Celebrating Women's History Month: Nonfiction

Inspired and inspirational, worldly wise, deeply felt, and often delightfully funny--here in one compact volume are 100 of the greatest poems written in English over the last century, memorable masterpieces that everyone should know and enjoy. From W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot to John Ashbury and A.R. Ammons; Elizabeth Bishop and Mariann Moore to Sylvia Plath and Mary Oliver; Robert Frost and W.B. Yeats to Allen Ginsberg and Thom Gunn, this comprehensive anthology features the poems that have best expressed the spirit of our times and helped create modern culture.

A photo-filled celebration of the women whose contributions this past century will be felt well into the new millennium. 200+ photos.

An LA Times Best Book of the Year "Engrossing... examines the major events of the mid 19th century through the lives of three key figures in the abolitionist and women's rights movements." --Smithsonian From the executive editor of The New Yorker, a riveting, provocative, and revelatory history of abolition and women's rights, told through the story of three women--Harriet Tubman, Frances Seward, and Martha Wright--in the years before, during and after the Civil War. "The Agitators tells the story of America before the Civil War through the lives of three women who advocated for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights as the country split apart. Harriet Tubman, Martha Coffin Wright, and Frances A. Seward are the examples we need right now--another time of divisiveness and dissension over our nation's purpose 'to form a more perfect union.'" --Hillary Rodham Clinton In the 1850s, Harriet Tubman, strategically brilliant and uncannily prescient, rescued some seventy enslaved people from Maryland's Eastern Shore and shepherded them north along the underground railroad. One of her regular stops was Auburn, New York, where she entrusted passengers to Martha Coffin Wright, a Quaker mother of seven, and Frances A. Seward, the wife of William H. Seward, who served over the years as governor, senator, and secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, Tubman worked for the Union Army in South Carolina as a nurse and spy, and took part in a spectacular river raid in which she helped to liberate 750 slaves from several rice plantations. Wright, a "dangerous woman" in the eyes of her neighbors, worked side by side with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to organize women's rights and anti-slavery conventions across New York State, braving hecklers and mobs when she spoke. Frances Seward, the most conventional of the three friends, hid her radicalism in public, while privately acting as a political adviser to her husband, pressing him to persuade President Lincoln to move immediately on emancipation. The Agitators opens in the 1820s, when Tubman is enslaved and Wright and Seward are young homemakers bound by law and tradition, and ends after the war. Many of the most prominent figures of the era--Lincoln, William H. Seward, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison--are seen through the discerning eyes of the protagonists. So are the most explosive political debates: about the civil rights of African Americans and women, about the enlistment of Black troops, and about opposing interpretations of the Constitution. Through richly detailed letters from the time and exhaustive research, Wickenden traces the second American revolution these women fought to bring about, the toll it took on their families, and its lasting effects on the country. Riveting and profoundly relevant to our own time, The Agitators brings a vibrant, original voice to this transformative period in our history.

Rich in detail, filled with fascinating characters, and panoramic in its sweep, this magnificent, comprehensive work tells for the first time the complete story of the American woman from the Pilgrims to the 21st-century In this sweeping cultural history, Gail Collins explores the transformations, victories, and tragedies of women in America over the past 300 years. As she traces the role of females from their arrival on the Mayflower through the 19th century to the feminist movement of the 1970s and today, she demonstrates a boomerang pattern of participation and retreat. In some periods, women were expected to work in the fields and behind the barricades--to colonize the nation, pioneer the West, and run the defense industries of World War II. In the decades between, economic forces and cultural attitudes shunted them back into the home, confining them to the role of moral beacon and domestic goddess. Told chronologically through the compelling true stories of individuals whose lives, linked together, provide a complete picture of the American woman's experience, Untitled is a landmark work and major contribution for us all.

