With a new year comes the desire to restart, rebirth and rebuild. In doing these, women must feed their minds with the right attitudes and beliefs to ensure that we do not make the same mistakes made in 2025.
Movies and books that center women are good ways to learn feminist lessons and unlearn former harmful ideologies.
To kickstart 2026, Urban Woman Magazine asked some women to share a movie or book that every woman must watch or read this year and why that is so.
Read their responses below.
RE
Ka Chi Foo Nu by Harachi Nnamchi. This book will remind you of the woman you definitely don’t want to be. If I want to stray from self preservation and autonomy, I’ll go back to that book.
PI
The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. I think it shows how women are molded by the patriarchy and how they suffer from it across the class system. It’s also a lesson that sometimes the system wins.
Like sometimes there’s no man at the end of your liberation journey, just you and the tribe you build.
MA
I’d recommend Tell Me Your Dreams by Sidney Sheldon to a woman because it’s thrilling on the surface, but underneath, it’s a sharp, compassionate exploration of female identity, trauma, and strength in a world that judges women. It also explores the shadow of trauma and it is empowering in an unexpected way.
AN
The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy.
I’m currently reading it, and it’s scratching all the best parts of my brain. It’s everything I haven’t been able to put into words in the past few years as my thought process has grown.
I’m not even done, but I’ve recommended it about 4 times.
IJ
Someone Great.
The movie is about relationships and moving on from it.
I watched it in 2024 or 23 maybe, I can’t remember but it’s cool to watch, especially if letting go is something any lady is struggling with.
And also Sex Lives of African Women and The Girl With a Louding Voice because they have themes such as freedom. Freeing yourself from the societal pressures that’s on women.
Someone great also focuses on the advantage of female friendships and how important it is to always have your girls around because when shit hits the fan they’re the ones to hold you together.
CE
1) Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez: generational read and the most defining book of my early 20’s.
The institutionalization of misogyny and the afterthought rendered towards women even in basic invention, this book is thorough.
Had a visceral response to this book, it forced me to read even deeper, to champion women better.
She was thorough in her dissertations.
For movie:
1) Legally Blonde: An ode to sisterhood, to self, to growth, to friendship, and dismissing stereotypes. Please remember to take certain parts of Elle woods with you in our dystopian esque society, one that reduces women to THIS OR THAT, this movie captured her as both, and more.
The central theme, to hold on to your core identity, even when you grow, the world will adjust. Stunning.
The first time I saw this movie as a little girl, it was a romcom. I am a young adult now, and I’m so glad that the romance was sort of a back burner. It celebrated everything I listed earlier without being pretentious or daunting.
OG
That would be Tomorrow I Become a Woman for me. That’s a novel. It teaches women about the ills that actually happen in the society, especially pertaining to marriage.
At the end of the day, it’s paramount that we should love ourselves for ourselves and not succumb to what society dictates for us.
BN
Mrs for a movie.
It’s an Indian one. I’d recommend it because it shows how sometimes women, mothers and wives help in making men useless to themselves and their future significant others.
It shows how much women suffer, how little they are acknowledged and their lack of autonomy after marriage and even before in their father’s house.
Angel Nduka-Nwosu is a writer, journalist and editor. She moonlights occasionally as a podcaster on As Angel Was Sayin’. Catch her on all socials @asangelwassayin.