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During the 2024-2025 school year, PEN America documented 6,870 book bans across eighty-seven public K-12 school districts in twenty-seven U.S. states. This is actually a decrease from the 2023-2024 school cycle, during which there were 10,046 individual book bans in U.S. public schools. In 2025, the Department of Education issued a dismissal of several book bans’ legal complaints on censorship grounds while at the same time limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that foster acceptance in classrooms.
For Texas students, the recent Senate Bill 13, which went into effect last September, limits “indecent” and “profane” material in public school classrooms. Educators have argued that the bill’s phrasing could be interpreted arbitrarily by administrators and parents, allowing any title to be banned. Since 2025, teachers across the Lone Star State have been forced to either clear their shelves or openly challenge school administrators and face being fired. And Texas isn’t the only Republican-led state where teachers have feared reprisal as a result of book bans: In Florida alone, more than 2,300 titles were targeted in public school classrooms during the past school year.
The content being targeted with these bans is far from random: Across the country, book banning efforts have been noticeably concentrated on stories that center women’s experiences, including classics like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, as well as more contemporary titles like Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb. Bans like these limit female students’ access to texts that reflect and engage with their experiences as young women, as well as directly attack discussions around female identity, especially those from women who come from marginalized backgrounds. These stories often discuss systematic injustice, patriarchal norms, the stripping of bodily autonomy, and domestic violence.
Raya Patel, a high school senior from Ridge Point High School in Missouri City, Texas, says her perspective on book bans is shaped by the lack of women-centered stories she has encountered in her classrooms.
“When it comes to reading and learning from literature, sure, we’ve read the classics, from Shakespeare to Reginald Rose, but I have never encountered any classic literature from a woman’s perspective,” Patel tells The Progressive. “We don’t get to see what that looks like—even in history classes, every book is written from a male perspective. If we don’t take the initiative to venture past even what is simply given to us, we don’t get to understand.”
For Alisa Chang, a high school senior at Valencia High School in Placentia, California, book bans are less common in her state after recent legislation that deters school districts from censoring books. “My classes tend to touch on a wide range of themes, so we do discuss stories of women,” she says. “They aren’t exactly common, but are present in the selected books each year.”
While students who live in less restrictive states face fewer book bans, the lack of inclusion of women’s stories in school curricula is still a concern. A report by the National Women’s History Museum found that where state curriculum standards focus on women in history, they “overwhelmingly” emphasize women’s domestic roles, rather than their contributions as workers or activists. What’s more, of the individual women referenced by name in the curriculum, 63 percent are white, while women of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage make up less than 1 percent. Chang, who is Chinese, says she has seen instances in which books that discuss Chinese culture and women who challenged traditional gender roles were banned.
In some states, including Texas, K-12 curricula have become a legislative battleground, with state laws now banning instruction that is being labeled as “critical race theory” and limiting classroom discussions around race, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Dhruva Ambati, a high school sophomore from Richmond, Texas, says this legislation makes her feel scared for the future.
“This censorship limits my ability to explore ideas freely,” says Ambati. “It creates a chilling effect where students might avoid certain topics out of fear or confusion.”
But as lawmakers seek to remove books from their classrooms, some students say they find it all the more important to speak up about the impact these titles have had in their lives. Patel describes relating to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which has become one of the most frequently banned books in the country due to its frank depiction of the internalized shame that victims of racism and sexual abuse often face. “Growing up in an area where not everyone looks like you [and] barely anyone at your school speaks the same language as you, it’s hard to feel connected to your ethnicity,” says Patel. “I find myself relating to the main character and her desire to feel as though she doesn’t need to work twice as hard to be valued as much as someone else based on their nationality.”
Patel and Chang both describe feeling similarly impacted by The Handmaid’s Tale, a work of near-future speculative fiction set in a Christian theocracy that forces some women to bear children for the elite class. Atwood’s novel, Patel says, “pushes me to care more about protecting both cultural progress and scientific freedom, because without them, women lose their voice first.”