American Women Biographies

Sometimes there is an entire year that sparkles in the memory as a time brimming over with the fullness of life. By the age of 10, Annie’s intervals of awakening began to occur more frequently; the hours and minutes of the years that followed were spent reveling in the delights and the anguishes that accompany being fully alive.

Dolly Parton is best known for her musical prowess, but there is so much more to her character than people realize. Nowadays, she is the epitome of old Hollywood glamor. She is pretty well known for getting a lot of cosmetic surgery over the years in order to keep up the gaudy, glamorous image we’ve come to know and love. Even through all this she’s still modest. What people may not realize is that her early life was anything but glamorous.

In the exhilarating spirit of Wild and A Walk in the Park, an adventure-filled memoir of one woman’s struggle to succeed as a wildland firefighter on an elite, male-dominated crew as they battle some of the fiercest wildfires in the West.

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous Black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. In this first full-scale biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927–2003).

At noon on October 27, 1924, a factory worker was admitted to a hospital in New York City, suffering from hallucinations and convulsions. Before breakfast the next day, he was dead. Alice Hamilton was determined to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. By the time of the accident, Hamilton had pioneered the field of industrial medicine in the United States. She specialized in workplace safety years before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created. But this time, she was up against a formidable new foe: America’s relentless push for progress, regardless of the cost.

“I am opposed to heart disease and cancer the way one is opposed to sin.” With that as her battle cry, health activist and philanthropist Mary Woodard Lasker had a singular goal: saving lives by increasing medical research. Together with her husband, advertising genius Albert, they created the Lasker Foundation, bestowing the Lasker Awards. But the real increase in medical research funding occurred when Mary discovered a revolutionary source: the federal government. “I’m just a catalytic agent,” she would insist, while she tirelessly lobbied Congress and presidents alike.

From 1955 to 1975, Vera Pigee (1924-2007) put her life and livelihood on the line with grassroots efforts for social change in Mississippi, principally through her years of leadership in Coahoma County's NAACP. Known as the "Lady of Hats," coined by NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, Pigee was a businesswoman, mother, and leader. Her book, The Struggle of Struggles, offers a detailed view of the daily grind of organizing for years to open the state's closed society.

Serving for seventeen months during the period between the British surrender at Yorktown and the signing of the final treaty, a time when peace was far from secure, Deborah Sampson accomplished her deception by becoming an outstanding soldier. Alfred Young shows us why she did it and exactly how she carried it off. He meticulously reconstructs her early life as an indentured servant; her young adulthood as a weaver, teacher, and religious rebel; and her military career in the light infantry—followed by service as an orderly to a general at West Point.

When Betsey Stockton was a child, she was "given, as a slave" to the household of Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent pastor and later the president of what is now Princeton University. Although she never went to school, she devoured the books in Green's library. After being emancipated, she used that education to benefit other people of color, first in Hawai'i as a missionary, then Philadelphia, and, for the last three decades of her life, Princeton—a college town with a genteel veneer that never fully hid its racial hostility.

When 16-year-old Mytrae Meliana and her family emigrate from India to the US, she is determined to avoid the arranged marriage her family expects her to have, and to create her own destiny. But when she falls in love with an American man, her family drags the talented graduate student back to India and keeps her hostage.

Shaking up New York and national politics by becoming the first African American congresswoman and, later, the first Black major-party presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm left an indelible mark as an "unbought and unbossed" firebrand and a leader in politics for meaningful change. Chisholm spent her formative years moving between Barbados and Brooklyn, and the development of her political orientation did not follow the standard narratives of the civil rights or feminist establishments.

In the middle of the Great Depression, Montana native Julia Bennett arrived in New York City with no money and an audacious business plan: to identify and visit easterners who could afford to spend their summers at her brand new dude ranch near Ennis, Montana. Julia, a big-game hunter whom friends described as “a clever shot with both rifle and shotgun,” flouted gender conventions to build guest ranches in Montana and Arizona that attracted world-renowned entertainers and artists.

The descendant of survivors of the Armenian genocide, Arlene Avakian was raised in America, where she could live free. But even with that freedom, she found herself a prisoner of both her family and society, denying her heritage along with her true sexuality. After marriage and motherhood, Arlene found herself exploring the growing women’s lib movement of the 1970s, coming to embrace the strength of her grandmother—known as the Lion Woman—and realizing her full potential and personhood.

Countless Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the enslavers who bought and sold their ancestors. Among them is Dionne Ford, whose great grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift. What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take? In this book, which move between her inner life and deep research, Ford tells us.

In the midst of her groundbreaking twenty-year career in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm once declared, “Everyone—with the exception of the black woman herself—has been interpreting the black woman.” Edited and introduced by Zinga A. Fraser, Shirley Chisholm in Her Own Words gives listeners a rare opportunity to engage with the congresswoman’s powerful ideas in her own voice.

1775: Overlooked Heroines focuses entirely on ordinary women who broke away from their social constraints to become soldiers, spies, and heroines in the American Revolutionary War. These women physically fought for America to be free from colonial imperialism, but yet society fails to recant their names. 1775: Overlooked Heroines fills in the gaps of history and places these women back into the historical narrative, whose names are less celebrated and are overshadowed or misattributed simply because they are women.

A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected because of her race. She went on to graduate first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study again at Harvard University this time on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law.

Donna Seaman brings to dazzling life seven forgotten artists, among the best of their day: Gertrude Abercrombie, with her dark, surreal paintings and friendships with Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins; Bay Area self-portraitist Joan Brown; Ree Morton, with her witty, oddly beautiful constructions; Loïs Mailou Jones of the Harlem Renaissance; Lenore Tawney, who combined weaving and sculpture; Christina Ramberg, who drew on pop culture and advertising; and Louise Nevelson, an art-world superstar.

Richly detailed and full of hope, this is the story of Cindy Lou Davis from Mocksville, North Carolina, who meets and marries Mohammed Ali, a Muslim from the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. The year is 1982, and 20-year-old Cindy leaves home and family after her wedding with no idea what awaits her in her new life. Living with his family and immersed in a traditional Arab culture with an incomprehensible language while her new husband is away on a military base during the week, her future with Mohammed depends on the strength of her love, faith, and determination to be true to herself.

Using the story of Raven and the Box of Daylight (and relating it to Sun Tzu’s equally timeless Art of War) to deepen her narration and reflection, Hayes expresses an ongoing frustration and anger at the obstacles and prejudices still facing Alaska Natives in their own land, but also recounts her own story of attending and completing college in her 50s and becoming a professor and a writer.