13 Banned Books by Women Writers That Refused to Be Quiet

Look closely at these banned books by women writers, and a throughline appears fairly quickly: so many of these novels and memoirs were challenged for being honest about things women weren’t supposed to say out loud, about their bodies, anger, histories and independence.

For each book, I’ve dug into what actually happened and who objected.

If you’re putting together a banned books list for Women’s History Month or Banned Books Week, or just want to understand why books by women end up challenged so often, this should give you a proper starting point.

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1. The Awakening – Kate Chopin (1899)

Edna Pontellier, a wife and mother vacationing on the Louisiana coast, begins to want more from life than the roles assigned to her, and pursues her own sexual and artistic awakening at any cost.

Why it Was Banned

Contemporary critics called the novel “poison,” “unhealthy” and “vulgar,” and the backlash was severe enough to effectively end Chopin’s writing career.

The novel later appeared on the American Library Association’s list of most frequently banned books of the 2010s, more than a century after its initial reception nearly buried it for good.

About the Author

Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was an American author whose frank depictions of women’s inner lives were decades ahead of the literary mainstream, and whose career never fully recovered from this novel’s reception.

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2. A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle (1962)

Meg Murry, a stubborn and brilliant teenager, travels across the universe with her younger brother to rescue their scientist father from a sinister cosmic force, guided by three mysterious, powerful women.

Why it Was Banned

Rejected by 26 publishers before finding a home, the novel has been challenged in nearly every decade since publication, with objectors alleging it promotes witchcraft or, conversely, that it blasphemously places Jesus alongside secular philosophers and artists.

L’Engle later reflected that “the act of banning is” the real danger, not the books themselves.

About the Author

Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) was an American author and devout Episcopalian whose fiction for young readers regularly blended science, faith and moral complexity in ways that unsettled critics on both ends of the religious spectrum.

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3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou (1969)

Angelou’s landmark memoir follows her childhood and adolescence in the segregated American South, addressing racism, family, sexual abuse and her own path toward finding her voice as a writer.

Why it Was Banned

The memoir has appeared repeatedly on the ALA’s most-challenged lists since the 1980s, most often over its account of Angelou being raped as a child and objections that the material “undermines” parental values, according to the National Coalition Against Censorship, which documented one such 1990s challenge in Florida. Angelou herself said she wrote about the abuse so that other survivors would feel less alone.

About the Author

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) was an American poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose seven-volume autobiography remains a cornerstone of American literature.

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4. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison (1970)

Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl in 1940s Ohio, longs for blue eyes as a way of escaping the racism and abuse that define her world, in Morrison’s debut novel about internalised self-hatred and beauty standards.

Why it Was Banned

The novel has appeared on the ALA’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books list repeatedly, most recently in 2023 and 2024, over its depiction of child sexual abuse, incest and its sexual content, which reported on a California school board’s 2025 vote to restrict the book to students 18 and older.

Objectors rarely address that the abuse in the novel is portrayed as a horror, not an endorsement.

About the Author

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) was an American novelist and the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993.

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5. Go Ask Alice – Beatrice Sparks (1971)

Marketed on publication as the real diary of an anonymous teenage girl who spirals into drug addiction after being unknowingly dosed with LSD, the book was later revealed to have been substantially written, if not invented outright, by its “editor.”

Why it Was Banned

The novel is one of the most consistently challenged books in American history, sitting at number 18 on the ALA’s list of most frequently challenged books of 2000–2009, cited for drug use, sexual content and profanity.

Its true authorship remains genuinely disputed, and it is generally understood today to be a work of fiction rather than a real diary.

About the Author

Beatrice Sparks (1917–2012) was an American youth counsellor who built a long career writing “real” teen diaries about addiction and other crises, most of which are now understood to have been largely her own invention.

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6. Forever – Judy Blume (1975)

Katherine and Michael, two American teenagers, navigate first love and, candidly, first sex, in a novel Blume wrote specifically because she couldn’t find a YA book that depicted a sexually active teenage girl without punishing her for it.

Why it Was Banned

Forever has appeared on the ALA’s most-challenged lists for decades over its frank, non-judgemental depiction of teenage sex and contraception, and Blume herself has become one of the most censored authors in America across her body of work.

Blume has said she wrote the book after her own daughter asked for a story where “people do it and nobody dies.”

About the Author

Judy Blume (born 1938) is an American author whose YA and children’s fiction has tackled puberty, sexuality and family life with a directness that made her a recurring target of censors from the 1970s onward.

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7. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (1985)

In the theocratic Republic of Gilead, Offred is one of the “handmaids,” fertile women forced into reproductive servitude for the ruling class, in Atwood’s dystopian vision of a United States where women’s rights have been entirely stripped away.

Why it Was Banned

The novel remains one of the most frequently challenged books in American schools, and in 2025 it was among more than 200 titles pulled from Edmonton, Canada school libraries under a provincial directive targeting “explicit sexual content,”.

Atwood responded with a satirical short story mocking the ban, and separately released a fireproof, “unburnable” edition of the novel as a protest against book-burning.

