In Defense of Women
Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate
Written by Nancy Gertner

Format: Trade Paperback, 264 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: April 17, 2012
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1148-5 (0-8070-1148-7)

From a “Human Rights Hero,” a memoir of her illustrious career litigating groundbreaking cases

In the boys’ club climate of 1975, Nancy Gertner launched her career fighting a murder charge on behalf of antiwar activist Susan Saxe, one of the few women to ever make the FBI’s Most Wanted List. What... Read more >

Ladies of Seneca Falls

Written by Miriam Gurko

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: December 27, 1987
Price: $12.76
ISBN: 978-0-8052-0545-9 (0-8052-0545-4)

On July 13, 1848, five women conversed over tea in a small upstate New York town. The next day, the local newspaper carried their announcement inviting women to attend "A Convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women." Thus, the American woman's rights movement became reality.

Gurko... Read more >

Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854-1911

Written by Malvina Shanklin Harlan
Afterword by Linda Przybyszewski
Foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: July 8, 2003
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6744-9 (0-8129-6744-5)

Like Abigail Adams, Malvina Shanklin Harlan witnessed—and gently influenced—national history from the unique perspective of a political leader’s wife. Her husband, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911), played a central role in some of the most significant civil rights decisions of his era, including his lone dissenting opinion in Plessy... Read more >

Lady Sings the Blues the 50th Anniversary Edition

Written by Billie Holiday and William Dufty
Foreword by David Ritz

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
On Sale: July 25, 2006
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2386-6 (0-7679-2386-3)

LADY SINGS THE BLUES is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred autobiography of Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation. Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and... Read more >

They Went Whistling
Women Wayfarers, Warriors, Runaways, and Renegades
Written by Barbara Holland

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: February 5, 2002
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-72002-1 (0-385-72002-5)

In her spirited account of willful women from Cleopatra to Mother Jones, Barbara Holland reanimates rebels both known and unknown who thrived doing the unexpected.

Her remarkable book–part history, part spicy op-ed–will acquaint you with the likes of Grace O’Malley, a blazing terror of the Irish seas in the 1500s, and... Read more >

Rereading Sex
Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America
Written by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

Format: Trade Paperback, 528 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 14, 2003
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70186-3 (0-375-70186-9)

Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for History

A lively, scholarly, and often startling exploration of nineteenth-century American attitudes toward sexuality—what we felt, thought, wrote, and said about the human body; about love, lust, intercourse, masturbation, contraception, and abortion; about the power of sexual words and images.

Horowitz shows us a many-voiced America in... Read more >

The Rivals
Chris Evert vs. Martina Navratilova Their Epic Duels and Extraordinary Friendship
Written by Johnette Howard

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
On Sale: June 13, 2006
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1885-5 (0-7679-1885-1)

Praise for THE RIVALS:

“For all our seeming familiarity with Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, Johnette Howard takes us deep inside the greatest rivalry in tennis history to reveal how it took the two champions the length of their twenty year tennis war to truly know and love each other and themselves... Read more >

Bold Spirit
Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America
Written by Linda Lawrence Hunt

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: January 11, 2005
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7993-3 (1-4000-7993-4)

In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America.

Hoping to win the wager and save her family’s farm, Helga and her teenaged... Read more >

A History of Women in America

Written by Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman

Format: Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Bantam
On Sale: September 1, 1984
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 978-0-553-26914-7 (0-553-26914-3)

From founding mothers to modern feminists, this narrative history, incorporating first-person accounts, traces the development of women's roles in America. Against the backdrop of major historical events and movements, the authors examine the issues that changed the roles and lives of women in our society. Includes photographs and index. 416 pp.

TABLE... Read more >

Mr. Jefferson's Women

Written by Jon Kukla

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 14, 2008
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7857-8 (1-4000-7857-1)

From the acclaimed author of A Wilderness So Immense comes a pioneering study of Thomas Jefferson’s relationships with women, both personal and political.

The author of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote the words “all men are created equal,” was surprisingly uncomfortable with woman. In eight chapters, Kukla examines the evidence... Read more >

A Mighty Long Way
My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School
Written by Carlotta Walls Lanier and Lisa Frazier Page
Foreword by Bill Clinton

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: One World/Ballantine
On Sale: July 27, 2010
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-51101-0 (0-345-51101-8)

Selected for Common Reading at the University of Illinois, Springfield

"Carlotta Walls LaNier's A Mighty Long Way is a riveting account of nine brave high school students and their families in a quest for quality desegregated public education. What happened in Little Rock in 1957 resulted in America's greatest constitutional crisis since... Read more >

The Kennedy Women
The Saga of an American Family
Written by Laurence Leamer

Format: Trade Paperback, 960 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: September 29, 1996
Price: $21.95
ISBN: 978-0-449-91171-6 (0-449-91171-3)

Laurence Leamer was granted unheralded access to private Kennedy papers, and he also interviewed family and old friends, many of whom had never been interviewed before, for this incredible portrait of the women in America’s "royal family." From Bridget Murphy, the foremother who touched shore at East Boston in 1849, to... Read more >

Typhoid Mary
Captive to the Public's Health
Written by Judith Walzer Leavitt

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: July 31, 1997
Price: $24.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-2103-3 (0-8070-2103-2)