The first Asian woman in hip-hop, Sophia Chang shares the inspiring story of her career in the music business, working with such acts as The Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest, her path to becoming an entrepreneur, and her candid accounts of marriage, motherhood, aging, desire, marginalization, and martial arts. Fearless and unpredictable, Sophia Chang prevailed in a male-dominated music industry to manage the biggest names in hip-hop and R&B. The daughter of Korean immigrants in predominantly white suburban Vancouver, Chang left for New York City, and soon became a powerful voice in music boardrooms at such record companies as Atlantic, Jive, and Universal Music Group. As an A&R rep, Chang met a Staten Island rapper named Prince Rakeem, now known as the RZA, founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, the most revered and influential rap group in hip-hop history. That union would send her on a transformational odyssey, leading her to a Shaolin monk who would become her partner, an enduring kung fu practice, two children, and a reckoning with what type woman she ultimately wanted to be. For decades, Chang helped remarkably talented men tell their stories. Now, with The Baddest Bitch In The Room, she is ready to tell her own story of marriage, motherhood, aging, desire, marginalization, and martial arts. This is an inspirational debut memoir by a woman of color who has had the audacity to be bold in the pursuit of her passions, despite what anyone--family, society, the dominant culture--have prescribed.

For the first time, the complete collection of Maya Angelou's published poems-including "On the Pulse of Morning"-in a permanent collectible, handsome hardcover edition.

In 1871, five young girls were sent by the Japanese government to the United States. Their mission: learn Western ways and return to help nurture a new generation of enlightened men to lead Japan. Raised in traditional samurai households during the turmoil of civil war, three of these unusual ambassadors--Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda--grew up as typical American schoolgirls. Upon their arrival in San Francisco they became celebrities, their travels and traditional clothing exclaimed over by newspapers across the nation. As they learned English and Western customs, their American friends grew to love them for their high spirits and intellectual brilliance. The passionate relationships they formed reveal an intimate world of cross-cultural fascination and connection. Ten years later, they returned to Japan--a land grown foreign to them--determined to revolutionize women's education. Based on in-depth archival research in Japan and in the United States, including decades of letters from between the three women and their American host families, Daughters of the Samurai is beautifully, cinematically written, a fascinating lens through which to view an extraordinary historical moment.

The year was 1765. Eminent botanist Philibert Commerson had just been appointed to a grand new expedition: the first French circumnavigation of the world. As the ships' official naturalist, Commerson would seek out resources--medicines, spices, timber, food--that could give the French an edge in the ever-accelerating race for empire.   Jeanne Baret, Commerson's young mistress and collaborator, was desperate not to be left behind. She disguised herself as a teenage boy and signed on as his assistant. The journey made the twenty-six-year-old, known to her shipmates as "Jean" rather than "Jeanne," the first woman to ever sail around the globe. Yet so little is known about this extraordinary woman, whose accomplishments were considered to be subversive, even impossible for someone of her sex and class.             When the ships made landfall and the secret lovers disembarked to explore, Baret carried heavy wooden field presses and bulky optical instruments over beaches and hills, impressing observers on the ships' decks with her obvious strength and stamina. Less obvious were the strips of linen wound tight around her upper body and the months she had spent perfecting her masculine disguise in the streets and marketplaces of Paris.             Expedition commander Louis-Antoine de Bougainville recorded in his journal that curious Tahitian natives exposed Baret as a woman, eighteen months into the voyage. But the true story, it turns out, is more complicated.   In The Discovery of Jeanne Baret, Glynis Ridley unravels the conflicting accounts recorded by Baret's crewmates to piece together the real story: how Baret's identity was in fact widely suspected within just a couple of weeks of embarking, and the painful consequences of those suspicions; the newly discovered notebook, written in Baret's own hand, that proves her scientific acumen; and the thousands of specimens she collected, most famously the showy vine bougainvillea.   Ridley also richly explores Baret's awkward, sometimes dangerous interactions with the men on the ship, including Baret's lover, the obsessive and sometimes prickly naturalist; a fashion-plate prince who, with his elaborate wigs and velvet garments, was often mistaken for a woman himself; the sour ship's surgeon, who despised Baret and Commerson; even a Tahitian islander who joined the expedition and asked Baret to show him how to behave like a Frenchman.   But the central character of this true story is Jeanne Baret herself, a working-class woman whose scientific contributions were quietly dismissed and written out of history--until now. Anchored in impeccable original research and bursting with unforgettable characters and exotic settings, The Discovery of Jeanne Baret offers this forgotten heroine a chance to bloom at long last.

