Women

"The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865" is an evocative and historically significant diary penned by Eliza Frances Andrews, which vividly captures the tumult and transformation of the American South during the waning days of the Civil War and the onset of Reconstruction.

Journeying through the decades, this book profiles a diverse array of influential hostesses. With each historic era comes iconic recipes, featuring a total of forty main cocktails and more than 100 variations that listeners can make at home. Whether its happy hour punch a la Martha Washington or a Harlem Renaissance-inspired Green Skirt, listeners will find that many of the ingredients and drinks they're familiar with today wouldn't be here without the hostesses who served them first.

The patriarchy has not been with us forever. There is archaeological evidence that until the late neolithic period (around 2500 B.C.E.) human communities were egalitarian or matriarchal. But then a combination of environmental and social forces drove a dramatic change: men became the masters and the lawgivers and repressed any resistance to their dominion at the personal as well as at the religious, social and political levels.

At the heart of this history is the female body. The century-span between the crinoline and the bikini witnessed more mutations in the ideal western woman's body shape than at any other period. In this richly detailed account, Virginia Nicholson takes us to the Frontline of Beauty to reveal the power, the pain and the pleasure involved in adorning the female body. Encompassing two world wars and a revolution in women's rights, All the Rage tells the story of western female beauty from 1860 to 1960.

Wendy Lower’s stunning account of the role of German women on the World War II Nazi eastern front powerfully revises history, proving that we have ignored the reality of women’s participation in the Holocaust, including as brutal killers. The long-held picture of German women holding down the home front during the war, as loyal wives and cheerleaders for the Führer, pales in comparison to Lower’s incisive case for the massive complicity, and worse, of the 500,000 young German women she places, for the first time, directly in the killing fields of the expanding Reich.

Epic poetry and tragic drama provide us with some of the richest ancient Greek depictions of women who are married to soldiers. In tales of the Trojan War, as told by Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, we encounter these mythical warriors' wives: Penelope, isolated but resourceful as she awaits the return of Odysseus after his lengthy absence; the war widow Andromache, enslaved and displaced from her homeland after the fall of Troy; the unfaithful and murderous Clytemnestra; and Tecmessa, a war captive who witnesses her partner's breakdown and suicide in the aftermath of battle.

It's the dawn of the Swinging Sixties. The Cold War is at its height and support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is building. The Berkshire Constabulary's Detective Gwen Crockford is promoted to Woman Police Sergeant in Newbury – the town at the heart of Britain's atomic weapons program. Gwen's initial reservations that her posting in rural Berkshire will be boring soon prove to be unfounded. A serial sex attacker on the loose, an attempted murder at Greenham Common US Airforce Base, and a charismatic heiress with a family secret keep things interesting for the capable sergeant.

What could possibly go wrong in a wealthy matriarch's country home when her dilettante son, his restless wife, and his widowed brother live there together? Strong Passions, rooted in the beguiling times of Edith Wharton's "old New York," recounts the true story of a tumultuous marriage.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the lesbian feminist movement and the no-fault divorce revolution transformed the lives of wives who desired women. Women could now choose to divorce their husbands in order to lead openly lesbian or bisexual lives; increasingly, however, these women were confronted by hostile state discrimination, typically in legal battles over child custody. Well into the 1980s, many women remained ambivalent about divorce and resistant to labeling themselves as lesbian, therefore complicating a simple interpretation of their lives and relationship choices.

In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare’s England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-sixteenth century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men.

In Bringing Home the White House, Melissa Estes Blair introduces us to five fascinating yet unheralded women who were at the heart of campaigns to elect and reelect some of our most beloved presidents. By examining the roles of these political strategists in affecting the outcome of presidential elections, Blair sheds light on their historical importance and the relevance of their individual influence.

Some Eminent Women of Our Times (which has been renamed Some Eminent Women of the 19th century) was written by Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett in 1889. It is available in the public domain and contains short biographies of various women who achieved great things both socially and in the literary field. The women Dame Millicent includes were singled out by her because of their unstinting dedication, selflessness, and in many cases bravery to do what they thought was right.

The indisputable “queen of crosswords,” Anna Shechtman published her first New York Times puzzle at age nineteen, and later, spearheaded the The New Yorker’s popular crossword section. Working with a medium often criticized as exclusionary, elitist, and out-of-touch, Anna is one of very few women in the field of puzzle making, where she strives to make the everyday diversion more diverse.

This is a neglected history. No attempt at a sweeping, definitive, exhaustive history of the world but something quieter, more intimate and particular, told by Annabelle Hirsch through her selection of 101 objects, and now brought thrillingly alive for you by a chorus of 101 remarkable women in this ground-breaking audio release.

In Women Money Power, business journalist Josie Cox tells the story of women’s fight for freedom and economic equality. This is an inspirational account of brave pioneers who took on social mores and the law, including the “Rosies,” who filled industrial jobs and helped win World War II, the heiress whose fortune helped create the birth control pill, the brassy banker who broke into the boys’ club of the New York Stock Exchange, and the namesake of landmark equal-pay legislation who refused to accept discrimination.