Featured Ebooks
Welcome
March is Women's History Month, so for March's featured ebooks, we are celebrating the women who have helped shape American history. This selection of ebooks looks at both icons of American history and the lesser-known heroes who worked hard for their cause.
For more biographies of women in history, visit the National Women's History Museum's website, which regularly updates with new stories.
Women of American History Books
Madame Chien-Shiung Wu
Narrating the well-lived life of the "Chinese Madame Curie" -- a recipient of the first Wolf Prize in Physics (1978), the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Princeton University, as well as the first female president of the American Physical Society -- this book provides a comprehensive and honest account of the life of Dr Wu Chien-Shiung, an outstanding and leading experimental physicist of the 20th century.
Dolly Parton, Gender, and Country Music
Dolly Parton crafted her exaggerated appearance and stage personality by combining two opposing stereotypes--the innocent mountain girl and the voluptuous sex symbol. Emerging through her lyrics, personal stories, stage presence, and visual imagery, these wildly different gender tropes form a central part of Dolly's media image and portrayal of herself as a star and celebrity.
Black Woman Reformer
During the early 1890s, a series of shocking lynchings brought unprecedented international attention to American mob violence. This created an opportunity for Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist and civil rights activist from Memphis, to travel to England to cultivate British moral indignation against American lynching. Wells adapted race and gender roles established by African American abolitionists in Britain to legitimate her activism as a "black lady reformer" - a role American society denied her - and assert her right to defend her race from abroad.
In My Own Moccasins
Helen Knott, a highly accomplished Indigenous woman, seems to have it all. But in her memoir, she offers a different perspective. In My Own Moccasins is an unflinching account of addiction, intergenerational trauma, and the wounds brought on by sexual violence. It is also the story of sisterhood, the power of ceremony, the love of family, and the possibility of redemption.
American Women and Flight since 1940
From Jackie Cochran, whose perseverance led to the formation of the Women's Army Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II to the recent achievements of Jeannie Flynn, the Air Force's first woman fighter pilot and Eileen Collins, NASA's first woman shuttle commander, Douglas introduces a host of determined women who overcame prejudice and became military fliers, airline pilots, and air and space engineers.
Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman
Matilda Rabinowitz?s illustrated memoir challenges assumptions about the lives of early twentieth-century women. In Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman, Rabinowitz describes the ways in which she and her contemporaries rejected the intellectual and social restrictions imposed on women as they sought political and economic equality in the first half of the twentieth century.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Legacy of Dissent
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's lifelong effort to reshape the language of American law has had profound consequences: she has shifted the rhetorical boundaries of jurisprudence on a wide range of fundamental issues from equal protection to reproductive rights. Beginning in the early 1970s, Ginsburg led a consequential attack on sexist law in the United States. By directly confronting the patriarchal voice of the law, she pointedly challenged an entrenched genre of legal language that silenced the voices and experiences of American women and undermined their status as equal citizens.
Curveball
From the time she was a girl growing up in the shadow of Lexington Park in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Toni Stone knew she wanted to play professional baseball. There was only one problem--every card was stacked against her. Curveball tells the inspiring story of baseball's "female Jackie Robinson," a woman whose ambition, courage, and raw talent propelled her from ragtag teams barnstorming across the Dakotas to playing in front of large crowds at Yankee Stadium.
Fannie Lou Hamer
In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer delivered a heart-wrenching testimony before the Democratic National Convention's (DNC) Credentials Committee. In this speech, Hamer represented both the concerns of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and the limits of American democracy when she proclaimed: "I question America. Is this the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily? Because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?" This accessible biography will enrich public memory about Hamer by telling not only the significant story of her riveting testimony, but also by recounting a life filled with triumphs, tragedies, and accompanying lessons for contemporary audiences.
The True Story of Pocahontas
The True Story of Pocahontas is the first public publication of the Powhatan perspective that has been maintained and passed down from generation to generation within the Mattaponi Tribe, and the first written history of Pocahontas by her own people.
Hysterical!
This anthology of original essays by the leading authorities on women's comedy surveys the disorderly, subversive, and unruly performances of women comics from silent film to contemporary multimedia.
Know My Name
She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford's campus. Her victim impact statement was posted on BuzzFeed, where it instantly went viral--viewed by eleven million people within four days, it was translated globally and read on the floor of Congress; it inspired changes in California law and the recall of the judge in the case. Thousands wrote to say that she had given them the courage to share their own experiences of assault for the first time. Now she reclaims her identity to tell her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words.