In the Spring of 1851 two women met on a street corner in Seneca Falls, New York--Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a thirty-five year old mother of four boys, and Susan B. Anthony, a thirty-one year old, unmarried, former school teacher. Immediately drawn to each other, they formed an everlasting and legendary friendship. Together they challenged entrenched beliefs, customs, and laws that oppressed women and spearheaded the fight to gain legal rights, including the right to vote despite fierce opposition, daunting conditions, scandalous entanglements and betrayal by their friends and allies. Weaving events, quotations, personalities, and commentary into a page-turning narrative, Penny Colman tells this compelling story and vividly portrays the friendship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, a friendship that changed history.

Muslim-American women, in all their diversity, are given the chance to tell their stories in their own voice by award-winning journalist Donna Gehrke-White. The only book of its kind, it tells in extraordinarily moving detail the lives of New Traditionalists, who wear the veil though their forebears did not; Blenders, who do not wear the veil but consider themselves spiritual; and Converts - women from other religious backgrounds who have converted to Islam. A rare, revealing look into the hearts, minds and lives of a misunderstood people.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Exhilarating." --New York Times Book Review "Riveting." --People "Keith O'Brien has brought these women--mostly long-hidden and forgotten--back into the light where they belong. And he's done it with grace, sensitivity and a cinematic eye for detail that makes Fly Girls both exhilarating and heartbreaking." --USA Today The untold story of five women who fought to compete against men in the high-stakes national air races of the 1920s and 1930s -- and won   Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. Thousands of fans flocked to multi-day events, and cities vied with one another to host them. The pilots themselves were hailed as dashing heroes who cheerfully stared death in the face. Well, the men were hailed. Female pilots were more often ridiculed than praised for what the press portrayed as silly efforts to horn in on a manly, and deadly, pursuit. Fly Girls recounts how a cadre of women banded together to break the original glass ceiling: the entrenched prejudice that conspired to keep them out of the sky. O'Brien weaves together the stories of five remarkable women: Florence Klingensmith, a high-school dropout who worked for a dry cleaner in Fargo, North Dakota; Ruth Elder, an Alabama divorcee; Amelia Earhart, the most famous, but not necessarily the most skilled; Ruth Nichols, who chafed at the constraints of her blue-blood family's expectations; and Louise Thaden, the mother of two young kids who got her start selling coal in Wichita. Together, they fought for the chance to race against the men -- and in 1936 one of them would triumph in the toughest race of all.   Like Hidden Figures and Girls of Atomic City, Fly Girls celebrates a little-known slice of history in which tenacious, trail-blazing women braved all obstacles to achieve greatness.

The first comprehensive history of the role of women in the civil rights movement, Freedom's Daughters fills a startling gap in both the literature of civil rights and of women's history. Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young, John Lewis, and other well-known leaders of the civil rights movement have admitted that women often had the ideas for which men took credit. In this groundbreaking book, credit finally goes where credit is due -- to the bold women who were crucial to the movement's success and who refused to give up the fight. From the Montgomery bus boycott to the lunch counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides, Lynne Olson's Freedom's Daughters offers a remarkable corrective to the standard history as she tells the long overlooked story of the extraordinary women, both black and white, who were among the most fearless, resourceful, and tenacious leaders of the civil rights movement. Reminding us that the story of women fighting for civil rights began much earlier than the 1950s and 1960s, Olson puts the formal civil rights movement into the context of a much larger history of women's activism. From the abolitionist and suffragist movements to women's liberation, Olson proves that the political activity of women has been the thread connecting the big reform movements from the 1830s to 1970. Into this context, then, she introduces portraits and cameos of more than sixty women -- many until now forgotten and some never before written about -- from the key figures (Pauli Murray, Ida Wells, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ella Baker, and Septima Clark, among others) whose activism spanned several different movements and decades to some of the smaller players who represent the hundredsand hundreds of women who each came forth to do her own small part and who together ultimately formed the mass movements that made the difference. As one male activist said of the movement in Mississippi: It was a woman's war. This is the story of women making difficult choices, trying to balance lives as wives and mothers with their all-consuming work, defying society's standards of proper female behavior. It's the story of indomitable black women like Diane Nash who refused to give up the civil rights fight, even as the formal movement collapsed, and of white female civil rights activists mourning the loss of their old movement while helping to launch a new one -- the battle for women's rights. Freedom's Daughters puts a human face on the civil rights struggle -- and shows that that face was often female.

