"Dressing With Dignity" is one I'd recommend, because it's an eye opener on why not only perhaps your daughters already DO dress that way (I'm assuming they do), but it lets them know, too, why they should go on doing it after they've moved out of your house.
I'd also recommend the Autobiography of St. Therese (the Little Flower), which gives us a glimpse of a beautiful, feminine soul, as a woman's soul should be. (Also very consoling because of her "little way" to heaven).
I'm not sure about books addressing feminism directly, but the important thing to get across is WHY feminism is wrong... and not merely because "wives should obey their husbands" or "just because women should wear dresses." Rather, it's important that girls growing up in this feminism poisoned world understand that what that movement really asks of them, is to abandon all that is beautiful and wholesome and virtuous and womanly about themselves, in lieu of acting not even merely "like a man" ... but like an IMMORAL man. In other words, it's not enough that a girl can work... she's supposed to dress immodestly, make passes at guys, be cutthroat and shrewd like a cold-blooded business man in every area of life (that cold, "shoot first" attitude), look out only for themselves and take or achieve whatever they can regardless of what immorality or wrong it requires to get it (anything to get ahead)... and all kinds of other like philosophies.
It's not enough to tell today's girls that feminism is just "bad" or to tell them to wear skirts and let the men lead in the home. They need to realize that feminism embodies a kind of brazen pride and immorality that is made to look "liberating" ... when all it really liberates women from is their womanhood, their dignity, their morality, their virtue and their self-esteem. It's the devil's sales pitch in a new package... "do whatever you want, or whatever you feel like doing... rebel and fight to satisfy yourself! Make yourself #1!"
What it amounts to is liberating yourself from skirts to dress like hookers. Liberating yourself from the virtue of humility, and fall into the sin of pride. Liberate yourself from the home so that you can scarcely spend a day resting in it. Liberate yourself from the slavery of childbearing at home to become a slave to the mortgage and the gas tank. Liberate yourself from femininity in order to get the respect of a man, and end up by being respected even less than a good woman (and nowhere NEAR as much as a good man).
Of course the list goes on. But I think it is important not to give vague reasons that amount to "because I said so" or "because it's right" ... but rather to give them an understanding of what feminism is and does in actuality, morally and even naturally... Look around you! Look at the faces of some of the women you pass every day. Look at how hard, how bitter, how jaded, how depraved, how depressed so many of them are! That is the face of feminism. That is the face of the reality of liberating women from their womanhood or womanliness. The reality is that when women try to be men, they not only fail to be good and happy women as a rule, but they certainly fail to be happy as what they become! There used to be a general sweetness, happiness and cheer in a good woman. Now they're all hard as nails. Why? because of course, feminism is totally and completely against our womanly nature! And when you deny nature, you will almost always end up by getting smacked hard in the face with the bad consequences of doing so.
This is why St. Thomas Aquinas's teachings and the general spirit of Thomism is vitally important. We need to realize that there is a nature of things, and to get at a problem, you have to begin by understanding the nature of the things in question. Women have denied their womanhood to become more like men. But it hasn't worked, because in our very nature most of us cannot mentally and emotionally handle the working life and business affairs of the world of men, without becoming hard-faced, thick-skinned, insensitive... and in short, unwomanly women! Feminism defies and denies the very nature of woman. And it's the woman that suffers, who is silly enough to go along with such an idea. I have never seen a peaceful, sweet, kind, charitable, happy, content, feminine, family and God oriented feminist. (Which is something like saying you've never seen a good devil. You haven't, and you aren't likely to any time soon.) They may have the biggest smile plastered on their faces 24/7... but if it's only skin deep, it's no true happiness or peace. Hitler probably knew how to smile and be polite. But good acting has nothing to do with our real happiness either here or hereafter. The reality remains that feminists tend to become the most hard and bitter (and hard-faced) women that there are. And I dare say there aren't many Catholics, or virtuous, pious women among them, either. You might as well expect a cat to become a dog. Just let a robber break in and see how far the cat gets in that career.
So it's not only the immorality and destruction of self and self esteem, (if not happiness itself,) but also it's a matter of being something that defies reality. You may as well say that from now on, gravity works in reverse, and things dropped will fall upwards. It's schizophrenic... out of touch with the reality of what a woman is... that is, what God has created her as. It's saying that we, on a whim, can literally re-create or alter the God-given and divinely-instituted nature of woman! Not only is it sinfully presumptuous to think we can take the power of God to create nature into our own hands, but since it's impossible to do so in any case (because we're not God), the results of trying to claim His power, or the power to contradict or alter what He has set down, can only be disastrous!
Those are the things young girls need to learn as they grow up. It's not a matter of "mean adults who want to keep you locked up in petticoats." It's a matter of reality! It's the matter that God made woman as well as man, and that when He did, He gave to woman a particular nature which cannot be changed or re-created by human power. We can twist that nature to it's breaking point, but that perversion will never be natural, and can only wreck havoc on the mind, heart, body and soul. (Why are so many women, I wonder, plagued with migraines, depression, psychological disorders of every kind, extreme stress to the point that they suffer ill health... Did men in history wither and wilt under their workloads doing simply an ordinary job?)
We cannot defy nature without suffering the ill consequences of trying. We cannot, as mere human beings, re-create human nature, whether male or female. We can pervert our behavior and way of thinking, but they will never become natural, nor ever lead to happiness and morality, because such perversion can never be moral in itself. It is a rebellion against God as the creator, and against His divine handiwork. We would be fools to think we could live that way, and ever follow in the footsteps of someone like Our Lady or St. Therese, who are prime models of all that is good in women, and how women can be holy.
This is the heart and soul of the error of feminism. It is that defiance, that rebellion. And it's consequences are ill all across the board, so to speak. It is much better to be the "strange girl in a long skirt that nobody likes" and go to heaven, than to rebel against nature and be miserable here for doing it, and hereafter for the moral and philosophical compromises required to do so.
Topic: Teaching girls correctly. (Read 2112 times)