I think those assumptions are things you can talk about in terms of feminism. The basic questions haven't changed: Do we choose the life of the mind or of the heart? Do marriage and children limit what women can accomplish? Do men have to make the same choices?

I have to second Cat's Eye. It is dead spot-on about girls and how they treat each other, and has some fabulous observation about women and how they are perceived by each other and by society.

It's really all about women and how they treat other women. Oh, and some stuff about art and how men see women. It's a novel I consistently re-read.

I pretty much love all Margaret Atwood's stuff because it makes me all thinky, and Cat's Eye is the one that randomly pops into my head with someting new to think about the most. Should make for excellent discussion.

I haven't read Cat's Eye in years. Maybe it's time to dig it out again.

erikaj - second Margaret Atwood & depending on your group's disposition, add either Handmaid's Tale or The Blind Assasin

There is a utopian called Herland, I think - not sure if it's been mentioned?

And Mary Wollstonecraft, George Elliot, and (arguably-not so arguably) Jane Austen, if you're headed in that direction.

Liese - speaking of female cyberpunk characters that don't come from traumatic backgrounds - America Shaftoe (Cryptonomicron, Y.T and Juanita Marquez (both Snowcrash), and Miranda (Diamond Age).

I'll suggest The Company Parade by Storm Jameson, which is a novel set between the wars in Britain. The main Character is a woman who leaves her husband and child in the country to come to London to become a writer. It's part of a trilogy, and I really became engrossed in that world.

Also, totally on the other end of the spectrum is The Passion According to GH, by Clarice Lispector. Lispector was a Brazilian writer in the 1960's and 70's. The plot of this novel is "woman kills a cockroach". It's been described as what Kafka would have written if he was a woman.

Clarice Lispector

she's amazing.

Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" and/or "Three Guineas"?

Or Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons, [link] which is slighter, but a good read.

Oh, man. That book, along with Bastard Out of Carolina and The Book of Ruth, made me wary of "Southern women's fiction" as a genre for years.

If you're willing to deal with a bit of preachiness, there's Tepper's Gate to Women's Country or Gibbon's Decline and Fall. The gender-role stuff is huge and explicit and a bit biased (women=creative force for good, men=you can imagine), but I found them interesting.

I recommend Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, or Grace Paley's The Little Disturbances of Man (which is a short story collection)