Women's History Month
Welcome to our digital exhibit celebrating Women's History Month. This page is a companion to the physical display in the HKS Library, available through March 2024. Harvard affiliates can request books via HOLLIS, for pick-up at the library of your choice.
The 2024 theme for Women's History Month is Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, designated by the National Women's History Alliance. This theme recognizes women "who understand that, for a positive future, we need to eliminate bias and discrimination entirely from our lives and institutions. Throughout 2024, we honor local women from the past and present who have taken the lead to show the importance of change and to establish firmer safeguards, practices and legislation reflecting these values. Following decades of discrimination, we are proud to celebrate women who work for basic inclusion, equality and fairness."
The books in this display feature the stories - both fictionalized and biographical - of women who have advocated for equity along intersectional lines of gender, race, sexuality, and beyond.
More on Women's History Month from the HKS Office of Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging:
"Women’s History Month is an annual celebration of the contributions and achievements that women have made to U.S. history. It first began the week of March 8, in 1978, as a local week-long celebration in Sonoma County, California, coinciding with International Women’s Day, which also recognizes the achievements of women and centers women’s social, political, economic, and cultural issues. In early 1980, the National Women’s History Project, which is now known as the National Women’s History Alliance, lobbied the federal government to give U.S. women’s history national recognition (Women’s History Month). Later that year, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed the week of March 8th as the first National Women’s History Week. In his proclamation, he urged educational institutions and community organizations to highlight unsung leaders who struggled and fought for equal rights, so that the people of the U.S. could better understand the need for full gender equality (First Presidential Message, 1980). In 1987, After continued lobbying from the National Women’s History Alliance, the U.S. Congress through proclamation later extended the weeklong observance to a month-long celebration in hopes to address how women had consistently been undervalued throughout history (Pub. L. 100-9, 100 Stat. 99).
Even though women have played integral roles in cultural, economic, and social life, they are still often overlooked and marginalized today in the U.S. and in most countries across the globe due to the long history of patriarchy. In the U.S., women have been leaders in major progressive social change movements including the women’s suffrage movement, the abolitionist movement, the emancipation movement, labor movement, the civil rights movement, and in contemporary intersectional social justice movements of today. As educators in a leading public policy school and/or future public policy leaders, we must approach the work we do from an intersectional lens and continue to ask ourselves how we can create a more fair and just society for all. We encourage the HKS community to critically analyze gender inequality and other intersecting identity-based injustices that persists in the U.S. and abroad, and to reflect on the role we can have as women and allies in addressing these injustices in our communities."
From the Political Buttons Collection
The Political Buttons at HKS Collection features nearly 3,000 buttons that represent U.S. political history from 1904 through today.
Curated selections from our Political Buttons Collection are available as digital exhibits, including Decades of Resistance: Political Movement Pins. Below is an excerpt from the 1980s women's movement section of the exhibit. The exhibit also features buttons from the 1960s women's movement, the 1970s women's movement, and the 2010s #MeToo movement.
"Following the 1982 defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, the women’s movement experienced a decade of transition. The movement's politics and tactics began to shift from second-wave to third-wave feminism through the development of difference feminism and equity feminism.
As a result of the new legal protections won in the previous decades, more women began to bring sex discrimination lawsuits against academic institutions and employers. One example from 1984 is the case of the Cornell 11, a group of five female professors representing 11 total at the university who in 1978 brought a class action lawsuit against their employer. The plaintiffs cited violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, claiming they were denied tenure and passed over for less-qualified male candidates. The case was settled for $250,000."
Featured Resource: Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute
Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is "considered the leading center for scholarship on the history of women in the United States, with collections that span civil rights and feminism, health and sexuality, work and family life, education and the professions, and culinary history and etiquette."
Schlesinger in open to the public. Explore their collections and research resources online. Most of the research guides listed below were created by Schlesinger librarians.
Harvard Library Research Guides
- 9 to 5, National Association of Working Women (U.S.)
