Science History Women

In Lost, medical historian Shannon Withycombe weaves together women’s personal writings and doctors’ publications from the 1820s through the 1910s to investigate the transformative changes in how Americans conceptualized pregnancy, understood miscarriage, and interpreted fetal tissue over the course of the 19th century. Withycombe’s pathbreaking research reveals how Americans construed, and continue to understand, miscarriage within a context of reproductive desires, expectations, and abilities.

Born during the Civil War into a slaveholding family that included Black, White, and Cherokee forebears, Adella Hunt Logan dedicated herself to advancing political and educational opportunities for the African American community. She taught at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute but also joined the segregated woman suffrage movement, passing for White in order to fight for the rights of people of color. Her determination - as a wife, mother, scholar, and activist - to challenge the draconian restraints of race and gender generated conflicts that precipitated her tragic demise.

At the same time as the women's rights convention was taking place at Seneca Falls in 1848, First Lady Sarah Childress Polk was wielding influence unprecedented for a woman. Yet, while history remembers the women of the convention, it has all but forgotten Sarah Polk. Now, Amy Greenberg brings her story into vivid focus in this riveting biography and reveals Sarah Polk's complicated but essential part in American feminism.

A fascinating chronicle of radical feminism’s rise and fall from the mid-60s to the mid-70s, Daring to Be Bad is a must-listen for both students of gender history and activists of intersectionality. This 30th anniversary edition reveals how current debates about race, transgender rights, queer theory, and sexuality echo issues that galvanized and divided feminists 50 years ago.

Woman Lawyer tells the story of Clara Foltz, the first woman lawyer in the West. Famous as a public intellectual, leader of the women's movement, and legal reformer, Foltz faced terrific prejudice and well-organized opposition as she tried cases in front of all-male juries, raised five children as a single mother, stumped for political candidates, and urged the creation of a public defender to balance the public prosecutor.

It’s a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic institution was in its heyday in the 1950 and '60s synonymous with supplying secretaries—always properly attired in heels, ladylike hats, and white gloves—to male executives. In Expect Great Things! Vanda Krefft turns the notion of a “Gibbs girl” on its head, showing us that while the school was getting women who could type 90 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool.

Salo’s queen has finally accepted his desire to be a mystic despite taboos concerning men’s use of magic. But her acceptance is not support; it is strategy. Under a disguise of the queen’s making, Salo enters Jungle City as a pilgrim to the Red Temple, only to find a magical barrier barring his entrance. Left at the mercy of the warring political factions that run the city, Salo faces a series of obstacles wrought by an unseen hand, knowing he cannot return home without completing his pilgrimage. But Isa, King of the Saire clan, has her own plans for Salo.

Meet the unsung sheroes of history: the diverse, defiant and daring (wo)men who changed the rules, and their identities, to get sh*t done. A call to action for the modern world, this book celebrates the #GenderRebels who paved the way for women everywhere to be soldiers and spies; kings and queens; firefighters, doctors, pilots; and a Swiss Army knife’s-worth more. These superbly spirited (wo)men all had one thing in common: they defied the rules to progress in a man’s world.

In these moving stories of Angelina Grimke Weld, wife of abolitionist Theodore Weld; Varina Howell Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis; and Julia Dent Grant, wife of Ulysses S. Grant, Carol Berkin reveals how women understood the cataclysmic events of their day. Their stories, taken together, help reconstruct the era of the Civil War with a greater depth and complexity by adding women's experiences and voices to their male counterparts.

In a voice as candid as it is evocative, Gail Caldwell traces a path from her West Texas girlhood through her emergence as a young daredevil, then as a feminist - a journey that reflected seismic shifts in the culture itself. Caldwell's travels took her to California and Mexico and dark country roads, and the dangers she encountered were rivaled only by the personal demons she faced.

More than 100 US Army and Navy nurses were stationed in Guam and the Philippines at the beginning of World War II. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, five navy nurses on Guam became the first American military women of World War II to be taken prisoner by the Japanese. More than 70 army nurses survived five months of combat conditions in the jungles of Bataan and Corregidor before being captured, only to endure more than three years in prison camps.

Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age During the Civil War explores gender, age, and Confederate identity by examining the lives of teenage daughters of Southern slaveholding, secessionist families. These young women clung tenaciously to the gender ideals that upheld marriage and motherhood as the fulfillment of female duty and to the racial order of the slaveholding South, an institution that defined their status and afforded them material privileges. When differences between the North and South proved irreconcilable, Southern daughters demonstrated extraordinary agency in seeking to protect their futures as wives, mothers, and slaveholders.

No one wants to be treated like an object, regarded as an item of property, or put up for sale. Yet many people frame personal autonomy in terms of self-ownership, representing themselves as property owners with the right to do as they wish with their bodies. Others do not use the language of property, but are similarly insistent on the rights of free individuals to decide for themselves whether to engage in commercial transactions for sex, reproduction, or organ sales. Drawing on analyses of rape, surrogacy, and markets in human organs, Our Bodies, Whose Property? challenges notions of freedom based on ownership of our bodies.

Until 1894 there were no female sport stars, no product endorsement deals, and no young mothers with the chutzpah to circle the globe on a bicycle. Annie Kopchovsky changed all of that.

This is the fascinating true story of four generations of Cuban women whose personal lives are woven with the story of their nation.

July 18, 1969: A car driven by Senator Edward M. Kennedy plunged off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, off the coast of Cape Cod. Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old former staffer for Kennedy’s brother Robert, died in the crash. The scandal that followed demeaned Kopechne’s reputation and scapegoated her for Ted Kennedy’s inability to run for the presidency instead of acknowledging her as an innocent victim in a tragedy that took her life. Kashatus’s biography of Mary Jo Kopechne illuminates the life of a politically committed young woman who embodied the best ideals of the 60s.

Conversations about gender equity in the workplace accelerated in the 2010s, with debates inside Hollywood specifically pointing to broader systemic problems of employment disparities and exploitative labor practices. Compounded by the devastating #MeToo revelations, these problems led to a wide-scale call for change. The Value Gap traces female-driven filmmaking across development, financing, production, film festivals, marketing, and distribution, examining the realities facing women working in the industry during this transformative moment.

Westover, a girls' high school in Middlebury, Connecticut, has evolved from a finishing school for the Protestant elite, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's first love, to a meritocracy for pupils of many religions and races from all around the world.

Zarifa Ghafari ist die weibliche Stimme Afghanistans. Mit 24 Jahren zur jüngsten Bürgermeisterin des Landes ernannt, versuchen Taliban, sie gewaltsam von der Ausübung ihres Amtes abzuhalten. Trotz der Anschläge setzt sie sich unermüdlich gegen Korruption, für Frieden und Frauenrechte ein. Als Vergeltung wird ihr Vater ermordet. Nach dem Einmarsch der Taliban 2021 muss Ghafari fliehen. Doch ihr Kampf geht weiter. Eindringlich schreibt sie über ihr Leben und ihr Engagement.

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.