When Grace Hopper retired as a rear admiral from the U.S. Navy in 1986, she was the first woman restricted line officer to reach flag rank and, at the age of seventy-nine, the oldest serving officer in the Navy. A mathematician by training who became a computer scientist, the eccentric and outspoken Hopper helped propel the Navy into the computer age. She also was a superb publicist for the Navy, appearing frequently on radio and television and quoted regularly in newspapers and magazines. Yet in spite of all the attention she received, until now "Amazing Grace," as she was called, has never been the subject of a full biography. Kathleen Broome Williams looks at Hopper's entire naval career, from the time she joined the WAVES and was sent in 1943 to work on the Mark I computer at Harvard, where she became one of the country's first computer programmers. Thanks to this early Navy introduction to computing, the author explains, Hopper had a distinguished civilian career in commercial computing after the war, gaining fame for her part in the creation of COBOL. The admiral's Navy days were far from over, however, and Williams tells how Hopper--already past retirement age--was recalled to active duty at the Pentagon in 1967 to standardize computerprogramming languages for Navy computers. Her temporary appointment lasted for nineteen years while she standardized COBOL for the entire department of defense. Based on extensive interviews with colleagues and family and on archival material never before examined, this biography not only illuminates Hopper's pioneering accomplishments in a field that came to be dominated by men, but provides a fascinating overview of computing from its beginnings in World War II to the late 1980s.

As World War II raged overseas, Harlem witnessed a battle of its own. Brimming with creative and political energy, the neighborhood's diverse array of artists and activists took advantage of a brief period of progressivism during the war years to launch a bold cultural offensive aimed at winning democracy for all Americans, regardless of race or gender. Ardent believers in America's promise, these men and women helped to lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement before Cold War politics and anti-Communist fervor temporarily froze their dreams at the dawn of the postwar era. In Harlem Nocturne, esteemed scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin tells the stories of three black female artists whose creative and political efforts fueled this historic movement for change: choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, and novelist Ann Petry. Like many African Americans in the city at the time, these women weren't't native New Yorkers, but the metropolis and its vibrant cultural scene gave them the space to flourish and the freedom to express their political concerns. Pearl Primus performed nightly at the legendary Cafe Society, the first racially integrated club in New York, where she debuted dances of social protest that drew on long-buried African traditions and the dances of former slaves in the South. Williams, meanwhile, was a major figure in the emergence of bebop, collaborating with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell and premiering her groundbreaking Zodiac Suite at the legendary performance space Town Hall. And Ann Petry conveyed the struggles of working-class black women to a national audience with her acclaimed novel The Street, which sold over a million copies -- a first for a female African American author. A rich biography of three artists and the city that inspired them, Harlem Nocturne captures a period of unprecedented vitality and progress for African Americans and women, revealing a cultural movement and a historical moment whose influence endures today.

The #1 New York Times bestseller -WINNER OF ANISFIELD-WOLF AWARD FOR NONFICTION -WINNER BLACK CAUCUS OF AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION BEST NONFICTION BOOK -WINNER NAACP IMAGE AWARD BEST NONFICTION BOOK -WINNER NATIONAL ACADEMIES OF SCIENCES, ENGINEERING AND MEDICINE COMMUNICATION AWARD The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space--a powerful, revelatory contribution that is as essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America as Between the World and Me and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The basis for the smash Academy Award-nominated film starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner. Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-black "West Computing" group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens. Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country's future.  

Award-winning author Lucey turns readers attention to the pioneering, innovative, and brave ways that women influenced the building of America before they had the right to vote. Through diaries, letters, and rare photographs, she evokes their struggles and indispensable contributions. 160 photos.

The lives and works of Imogene Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Carrie Mae Weems, Elsa Dorfman and Cindy Sherman.