- African American Women
- Black Women Oral History Project Interviews, 1976–1981
- Boston Women's Health Book Collective
- Catching the Wave: Photographs of the Women's Movement
- Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)
- Immigration
- Latine and Hispanic Women
- LGBTQ+
- National Organization for Women
- Violence Against Women
- Women at Harvard University
Research Databases for Women's History
- Gender Action PortalWith its Gender Action Portal, the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School provides scientific evidence—based on experiments in the field and in the laboratory—on the impact of policies, strategies and organizational practices aimed at closing gender gaps in the areas of economic opportunity, politics, health, and education to help translate research into action and take successful interventions to scale.
- GenderWatch (Harvard Login)Comprehensive, interdisciplinary database of articles on all aspects of gender studies; draws on both scholarly and non-academic publications.
- Women's Studies International (Harvard Login)Citations and abstracts drawn from a variety of essential women's studies databases which range in coverage from classic works & core studies to the latest scholarship in feminist research. 1972-present.
- Studies on Women and Gender Abstracts (Harvard Login)Comprehensive index of journal articles in women's and gender studies, with a strong focus on the social sciences.
- Historical Abstracts (Harvard Login)Covers scholarship on world history (except the U.S. and Canada) since 1450. Also includes abstracting and indexing for major non-English, non-American history journals.
Note: For U.S. and Canadian history, use HA's companion database, America: History & Life. - America: History and Life (Harvard Login)Covers historical scholarship on the United States and Canada from prehistoric times to the present.
Note: For world history, use AHL's companion database, Historical Abstracts.
Primary Sources for Women's History
- Archives of Sexuality and Gender: LGBTQ Culture and History since 1940 (Harvard Login)Includes historical primary source material from hundreds of major international activist organizations and local, grassroots groups, as well as interviews with LGBTQ individuals, letters, LGBTQ newspaper archives, policy papers, etc.
- Everyday Life and Women in America, c.1800-1920 (Harvard Login)Primary source materials from the holdings of the New York Public Library and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, including rare books, broadsides, pamphlets, and periodicals.
- Gender: Identity and Social Change (Harvard Login)Compiles materials from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia that document changing attitudes to gender roles and relations, women's rights, etc., from the 19th century.
- The Gerritsen Collection: Women's History Online, 1543-1945 (Harvard Login)Digitized version of one of the most famous and significant collections of books, periodicals, and pamphlets documenting the history of women, initially started in the late 19th century.
- ProQuest History Vault: Women's Studies (Harvard Login)Contains files and manuscripts of major U.S. women's rights organizations (e.g., the League of Women Voters) and activists (e.g., Margaret Sanger).
- Women's Studies Archive (Harvard Login)Collection of primary sources focused on women's movements in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Women and Social Movements, International: 1840 to Present (Harvard Login)Compiles primary sources on international women's activism since the mid-19th century.
- Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires Since 1820 (Harvard Login)Primary sources documenting the history of empire and imperialism from the perspective of women.
- Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (Harvard Login)Contains a wealth of primary and secondary sources on U.S. women's history, arranged in thematic "document projects."
- Women Working, 1800-1930Special collection from Harvard's Schlesinger Library documenting the economic history of American women.
Groups & Initiatives around HKS & Harvard
- In Focus: Women's History Month - curated resources from across Harvard including institutional history, collections, podcasts, books, articles, and people.
- Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) - HKS research program working to "advance women and gender equity by creating knowledge, training leaders, and informing public policy and organizational practices."
- Gender, Race & Identity - HKS Policy Topic centered on the question of how gender, race, class and other aspects of identity affect the policymaking process.
- Muslim Women's Caucus - HKS student organization "committed to strengthening advocacy on Muslim women's human rights and helping to develop an inclusive community for Muslim women" at HKS.
- W3D: Women in Defense, Diplomacy, and Development - HKS student organization that "aims to elevate the visibility and impact of women at the Kennedy School interested in pursuing careers in the fields of security, diplomacy, and development."
