Three Guineas
By Viginia Woolf

Woolf wrote this after receiving requests for one guinea from three charitable organizations. It's largely about education—women's education—and the fact that it really wasn't believed in. Woolf's position was that it was important, and that's become central to feminist thinking. Reading the book gave me the feeling that higher education sometimes stifled questions, and that the best type of instruction makes you able to ask the right questions and to continue asking those questions for the rest of your life. Three Guineas led me to Noam Chomsky and others like him—you know, the great dissenters.