The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison
In September 1918, World War I was nearing its end when Marguerite E. Harrison, a thirty-nine-year-old Baltimore socialite, wrote to the head of the U.S. Army's Military Intelligence Division (MID) asking for a job. The director asked for clarification. Did she mean a clerical position? No, she told him. She wanted to be a spy.
Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Published in 1850, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth was spoken aloud to Truth’s friend and neighbor Olive Gilbert, as she herself was illiterate. Along with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, it remains one of the most moving and eloquent slave narratives—a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
Alcott in Her Own Time
By 1888, twenty years after the publication of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was one of the most popular and successful authors America had yet produced. In her pre-Little Women days, she concocted blood-and-thunder tales for low wages; post-Little Women, she specialized in domestic novels and short stories for children. Collected here for the first time are the reminiscences of people who knew her, the majority of which have not been published since their original appearance in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman s name is known world-wide and her exploits as a self-liberated Underground Railroad heroine are celebrated in children s literature, film, and history books, yet no major biography of Tubman has appeared since 1943. Jean M. Humez s comprehensive Harriet Tubman is both an important biographical overview based on extensive new research and a complete collection of the stories Tubman told about her life a virtual autobiography culled by Humez from rare early publications and manuscript sources.
Agent of Change
The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901-1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas's Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento's achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader.
Soul Talk, Song Language
Joy Harjo is a "poet-healer-philosopher-saxophonist," and one of the most powerful Native American voices of her generation. She has spent the past two decades exploring her place in poetry, music, dance/performance, and art. Soul Talk, Song Language gathers together in one complete collection many of these explorations and conversations. Through an eclectic assortment of media, including personal essays, interviews, and newspaper columns, Harjo reflects upon the nuances and development of her art, the importance of her origins, and the arduous reconstructions of the tribal past, as well as the dramatic confrontation between Native American and Anglo civilizations.
Abigail Adams
In this book, Edith B. Gelles asserts that Abigail Adams' vivid, insightful letters are "the best account that exists from the pre to the post-Revolutionary period in America of a woman's life and world." Adams' spontaneous, witty letters serve dual purposes for the modern reader: it provides an intriguing first hand account of pivotal historical events and it shows how these events from the Boston Tea Party to the War of 1812 entered the private sphere. Included in the book is a chronology, notes and reference section and a selected bibliography. This book will be a must for all scholars of American literature, history and politics seeking to understand this literary figure.
Remaking Black Power
In this comprehensive history, Ashley D. Farmer examines black women's political, social, and cultural engagement with Black Power ideals and organizations. Complicating the assumption that sexism relegated black women to the margins of the movement, Farmer demonstrates how female activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power and social justice by developing new ideas about black womanhood. This compelling book shows how the new tropes of womanhood that they created--the "Militant Black Domestic," the "Revolutionary Black Woman," and the "Third World Woman," for instance--spurred debate among activists over the importance of women and gender to Black Power organizing, causing many of the era's organizations and leaders to critique patriarchy and support gender equality.
Understanding Marge Piercy
Grounded in feminism, political activism, and Jewish spirituality, Marge Piercy's work includes more than thirty volumes of poetry, as well as fiction written over nearly five decades. Her poetry fuses political, domestic, and autobiographical spheres with imagery drawn from nature, sensual and dream memories, and Jewish mysticism. Exploring the choices people make and how their decisions are shaped by a multitude of factors, her novels include personal and family histories, societal belief systems, and social circumstances.
That Woman
When Nikki R. Van Hightower stepped into the position of Women's Advocate for the City of Houston in 1976, she quickly discovered that she had very little real power. And when the all-male city council cut her salary to $1 a year after she spoke at a women's rights rally, she gained full appreciation for just what she was up against. Nonetheless, before the job was abolished altogether two years later, Van Hightower went on to help orchestrate the enormously successful 1977 US National Women's Conference in Houston as part of the 1975 International Woman's Year, to help found the Houston Area Women's Center and establish its rape crisis and shelter programs, and to host a radio show where she publicly discussed issues of gender, race, and human rights.
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks's crucial decision proved more than one to remain seated. This book uses historical analysis and Parks's own words to paint a complete picture of her life as a courageous and defiant civil rights activist. Rosa Parks: A Life in American History explores the life of this important civil rights activist in the context of the cultural and social history of her time.
Sarah Winnemucca
This book is the triumphant and moving story of Sarah Winnemucca (1844-91), one of the most influential and charismatic Native women in American history. Born into a legendary family of Paiute leaders in western Nevada, Sarah dedicated much of her life to working for her people. In 1883 she produced her autobiography--the first written by a Native woman--and founded a Native school whose educational practices were far ahead of its time.