- Women's Caucus - HKS student organization that "advocates for gender equity and works to enhance personal, academic, and professional development of all women at HKS (including both trans and cis women), as well as nonbinary members of the HKS community."
Display Books: Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
Click on the circular "i" icons to view book descriptions. Click on the Harvard shield icons to access ebooks (Harvard Key required).
- All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis- the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women's faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds. It honors the creativity and resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.ISBN: 9781984854995Publication Date: 2021
- Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women's Fight for Their Rights by The ongoing struggle for women's rights has spanned human history, touched nearly every culture on Earth, and encompassed a wide range of issues, such as the right to vote, work, get an education, own property, exercise bodily autonomy, and beyond. Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists is a fun and fascinating graphic novel-style primer that covers the key figures and events that have advanced women's rights from antiquity to the modern era. In addition, this compelling book illuminates the stories of notable women throughout history-from queens and freedom fighters to warriors and spies-and the progressive movements led by women that have shaped history, including abolition, suffrage, labor, civil rights, LGBTQ liberation, reproductive rights, and more. Examining where we've been, where we are, and where we're going,Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists is an indispensable resource for people of all genders interested in the fight for a more liberated future.ISBN: 9780399581793Publication Date: 2019
- Bad Feminist: Essays by A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched cultural observers of her generation In these funny and insightful essays, Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture. Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better, coming from one of our most interesting and important cultural critics.ISBN: 9780062282712Publication Date: 2014
- Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.ISBN: 9780203900055Publication Date: 2002
- Black Woman Reformer: Ida B Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism by During the early 1890s, a series of shocking lynchings brought unprecedented international attention to American mob violence. This interest created an opportunity for Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist and civil rights activist from Memphis, to travel to England to cultivate British moral indignation against American lynching. Wells adapted race and gender roles established by African American abolitionists in Britain to legitimate her activism as a "black lady reformer"-a role American society denied her-and assert her right to defend her race from abroad. Based on extensive archival research conducted in the United States and Britain, Black Woman Reformer by Sarah Silkey explores Wells's 1893-94 antilynching campaigns within the broader contexts of nineteenth-century transatlantic reform networks and debates about the role of extralegal violence in American society. Through her speaking engagements, newspaper interviews, and the efforts of her British allies, Wells altered the framework of public debates on lynching in both Britain and the United States. No longer content to view lynching as a benign form of frontier justice, Britons accepted Wells's assertion that lynching was a racially motivated act of brutality designed to enforce white supremacy. As British criticism of lynching mounted, southern political leaders desperate to maintain positive relations with potential foreign investors were forced to choose whether to publicly defend or decry lynching. Although British moral pressure and media attention did not end lynching, the international scrutiny generated by Wells's campaigns transformed our understanding of racial violence and made American communities increasingly reluctant to embrace lynching.ISBN: 9780820345574Publication Date: 2015
- A Black Women's History of the United States by A Black Women's History of the United States is a critical survey of black women's complicated legacy in America, as it takes into account their exploitation and victimization as well as their undeniable and substantial contributions to the country since its inception.ISBN: 9780807033562Publication Date: 2020
- Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Specualitive Fiction by In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds--the intertwinement of the mental and the physical--in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson--where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic--destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler's Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.ISBN: 9780822370734Publication Date: 2018
- Burning My Roti: Breaking Barriers as a Queer Indian Woman by Part memoir, part guide, Burning My Roti is essential reading for a new generation of South Asian women. With chapters covering sexual and cultural identity, body hair, colorism and mental health, and a particular focus on the suffocating beauty standards South Asian women are expected to adhere to, Sharan Dhaliwal speaks openly about her journey towards loving herself, offering advice, support and comfort to people that are encountering the same issues. This provocative book celebrates the strides South Asian women have made, whilst also providing powerful advice through personal stories by Sharan and other South Asian women from all over the world.ISBN: 9781784884390Publication Date: 2022
- Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's by Why is there no Native woman David Sedaris? Or Native Anne Lamott? Humor categories in publishing are packed with books by funny women and humorous sociocultural-political commentary--but no Native women. There are presumably more important concerns in Indian Country. More important than humor? Among the Diné/Navajo, a ceremony is held in honor of a baby's first laugh. While the context is different, it nonetheless reminds us that laughter is precious, even sacred. Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's is a powerful and compelling collection of Tiffany Midge's musings on life, politics, and identity as a Native woman in America. Artfully blending sly humor, social commentary, and meditations on love and loss, Midge weaves short, stand-alone musings into a memoir that stares down colonialism while chastising hipsters for abusing pumpkin spice. She explains why she does not like pussy hats, mercilessly dismantles pretendians, and confesses her own struggles with white-bread privilege. Midge goes on to ponder Standing Rock, feminism, and a tweeting president, all while exploring her own complex identity and the loss of her mother. Employing humor as an act of resistance, these slices of life and matchless takes on urban-Indigenous identity disrupt the colonial narrative and provide commentary on popular culture, media, feminism, and the complications of identity, race, and politics.ISBN: 9781496215574Publication Date: 2019
- Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry by Spanning from the debut of A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway in 1959 to her early death from cancer in January 1965, Lorraine Hansberry's short stint in the public eye changed the landscape of American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry (1930-1965) became both the first African American woman to have a play produced on Broadway and the first to win the prestigious New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Resonating deeply with the aims of the civil rights movement, Raisin also ushered in a new era of black representation on the stage and screen, displacing the cartoonish stereotypes that were the remnants of blackface minstrelsy in favor of complex three-dimensional portrayals of black characters and black life. Hansberry's public discourse in the aftermath of Raisin's success also disrupted mainstream critical tendencies to diminish the work of black artists, helping pave the way for future work by black playwrights. Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry is the first volume to collect all of her substantive interviews in one place, including many radio and television interviews that have never before appeared in print. The twenty-one interviews collected here - ranging from just before the Broadway premier of A Raisin in the Sun to less than six months before Hansberry's death - offer an incredible window into Hansberry's aesthetic and political thought. In these conversations, Hansberry explores many of the questions most often put to black writers of the mid-twentieth century - including everything from her thinking about the relationship between art and protest, university and particularity, and realism and naturalism, to her sense of the relationship between black intellectuals and the black masses, integration and Black Nationalism, and African American and Pan-African liberation. Taken together, these interviews reveal the insight, intensity, and eloquence that made Hansberry such a transformative figure in American letters.ISBN: 9781496829634Publication Date: 2020
- Feminism for The 99%: A Manifesto by Feminism shouldn't start--or stop--with seeing women represented at the top of society. It should start with the 99%. Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, inadequate healthcare, border policing, climate change--these are not what you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But aren't they the biggest issues for the vast majority of women around the globe? Taking as its inspiration the new wave of feminist militancy that has erupted globally, this manifesto makes a simple but powerful case: feminism shouldn't start--or stop--with the drive to have women represented at the top of their professions. It must focus on those at the bottom, and fight for the world they deserve. And that means targeting capitalism. Feminism must be anticapitalist, eco-socialist and antiracist.ISBN: 9781788734424Publication Date: 2019
- Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement by This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domingez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara Gonzalez; from Chile, Marta Vergara; and from the United States, Doris Stevens. This Pan-American network drove a transnational movement that advocated women's suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity rights, and broader self-determination. Their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights. But their work also revealed deep divides, with Latin American activists overcoming U.S. presumptions to feminist superiority. As Marino shows, these early fractures continue to influence divisions among today's activists along class, racial, and national lines. Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.ISBN: 9781469649696Publication Date: 2019
