Xiaohongshu
Women’s History Month, which takes place every March, is a time for celebrating the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society. The month is a brilliant opportunity to reflect on and recognise the strength and many accomplishments of brilliant women throughout history that are long overdue.
International Women’s Day, which takes place on March 8, is a global celebration with a focus on increasing visibility and calling out inequality.
The theme for 2026's Women's History Month is Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future. This theme honours the women who have and continue to reimagine and rebuild environmental, economic, educational, and societal systems to ensure long-term sustainability.
Events
Meet your Officer
Your Women's Officer leads the Union and their Networks in continuing to build an engaging, dynamic and rewarding community of students on campus and beyond.
Devi Sankhla, Women's Officer
The UCL Women's Network is a student community for anyone who self-defines as a woman. We're here to connect people, spark conversations, and push for real change on campus and beyond.
We work on issues that matter - from period product access and campus safety to careers and healthcare- while making sure different voices and experiences are at the centre of everything we do.
Whether you want to get involved in campaigns, come to a social, hear from inspiring speakers, or just find your people at university, there's a place for you here. Join us to create a campus where every woman feels valued, respected, and supported. Together, we can build a brighter future.
This Month's Must-Reads
Fiction
- The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
- Sabrina & Corina - Kali Fajardo-Anstine
- The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O'Farrell
- Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare - Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
- Prima Facie - Suzie Miller
- Heart Lamp: Selected Stories - Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhasthi
- I'm a Fan - Sheena Patel
- Swing Time - Zadie Smith
- Detransition, Baby - Torrey Peters
- Nightbitch - Rachel Yoder
Nonfiction
- Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Don't Touch My Hair - Emma Dabiri
- Caliban and the Witch - Silvia Federici
- The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law - Kate Morgan
- Educated - Tara Westover
- A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
- Against White Feminism - Rafia Zakaria
Fiction Spotlight:
Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
From major new storytelling talent Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, a blazing, bodily, raucous journey through contemporary Hawaiian identity and womanhood.
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth.
Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is both a fierce love letter to Hawaiian identity and mythology, and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory threatening to erupt with violent secrets.
I'm a Fan
Sheena Patel
In I'm A Fan, a single speaker uses the story of their experience in a seemingly unequal, unfaithful relationship as a prism through which to examine the complicated hold we each have on one another. With a clear and unforgiving eye, the narrator unpicks the behaviour of all involved, herself included, and makes startling connections between the power struggles at the heart of human relationships and those of the wider world, in turn offering a devastating critique of access, social media, patriarchal hetero-normative relationships, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.
In this incredible debut, Sheena Patel announces herself as a vital new voice in literature, capable of rendering a range of emotions and visceral experiences on the page. Sex, violence, politics, tenderness, humour—Patel handles them all with both originality and dexterity of voice.
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale is an instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from "the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction" ( New York Times ) The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast.
Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States and is now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans. The regime takes the Book of Genesis absolutely at its word, with bizarre consequences for the women and men in its population. The story is told through the eyes of Offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order. In condensed but eloquent prose, by turns cool-eyed, tender, despairing, passionate, and wry, she reveals to us the dark corners behind the establishment’s calm facade, as certain tendencies now in existence are carried to their logical conclusions. The Handmaid’s Tale is funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing. It is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and a tour de force. It is Margaret Atwood at her best.
Nonfiction Spotlight:
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today – written as a letter to a friend.
A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a dear friend from childhood, asking her how to raise her baby girl as a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie's letter of response.
Here are fifteen invaluable suggestions–compelling, direct, wryly funny, and perceptive–for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. From encouraging her to choose a helicopter, and not only a doll, as a toy if she so desires; having open conversations with her about clothes, makeup, and sexuality; debunking the myth that women are somehow biologically arranged to be in the kitchen making dinner, and that men can "allow" women to have full careers, Dear Ijeawele goes right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century. It will start a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today.
The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law
Churnjeet Mahn, Rohit K. Dasgupta and DJ Ritu
'A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.'
So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of Parliament in 1853. His words – intended ironically in a debate about a rise in attacks on women – summed up the prevailing attitude of the day, in which violence against women was waved away as a part and parcel of modern living – a chilling seam of misogyny that had polluted both parliament and the law. But were things about to change?
In this vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women whose cases became cornerstones of our modern legal system and shine a light on the historical inequalities of the law.
Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption
Rafia Zakaria
Upper-middle-class white women have long been heralded as “experts” on feminism. They have presided over multinational feminist organisations and written much of what we consider the feminist canon, espousing sexual liberation and satisfaction, LGBTQ inclusion, and racial solidarity, all while branding the language of the movement itself in whiteness and speaking over Black and Brown women in an effort to uphold privilege and perceived cultural superiority. An American Muslim woman, attorney, and political philosopher, Rafia Zakaria champions a reconstruction of feminism in Against White Feminism, centring women of colour in this transformative overview and counter-manifesto to white feminism’s global, long-standing affinity with colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist ideals.
Covering such ground as the legacy of the British feminist imperialist savior complex and “the colonial thesis that all reform comes from the West” to the condescension of the white feminist–led “aid industrial complex” and the conflation of sexual liberation as the “sum total of empowerment,” Zakaria follows in the tradition of intersectional feminist forebears Kimberlé Crenshaw, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Zakaria ultimately refutes and reimagines the apolitical aspirations of white feminist empowerment in this staggering, radical critique, with Black and Brown feminist thought at the forefront.