About the Author

Margaret Atwood (born 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet and essayist whose speculative fiction has repeatedly proven uncomfortably prescient to the governments trying to keep it off shelves.

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8. Beloved – Toni Morrison (1987)

Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman living in post-Civil War Ohio, is haunted — quite literally — by the ghost of the daughter she killed rather than see returned to slavery, in Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning meditation on trauma, memory and motherhood.

Why it Was Banned

The novel became a genuine flashpoint in Virginia politics when a 2021 gubernatorial campaign ad featured a mother who had spent years trying to have it removed from her son’s AP English curriculum, calling it “some of the most explicit material you can imagine.”

The ALA has repeatedly listed the novel among its most challenged books, most often for its depictions of violence and sexual assault under slavery.

About the Author

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) remains one of the most frequently banned American authors in the country, a fact her biographers and colleagues have linked directly to her insistence on centring Black women’s interior lives in her fiction.

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9. It’s Perfectly Normal – Robie H. Harris (1994)

This illustrated nonfiction guide walks pre-teens and teenagers through puberty, changing bodies, sex, gender and sexual health in clear, non-judgemental language, aimed at answering the questions kids are often too embarrassed to ask.

It’s published as Let’s Talk about Sex in the UK.

Why it Was Banned

The book has topped the ALA’s list of most challenged books multiple times since 2005 and has been formally banned by numerous library boards and school districts, most recently in 2025, over its illustrations and sex-education content.

Harris, who died in 2024, said she was warned the book would “ruin her career” before publication and wrote it anyway.

About the Author

Robie H. Harris (1940–2024) was an American children’s author and former elementary school teacher who spent three decades defending the book against censorship attempts.

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10. Push – Sapphire (1996)

Precious Jones, an illiterate, pregnant sixteen-year-old in Harlem, begins to find her voice and imagine a different future for herself after enrolling in an alternative school, in a novel later adapted into the Oscar-nominated film Precious.

Why it Was Banned

The novel was among 52 titles removed from Utah’s Alpine School District in 2022 under a state law targeting “sensitive materials,” a move PEN America called a “worrisome escalation of censorship,” and it has also been pulled from school libraries in South Carolina and California over its depictions of sexual and physical abuse.

About the Author

Sapphire is the pen name of Ramona Lofton (born 1950), an American poet and novelist whose fiction confronts abuse and trauma without softening it for the reader’s comfort.

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11. Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi (2000)

This autobiographical graphic memoir follows Satrapi’s childhood in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War.

Why it Was Banned

Chicago Public Schools ordered the memoir removed from classrooms in 2013 over a scene depicting torture, prompting a student-led protest and a swift partial reversal, according to reporting compiled by university library guides tracking the incident.

The book has also been challenged elsewhere in the US for violence and political content, despite being based directly on Satrapi’s own lived experience.

About the Author

Marjane Satrapi (1969-2026) was an Iranian-French graphic novelist and filmmaker whose memoir has become one of the most widely taught works of graphic nonfiction in American schools, bans notwithstanding.

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12. Sold – Patricia McCormick (2006)

Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old girl from rural Nepal, is sold by her stepfather into sexual slavery in India, in a novel McCormick researched by travelling to Nepal and India to interview trafficking survivors and a convicted trafficker.

Why it Was Banned

Sold was the single most challenged book in America in 2025, with 36 separate censorship attempts logged by the ALA, and Alabama’s state library service froze funding to a public library in 2025 partly over the novel’s inclusion in its teen section.

McCormick has said that banning the book “takes away a lifeline for readers who are experiencing abuse.”

About the Author

Patricia McCormick (born 1956) is an American journalist and novelist whose YA fiction confronts subjects (such as trafficking, self-harm, genocide) that she believes deserve a young readership precisely because young people are so often their victims.

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13. This One Summer – Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki (2014)

Two teenage girls, Rose and Windy, spend their annual summer holiday at a lake house, navigating the messy, uncomfortable transition out of childhood while the adults around them deal with crises of their own.

Why it Was Banned

The graphic novel topped the ALA’s list of most challenged books in both 2016 and 2018, cited for mature themes, drug use, and profanity despite winning a Caldecott Honor, an award typically reserved for children’s picture books, a mismatch libraries have pointed to as part of the confusion driving its challenges.

About the Authors

Mariko Tamaki (born 1975) and Jillian Tamaki (born 1980) are Canadian cousins and long-time collaborators whose graphic novels frequently centre the interior lives of teenage girls.

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More Banned Books by Women Writers

This banned books by women writers collection tells a consistent story: books get pulled from shelves most often not because they lie about women’s lives, but because they tell the truth about them; about bodies, trauma, sexuality, motherhood and survival.

Did I miss a favourite of yours? Let me know in the comments below.

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Fantastic Books & Where to Find Them

For more of what to read where, check out my full Travel Books Guide, filled with book recommendations for different destinations, the most beautiful bookstores around the world, tips on how to get the best deals on audiobooks and e-books, as well as more literary travel.