- The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability by From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story--mostly lesbians and including women of color--measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability. At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.ISBN: 9780822374336Publication Date: 2016
- From Oppression to Grace: Women of Color and Their Dilemmas in the Academy by This book gives voice to the experiences of women of color--women of African, Native American, Latina, East Indian, Korean and Japanese descent--as students pursuing terminal degrees and as faculty members navigating the Academy, grappling with the dilemmas encountered by others and themselves as they exist at the intersections of their work and identities. Women of color are frequently relegated--on account both of race and womanhood--into monolithic categories that perpetuate oppression, subdue and suppress conflict, and silence voices. This book uses critical race feminism (CRF) to place women of color in the center, rather than the margins, of the discussion, theorizing, research and praxis of their lives as they co-exist in the dominant culture. The first part of the book addresses the issues faced on the way to achieving a terminal degree: the struggles encountered and the lessons learned along the way. Part Two, "Pride and Prejudice: Finding Your Place After the Degree" describes the complexity of lives of women with multiple identities as scholars with family, friends, and lives at home and at work. The book concludes with the voices of senior faculty sharing their journeys and their paths to growth as scholars and individuals. This book is for all women of color growing up in the academy, learning to stand on their own, taking first steps, mastering the language, walking, running, falling and getting up to run again--and illuminates the process of self-definition that is essential to their growth as scholars and individuals.ISBN: 9781579221119Publication Date: 2006
- Girl, Woman, Other by Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women that paints a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and looks back to the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London's funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley's former students, is a successful investment banker; Carole's mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter's lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class. Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative fast-moving form that borrows technique from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that shows a side of Britain we rarely see, one that reminds us of all that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart.ISBN: 9780802156983Publication Date: 2019
- Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella "Especially Heinous," Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.ISBN: 9781555977887Publication Date: 2017
- How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.ISBN: 9781608468553Publication Date: 2017
- I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken, too. Instead, her mother seems to channel her grief into pointing out every possible way Julia has failed. But it's not long before Julia discovers that Olga might not have been as perfect as everyone thought. With the help of her best friend Lorena, and her first love, first everything boyfriend Connor, Julia is determined to find out. Was Olga really what she seemed? Or was there more to her sister's story? And either way, how can Julia even attempt to live up to a seemingly impossible ideal?ISBN: 9781524700515Publication Date: 2019
- Life Sciences by Ninon Moise is cursed. So is her mother Esther, as was every eldest female member of her family going back to the Middle Ages. Each generation is marked by a uniquely obscure disease, illness, or ailment--one of her ancestors was patient zero in the sixteenth-century dancing plague of Strasbourg, while Esther has a degenerative eye disease. Ninon grows up comforted and fascinated by the recitation of these bizarre, inexplicable medical mysteries, forewarned that something will happen to her, yet entirely unprepared for how it will alter her life. Her own entry into this litany of maladies appears one morning in the form of an excruciating burning sensation on her skin, from her wrists to her shoulders. Embarking on a dizzying and frustrating cycle of doctors, specialists, procedures, needles, scans, and therapists, seventeen-year-old Ninon becomes consumed by her need to receive a diagnosis and find a cure for her ailment. She seeks to break the curse and reclaim her body by any means necessary, through increasing isolation and failed treatment after failed treatment, even as her life falls apart. A provocative and empathic questioning of illness, remedy, transmission, and health, Life Sciences poignantly questions our reliance upon science, despite its limitations, to provide all the answers.ISBN: 9781632062956Publication Date: 2021
- Our Voices, Our Histories: Asian American and Pacific Islander Women by An innovative anthology showcasing Asian American and Pacific Islander women's histories Our Voices, Our Histories brings together thirty-five 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. This volume is unique in exploring Asian American and Pacific Islander women's lives along local, transnational, and global dimensions. The contributions present new research on diverse aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's history, from the politics of language, to the role of food, to experiences as adoptees, mixed race, and second generation, while acknowledging shared experiences as women of color in the United States. Our Voices, Our Histories showcases how new approaches in US history, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and Women's and Gender studies inform research on Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Attending to the collective voices of the women themselves, the volume seeks to transform current understandings of Asian American and Pacific Islander women's histories.ISBN: 9781479815067Publication Date: 2020
