Showing titles in Women

In The Silver Women, Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the Panama Canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans.

Part hidden history, part love letter to creative innovation, this is the true story of an unlikely friendship between a dancer, Loie Fuller, and a scientist, Marie Curie, brought together by an illuminating discovery.

Dorothy Butler Gilliam, whose 50-year-career as a journalist put her in the forefront of the fight for social justice, offers a comprehensive view of racial relations and the media in the US.

Discover a feminist pop history that looks beyond the Ton and Jane Austen to highlight the Regency women who succeeded on their own terms and were largely lost to history - until now.

In 2010, for the first time since the Soviets, Afghanistan allowed women to join the armed forces, and Niloofar entered Afghanistan’s military academy. Niloofar had to break through social barriers to demonstrate confidence, leadership, and decisiveness - essential qualities for a combat pilot. Niloofar performed the first solo flight of her class - ahead of all her male classmates - and in 2013 became Afghanistan’s first female fixed-wing air force pilot.

Queen Victoria's reign was an era of breathtaking social change, but it did little to create a platform for women. But not so within the social sphere of the seance - a mysterious, lamp-lit world on both sides of the Atlantic, in which women who craved a public voice could hold their own. Out of the Shadows tells the stories of the enterprising women whose supposedly clairvoyant gifts granted them fame, fortune, and, most important, influence, as they crossed rigid boundaries of gender and class as easily as they passed between the realms of the living and the dead.

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.

This book is for and about the women who kicked in doors, as pioneers of their craft or making politics central to their sound: those who offer a new way of thinking about the vast spectrum of women in music. In this radical departure from the historic narrative of music and music writing being written by men, for men, This Woman’s Work challenges the male dominance and sexism that have been hard-coded in the canons of music, literature, and film and has forced women to fight pigeon-holing or being side-lined by carving out their own space.

Michelle Obama's legacy transcends categorization. Mrs. Obama was not only our first black first lady; she was President Obama's equal partner in marriage and parenthood and a tireless advocate for women's rights, education, healthy eating, and exercise. Her genre-busting personal style encouraged others to speak, to engage, even to dress as they wished.

Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend; think Byron and Shelley, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the world's best-loved female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Coauthors and real-life friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their discovery of a wealth of surprising collaborations.

In this fascinating and insightful book, feminist curator Rachael Lennon provides an intimate and intersectional examination of the history of marriage around the world.

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.

Are the ways we look at menopause all wrong? Historian Susan Mattern says yes, and The Slow Moon Climbs reveals just how wrong we have been. Taking listeners from the rainforests of Paraguay to the streets of Tokyo, Mattern draws on historical, scientific, and cultural research to reveal how our perceptions of menopause developed from prehistory to today. For most of human history, people had no word for menopause and did not view it as a medical condition. Rather, in traditional foraging and agrarian societies, it was a transition to another important life stage.

Dive into a compelling historical account with Female Life Among the Mormons! This remarkable book provides a vivid glimpse into the lives, experiences, and challenges faced by women in the early days of the Mormon community. Written by Maria Ward, who experienced the lifestyle first-hand, this book navigates through the intricacies and dynamics of polygamous relationships, societal expectations, and the overall environment within the Mormon community during the 19th century.

With deep archival scope and rigorous execution, The Icon and the Idealist weaves together a personal narrative of two fascinating women and the political history of a country arriving at one of the most necessary social inventions of the modern day. Refusing to shy away from the enmeshed struggles of race, class, and gender, Gorton has made a sweeping examination of every force that has come in the way of women’s reproductive freedom.

Wie Frauen Geschichte schrieben – und Männer dafür den Ruhm bekamen. Muse, Sekretärin, Ehefrau – es gibt viele Bezeichnungen für Frauen, deren Einfluss aus der Geschichte radiert wurde. Für deren Leistungen Männer die Auszeichnungen und den Ruhm bekamen. Männer, wie Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht oder Albert Einstein, deren Bekannte, Töchter oder Geliebte an ihren Werken mitwirkten – und deren Namen damals wie heute kaum jemand kennt.

This remarkable historical novel is about Martyna, an 89 year old woman living in Germany who, on the 22nd of April, 2015, has a strange dream during her afternoon nap, then dies from a heart attack. But that is the beginning of the story, not the end. And the story—that she insists on experiencing in order to understand her just-completed life—is a powerful drama of courage and commitment, of love and loss, of longing and hope.

Their wings were weak, their talons broken…yet they flew the Soviets into winning the war against the Nazis. They were ignored, laughed at, and forced to do chores beneath their ranks. Why? They were the "weaker" gender. Despite being capable, they were initially denied entry into combat. And when they did enlist, their treatment only worsened: They were assigned worn-out uniforms and left to the mercy of rusted equipment on the battlefield. These adversities didn’t stop the Soviet female fighters from going ahead and showing unprecedented excellence in warfare.

The best-selling revisionist biography of one of the great women of the 16th century. Orphaned in infancy, Catherine de Medici was the sole legitimate heiress to the Medici family fortune. Married at 14 to the future Henri II of France, she was constantly humiliated by his influential mistress, Diane de Poitiers. When her husband died as a result of a duelling accident in Paris, Catherine was made queen regent during the short reign of her eldest son (married to Mary Queen of Scots, and like many of her children he died young).

In the summer of 1966, crammed into a DC hotel suite and passing paper cups of liquor, twenty-eight women hatched a revolutionary plan. Betty Friedan, the well-known author of The Feminine Mystique, and Pauli Murray, a lawyer at the front lines of the civil rights movement, had quietly pulled away attendees from the State Womens’ Commissions annual conference. Frustrated with government inertia, they laid out a vision for an organization to unite and advocate for all women. Inspired, challenged, skeptical, they debated the idea late into the night and the next day.