlantic, Jul 9 2013 “It’s Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel That’s Not About Love,” https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/07/its-frustratingly-rare-to-find-a-novel-about-women-thats-not-about-love/277621/
The Ultimate Heroine on Goodreads.com, https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1668.the_ultimate_Heroine
I Am Woman Hear Me Roar on Goodreads.com, https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/39797._I_Am_Woman_Hear_Me_Roar_
Reader’s Digest The 10 strongest female literary characyters of all time — Jennifer Brozak updated Oct 8 2021 https://www.rd.com/list/strongest-female-literary-characters/
Bhavya, March 22 2022, 7 Strongest Female Characters in Literature we all wanted to be, Women in the World, https://womenintheworld.org/strong-female-characters-in-literature/