"One of the most important women of the American century, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was also one of its most prolific letter writers. Particularly after the death of her husband in 1945, she became a national figure, often resolving social and political problems merely by bringing attention to them." "It Seems to Me is the first major published collection of her letters to public figures, world leaders, and individuals outside her family. Roosevelt's writings demonstrate her significance as a stateswoman and professional politician. They also reveal a dimension of her personality often lost in collections of letters to family members and friends - that of a shrewd, self-confident woman unafraid to speak her mind."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

At a time of few opportunities for women in general and even fewer for African American women, Jackie Ormes (1911-85) blazed a trail as a popular cartoonist with the major black newspapers of the day. Her cartoon characters (including Torchy Brown, Candy, Patty-Jo, and Ginger) delighted readers and spawned other products, including an elegant doll with a stylish wardrobe and "Torchy Togs" paper dolls. Ormes was a member of Chicago's black elite, with a social circle that included the leading political figures and entertainers of the day. Her cartoons and comic strips provide an invaluable glimpse into American culture and history, with topics that include racial segregation, U.S. foreign policy, educational equality, the atom bomb, and environmental pollution, among other pressing issues of the times--and of today's world as well. This celebrated biography features a large sampling of Ormes's cartoons and comic strips, and a new preface.  

A Jury of Her Peers is an unprecedented literary landmark: the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000. In a narrative of immense scope and fascination, brimming with Elaine Showalter's characteristic wit and incisive opinions, we are introduced to more than 250 female writers. These include not only famous and expected names (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, Gwendolyn Brooks, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, and Jodi Picoult among them), but also many who were once successful and acclaimed yet now are little known, from the early American best-selling novelist Catherine Sedgwick to the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Susan Glaspell. Showalter shows how these writers both the enduring stars and the ones left behind by the canon were connected to one another and to their times. She believes it is high time to fully integrate the contributions of women into our American literary heritage, and she undertakes the task with brilliance and flair, making the case for the unfairly overlooked and putting the overrated firmly in their place. Whether or not readers agree with the book's roster of writers, A Jury of Her Peers is an irresistible invitation to join the debate, to discover long-lost great writers, and to return to familiar titles with a deeper appreciation. Itis a monumental work that will greatly enrich our understanding of American literary history and culture.

"A searching, sensitive, and engagingly witty meditation." --Lyndall Gordon   "What a great pleasure this gorgeous little book has given me! It should be offered everywhere indeed, and at every museum shop on earth."--Honor Moore   A fascinating meditation on art and personality, Patricia Vigderman's exploration of Isabella Stewart Gardner's famous Boston museum radiates out from its subject to investigate Garnder's legacy of luxury and willfulness.  Isabella Gardner's high spirits and aesthetic pleasure, her women friends and female power, her friendships with the adventurers and aesthetes of her world, are gathered into this engrossing investigation of patronage and passion.  Blending biography, memoir, philosophy, and detective story,The Memory Palace is more than a tribute to the museum and the woman; it is an altogether new genre.  Vigderman's witty and intimate quest for her subject sets a literary precedent for the appreciation of artistic imagination.  Loosening up the past, entering its mysteries and its memories, she reminds us that we change our lives when we begin a relationship with art.   Patricia Vigderman grew up in Washington, D.C., and Europe. She graduated from Vassar College, after which a circuitous course led her through editing, translating, freelance journalism, teaching, marriage, motherhood, divorce, a doctoral dissertation (on nineteenth-century novels as film, as history, and as autobiography), and a lot of time in museums. Her recent writing has appeared inThe Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Northwest Review, Raritan, Seneca Review, andSouthwest Review. She divides her year between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches in the English department at Kenyon College. She is married to the writer Lewis Hyde.

When gold rush fever gripped the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese immigrants came through San Francisco seeking fortune. In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett uses a little-known Idaho legend as a lens into this Chinese experience. Before 1849, the Chinese in the United States were little more than curiosities. But as word spread of the discovery of gold, they soon became a regular sight in the American West. In San Francisco, a labyrinthine Chinatown arose where Chinese smuggled into the country were deposited. Polly, a young Chinese concubine, accompanied her owner to a mining camp in the highlands of Idaho. After he lost her in a poker game, Polly found her way with her new owner to an isolated ranch on the banks of the Salmon River. As the gold rush receded, it took with it the Chinese miners, but left behind Polly, who would make headlines when she emerged from the Idaho hills nearly half a century later to visit a modern city and tell her story. The Poker Bride vividly reconstructs a lost period of history when the first Chinese sojourners flooded into the country and left only glimmering traces of their presence scattered across the American West.

