Women's History Month: General Women's History

Describes a variety of landmarks and buildings that represent women's experiences and accomplishments throughout history.

Now is the time for a new women's history--for the famous, infamous, and unsung women to get their due--from the Enlightenment to the #MeToo movement. Recording the important milestones in the birth of the modern feminist movement and the rise of women into greater social, economic, and political power, Miles takes us through a colorful pageant of astonishing women, from heads of state like Empress Cixi, Eugenia Charles, Indira Gandhi, Jacinda Ardern, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to political rainmakers Kate Sheppard, Carrie Chapman Catt, Anna Stout, Dorothy Height, Shirley Chisholm, Winnie Mandela, STEM powerhouses Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Rosalind Franklin, Sophia Kovalevskaya, Marie Curie, and Ada Lovelace, revolutionaries Olympe de Gouges, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Patyegarang, and writer/intellectuals Mary Wollstonecraft, Simon de Beauvoir, Elaine Morgan, and Germaine Greer. Women in the arts, women in sports, women in business, women in religion, women in politics--this is a one-stop roundup of the tremendous progress women have made in the modern era. A testimony to how women have persisted--and excelled--this is a smart and stylish popular history for all readers.

Women in World History brings together the most recent scholarship in women's and world history in a single volume covering the period from 1450 to the present, enabling readers to understand women's relationship to world developments over the past five hundred years. Women have served the world as unfree people, often forced to migrate as slaves, trafficked sex workers, and indentured laborers working off debts. Diseases have migrated through women's bodies and women themselves have deliberately spread religious belief and fervor as well as ideas. They have been global authors, soldiers, and astronauts encircling the globe and moving far beyond it. They have written classics in political and social thought and crafted literary and artistic works alongside others who were revolutionaries and reform-minded activists. Historical scholarship has shown that there is virtually no part of the world where women's presence is not manifest, whether in archives, oral testimonials, personal papers, the material record, evidence of disease and famine, myth and religious teachings, and myriad other forms of documentation. As these studies mount, the idea of surveying women's past on a global basis becomes daunting. This book aims to redress this situation and offer a synthetic world history of women in modern times.

Cokie Roberts's number one New York Times bestseller, We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, examined the nature of women's roles throughout history and led USA Today to praise her as a "custodian of time-honored values." Her second bestseller, From This Day Forward, written with her husband, Steve Roberts, described American marriages throughout history, including the romance of John and Abigail Adams. Now Roberts returns with Founding Mothers, an intimate and illuminating look at the fervently patriotic and passionate women whose tireless pursuits on behalf of their families -- and their country -- proved just as crucial to the forging of a new nation as the rebellion that established it. While much has been written about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, battled the British, and framed the Constitution, the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters they left behind have been little noticed by history. Roberts brings us the women who fought the Revolution as valiantly as the men, often defending their very doorsteps. While the men went off to war or to Congress, the women managed their businesses, raised their children, provided them with political advice, and made it possible for the men to do what they did. The behind-the-scenes influence of these women -- and their sometimes very public activities -- was intelligent and pervasive. Drawing upon personal correspondence, private journals, and even favored recipes, Roberts reveals the often surprising stories of these fascinating women, bringing to life the everyday trials and extraordinary triumphs of individuals like Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Deborah Read Franklin, Eliza Pinckney, Catherine Littlefield Green, Esther DeBerdt Reed, and Martha Washington -- proving that without our exemplary women, the new country might never have survived. Social history at its best, Founding Mothers unveils the drive, determination, creative insight, and passion of the other patriots, the women who raised our nation. Roberts proves beyond a doubt that like every generation of American women that has followed, the founding mothers used the unique gifts of their gender -- courage, pluck, sadness, joy, energy, grace, sensitivity, and humor -- to do what women do best, put one foot in front of the other in remarkable circumstances and carry on.

What was it like to be there and, if you were lucky, to live through it? In a compelling combination of narrative and groundbreaking historical research, Salem Witch Trial scholar Marilynne K. Roach vividly brings the terrifying times to life while skillfully illuminating the lives of the accused, the accusers, and the afflicted.

While interpersonal, local, and regional contexts are critical to the analysis of witch-hunting in early New England, this book shows that a full understanding of the Puritan colonies' battle against black magic can only be achieved by placing it in a trans-Atlantic perspective.

Presents biographical portraits of pioneering American women who overcame difficult obstacles to gain entry into male-dominated arenas, from medicine and politics to business and the media.

Memories of September 11 will always be with us, as will the need to understand it through those who were there.

A riveting investigation into a cold case asks how much control women have over their bodies and the direction of their lives. In July 1970, eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and never returned. A cold case for fifty years, Paula's story had been largely forgotten when Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could a community give up and move on? Could there ever be justice for Paula? Tracing the knowns and unknowns, Dykstra discovers a girl who was hemmed in by the culture of the late 1960s, when women's rights had been brought to the fore but had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more she learns about Paula, the more parallels Dykstra finds in the lives of the women who knew Paula, the lives of the women in her own family, and even in her own life. Captivating and expertly crafted, What Happened to Paula is a timely, powerful look at gender, autonomy, and the cost of being a woman.

Indigenous Activism profiles eighteen American Indian women of the twentieth century who distinguished themselves through their political activism.