Women's History Month - Spotlight Series: Books

We Are Not Born Submissive offers the first in-depth philosophical exploration of female submission, focusing on the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, and more recent work in feminist philosophy, epistemology, and political theory. Manon Garcia argues that to comprehend female submission, we must invert how we examine power and see it from the woman's point of view. Ultimately, she asserts that women do not actively choose submission. Rather, they consent to--and sometimes take pleasure in--what is prescribed to them through social norms within a patriarchy. Moving beyond the simplistic binary of natural destiny or moral vice, We Are Not Born Submissive takes a sophisticated look at how female submissiveness can be explained.

Examines how Black women elders have managed stress, emphasizing how self-care practices have been present since at least the mid-nineteenth century, with roots in African traditions.

Mama Phife Represents is an arresting document of the body's lowest depth of hurt, from a poet and mother who suddenly loses her son to Type 1 diabetes at the height of his musical career. It is a love letter from a grieving mother to her child.

Through archival research and interviews with Walker, Oprah Winfrey, and Quincy Jones (among others), Tillet studies Walker's life and how themes of violence emerged in her earlier work. Reading The Color Purple at age 15 was a groundbreaking experience for Tillet. It continues to resonate with her--as a sexual violence survivor, as a teacher of the novel, and as an accomplished academic. Provocative and personal, In Search of The Color Purple is a bold work from an important public intellectual, and captures Alice Walker's seminal role in rethinking sexuality, intersectional feminism, and racial and gender politics.

Told from alternating perspectives, an evocative and riveting novel about the lifelong bond between two women, one Black and one white, whose friendship is indelibly altered by a tragic event--a powerful and poignant exploration of race in America today and its devastating impact on ordinary lives. We Are Not Like Them explores complex questions of race and how they pervade and shape our most intimate spaces in a deeply divided world. But at its heart, it's a story of enduring friendship--a love that defies the odds even as it faces its most difficult challenges.

Western feminists, pundits, and policymakers tend to portray the Muslim world as the last and most difficult frontier of global feminism. Challenging this view, Elora Shehabuddin presents a unique and engaging history of feminism as a story of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Western and Muslim societies. Stretching from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era to the War on Terror present, Sisters in the Mirror shows how changes in women's lives and feminist strategies have consistently reflected wider changes in national and global politics and economics.

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. Readers will benefit from a holistic approach that explores Parks' life well beyond her refusal to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus line. Of note, this book connects Parks' lifelong activism to the spirit of justice and resistance she learned at a young age.

A spectacular, searing history that brings to light the extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who became resistance fighters. Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland--some still in their teens--helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. Powerful and inspiring, The Light of Days is an unforgettable true tale of war, the fight for freedom, exceptional bravery, female friendship, and survival in the face of staggering odds.  

When Laura Coates joined the Department of Justice as a prosecutor, she wanted to advocate for the most vulnerable among us. But she quickly realized that even with the best intentions, "the pursuit of justice creates injustice." On the front lines of our legal system, Coates saw how Black communities are policed differently; Black cases are prosecuted differently; Black defendants are judged differently. Through these revelatory and captivating scenes from the courtroom, Coates explores the tension between the idealism of the law and the reality of working within the parameters of our flawed legal system, exposing the chasm between what is right and what is lawful.

More than 300 images from the archives of the Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City offer readers a glimpse of Kahlo’s distinctive wardrobe and the impressive collections of popular and pre-Hispanic art she assembled with Rivera, her connection with photography and the history of La casa azul, her beloved blue home that now serves as the museum’s main building. This volume welcomes us into Frida Kahlo’s universe, exploring the legacy of an indispensable figure in the world of 20th-century art and culture in her native Mexico and across the globe.

Before children's stories came to exemplify the French fairy tale, early modern audiences read the works of women writers known as conteuses. From the late seventeenth century through the Revolution, the conteuses published rich, complex tales that were popular in literary salons and elite courtly settings. Brief biographies introduce to new audiences writers who challenged social conventions, won popular and critical acclaim, and defined the fairy tale genre in their own time.

This book presents the stories of six intrepid women of science in eighteenth-century France whose lives and accomplishments--though celebrated in their lifetimes--have been largely written out of the history of their period: mathematician and philosopher Elisabeth Ferrand, astronomer Nicole Reine Lepaute, field naturalist Jeanne Barret, garden botanist and illustrator Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, anatomist and inventor Marie-Marguerite Biheron, and chemist Geneviève d'Arconville.