She was an Irish immigrant cook. Between 1900 and 1907, she infected twenty-two New Yorkers with typhoid fever through her puddings and cakes; one of them died. Tracked down through epidemiological detective work, she was finally apprehended as she hid behind a barricade of trashcans. To protect the public’s health, authorities... Read more >

Harriet Tubman
Imagining a Life
Written by Beverly Lowry

Format: Hardcover, 432 pages
Publisher: Doubleday
On Sale: June 12, 2007
Price: $26.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-50291-7 (0-385-50291-5)

“I am at peace with God and all mankind.”
—Harriet Tubman to Mary Talbert, on the occasion of their last visit, 1913
Now, from the award-winning novelist and biographer, an astonishing reimagining of the remarkable life of Harriet Tubman—the “Moses of Her People.”

During her lifetime Harriet Tubman was an escaped slave, lumberjack, laundress... Read more >

Her Dream of Dreams
The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker
Written by Beverly Lowry

Format: Trade Paperback, 496 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 11, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76803-6 (0-679-76803-3)

“I am a woman that came from the cotton fields of the South; I was promoted from there to the wash-tub; then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.” —Madam C. J. Walker, National Negro Business... Read more >

I Await the Devil's Coming

Written by Mary MacLane
Introduction by Jessa Crispin

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: March 19, 2013
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-61219-194-2 (1-61219-194-0)

Mary MacLane’s I Await the Devil’s Coming is a shocking, brave and intellectually challenging diary of a 19-year-old girl living in Butte, Montana in 1902. Written in potent, raw prose that propelled the author to celebrity upon publication, the book has become almost completely forgotten.

In the early 20th century, MacLane’s name... Read more >

Thousand Pieces of Gold

Written by Ruthanne Lum McCunn

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: August 25, 2004
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8381-9 (0-8070-8381-X)

Lalu Nathoy’s father called his thirteen-year-old daughter his treasure, his “thousand pieces of gold,” yet when famine strikes northern China in 1871, he is forced to sell her. Polly, as Lalu is later called, is sold to a brothel, sold again to a slave merchant bound for America, auctioned to a... Read more >

At the Dark End of the Street
Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
Written by Danielle L. McGuire

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 4, 2011
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-38924-4 (0-307-38924-3)

Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement.

The truth of who Rosa Parks was and... Read more >

At the Dark End of the Street
Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
Written by Danielle L. McGuire

Format: Hardcover, 352 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: September 7, 2010
Price: $27.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-26906-5 (0-307-26906-X)

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award

In a supposedly solitary, spontaneous act, Rosa Parks sparked the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which gave birth to the civil rights movement. Parks is often described as an unassuming woman whose fatigue caused her to defy the Jim Crow laws. The truth of... Read more >

Hell Hath No Fury
True Stories of Women at War from Antiquity to Iraq
Written by Rosalind Miles and Robin Cross

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: February 26, 2008
Price: $23.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-34637-7 (0-307-34637-4)

HELL HATH NO FURY fills a significant gap in the way we look at women's contributions and role in war. These compelling biographical essays give an in-depth sense of the widely different ways in which women across all cultures have participated in war--from the front lines to the the medical tents... Read more >

Who Cooked the Last Supper?
The Women's History of the World
Written by Rosalind Miles

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: April 10, 2001
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-609-80695-1 (0-609-80695-5)

Men dominate history because men write history. There have been many heroes, but no heroines. This is the book that overturns that "phallusy of history," giving voice to the true history of the world — which, always and forever, must include the contributions of millions of unsung women. Here is the... Read more >

A Few Good Women
America's Military Women from World War I to the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
Written by Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee

Format: Trade Paperback, 496 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: March 8, 2011
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-9560-5 (1-4000-9560-3)

In this riveting narrative history, women veterans from the world wars, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq tell their extraordinary stories.

Evelyn M. Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee spent fifteen years combing through archives, journals, histories, and news reports, and gathering thousands of eyewitness accounts, letters, and interviews for this unprecedented chronicle... Read more >

Women's History For Beginners

Written by Bonnie Morris
Illustrated by Phillip Evans

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: For Beginners
On Sale: February 14, 2012
Price: $16.99
ISBN: 978-1-934389-60-7 (1-934389-60-9)

History books have either blurred, glossed, or omitted many events and people throughout history involving women and their roles in furthering the progression of the world’s cultures. What is women’s history? Is it the history of sex or gender? Is it scholarly history, or a feminist viewpoint? Is it the story... Read more >

Market Sentiments
Middle-Class Market Culture in Nineteenth-Century America
Written by Elizabeth White Nelson

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: July 6, 2010
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-58834-290-4 (1-58834-290-5)

In this brilliant study, Elizabeth White Nelson challenges a central tenet of 19th-century American history: namely, that men and women lived in separate spheres. Women, supposedly, lived lives focused around hearth and home; men focused on trade and commerce. Market Sentiments turns this theory on its head, arguing that the market... Read more >

In the Devil's Snare
The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
Written by Mary Beth Norton

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 14, 2003
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70690-5 (0-375-70690-9)

Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in this startlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study.

In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many... Read more >