Memoirs Political Women

In 1941 a 31-year-old Frenchwoman, a young mother born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour, became the leader of a vast intelligence organization - the only woman to serve as a chef de résistance during the war. Strong-willed, independent, and a lifelong rebel against her country’s conservative, patriarchal society, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was temperamentally made for the job. No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence. Fourcade was captured twice by the Nazis - and both times she managed to escape.

National leader Stacey Abrams has written the guide to harnessing the strengths of being an outsider and succeeding anyway. Leadership is hard. Convincing others - and yourself - that you are capable of taking charge and achieving more requires insight and courage. Lead from the Outside is the handbook for outsiders, written with an eye toward the challenges that hinder women, people of color, the working class, members of the LGBTQ community, and millennials ready to make change.

Brigitte Gabriel lost her childhood to militant Islam. Because They Hate is a political wake-up call. Brigitte warns that the United States is threatened by fundamentalist Islamic theology in the same way Lebanon was - radical Islam will stop at nothing short of domination of all non-Muslim countries.

Gloria Steinem - writer, activist, organizer, and one of the most inspiring leaders in the world - now tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of how her early years led her to live an on-the-road kind of life, traveling, listening to people, learning, and creating change. She reveals the story of her own growth in tandem with the growth of an ongoing movement for equality. This is the story at the heart of My Life on the Road.

In the same vivid, eloquent style that earned Ronald Reagan the designation "the Great Communicator," Peggy Noonan delivers a candid portrait of the Reagan White House in this stylish, sensitive memoir that pursues the question, "Who's running things here anyway?"

Never having run for office before, Katie Porter charted a new path in 2018 when she was elected to Congress as a Democrat in historically conservative Orange County, California. Underestimated as a single mom and chided for her progressive values, Katie defied expectations. Then, using her signature whiteboard, she began to take CEOs and corrupt government officials to task in Congressional hearings. The videos went viral, introducing Americans to her no-bullshit style, and making her a coveted guest on cable news and late-night television.

Erin Gibson has a singular goal - to create a utopian future where women are recognized as humans. In Feminasty - titled after her nickname on the hit podcast Throwing Shade - she has written a collection of make-you-laugh-until-you-cry essays that expose the hidden rules that make life as a woman unnecessarily hard and deconstructs them in a way that's bold, provocative, and hilarious.

On the morning of January 31, 2009, Roxana Saberi, a brilliant and fearless Iranian American journalist working in Iran, was dragged from her home by four men and secretly arrested. The intelligence agents who captured her accused her of espionage---a charge she denied. For 11 days, Saberi was cut off from the outside world, forbidden even a phone call. For weeks, neither her family, friends, nor colleagues had any knowledge of her whereabouts.

Escucha el íntimo, poderoso e inspirador libro de memorias de la exprimera dama de Estados Unidos. En sus memorias, profundamente reflexivas y cautivadoras, Michelle Obama nos invita a entrar en su mundo relatando las experiencias que han forjado su carácter, desde su infancia en la zona sur de Chicago, hasta los años que vivió en la residencia más famosa del mundo, pasando por su etapa como alta directiva, durante la que tuvo que compaginar la maternidad con la vida profesional.

Hillary Clinton’s surprising defeat in the 2008 Democratic primary brought her to the nadir of her political career, vanquished by a much younger opponent whose message of change and cutting-edge tech team ran circles around her stodgy campaign. And yet, six years later, she has reemerged as an even more powerful and influential figure, a formidable stateswoman and the presumed front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, marking one of the great political comebacks in history.

Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: Her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives.

In January 1889, Louisa Collins, a 41-year-old mother of 10 children, became the first woman hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol and the last woman hanged in New South Wales. Both of Louisa's husbands had died suddenly and the Crown, convinced that Louisa poisoned them with arsenic, put her on trial an extraordinary four times in order to get a conviction, to the horror of many in the legal community. Louisa protested her innocence until the end.

When Özlem Cekic became the first Muslim MP in the Danish Parliament, her email inbox was inundated with hate mail and threats, and her gut reaction was to delete and ignore each abusive message. But eventually, she decided to take a risk. She started replying to each message and inviting the senders to meet and engage in dialogue over coffee. And with time, understanding, and patience, she began to make a difference, both in the lives of those who hated her before even meeting her, and in her own life.

“We don’t complain about things, Kristi. We fix them.” Taking her father’s words to heart, South Dakota's first woman governor Kristi Noem shares heartfelt—and heartbreaking—lessons on making things right in the world, from her childhood on a farm in the vastness of rural America, to the marbled halls of Congress, to the national spotlight amid a global pandemic.

For far too long, the history of how American women won the right to vote has been told as the tale of a few iconic leaders, all white and native-born. But Susan Ware uncovered a much broader and more diverse story waiting to be told. Why They Marched is a tribute to the many women who worked tirelessly in communities across the nation, out of the spotlight, protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship.

German historian Heike B. Görtemaker delivers the first comprehensive biography of Eva Braun in this authoritative reassessment of Braun’s role in Hitler’s life and revealing portrait of the Führer and his inner circle. Drawing on newly discovered documents, Görtemaker carefully distinguishes fact from fiction.

Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She cofounded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement. This engaging memoir relates Wells’ private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice.

Averil Mansfield established herself as a pioneer in every sense of the word when she qualified as a surgeon in the early 1970s. At the time just two per cent of her colleagues were female, and she was often met with surprise, bordering on disbelief and amusement, when telling people what she did. But time and again, Averil proved herself more than capable of the role which had been her greatest dream since the age of eight. After a formidable operating career in Liverpool and London, she went on to became the UK's first ever female professor of surgery.

Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor.

When COVID-19 hit the United States, New York governor Andrew Cuomo was thrust onto the national stage, hailed around the globe for his leadership. Alongside him every step of the way, Melissa DeRosa quickly became a household name. In her riveting memoir, DeRosa details her journey as a young woman in politics rising to the highest levels of government, writing with raw honesty and vulnerability about the personal challenges she faced—a failing marriage, infertility, death threats, misogyny—while navigating unprecedented professional landmines along the way.