Science History Women

In the spring of 2021, Maira and Alex Kalman created a small, limited-edition booklet “Women Holding Things,” which featured select recent paintings by Maira, accompanied by her insightful and deeply personal commentary. The booklet quickly sold out. Now, the Kalmans have expanded that original publication into this extraordinary compendium. Women Holding Things includes thoughtful and intimate anecdotes, recollections, and ruminations about portraits of women, both ordinary and famous.

Weaving together information from official sources and personal interviews, Barbara Tomblin gives the first full-length account of the US Army Nurse Corps in the Second World War. She describes how over 60,000 army nurses, all volunteers, cared for sick and wounded American soldiers in every theater of the war, serving in the jungles of the Southwest Pacific, the frozen reaches of Alaska and Iceland, the mud of Italy and northern Europe, or the heat and dust of the Middle East.

God Save the Queens pays tribute to the women of hip-hop - from the early work of Roxanne Shante, to hitmakers like Queen Latifah and Missy Elliot, to the superstars of today. Exploring issues of gender, money, sexuality, violence, body image, feuds, objectification and more, God Save the Queens is an important and monumental work of music journalism that at last gives these influential female artists the respect they have long deserved.

Widely considered the first female presidential chief of staff, Marguerite "Missy" LeHand was the right-hand woman to Franklin Delano Roosevelt - both personally and professionally - for more than 20 years. Although her official title as personal secretary was relatively humble, her power and influence were unparalleled. Everyone in the White House knew one truth: if you wanted access to Franklin, you had to get through Missy. The Gatekeeper is a thoughtful, revealing, unsung-hero story about a woman ahead of her time.

During the early twentieth century, transatlantic travel was the province of the great ocean liners. It was an extraordinary undertaking made by many women, whose lives were changed forever by their journeys between the Old World and the New. Some traveled for leisure, some for work; others to reinvent themselves or find new opportunities. They were celebrities, migrants and millionaires, refugees, aristocrats and crew members whose stories have mostly remained untold—until now.

This close look at Wonder Woman's history portrays a complicated heroine who is more than just a female Superman with a golden lasso and bullet-deflecting bracelets. The original Wonder Woman was ahead of her time, advocating female superiority and the benefits of matriarchy in the 1940s. At the same time, her creator filled the comics with titillating bondage imagery, and Wonder Woman was tied up as often as she saved the world.

July 18, 1969: A car driven by Senator Edward M. Kennedy plunged off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, off the coast of Cape Cod. Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old former staffer for Kennedy’s brother Robert, died in the crash. The scandal that followed demeaned Kopechne’s reputation and scapegoated her for Ted Kennedy’s inability to run for the presidency instead of acknowledging her as an innocent victim in a tragedy that took her life. Kashatus’s biography of Mary Jo Kopechne illuminates the life of a politically committed young woman who embodied the best ideals of the 60s.

Comic book superheroines bend steel, travel across time and space, and wield awesome forces. These mighty females do everything that male superheroes do. But they have to work their wonders in skirts and high heels. The Supergirls asks whether their world of fantasy is that different from our own. Are the stories of Wonder Woman’s search for an identity, Batwoman and Power Girl’s battle for equality, and Manhunter’s juggling of a crime fighting career and motherhood also an alternative saga of modern American women?

We all get dressed. But how often do we pause to think about the place of clothes in our world? What unconscious thoughts do we express when we dress every day? Can a philosophy of living be wrapped up in a winter coat? Can we see a handbag not just as an object, but as an idea? Dressed is the thinking person’s book about clothes. Ranging freely from suits to shoes, from Marx’s coat to Madame X’s gown, philosopher Shahidha Bari unveils the hidden power of what we wear, addressing the deepest questions of who we are and how we choose to face the world.

Far Side of the Moon is the untold, fully authorized story of the lives of Frank and Susan Borman. One was a famous astronaut - an instrumental part of the Apollo space program - but the other was just as much a warrior. This real-life love story is far from a fairy tale. Life as a military wife was beyond demanding, but Susan always rose to the occasion. When Frank joined NASA and was selected to command the first mission to orbit the moon, Susan’s well-hidden depression and alcoholism finally came to light.

Are the ways we look at menopause all wrong? Historian Susan Mattern says yes, and The Slow Moon Climbs reveals just how wrong we have been. Taking listeners from the rainforests of Paraguay to the streets of Tokyo, Mattern draws on historical, scientific, and cultural research to reveal how our perceptions of menopause developed from prehistory to today. For most of human history, people had no word for menopause and did not view it as a medical condition. Rather, in traditional foraging and agrarian societies, it was a transition to another important life stage.

Countless Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the enslavers who bought and sold their ancestors. Among them is Dionne Ford, whose great grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift. What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take? In this book, which move between her inner life and deep research, Ford tells us.

People of color have been having abortions since the dawn of time, yet our access is continuously under attack. In Liberating Abortion, award-winning abortion activist Renee Bracey Sherman and journalist Regina Mahone illustrate the long racist history that brought us to this moment, uncover the hidden figures who set the foundation activists and storytellers are building on today, and explain how abortion has been and remains essential to the health of our communities.

Rent a new body . . . Sounds perfect. Unless your body is the one getting rented. Sarah is a top model, making tons of money to let other people live in her skin. But she feels like she's losing her identity. Time to get out. Her employer decides to sell her body instead. Sarah plunges into a terrifying race to escape with body and soul intact. Failure means becoming the ultimate orphan. As she scrambles for any possible salvation, she finds an unexpected ally who is definitely not who he pretends to be. Neither is the entire body renting program. Sarah stumbles upon dark truths, arcane ...

New York City in the Jazz Age was host to a pulsating artistic and social revolution. Uptown, an unprecedented explosion in Black music, literature, dance, and art sparked the Harlem Renaissance. While the history of this African-American awakening has been widely explored, one chapter remains untold: The story of a group of women collectively dubbed “Miss Anne.” Kaplan’s formidable work remaps the landscape of the 1920s, and alters our perception of this historical moment.

In this remarkable book, Sandra Day O’Connor explores the law, her life as a Supreme Court Justice, and how the Court has evolved and continues to function, grow, and change as an American institution. Tracing some of the origins of American law through history, people, ideas, and landmark cases, O’Connor sheds new light on the basics, exploring through personal observation the evolution of the Court and American democratic traditions.

A ferociously intimate memoir by a devout woman from a modest family in Saudi Arabia who became the unexpected leader of a courageous movement to support women's right to drive.

The last 20 years have brought us the rise of the Internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective.

How did South Africa turn out the way it did? In Moederland - 'Motherland', in Afrikaans - Cato Pedder takes us on an eye-opening journey across four centuries, tracing the country's turbulent past and the rise and fall of apartheid (and her family's charged legacy) through the lives of nine very different women.

The first woman ever to issue the threat of a nuclear weapons strike is not even officially a head of state. Kim Yo Jong is the sister of North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and, as their murderous regime’s chief propagandist, internal administrator, and foreign policymaker, she is the most powerful woman in North Korean history. Cruel but charming, she threatens and insults foreign leaders with sardonic wit, issuing proclamations and denunciations in her own name, a first for any woman in the Korean royal family.