A resonant collection of all new poems from one of America's preeminent poets. Ever commanding, luminous, and controversial, Nikki Giovanni speaks truth to power on issues of social justice, racism, gender, violence, and justice. Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea is a tour de force from Nikki Giovanni, one of the most powerful voices in American culture and African American literature today. From Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgment in the 1960s to Bicycles in 2010, Giovanni's poetry has touched millions of readers worldwide, focusing a sharp eye on politics, racial inequality, violence, gender, social justice and African-American life. In Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Giovanni turns her gaze toward the state of the world around her, and offers a daring, resonant look inside her own self as well. "One of her best collections to date." --Essence

The fascinating, little-known story of how two brilliant female physicists' groundbreaking discoveries led to the creation of the atomic bomb. In 1934, Irène Curie, working with her husband and fellow scientist, Frederic Joliot, made a discovery that would change the world: artificial radioactivity. This breakthrough allowed scientists to modify elements and create new ones by altering the structure of atoms. Curie shared a Nobel Prize with her husband for their work. But when she was nominated to the French Academy of Sciences, the academy denied her admission and voted to disqualify all women from membership. Four years later, Curie's breakthrough led physicist Lise Meitner to a brilliant leap of understanding that unlocked the secret of nuclear fission. Meitner's unique insight was critical to the revolution in science that led to nuclear energy and the race to build the atom bomb, yet her achievement was left unrecognized by the Nobel committee in favor of that of her male colleague. Radioactive! presents the story of two women breaking ground in a male-dominated field, scientists still largely unknown despite their crucial contributions to cutting-edge research, in a nonfiction narrative that reads with the suspense of a thriller. Photographs and sidebars illuminate and clarify the science in the book.

The riveting true story of the women who launched America into space. In the 1940s and 50s, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate velocities and plot trajectories, they didn't turn to male graduates. Rather, they recruited an elite group of young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, helped bring about the first American satellites, and made the exploration of the solar system possible. For the first time, Rise of the Rocket Girls tells the stories of these women -- known as "human computers" -- who broke the boundaries of both gender and science. Based on extensive research and interviews with all the living members of the team, Rise of the Rocket Girls offers a unique perspective on the role of women in science: both where we've been, and the far reaches of space to which we're heading. "If Hidden Figures has you itching to learn more about the women who worked in the space program, pick up Nathalia Holt's lively, immensely readable history, Rise of the Rocket Girls." -- Entertainment Weekly

We know who drove in the rivets on airplane assembly lines during World War II. But what about World War I? Who assembled all those fabriccovered biplanes? Who shaped and filled the millions of cartridges that America sent over to the trenches of Europe? Who made the gas masks to protect American soldiers facing chemical warfare for the first time? Although the World War II posters of Rosie the Riveter and Wendy the Welder remind us of the women who contributed to the nation's war effort in the 1940s, the women workers of World War I are nearly forgotten. In Rosie's Mom, Carrie Brown recovers these women of an earlier generation through lively words and images. She takes us back to the time when American women abandoned their jobs dipping chocolates, sewing corsets, or canning pork and beans, to contribute to the war effort. Trading their ankle-length skirts and crisp white shirtwaists for coarse bloomers or overalls, they went into the munition plants to face explosives, toxic chemicals, powerful metal-cutting machines, and the sullen hostility of the men in the shops. By the end of the war, notes the author, more than a million American women had become involved in war production

The ten brilliant women who are the focus of Sharp came from different backgrounds and had vastly divergent political and artistic opinions. But they all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America and ultimately changed the course of the twentieth century, in spite of the men who often undervalued or dismissed their work. These ten women--Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm--are united by what Dean calls "sharpness," the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit. Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties at night gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books. It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing in a climate where women were treated with extreme condescension by the male-dominated cultural establishment. Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp is a celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world.

An exploration of how engaging identity and cultural heritage can transform teaching and learning for Black women educators in the name of justice and freedom in the classroom In The Spirit of Our Work, Dr. Cynthia Dillard centers the spiritual lives of Black women educators and their students, arguing that spirituality has guided Black people throughout the diaspora. She demonstrates how Black women teachers and teacher educators can heal, resist, and (re)member their identities in ways that are empowering for them and their students. Dillard emphasizes that any discussion of Black teachers' lives and work cannot be limited to truncated identities as enslaved persons in the Americas. The Spirit of Our Work addresses questions that remain largely invisible in what is known about teaching and teacher education. According to Dillard, this invisibility renders the powerful approaches to Black education that are imbodied and marshaled by Black women teachers unknown and largely unavailable to inform policy, practice, and theory in education. The Spirit of Our Work highlights how the intersectional identities of Black women teachers matter in teaching and learning and how educational settings might more carefully and conscientiously curate structures of support that pay explicit and necessary attention to spirituality as a crucial consideration.