- Reshaping Women's History: Voices of Nontraditional Women Historians by Award-winning women scholars from nontraditional backgrounds have often negotiated an academic track that leads through figurative--and sometimes literal--minefields. Their life stories offer inspiration, but also describe heartrending struggles and daunting obstacles. Reshaping Women's History presents autobiographical essays by eighteen accomplished scholar-activists who persevered through poverty or abuse, medical malpractice or family disownment, civil war or genocide. As they illuminate their own unique circumstances, the authors also address issues all-too-familiar to women in the academy: financial instability, the need for mentors, explaining gaps in resumes caused by outside events, and coping with gendered family demands, biases, and expectations. Eye-opening and candid, Reshaping Women's History shows how adversity, and the triumph over it, enriches scholarship and spurs extraordinary efforts to affect social change.ISBN: 9780252050749Publication Date: 2018
- Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir by Rumours of Spring is the unforgettable account of Farah Bashir’s adolescence spent in Srinagar in the 1990s. As Indian troops and militants battle across the cityscape and violence becomes the new normal, a young schoolgirl finds that ordinary tasks - studying for exams, walking to the bus stop, combing her hair, falling asleep - are riddled with anxiety and fear. With haunting simplicity, Farah Bashir captures moments of vitality and resilience from her girlhood amidst the increasing trauma and turmoil of passing years - secretly dancing to pop songs on banned radio stations; writing her first love letter; going to the cinema for the first time. This deeply affecting coming-of-age memoir portrays how territorial conflict surreptitiously affects everyday lives in Kashmir.ISBN: 9789354897849Publication Date: 2021
- Rwandan Women Rising by In the spring of 1994, the tiny African nation of Rwanda was ripped apart by a genocide that left nearly a million dead. Neighbors attacked neighbors. Family members turned against their own. After the violence subsided, Rwanda's women--drawn by the necessity of protecting their families--carved out unlikely new roles for themselves as visionary pioneers creating stability and reconciliation in genocide's wake. Today, 64 percent of the seats in Rwanda's elected house of Parliament are held by women, a number unrivaled by any other nation. While news of the Rwandan genocide reached all corners of the globe, the nation's recovery and the key role of women are less well known. In Rwandan Women Rising, Swanee Hunt shares the stories of some seventy women--heralded activists and unsung heroes alike--who overcame unfathomable brutality, unrecoverable loss, and unending challenges to rebuild Rwandan society. Hunt, who has worked with women leaders in sixty countries for over two decades, points out that Rwandan women did not seek the limelight or set out to build a movement; rather, they organized around common problems such as health care, housing, and poverty to serve the greater good. Their victories were usually in groups and wide ranging, addressing issues such as rape, equality in marriage, female entrepreneurship, reproductive rights, education for girls, and mental health. These women's accomplishments provide important lessons for policy makers and activists who are working toward equality elsewhere in Africa and other postconflict societies. Their stories, told in their own words via interviews woven throughout the book, demonstrate that the best way to reduce suffering and to prevent and end conflicts is to elevate the status of women throughout the world.ISBN: 9780822362579Publication Date: 2017
- Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change, 1926-2005 by A staunch proponent of breaking down racial and gender barriers, Shirley Chisholm had the esteemed privilege of being a pioneer in many aspects of her life. She was the first African American woman from Brooklyn elected to the New York State legislature and the first African American woman elected to Congress in 1968. She also made a run for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1972. Focusing on Chisholm's lifelong advocacy for fair treatment, access to education, and equalpay for all American minority groups, this book explores the life of a remarkable woman in the context of twentieth-century urban America and the tremendous social upheaval that occurred after World War II.ISBN: 9780813347691Publication Date: 2013
- The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, "black matter(s)," human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise) and that of others. An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.ISBN: 9780525521037Publication Date: 2019
