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Drawn from NPR Music’s acclaimed, groundbreaking series Turning the Tables, the definitive book on the vital role of Women in Music—from Beyoncé to Odetta, Taylor Swift to Joan Baez, Joan Jett to Dolly Parton—featuring excerpts of archival interviews, essays, and best album and song shout-outs.

Since the inception of the Secret Service Bureau back in 1909, women have worked at the very heart of British secret intelligence - yet their contributions have been all but written out of history. Now, drawing on private and previously-classified documents, leading historian Claire Hubbard-Hall brings their gripping true stories to life.

Created in the aftermath of World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency relied on women even as it attempted to channel their talents and keep them down. Women sent cables, made dead drops, and maintained the agency's secrets. Despite discrimination—even because of it—women who started as clerks, secretaries, or unpaid spouses rose to become some of the CIA's shrewdest operatives. They were unlikely spies—and that's exactly what made them perfect for the role.

Warhol’s Muses explores the lives of ten endlessly intriguing women, transports us to an era that changed America forever, and uncovers the life and work of one of the most legendary artists of all time.

Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the true story of the scandalous murder investigation that became the inspiration for both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and the first true-crime book published in America.

Breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb. Across history, these body parts have told women who they are and what they should do. Although knowledge of each part has changed through time, none of them tells a simple story. The way they work and in some cases even their existence have been debated. They can be seen as powerful or as disgusting, as relevant only to reproduction or as sources of sexual pleasure. Historian Helen King explores the symbiotic relationship between religion and medicine and their twinned history of gatekeeping over these key organs that have been used to define “woman.”

From the critically acclaimed artist, designer, and author of the bestsellers The Principles of Uncertainty and My Favorite Things comes a collection of moving meditations on the beauty and complexity of women’s lives and roles, revealed in the things they hold, and on remorse, joy, ancestry, and memory. Ultimately, she reveals that many of the things we hold dear—as well as those that burden or haunt us—remain constant and connect us from generation to generation.

In the spring of 2021, Maira and Alex Kalman created a small, limited-edition booklet “Women Holding Things,” which featured select recent paintings by Maira, accompanied by her insightful and deeply personal commentary. The booklet quickly sold out. Now, the Kalmans have expanded that original publication into this extraordinary compendium. Women Holding Things includes thoughtful and intimate anecdotes, recollections, and ruminations about portraits of women, both ordinary and famous.

When they married Emperors Franz Joseph and Napoleon III, respectively, Elisabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France became two of the most famous women on the planet. Not only were they both young and beautiful—becoming cultural and fashion icons of their time—but they played a pivotal role in ruling their realms during a tempestuous era characterized by unprecedented political and technological change. Fearless, adventurous, and independent, Elisabeth and Eugénie represented a new kind of empress—one who rebelled against tradition and anticipated and embraced modern values.

For millennia, across cultures and continents, women and people who experience pregnancy, as well as midwives and those who assist them, have been persecuted as witches (whether they actually practiced the craft or not). In this dauntless, voice-driven reassessment of that history, journalist Sophie Saint Thomas follows the tangled threads of witches and reproductive rights through the ages.

In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of scientific thought. But after the Nazis took power, Jewish and female citizens were forced out of their academic positions. Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer and Hildegard Stücklen were eminent in their fields, but they had no choice but to flee due to their Jewish ancestry or anti-Nazi sentiments. Their harrowing journey out of Germany became a life-and-death situation that required Herculean efforts of friends and other prominent scientists.

On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a 45-year-old woman of quiet daring, found herself in a truly terrifying position. Frontline French tanks had rolled down the Paris streets and surrounded where she stood. The Nazi leadership was hiding in her beloved Jeu de Paume museum behind her. Bullets flew over the Seine. Nazi soldiers were flooding onto the streets in surrender. Would the museum curator be killed before she could tell her story, a story that would mean saving humanity's cultural inheritance?

Etta Shiber and Kitty Bonnefous are the unlikeliest of heroines: two seemingly ordinary women, an American widow and an English divorcée, living quietly together in Paris. Yet during the Nazi occupation, these two friends find themselves unexpectedly plunged into the whirlwind of history. With the help of a French country priest and others, they rescue untold numbers of British and French soldiers trapped behind enemy lines—some of whom they daringly smuggle through Nazi checkpoints in the trunk of their car.

From the women who pounded the pavement selling their songs in Tin Pan Alley at the turn of the twentieth century; to the women who broke new ground writing shows during the Great Depression; to the women who penned protest musicals fighting for social justice during the 1970s; to those who are revitalizing the landscape of American musicals today, Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy That the History Books Left Out is the first-ever book to tell the story of the over three hundred inspiring women who wrote Broadway and Off-Broadway musicals.

What does it mean to be someone's "muse"? Historically, to be called a “muse” among artistic circles has been marketed as a flattering title. But the very concept of a muse underestimates these women and their abilities. At its root, muse is a support role, the title a consolation prize that claims to recognize a woman’s greatness—but only in her support of another. I'm Not Your Muse reclaims the narrative of 31 of these extraordinary women.

In the 1970s, a new wave of feminism was sweeping America. But in the boys’ club of banking and finance, women were still infantilized—no credit without a male cosigner, and their income was dismissed as unreliable. If bankers weren’t going to accommodate women, then women had to take control of their own futures. In 1978 in Denver, Colorado, the opening of the Women’s Bank changed everything.

In the midst of her groundbreaking twenty-year career in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm once declared, "Everyone—with the exception of the black woman herself—has been interpreting the black woman." Edited by Zinga A. Fraser, the leading scholar dedicated to the study of Chisholm's legacy, Shirley Chisholm in Her Own Words gives listeners a rare opportunity to engage with the congresswoman's powerful ideas in her own voice.

At a time when many royal brides meekly submitted to disastrous marriages, Julie proved to be a woman ahead of her time, sacrificing her reputation and a life of luxury in exchange for the freedom to live as she wished. The Rebel Romanov is the inspiring tale of a bold woman who, until now, has been ignored by history.

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.

Approaching Marie Curie from a unique angle, Sobel navigates her remarkable discoveries and fame alongside the women who became her legacy – from Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch and France’s Marguerite Perry, who discovered the element francium, to her own daughter, Irene, a Nobel Prize winner in her own right. Elements of Marie Curie illuminates the trailblazing life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time.