Honoring the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, this exciting history explores the full scope of the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists. Distinguished historian Ellen Carol DuBois begins in the pre-Civil War years with foremothers Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth as she explores the links of the woman suffrage movement to the abolition of slavery. After the Civil War, Congress granted freed African American men the right to vote but not white and African American women, a crushing disappointment. DuBois shows how suffrage leaders persevered through the Jim Crow years into the reform era of Progressivism. She introduces new champions Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, who brought the fight into the 20th century, and she shows how African American women, led by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, demanded voting rights even as white suffragists ignored them. DuBois explains how suffragists built a determined coalition of moderate lobbyists and radical demonstrators in forging a strategy of winning voting rights in crucial states to set the stage for securing suffrage for all American women in the Constitution. In vivid prose DuBois describes suffragists' final victories in Congress and state legislatures, culminating in the last, most difficult ratification, in Tennessee. DuBois follows women's efforts to use their voting rights to win political office, increase their voting strength, and pass laws banning child labor, ensuring maternal health, and securing greater equality for women. Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote is sure to become the authoritative account of one of the great episodes in the history of American democracy.

New York Times Bestseller "This dynamic blend of biography and manifesto centers on Louise Little, Alberta King, and Berdis Baldwin . . . Tubbs's book stands against the women's erasure, a monument to their historical importance." --The New Yorker "Tubbs' connection to these women is palpable on the page -- as both a mother and a scholar of the impact Black motherhood has had on America. Through Tubbs' writing, Berdis, Alberta, and Louise's stories sing. Theirs is a history forgotten that begs to be told, and Tubbs tells it brilliantly." -- Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and National Book Award winner Stamped from the Beginning Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them. In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes. A New York Times Bestsellers Editors' Choice An Amazon Editor's Pick for February Amazon's Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2021 One of theSkimm's "16 Essential Books to Read This Black History Month" One of Fortune Magazine's "21 Books to Look Forward to in 2021!" One of Badass Women's Bookclub picks for "Badass Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2021!" One of Working Mother Magazine's "21 Best Books of 2021 for Working Moms" One of Ms. Magazine's "Most Anticipated Reads for the Rest of Us 2021" One of Bustle's "11 Nonfiction Books To Read For Black History Month -- All Written By Women" One of SheReads.com's "Most anticipated nonfiction books of 2021" Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little were all born at the beginning of the 20th century and forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women. These three extraordinary women passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning--from Louise teaching her children about their activist roots, to Berdis encouraging James to express himself through writing, to Alberta basing all of her lessons in faith and social justice. These women used their strength and motherhood to push their children toward greatness, all with a conviction that every human being deserves dignity and respect despite the rampant discrimination they faced. These three mothers taught resistance and a fundamental belief in the worth of Black people to their sons, even when these beliefs flew in the face of America's racist practices and led to ramifications for all three families' safety. The fight for equal justice and dignity came above all else for the three mothers. These women, their similarities and differences, as individuals and as mothers, represent a piece of history left untold and a celebration of Black motherhood long overdue.