- Thick: And Other Essays by In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom--award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed--is unapologetically "thick": deemed "thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less," McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. Thick "transforms narrative moments into analyses of whiteness, black misogyny, and status-signaling as means of survival for black women" (Los Angeles Review of Books) with "writing that is as deft as it is amusing" (Darnell L. Moore). This "transgressive, provocative, and brilliant" (Roxane Gay) collection cements McMillan Cottom's position as a public thinker capable of shedding new light on what the "personal essay" can do. She turns her chosen form into a showcase for her critical dexterity, investigating everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies. Collected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be "painfully honest and gloriously affirming" and hold "a mirror to your soul and to that of America" (Dorothy Roberts).ISBN: 9781620974360Publication Date: 2019
- This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color by Originally released in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, "the complex confluence of identities--race, class, gender, and sexuality--systemic to women of color oppression and liberation." Reissued here, nearly thirty-five years after its inception, the fourth edition contains an extensive new introduction by Moraga, along with a previously unpublished statement by Gloria Anzaldúa. The new edition also includes visual artists whose work was produced during the same period as Bridge, including Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, and Yolanda López, as well as current contributor biographies. Bridge continues to reflect an evolving definition of feminism, one that can effectively adapt to, and help inform an understanding of the changing economic and social conditions of women of color in the United States and throughout the world.ISBN: 9781438454382Publication Date: 2015
- This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President by From Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf--Africa's first elected female president--comes an inspirational memoir about her improbable rise to international prominence, her fight for political freedom, and her unwavering determination to rebuild Liberia in the wake of civil war.ISBN: 9780061353475Publication Date: 2009
- To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells by Born to slaves in 1862, Ida B. Wells became a fearless antilynching crusader, women's rights advocate, and journalist. Wells's refusal to accept any compromise on racial inequality caused her to be labeled a dangerous radical in her day but made her a model for later civil rights activists as well as a powerful witness to the troubled racial politics of her era. In the richly illustrated To Tell the Truth Freely, the historian Mia Bay vividly captures Wells's legacy and life, from her childhood in Mississippi to her early career in late nineteenth-century Memphis and her later life in Progressive-era Chicago. Wells's fight for racial and gender justice began in 1883, when she was a young schoolteacher who traveled to her rural schoolhouse by rail. Forcibly ejected from her seat on a train one day on account of her race, Wells immediately sued the railroad. Though she ultimately lost her case on appeal in the Supreme Court of Tennessee, the published account of her legal challenge to Jim Crow changed her life, propelling her into a career as an outspoken journalist and social activist. Also a fierce critic of the racial violence that marked her era, Wells went on to launch a crusade against lynching that took her across the United States and eventually to Britain. Though she helped found the NAACP in 1910 after resettling in Chicago, she would not remain a member for long. Always militant in her quest for racial justice, Wells rejected not only Booker T. Washington's accommodationism but also the moderating influence of white reformers within the early NAACP. The life of Ida B. Wells and her enduring achievements are dramatically recovered in Mia Bay's To Tell the Truth Freely.ISBN: 9780809095292Publication Date: 2009
- Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement by From the founder and activist behind one of the largest movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the "me too" movement, Tarana Burke debuts a powerful memoir about her own journey to saying those two simple yet infinitely powerful words--me too--and how she brought empathy back to an entire generation in one of the largest cultural events in American history. Tarana didn't always have the courage to say "me too." As a child, she reeled from her sexual assault, believing she was responsible. Unable to confess what she thought of as her own sins for fear of shattering her family, her soul split in two. One side was the bright, intellectually curious third generation Bronxite steeped in Black literature and power, and the other was the bad, shame ridden girl who thought of herself as a vile rule breaker, not as a victim. She tucked one away, hidden behind a wall of pain and anger, which seemed to work...until it didn't. Tarana fought to reunite her fractured self, through organizing, pursuing justice, and finding community. In her debut memoir she shares her extensive work supporting and empowering Black and brown girls, and the devastating realization that to truly help these girls she needed to help that scared, ashamed child still in her soul. She needed to stop running and confront what had happened to her, for Heaven and Diamond and the countless other young Black women for whom she cared. They gave her the courage to embrace her power. A power which in turn she shared with the entire world. Through these young Black and brown women, Tarana found that we can only offer empathy to others if we first offer it to ourselves. Unbound is the story of an inimitable woman's inner strength and perseverance, all in pursuit of bringing healing to her community and the world around her, but it is also a story of possibility, of empathy, of power, and of the leader we all have inside ourselves. In sharing her path toward healing and saying "me too," Tarana reaches out a hand to help us all on our own journeys.ISBN: 9781250621733Publication Date: 2021
- Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour de force that tells the "powerful" (The New York Times Book Review) story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall's efforts to uncover the truth about these women warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record. Women warriors planned and led revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. Wake tells the "riveting" (Angela Y. Davis) story of Dr. Rebecca Hall, a historian, granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery. The accepted history of slave revolts has always told her that enslaved women took a back seat. But Rebecca decides to look deeper, and her journey takes her through old court records, slave ship captain's logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the "negro burying ground" uncovered in Manhattan. She finds women warriors everywhere. Using a "remarkable blend of passion and fact, action and reflection" (NPR), Rebecca constructs the likely pasts of Adono and Alele, women rebels who fought for freedom during the Middle Passage, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. We also follow Rebecca's own story as the legacy of slavery shapes her life, both during her time as a successful attorney and later as a historian seeking the past that haunts her. Illustrated beautifully in black and white, Wake will take its place alongside classics of the graphic novel genre, like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Art Spiegelman's Maus. This story of a personal and national legacy is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake.ISBN: 9781982115197Publication Date: 2022
- We Are Bridges: A Memoir by When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood.She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town. We Are Bridges turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family--and considers how to take back one's American story.ISBN: 9781952177927Publication Date: 2021
- When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics by In this collection of her provocative essays on Third World art and culture, Trinh Minh-ha offers new challenges to Western regimes of knowledge. Bringing to her subjects an acute sense of the many meanings of the marginal, she examines topics such as Asian and African texts, the theories of Barthes, questions of spectatorship, the enigmas of art, and the perils of anthropology. When the Moon Waxes Red is an extended argument against reductive analyses, even those that appear politically adroit. The multiply-hyphenated peoples of color are not simply placed in a duality between two cultural heritages; throughout, Trinh describes the predicament of having to live "a difference that has no name and too many names already." She argues for multicultural revision of knowledge so that a new politics can transform reality rather than merely ideologize it. By rewriting the always emerging, already distorted place of struggle, such work seeks to "beat the master at his own game."ISBN: 9780415904308Publication Date: 1991
- Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by In Whipping Girl, biologist and trans activist Julia Serano shares her experiences and insights--both pre- and post-transition--to reveal the ways in which fear, suspicion, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape our attitudes toward trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole. Serano's well-honed arguments and pioneering advocacy stem from her ability to bridge the gap between the often-disparate biological and social perspectives on gender. In this provocative manifesto, she exposes how deep-rooted the cultural belief is that femininity is frivolous, weak, and passive. In addition to debunking popular misconceptions about being transgender, Serano makes the case that today's feminists and transgender activists must work to embrace and empower femininity--in all of its wondrous forms.ISBN: 9781580056229Publication Date: 2016
- Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems by A voice for justice, anti-racism, and equality--here is the greatest and most powerful work of the people's poet, Wanda Coleman. Coleman was a beat-up, broke, and Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and clarity. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a selection of 130 of her poems, edited and introduced by Terrance Hayes. A self-made writer from Black Los Angeles, Wanda Coleman made art while living every day with racism, poverty, violence. Her triumph is in words that endure. It's time for Coleman's courageous, impassioned, inspiring, one-of-a-kind voice to reach readers everywhere.ISBN: 9781574232462Publication Date: 2021
- A Woman Is No Man by Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children--four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear. Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra's oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda's insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can't help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man. But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family--knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.ISBN: 9780062699763Publication Date: 2019