Science History Women

As she did so provocatively with military spouses in Army Wives, Tanya Biank gives us the inside story of women in today’s military - their professional and personal challenges from the combat zone to the home front. Since 9/11, more than 240,000 women have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan - more than 140 have died there, and they currently make up 14 percent of the total active-duty forces. Despite advances, today’s servicewomen are constantly pressed to prove themselves.

During the harshest year of the Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, a top woman news reporter of the day and intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, was hired by FDR’s right-hand man Harry Hopkins to embark upon a grueling journey to the hardest-hit areas of the country to report back on the degree of devastation. Distinguished historian Michael Golay draws on a trove of original sources - including the moving, remarkably intimate, almost daily letters between Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt - as he re-creates that extraordinary journey.

Maggie Carter knows Victoria Park like the back of her hand. She knows which routes around the park are easiest to navigate; she knows what time of year the most beautiful flowers bloom; and she knows which bench by the pond allows you to hear the joyful chatter of children throwing bread to the ducks without risking getting splashed by over-enthusiastic flapping. But she's never seen any of these things. Maggie is blind: Her senses of touch, smell and hearing have built an image of the place she loves most in the world, and she's never felt held back by her unseeing eyes.

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.

Low-rise jeans, butterfly clips, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, and Paris Hilton’s nights out. The early 2000s were a time of major moments in fashion, media, celebrity culture, and especially music. Artists such as Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Beyoncé were leading the charge—their success not only producing a new respect for female artists, but for pop stardom itself. Nora Princiotti examines how these artists redefined the role of the pop star within the music industry and culture more broadly, and ultimately set the stage for the women who top the charts today.

In the Company of Radical Women Writers rediscovers the political commitments and passionate advocacy of seven writers who as young women turned to communism around the Great Depression and, over decades of national crisis, spoke to issues of labor, land, and love in ways that provide thought-provoking guidance for today. Rosemary Hennessy spotlights the courageous lives of women who confronted similar challenges to those we still face: exhausting and unfair labor practices, unrelenting racial injustice, and environmental devastation.

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 synonymous with supplying secretaries 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 120 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool to assume positions of power on the other side of the desk.

Under the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B., humor writer Mortimer Thomson went undercover to investigate and report on the fortune tellers of New York City's tenements and slums. When his articles were published in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that scandalized and delighted the public. In Mortimer and the Witches, author Marie Carter examines the lives of these marginalized fortune tellers while detailing Mortimer Thomson's peculiar and complicated biography.

In 1909, a young Australian actress made headlines around the world when she took to the sky over London in an airship emblazoned with the slogan 'Votes for Women' and dropped leaflets over the city. Muriel Matters was dubbed 'that daring Australian girl', and the American media declared it to be the world's first aerial protest. Just months earlier, Muriel had become the first woman to make a speech in the British House of Commons, after chaining herself to a brass grille to protest against the segregation of women in the Parliament.

In Vera Rubin: A Life, Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton provide a detailed, accessible overview of Rubin's work, showing how she leveraged immense curiosity, profound intelligence, and novel technologies to help transform our understanding of the cosmos. But Rubin's impact was not limited to her contributions to scientific knowledge. She also helped to transform scientific practice by promoting the careers of women researchers. Not content to be an inspiration, Rubin was a mentor and champion for hiring women faculty and honoring them with awards historically exclusive to men.

Le forme di violenza esercitate nel Medioevo contro le donne compongono un catalogo impressionante: percosse in nome del diritto del marito a "correggere" la moglie, del padre a costringere e punire la figlia, del padrone a battere la serva; ingiurie connesse al comportamento femminile; stupri, segregazioni, omicidi in nome dell'onore tradito; spoliazione di beni, a partire dalle eredità e dalle doti; matrimoni e monacazioni forzate; manipolazione delle coscienze e violenze inquisitoriali; maltrattamenti, prevaricazione e discriminazione nel mondo del lavoro.

Sie ist die Frau, der man nachsagt, dass sie kein Glück in der Liebe hat. Diejenige, die ihr Leben allein regelt: Die Frau ohne Begleitung. Als die Autorin feststellt, dass auch sie so eine geworden ist - ein weiblicher Langzeit-Single - ist die Erkenntnis ein Schock. Dann eine Befreiung. Und ein Ansporn, nicht nur für eine schonungslose Selbsterkundung, sondern auch für eine überfällige Spurensuche.

Tananarive Due, best-selling author and American Book Award winner, and her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, guide listeners through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Told in alternating chapters, their story is a triumphant memoir of their experiences with everyday people fighting for equality as members of grassroots organizations in the South. Filled with drama, heartache and rousing successes, Freedom in the Family will inspire and enlighten with its riveting account of one of America’s most progressive times.

A fierce and galvanizing reminder that resistance is everywhere in the fight for abortion and reproductive justice in the United States. Fighting Mad is a book about what "reproductive justice" means and what it looks like to fight for it. Editors Krystale E. Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger bring together many of the strongest, most resistant voices in the country to describe the impacts of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision on abortion access and care.

Alice Paul has long been an elusive figure in the political history of American women. Raised by Quaker parents in Moorestown, New Jersey, she would become a passionate and outspoken leader of the woman suffrage movement. In 1913 she reinvigorated the American campaign for a constitutional suffrage amendment and, in the next seven years, dominated that campaign and drove it to victory with bold, controversial action - wedding courage with resourcefulness and self-mastery.

Our Voices, Our Histories brings together 35 Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, perspectives, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond.

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.

Linda Hirshman, acclaimed historian of social movements, delivers the sweeping story of the struggle leading up to #MeToo and beyond: from the first tales of workplace harassment percolating to the surface in the 1970s, to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal - when liberal women largely forgave Clinton, giving men a free pass for two decades. Many liberals even resisted the movement to end rape on campus. And yet, legal, political, and cultural efforts, often spearheaded by women of color, were quietly paving the way for the takedown of abusers and harassers.

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.

Jan MacKell provides a detailed overview of the business between 1860 and 1930, focusing her research on the mining towns of Cripple Creek, Salida, Colorado City, and similar boomtown communities. She used census data, Sanborn maps, city directories, property records, marriage records, and court records to document and trace the movements of the women over the course of their careers, uncovering work histories, medical problems, and numerous relocations from town to town. She traces many to their graves, through years filled with abuse, disease, narcotics, and violence.