Orthodox Jewish women are increasingly seeking new ways to express themselves religiously, and important changes have occurred in consequence in their self-definition and the part they play in the religious life of their communities. Drawing on surveys and interviews across different Orthodoxgroups in London, as well as on the author's own experience of active participation over many years, this is a thoroughly researched study that analyses its findings in the context of related developments in Israel and the USA.

This publication surveys work from Méret Oppenheim's precocious debut in 1930s Paris, up to her death in 1985. Essays by curators from Kunstmuseum Bern, The Menil Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art critically examine the artist's active role in shaping the narrative of her life and art, providing the context for her pre- and post-World War II oeuvre.

"In this darkly delightful Gothic treasure, Mas explores grief, trauma, and sisterhood behind the walls of Paris's infamous Salpêtrière hospital." The Madwomen's Ball is a literary historical novel detailing the horrors faced by institutionalized women in 19th century Paris

Mouths of Rain, the companion anthology to Beverly Guy-Sheftall's classic Words of Fire, traces the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black Lesbian writers, spanning the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. Taking its title from a poem by Audre Lorde, Mouths of Rain addresses pervasive issues such as misogynoir and anti-blackness while also attending to love, romance, "coming out," and the erotic. Contributors include: Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Bettina Love, Dionne Brand, Cheryl Clarke, Cathy J. Cohen, Angelina Weld Grimke, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, Dawn Lundy Martin, Pauli Murray, Michelle Parkerson, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Alice Walker, Jewelle Gomez

Running from Bondage tells the compelling stories of enslaved women, who comprised one-third of all runaways, and the ways in which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. Karen Cook Bell's enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape.

In this acclaimed biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Soyica Diggs Colbert narrates a life at the intersection of art and politics, arguing that for Hansberry the theater operated as a rehearsal room for her political and intellectual work. Celebrated for her play A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry was also the author of innovative journalism and of plays touching on slavery, interracial communities, and Black freedom movements. Drawing from Hansberry's papers, speeches, and interviews, this book provides a new point of entry in the history of Black radicalism, and a new perspective on Black women in mid‑twentieth‑century political movements.

This book accompanies Yayoi Kusama's first major European retrospective exhibition, offering a comprehensive overview of the Japanese artist's influential oeuvre, which spans more than eighty years. A diverse selection of images and archival documents feature alongside texts by authors from different theoretical backgrounds. As panoramic and fascinating as its subject, this monumental retrospective guides viewers interested in Kusama towards a deeper understanding of her creative trajectory and of the breadth of her extraordinary career.

Spanning more than four hundred years, the fifty-six works of textile art in this book express the personal narratives of their makers and owners and connect to broader stories of global trade, immigration, industry, marginalization, and territorial and cultural expansion. Made by Americans of European, African, Native, and Hispanic heritage, these engaging works of art range from family heirlooms to acts of political protest, each with its own story to tell.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman's psychic deterioration in the face of rampant misogyny. In a tidy apartment on the outskirts of Seoul, millennial "everywoman" Kim Jiyoung spends her days caring for her infant daughter. But strange symptoms appear: Jiyoung begins to impersonate the voices of other women, dead and alive. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her concerned husband sends her to a psychiatrist. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 heralds the arrival of international powerhouse Cho Nam-Joo.

Activists and writers Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have gathered an unprecedented collection of works--many long out-of-print and hard to find--that catalyzed and propelled the women's liberation movement. Ranging from Friedan's Feminine Mystique to Backlash, Susan Faludi's Reagan-era requiem, and framed by Shulman and Moore with an introduction and headnotes that provide historical and personal context, the anthology reveals the crucial role of Black feminists and other women of color in a decades long mass movement that not only brought about fundamental changes in American life--changes too often taken for granted today--but envisioned a thoroughgoing revolution in society and consciousness still to be achieved.

A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born. From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals--personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others--that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America's most tangled, honest, human roots.

When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. The Code Breaker traces the history of gene editing while simultaneously tracking Nobel prize winner Jennifer Doudna’s life — pioneer of the CRISPR technology (an immune system that bacteria adapt whenever they get attacked by a new virus).