Women's History Month 2024

Prof. Woody Holton (NBA-finalist for Unruly Americans) reveals that American icon Abigail Adams was far wiser and wilier than previously known.

"After the end of World War II, top-secret research continued across the United States as engineers and programmers rushed to complete their confidential assignments. Among them were six pioneering women, tasked with figuring out how to program the world's first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer - a machine built to calculate a single ballistic trajectory in twenty seconds rather than forty hours by human hand - even though there...

""The self-described black feminist lesbian mother poet used a mixture of prose, theory, poetry, and experience to interrogate oppressions and uplift marginalized communities. She was one of the first black feminists to target heteronormativity, and to encourage black feminists to expand their understanding of erotic pleasure. She amplified anti-oppression, even as breast cancer ravaged her ailing body." -- Evette Dionne, Bustle Magazine Winner of...

The author reflects on her life as she turns sixty-five. Told in free verse.

"Gloria Steinem had an itinerant childhood. Every fall, her father would pack the family into the car and they would drive across the country, in search of their next adventure. The seeds were planted: Steinem would spend much of her life on the road, as a journalist, organizer, activist, and speaker. In vivid stories that span an entire career, Steinem writes about her time on the campaign trail, from Bobby Kennedy to Hillary Clinton; her early exposure...

Examines the experiences of the children and husband of Henrietta Lacks, who, twenty years after her death from cervical cancer in 1951, learned doctors and researchers took cells from her cervix without consent which were used to create the immortal cell line known as the HeLa cell; provides an overview of Henrietta's life; and explores issues of experimentation on African-Americans and bioethics.

"On a Saturday afternoon in New York in late 1912, around the plain wooden tables of Polly's Restaurant in Greenwich Village, a group of women gathered, all of them convinced that they were going to change the world. It was the first meeting of "Heterodoxy," a secret supper club. The goals of the group were simple: They would meet to talk about their lives, their politics, and the still-not widely recognized idea that women were fundamentally equal...

"Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How...

"A collection of essays taking aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women"--Provided by publisher