Women's History Month

"When Florence Finch died at the age of 101, few of her Ithaca, NY neighbors knew that this unassuming Filipina native was a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, whose courage and sacrifice were unsurpassed in the Pacific War against Japan. Long accustomed to keeping her secrets close in service of the Allies, she waited fifty years to reveal the story of those dramatic and harrowing days to her own children. Florence was an unlikely warrior....

"In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women's rights. And yet that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard of. The Islamic State by then had swept across vast swaths of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around it. From that unlikely showdown in the town of Kobani emerged a fighting...

"A brilliant, sweeping history of the contemporary women's movement told through the lives and works of the literary women who shaped it. Forty years after their first groundbreaking work of feminist literary theory, The Madwoman in the Attic, award-winning collaborators Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar map the literary history of feminism's second wave. In Still Mad, they offer lively readings of major works by such writers as Sylvia Plath, Lorraine...

"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."--Provided by publisher.

"From the twentieth century onward, women took on an extraordinary range of roles in intelligence, defying the conventions of their time. Across both world wars, far from being a small part of covert operations, women ran spy networks and escape lines, parachuted behind enemy lines, and interrogated prisoners. And, back in Bletchley and Whitehall, women's vital administrative work in MI offices kept the British war engine running. In this major, panoramic...

"They are often seen in photos of crowds in the mid-century South--white women shooting down blacks with looks of pure hatred. Yet it is the male white supremacists who have been the focus of the literature on white resistance to Civil Rights. This groundbreaking first book recovers the daily workers who upheld the system of segregation and Jim Crow for so long--white women. Every day in rural communities, in university towns, and in New South cities,...

"In the last several years, Black feminism has reemerged as the analytical framework for the activist response to the oppression of trans women of color, the fight for reproductive rights, and, of course, the movement against police abuse and violence. The most visible organizations and activists connected to the Black Lives Matter movement speak openly about how Black feminism shapes their politics and strategies today. The interviews I have compiled...

"After the election of Donald J. Trump, journalist Seyward Darby went looking for the women of the so-called 'alt-right'--really just white nationalism with a new label. The mainstream media depicted the alt-right as a bastion of angry white men, but was it? As women headlined resistance to the Trump administration's bigotry and sexism, most notably at the Women's Marches, Darby wanted to know why others were joining a movement espousing racism and...

In 1944, American naval officer Lt. Wyatt Paxton arrives in London to prepare for the Allied invasion of France. He works closely with Dorothy Fairfax, a "Wren" in the Women's Royal Naval Service. Dorothy pieces together reconnaissance photographs with thousands of holiday snapshots of France--including those of her own family's summer home--in order to create accurate maps of Normandy. Maps that Wyatt will turn into naval bombardment plans. As the...

A groundbreaking collection based on oral histories that brilliantly plumb the leadership of African American women in the twentieth-century fight for civil rights--many nearly lost to history--from the latest winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize. During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women were generally not in the headlines; they simply did the work that needed to be done. Yet despite their significant contributions at all levels...