5 Books That Every Teenage Girl Should Read

Girls face a set of challenges that are almost exclusively unique to them and these can prove agonizingly destructive. Because, as a young woman tries to find out who she is, the answer often seems to lie in what she looks like.

These fragile years can skew a girl’s view of herself, her ambitions and her place in the world. So, while young women are bombarded by glossy magazines and advertisements, telling them that being beautiful and brainless is the most desirable state, it is vital to know that there are alternative points of view out there.

So, these five books are my recommendations for all teenage girls.

Oh, and for any mothers of teenagers reading: yes, she’s probably at that stage when she doesn’t listen to a word you say, believing you to be too “old” to understand what HER life is like. A gentle nudge in the direction of these books, however, may help you to get some positive messages across.

Despite the popularity of the Twilight books and films, we have to ask ourselves whether these stories are projecting a good, strong, positive young female role model. And, I would argue, that Bella is not someone who our girls and young women should be modeling themselves on.

Instead, we should be looking to characters like Scout and I don’t just say that because she’s a tomboy, but because she’s fiercely intelligent and brave enough to speak her mind. She also, albeit unintentionally, saves her father’s life and acts as something of an inspiration to him.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird is, of course, a wonderful book for many other reasons, including its message of tolerance and lessons in judging someone without, as Scout so beautifully puts it, “getting in their skin and walking around in it”. This is just as important and necessary now as it was 50 years ago.

It concerns me deeply that many women of my generation, and younger, would not describe themselves as feminists. In fact, they balk at the word. This worries me, because I think it indicates that the definition of feminism has been tainted. Now, ‘feminism’ is interchangeable with man-hating, which, of course, is ridiculous and could not be further from the truth.

In order for teenage girls and young women to get to grips with feminism, I believe it’s important for them to understand where it came from and the ideas behind it. Melanie Phillips’ The Ascent of Women follows the rise of the suffragettes, detailing the lengths women had to go to in order to obtain the right to vote, which many of us now take for granted.

I believe that it’s vital to never take for granted the strides that have been made in achieving sexual equality, to know that we're not quite there yet and to remember exactly what the goals of feminism are.