"Like a suspense novel, this book is impossible to put down. All readers interested in China, as well as memoir fans (especially of success stories), must read this astonishing title."-- Library Journal (Starred Review)  Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{{behavior:url(#ieooui) }} /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {{mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-phan∨ font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:¿ mso-fareast-language:¿ mso-bidi-language:¿}} “In Aisling Juanjuan Shen’s remarkable and assured memoir, a peasant girl born to illiterate parents and bleak prospects rises to prominence as the first person in her village to graduate college. Determined to escape the trappings of rural village life, she leaves the stability of a government-assigned teaching post behind and bravely ventures to the south in search of wealth and happiness. Shen offers a brutally honest and vivid portrait of the early days of China’s economic boom, the fascinating interplay between the provinces, the lives of those who leave and those who remain behind, and the cost of abandoning tradition for the promise of prosperity.”—Felicia C. Sullivan, The Sky Isn’t Visible from Here“A brave and honest tale of one woman's struggle to overcome her circumstances and triumph against all odds.”—Alison Weaver, Gone to the Crazies: A MemoirAisling Juanjuan Shen was born to illiterate peasants in a tiny rice-farming hamlet in China’s Yangtze Delta in 1974. Pronounced useless by her parents because she wasn’t good at planting rice, she became the first person from her village ever to attend college. After graduating from teachers college, she was assigned by the government to a remote and low-paying teaching job that she was expected to hold for the rest of her life. Deeply dissatisfied, she bought her way out of her secure government job and left for the special economic zones of southern China in search of happiness and success in the business world.A Tiger’s Heart chronicles Aisling's rise from poverty in the rice fields of rural China to a successful career in business in the early days of the country’s economic boom, illustrating the massive economic and social changes that have taken place in China over the past several decades. Her story is emblematic of a new generation of Chinese women who are leaving the rice paddies and government jobs in order to enter the free market and determine the course of their own lives.Aisling Juanjuan Shen worked as a teacher, saleswoman, and translator in China before immigrating to the United States in 2000. In 2005 she graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley Colle≥ she currently works for an investment management firm in Boston. Excerpts of A Tiger’s Heart have appeared in Pindeldyboz and H.O.W.

In January 1943, 230 women of the French Resistance were sent to the death camps by the Nazis who had invaded and occupied their country. This is their story, told in full for the first time--a searing and unforgettable chronicle of terror, courage, defiance, survival, and the power of friendship. Caroline Moorehead, a distinguished biographer, human rights journalist, and the author of Dancing to the Precipice and Human Cargo, brings to life an extraordinary story that readers of Mitchell Zuckoff's Lost in Shangri-La, Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts, and Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken will find an essential addition to our retelling of the history of World War II--a riveting, rediscovered story of courageous women who sacrificed everything to combat the march of evil across the world.

From the South Bronx projects to the boardroom--at only nineteen years old, Cin Fabré ran with the wolves of Wall Street. Growing up, Cin Fabré didn't know anything about the stock market. But she learned how to hustle from her immigrant parents, saving money so that one day she could escape her abusive father and poverty in the Bronx. Through a tip from a friend, Cin pushed her way into brokerage firm VTR Capital--an offshoot of Stratton Oakmont, the company where the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, had reigned. She was shocked to find an army of young workers, mostly Black and Brown, with no real prospects for promotion sitting at phones doing the drudge work of finding investment leads for white male brokers. But she felt the pull of profit and knew she would do whatever she had to do to be successful. Pulling back the curtain on the inequities she and so many others faced, Wolf Hustle reveals how Cin worked grueling hours, ascending from cold caller to stockbroker, becoming the only Black woman to do so at her firm. She also discloses the excesses she took part in on 1990s Wall Street--the strip clubs, the Hamptons parties, the Gucci shopping sprees--while reveling in the thrill of making money. From landing clients worth hundreds of millions to gaining, losing, then gaining back fortunes in seconds, Cin examines her years spent trading frantically and hustling successfully, grappling with what it takes to build a rich life, and, ultimately, beating Wall Street at its own game.

Historical events of the last three centuries come alive through these women’s singular correspondences—often their only form of public expression. In 1775, Rachel Revere tries to send financial aid to her husband, Paul, in a note that is confiscated by the British; First Lady Dolley Madison tells her sister about rescuing George Washington’s portrait during the War of 1812; one week after JFK’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy pens a heartfelt letter to Nikita Khrushchev; and on September 12, 2001, a schoolgirl writes a note of thanks to a New York City firefighter, asking him, “Were you afraid?” The letters gathered here also offer fresh insight into the personal milestones in women’s lives. Here is a mid-nineteenth-century missionary describing a mastectomy performed without anesthesia; Marilyn Monroe asking her doctor to spare her ovaries in a handwritten note she taped to her stomach before appendix surgery; an eighteen-year-old telling her mother about her decision to have an abortion the year after Roe v. Wade; and a woman writing to her parents and in-laws about adopting a Chinese baby. With more than 400 letters and over 100 stunning photographs, Women’s Letters is a work of astonishing breadth and scope, and a remarkable testament to the women who lived–and made–history. From the Hardcover edition.