Books

Steinem’s final memoir, published weeks after her death at 92. She returns to her early life and to the equal-rights movements she helped build, and looks forward rather than back — what the fight still needs, and who will carry it. The last chance to hear directly from the voice that shaped fifty years of American feminism.

Research professor Brené Brown’s guide to courageous leadership — vulnerability, trust, difficult conversations, and clarity of values. Powerful for women at any stage of their careers or community involvement, including those taking on leadership roles in midlife.

Gail Sheehy, author of the landmark Passages, tells her own story: coming of age in postwar America, building a journalism career, navigating love and loss, and arriving at the second half of life with the same fierce curiosity she brought to her decades of reporting on how Americans grow and change.

Geriatrician Louise Aronson spent 25 years caring for older patients before writing this Pulitzer finalist — part memoir, part manifesto — arguing that America’s medical system is failing its elders and that old age deserves to be treated as a distinct, valuable stage of human life, not a problem to be managed.

A powerful corrective to decades of fear around hormone therapy. Presents the science showing estrogen is safe and beneficial for most women. Essential before any HRT decision.

Media scholar Susan J. Douglas examines how women who came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s are now rewriting the script for older womanhood — rejecting the invisibility and passivity assigned to them by culture while honestly confronting the realities of aging. A sociological portrait of a generation refusing to go quietly.

Six long essays taking apart the invented categories of gender and race, including the original Doing Sixty. Written with what one reviewer called cool humour and rich intellect, and notable here for treating age as a political construction rather than a private misfortune.

Dr. Stacy Sims applies her female physiology expertise specifically to the menopausal transition, with training and nutrition protocols designed to maintain strength, power, and athletic performance through and beyond menopause.

Gail Collins surveys three centuries of American history to show that older women have always been more influential, more inventive, and more powerful than the culture acknowledges. From colonial grandmothers to suffragists to modern activists, No Stopping Us Now recovers a hidden history of elder women who refused to step aside.

The collection that made her name, in its third edition with a foreword by Emma Watson. The famous undercover Playboy Bunny exposé is here alongside the essays that argued for a world run “as if women mattered.” Half a million copies since 1983, and the foundation everything later in her work stands on.

Essays on creativity, beauty, purpose, and power for women after sixty. Featuring profiles of trailblazing women and questions for reflection, Rock On invites readers to reignite their creative spark, advocate for better healthcare, make confident money choices, and live out loud.

The classic 12-week program for recovering your creative self. Particularly powerful for women in midlife who have spent decades putting others first and are ready to reclaim — or discover for the first time — their creative lives.

Sonya Renee Taylor’s powerful call for radical self-love challenges us to examine how body shame and sizeism shape our lives — and offers a framework for rejecting these systems. Particularly valuable for women navigating body changes in midlife.

Barbara Walker reclaims the ‘crone’ archetype from its derogatory associations, presenting the post-menopausal woman as a being of power, wisdom, and spiritual authority in pre-patriarchal traditions. A foundational feminist text on aging.

Neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi reveals how menopause reshapes the brain and what women can do to protect their cognitive health. Groundbreaking and empowering.

A collected, illustrated gathering of Steinem’s sharpest lines, with new essays framing them, published when she was eighty-five. Short enough to dip into and quotable by design — five decades of organising distilled into the sentences people actually remember.

Dr. Christiane Northrup treats menopause as a powerful life transition, not a medical problem. Drawing on medicine, psychology, and holistic healing, she guides women through the physical and emotional landscape of the change.

Neuroscientist Dr. Sarah McKay traces the female brain across the whole span of a woman’s life — from girlhood and the menstrual cycle through pregnancy, menopause, and old age — showing how hormones, experience, and biology shape the mind at every stage. For readers over 50, the later chapters on menopause and healthy brain aging are especially resonant, set in the fuller context of a lifetime.

Myrlie Evers-Williams recounts her journey from marriage to civil-rights leader Medgar Evers and his assassination through single motherhood, education, public service, and leadership of the NAACP. Her memoir is a candid account of resilience, self-discovery, and becoming a powerful woman in her own right.

This visually stunning book includes photographs and quotes from women in from their sixties all the way to a hundred years of age.  Some of these women are well-known and others are obscure.  All show the beauty of women as we grow in age and wisdom.  Try this book as a stimulus to your own creativity as a writer and artist.

Suze Orman addresses the financial challenges unique to women — pay gaps, caregiving breaks, longer lifespans — with a concrete action plan for retirement, savings, and financial independence.

Marienau and Zelitzky have spent years interviewing women between seventy and one hundred and ten for their podcast, and this is the book that came out of it: artists, activists and entrepreneurs who are visibly not finished. Built against the assumption that the later decades are a subtraction.