American Womens History

A sweeping and enchanting new novel from the widely beloved, award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken about three generations of an unconventional New England family who own and operate a candlepin bowling alley. From the day she is discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery at the turn of...

At the historic Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, Anita Hill spoke out courageously about workplace sexual harassment. Now she turns to the topic of home. As our country reels from the subprime mortgage meltdown and the resulting devastation of so many families and communities, Hill takes us inside this “crisis of home” and exposes its deep roots in race and gender inequities, which continue to imperil every American’s ability to achieve the American Dream. In this period of recovery and its aftermath, what is at stake is the inclusive democracy the Constitution promises.

Raised like a princess in one of the most powerful families in the American South, Henrietta Bingham was offered the helm of a publishing empire. Instead she ripped through the Jazz Age like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. In New York, Louisville, and London, she drove both men and women wild with desire, and her youth blazed with sex. But her love affairs with women made her the subject of derision, and she suffered from years of addiction and breakdowns.

Inspired by her own foremothers’ legacies and the friendships formed throughout her life, Rozella Kennedy centers and celebrates the stories of 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women—both famous and little-known—who changed the course of US history. In the beautiful pages of Our...

At sixteen, Susanna Bolling is like America in rebellion; she craves independence. While her brothers are off fighting for the Patriots, she longs to do more than tedious household chores and attend spinning bees in sleepy City Point, Virginia. When British General Cornwallis invades her family's Bollingbrook Plantation, she overhears his secret plan to defeat the Patriots. Much to her shock, she finds herself at the center of the war. Now America's fight for liberty hinges on her.

I Did It is the story of Gina Champion-Cain, the mastermind behind the largest woman-led Ponzi scheme in US history—$400 million. This real-life story includes a multitude of participants, banks, hedge funds, egomaniacs, and small-time crooks, all fueled by greed, stupidity, and a keen desire to look the other way. And even when they were looking in the right direction, all of these people and entities saw nothing.

In 1910, Crystal Eastman was one of the most conspicuous progressive reformers in America. By the 1920s, her ardent suffragism, insistent anti-militarism, gregarious internationalism, and uncompromising feminism branded her "the most dangerous woman in America" and led to her exile in England. Yet a century later, her legacy in shaping several defining movements of the modern era-labor, feminism, free speech, peace - is unquestioned.

In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first American woman to obtain a medical degree. Following in her footsteps in the early 1980s, Brenda Berkman was the first woman to challenge New York City’s ban on female firefighters. During the last few centuries, countless women have made amazing contributions to society. Women are now Nobel Peace Prize winners, world-class athletes, and talented inventors and adventurers.

Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905-1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a "sex and race discriminating world." Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.

At a time when most of the public discourse was dominated by men, Anna Julia Cooper’s writings offered a blistering rebuke to that status quo. The essays and speeches collected here anticipated the debates about racism, sexism, and intersectionality that we are still having today. Cooper argues in particular for the importance of Black women’s participation in identifying and combating the structures of oppression that surrounded them - and that made life so much more difficult for many other groups as well.

From the bestselling author of Los Alamos and The Good German comes Joseph Kanon's riveting tale of love, revenge and murder set in postwar Venice. Winner of the Hammett Prize It is 1946, and Adam Miller has come to Venice to visit his widowed mother and try to forget the horrors he has...

For centuries, women who emerge as mystic leaders have played vital roles in American culture. For just as long, they've been subjugated and ridiculed. Today, women and others across the nation are once again turning to their mystic powers to #HexThePatriarchy and help fight the forces that seem bent on relegating them to second-class citizenry.

The dramatic inside story of the rise of women in elected office over the past quarter-century, from the pioneering founder of three-million-member EMILY's List - one of the most influential players in today's political landscape.

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous Black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. In this first full-scale biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927–2003).

Cultural criticism and pop culture history intertwine in this important book, which dissects how hip hop has sidelined Black women's identity and emotional well-being. Do you have a “ride or die chick” in your life? A “ride or die chick” is a Black woman who holds down her family and...

Anaïs Nin was an influential and acclaimed writer best known for her diaries that cover six decades from the 1910s to the 1970s. In addition to her famous journals, her works include novels, essays, poetry, studies, and erotica - many of which remain popular to this day. As one of the first prominent female authors of erotica, Nin led a controversial life that was subject to many rumors. Her fearlessness when it came to tackling taboo topics such as incest, sexual abuse, and extra-marital affairs would earn her both staunch supporters and zealous critics.

“I’ll take my share of the blame. I only ask that he take his.” In Bringing Down the Colonel, journalist Patricia Miller tells the story of Madeline Pollard, an unlikely nineteenth-century women’s rights crusader. After an affair with a prominent politician left her “ruined,” Pollard...

A sweeping novel about a correspondent trapped behind enemy lines during the Korean War, and the women who help her find her way home, from the national bestselling author of Daughters of Shandong 1950. It’s the coldest winter in decades, and twenty-eight-year-old Chinese American journalist...

From Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition to Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Black writers, some of whom worked as maids themselves, have manipulated the stereotype in a strategic way as a figure to comment on Black-white relations or to dramatize the conflicts of the Black protagonists. In fact, the characters themselves, like real-life maids, often use the stereotype to their advantage or to trick their oppressors.

The first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, there was no one like Effa Manley in the sports world of the 1930s and 1940s. She was a sophisticated woman who owned a baseball team. She never shrank from going head to head with men, who dominated the ranks of sports executives. That her life story remained unchronicled for so long can only be attributed to one thing: her team, the Newark Eagles, belonged to the Negro Leagues. Author James Overmyer brings to light new details regarding Effa Manley's fascinating story.