The Best Women's History Books 2025

1. Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de la Tour Du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era, (Paperback)

\"[A] remarkable biography....Moorehead deftly wields periods detail...to tell the story of a captivating woman who kept her sense of self amid the vicissitudes of politics.\" --Vogue From acclaimed biographer Caroline Moorhead comes Dancing to the Precipice, a sweeping chronicle of the remarkable life of Lucie de la Tour du Pin--\"an astute, thoroughly engaging biography of a formidable woman\" (Boston Globe) who, over the span of some 80 years, was witness to, and often a participant in the major social upheavals of eighteenth-century French history.

Dancing to the Precipice: The Life of Lucie de la Tour Du Pin, Eyewitness to an Era, (Paperback) Author: Harper Perennial ISBN: 9780061684425 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2010-07-27 Page Count: 512

2. Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America, (Paperback)

In the 1800s, nuns moved west with the frontier, building hospitals and schools in immigrant communities. They provided aid during the Chicago fire, cared for orphans and prostitutes during the California Gold Rush, and brought professional nursing skills to field hospitals on both sides of the Civil War. In the 1900s, nuns built the nation's largest private school and hospital systems, and brought the Catholic Church into the Civil Rights movement. As their numbers began to decline in the 1970s, many sisters were forced to take professional jobs as lawyers, probation workers, and hospital executives because their salaries were needed to support older nuns, many of whom lacked a pension system. Currently there are about 65,000 sisters in America, down from 204,000 in 1968. Their median age is sixty-nine. Nuns became the nation's first cadre of independent, professional women. Some nursed, some taught, and many created and managed new charitable organizations, including large hospitals and colleges. Sweeping in its scope and insight, Sisters reveals the spiritual wealth that these women invested in America.

Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America, (Paperback) Author: St. Martin's Griffin ISBN: 9780312325961 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2004-01-19 Page Count: 368

3. Letters of a Woman Homesteader, (Paperback)

\"Peopled with the kinds of characters most novelists only dream of\" (Christian Science Monitor), this classic account of American frontier living captures the rambunctious spirit of a pioneer who set out in 1909 to prove that a woman could ranch. A series of letters make for a fascinating narrative and descriptive journal of Mrs. Stewart's life, moving from the city to a Wyoming homestead, marrying and still having the determination to homestead on her own. Stewart's captivating missives bring to full life the beauty, isolation, and joys of working the prairie.

Letters of a Woman Homesteader, (Paperback) Author: Mariner Books ISBN: 9780395911518 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2023-10-18 Page Count: 320

4. Feminism in Our Time : The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present (Paperback)

A landmark collection of writings that define the intellectual and political underpinnings of contemporary feminism, from Simone de Beauvoir to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In this important volume, the respected feminist historian Miriam Schneir completes the work she began in her bestselling Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, presenting contemporary writings that define the women's movement today--and revealing how radically transformative a force it is throughout the world. Here are the words of Doris Lessing, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Anita Hill, and many other important feminist figures. Ranging from intensely personal statements to ringing manifestos, from diagnosis to outright rebellion, and incorporating both public records and works addressing such specific issues as religion, rape, women's health, pornography, and the concerns of lesbians and women of color, Feminism in Our Time is a thorough record of women's ongoing struggle to control their own destinies and provide alternative visions of a just society and true human equality.

A landmark collection of writings that define the intellectual and political underpinnings of contemporary feminism, from Simone de Beauvoir to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In this important volume, the respected feminist historian Miriam Schneir completes the work she began in her bestselling Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, presenting contemporary writings that define the women's movement today—and revealing how radically transformative a force it is throughout the world. Here are the words of Doris Lessing, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Anita Hill, and many other important feminist figures. Ranging from intensely personal statements to ringing manifestos, from diagnosis to outright rebellion, and incorporating both public records and works addressing such specific issues as religion, rape, women's health, pornography, and the concerns of lesbians and women of color, Feminism in Our Time is a thorough record of women's ongoing struggle to control their own destinies and provide alternative visions of a just society and true human equality.

5. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence, (Paperback)

A groundbreaking history of the American Revolution that "vividly recounts Colonial women's struggles for independence--for their nation and, sometimes, for themselves.... [Her] lively book reclaims a vital part of our political legacy" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American. In this book, Carol Berkin shows us how women played a vital role throughout the conflict. The women of the Revolution were most active at home, organizing boycotts of British goods, raising funds for the fledgling nation, and managing the family business while struggling to maintain a modicum of normalcy as husbands, brothers and fathers died. Yet Berkin also reveals that it was not just the men who fought on the front lines, as in the story of Margaret Corbin, who was crippled for life when she took her husband's place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth. This incisive and comprehensive history illuminates a fascinating and unknown side of the struggle for American independence.

Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence, (Paperback) Author: Vintage ISBN: 9781400075324 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2006-02-14 Page Count: 224

6. Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World, (Paperback)

Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas A. Basbanes offers a lively consideration of writings that have \"made things happen\" in the world, works that have both nudged the course of history and fired the imagination of countless influential people. In his fifth work to examine a specific aspect of book culture, Basbanes also asks what we can know about such figures as John Milton, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Henry James, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller--even the notorious Marquis de Sade and Adolf Hitler--by knowing what they have read. He shows how books that many of these people have consulted, in some cases annotated with their marginal notes, can offer tantalizing clues to the evolution of their character and the development of their thought.

Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World, (Paperback) Author: Harper Perennial ISBN: 9780060593247 Format: Paperback Publication Date: 2006-12-12 Page Count: 400

7. Appalachian Travels: The Diary of Olive Dame Campbell (Hardcover)

In 1908 and 1909, noted social reformer and ""songcatcher"" Olive Dame Campbell traveled with her husband, John C. Campbell, through the Southern Highlands region of Appalachia to survey the social and economic conditions in mountain communities. Throughout the journey, Olive kept a detailed diary offering a vivid, entertaining, and personal account of the places the couple visited, the people they met, and the mountain cultures they encountered. Although John C. Campbell's book, The Southern Hig

Appalachian Travels: The Diary of Olive Dame Campbell (Hardcover)

8. Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Paperback)

The eight essays collected in this volume examine the practice of gender history and its impact on our understanding of European history. Each essay takes up a major methodological or theoretical issue in feminist history and illustrates the necessity of critiquing and redefining the concepts of body, citizenship, class, and experience through historical case studies. Kathleen Canning opens the book with a new overview of the state of the art in European gender history. She considers how gender history has revised the master narratives in some fields within modern European history (such as the French Revolution) but has had a lesser impact in others (Weimar and Nazi Germany).Gender History in Practice includes two essays now regarded as classics?"Feminist History after the 'Linguistic Turn'" and "The Body as Method"--as well as new chapters on experience, citizenship, and subjectivity. Other essays in the book draw on Canning's work at the intersection of labor history, the history of the welfare state, and the history of the body, showing how the gendered "social body" was shaped in Imperial Germany. The book concludes with a pair of essays on the concepts of class and citizenship in German history, offering critical perspectives on feminist understandings of citizenship. Featuring an extensive thematic bibliography of influential works in gender history and theory that will prove invaluable to students and scholars, Gender History in Practice offers new insights into the history of Germany and Central Europe as well as a timely assessment of gender history's accomplishments and challenges.

Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Paperback)

9. Masquerade : The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (Paperback)

In Masquerade, Alfred F. Young scrapes through layers of fiction and myth to uncover the story of Deborah Sampson, a Massachusetts woman who passed as a man and fought as a soldier for seventeen months toward the end of the American Revolution. Deborah Sampson was not the only woman to pose as a male and fight in the war, but she was certainly one of the most successful and celebrated. She managed to fight in combat and earn the respect of her officers and peers, and in later years she toured the country lecturing about her experiences and was partially successful in obtaining veterans' benefits. Her full story, however, was buried underneath exaggeration and myth (some of which she may have created herself), becoming another sort of masquerade. Young takes the reader with him through his painstaking efforts to reveal the real Deborah Sampson in a work of history that is as spellbinding as the best detective fiction.

In Masquerade, Alfred F. Young scrapes through layers of fiction and myth to uncover the story of Deborah Sampson, a Massachusetts woman who passed as a man and fought as a soldier for seventeen months toward the end of the American Revolution. Deborah Sampson was not the only woman to pose as a male and fight in the war, but she was certainly one of the most successful and celebrated. She managed to fight in combat and earn the respect of her officers and peers, and in later years she toured the country lecturing about her experiences and was partially successful in obtaining veterans’ benefits. Her full story, however, was buried underneath exaggeration and myth (some of which she may have created herself), becoming another sort of masquerade. Young takes the reader with him through his painstaking efforts to reveal the real Deborah Sampson in a work of history that is as spellbinding as the best detective fiction.

10. The Republic of Letters (Paperback)

In the first major reinterpretation of the French Enlightenment in twenty years, Dena Goodman moves beyond the traditional approach to the Enlightenment as a chapter in Western intellectual history and examines its deeper significance as cultural history. She finds the very epicenter of the Enlightenment in a community of discourse known as the Republic of Letters, where salons governed by women advanced the Enlightenment project "to change the common way of thinking." Goodman details the history of the Republic of Letters in the Parisian salons, where men and women, philosophes and salonnieres, together not only introduced reciprocity into intellectual life through the practices of letter writing and polite conversation but also developed a republican model of government that was to challenge the monarchy. Providing a new understanding of women's importance in the Enlightenment, Goodman demonstrates that in the Republic of Letters men and women played complementary - and unequal - roles. Salonnieres governed the Republic of Letters by enforcing rules of polite conversation that made possible a discourse characterized by liberty and civility. Goodman chronicles the story of the Republic of Letters from its earliest formation through major periods of change: the production of the Encyclopedia, the proliferation of a print culture that widened circles of readership beyond the control of salon governance, and the early years of the French Revolution. Although the legacy of the Republic of Letters remained a force in French cultural and political life, in the 1780s men formed new intellectual institutions that asserted their ability to govern themselves and that marginalized women. TheRepublic of Letters introduces provocative explanations both for the failure of the Enlightenment and for the role of the Enlightenment in the French Revolution.

The Republic of Letters (Paperback)