LibGuides: Women's History Month: Selected Readings

Selected Books

A Companion to American Women's History by Anne M. Valk (Editor); Nancy A. Hewitt (Editor)
ISBN: 1119522625
Publication Date: 2020-10-30
The most important collection of essays on American Women's History This collection incorporates the most influential and groundbreaking scholarship in the area of American women's history, featuring twenty-three original essays on critical themes and topics. It assesses the past thirty years of scholarship, capturing the ways that women's historians confront issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
A Black Women's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry; Kali Nicole Gross
ISBN: 9780807033555
Publication Date: 2020-02-04
The award-winning Revisioning American History series continues with this "groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States" (Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist)-the perfect companion to An Indigenous People's History of the United States and An African American and Latinx History of the United States. An empowering and intersectional history that centers the stories of African American women across 400+ years, showing how they are-and have always been-instrumental in shaping our country. In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism.
Reshaping Women's History by Barbara Winslow (Editor)
ISBN: 0252050746
Publication Date: 2018-09-25
Award-winning women scholars from nontraditional backgrounds have often negotiated an academic track that leads through figurative--and sometimes literal--minefields. Their life stories offer inspiration, but also describe heartrending struggles and daunting obstacles. Reshaping Women's History presents autobiographical essays by eighteen accomplished scholar-activists who persevered through poverty or abuse, medical malpractice or family disownment, civil war or genocide. As they illuminate their own unique circumstances, the authors also address issues all-too-familiar to women in the academy: financial instability, the need for mentors, explaining gaps in resumes caused by outside events, and coping with gendered family demands, biases, and expectations. Eye-opening and candid, Reshaping Women's History shows how adversity, and the triumph over it, enriches scholarship and spurs extraordinary efforts to affect social change.

Selected Articles & Essays

"Being a Trans Woman During Women's History Month" by Mari Brighe

"The traditional writing of history would give you the impression that anything important ever accomplished was accomplished by men alone, ignoring the contributions of half the world's population most of the time. It's for this reason that March has been designated Women's History Month in the U.S. since 1987, when, for at least one month out of the year, the accomplishments of women throughout history are actually acknowledged. But, as a transgender woman, Women's History Month doesn't feel like it's for me."

"How Black Suffragists Fought for the Right to Vote and a Modicum of Respect" by Martha S. Jones

"Consider how black women did not take part in the mythical 1848 women’s meeting in Seneca Falls, New York. When we look for them in that year, we find that, instead, some of them were already at work demanding women’s rights, but they were doing so in black churches rather than in women’s conventions. And what about 1920 and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment? Study of that hallmark moment reveals that, while some black women in the North and West had reason to celebrate, it was but a brief pause in their ongoing struggle for voting rights."