I happened upon this article listing seven young adult (YA) books everyone should read and thought I'd share it. I'm not entirely sure that all of these were intended to be in this catagory we now call YA. I'm not even sure they were all intended to be called feminist, but they do qualify as classics with strong female characters and deserve a read. An excerpt from Margo Rabb's article appears below along with a link to the article on Huffington Post.
My new novel, Kissing in America, is a feminist story about a young girl coming into her own as she gradually understands the complexities of grief and loss and love. As I wrote the book over the course of seven years, I kept thinking back to seven books I read when I was a teen, narratives that seeped under my skin and shaped who I am. Although they're not all traditional YA titles, they have great appeal to young adults, regardless of whether or not the books were published or marketed as YA. (In the words of Patrick Ness: "YA is not a genre. It contains all genres.") I can't imagine how I would have survived adolescence--or adulthood--without them. Read more...
Source: 7 Classic Feminist YA Books Everyone Should Read