Science History Women

This stimulating collection of essays in an autobiographical framework encompasses Gerda Lerner's theoretical writing and her organizational work in transforming the history profession and in establishing Women's History as a mainstream field.

Millions of us use restrictive diets, intermittent fasting, IV therapies, and Ozempic abuse to shrink until we are sample-size acceptable. But for the 30 million Americans who live with eating disorders, it isn’t just about less. More, Please is a chronicle of a lifelong fixation with food—its power to soothe, to comfort, to offer a fleeting escape from the outside world—as well as an examination of the ways in which compulsory thinness, diet culture, and the seductive promise of “wellness” have resulted in warping countless Americans’ relationship with healthy eating.

At a time when most of the public discourse was dominated by men, Anna Julia Cooper’s writings offered a blistering rebuke to that status quo. The essays and speeches collected here anticipated the debates about racism, sexism, and intersectionality that we are still having today. Cooper argues in particular for the importance of Black women’s participation in identifying and combating the structures of oppression that surrounded them - and that made life so much more difficult for many other groups as well.

In a rich and riveting narrative, Jane Dunn reveals the extraordinary rivalry between the regal cousins. It is the story of two queens ruling on one island, each with a claim to the throne of England, each embodying dramatically opposing qualities of character, ideals of womanliness (and views of sexuality), and divinely ordained kingship.

Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: Her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives.

Sexual misconduct accusations spark competing claims: Her word against his. How do we decide who is telling the truth? The answer comes down to credibility. But as this eye-opening book reveals, invisible forces warp the credibility judgments of even the well-intentioned among us. We are all shaped by a set of false assumptions and hidden biases embedded in our culture, our legal system, and our psyches. Deborah Tuerkheimer provides a much-needed framework to explain how we perceive credibility, why our perceptions are distorted, and why these distortions harm survivors.

Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood's employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position. By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: In 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500.

The newest title in the Emergent Strategy Series, Liberated to the Bone, addresses the intersections between healing our physical bodies and healing our social relations which are shaped by violence. Bodyworker and cultural worker Susan Raffo addresses intergenerational trauma, social justice, organizing, and how all of these things are relevant to our bodies. The book illuminates three different approaches to healing: ending violence, the significance of being rooted in the present, and creating the conditions to address unfinished histories and generational trauma.

Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered by a pond outside Philadelphia in 1887, investigators homed in on two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a married, working-class Black woman, and George Wilson, a former neighbor whom Tabbs implicated after her arrest. As details surrounding the shocking case emerged, both the crime and ensuing trial - which spanned several months - were featured in the national press. The trial brought otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the Black community to public attention.

In January 1889, Louisa Collins, a 41-year-old mother of 10 children, became the first woman hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol and the last woman hanged in New South Wales. Both of Louisa's husbands had died suddenly and the Crown, convinced that Louisa poisoned them with arsenic, put her on trial an extraordinary four times in order to get a conviction, to the horror of many in the legal community. Louisa protested her innocence until the end.

Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyonce exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures—a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers.

What happens to the women who choose to work in a country struggling to reconcile a traditional culture with the demands of globalization? In this sharply drawn portrait of Egyptian society—deepened by two years of immersive reporting—Leslie T. Chang follows three women as they persevere in a country that throws up obstacles to their progress at every step, from dramatic swings in economic policy to conservative marriage expectations and a failing education system.

Sultana, a Muslim woman living in colonial India, falls asleep and wakes up in a transformed future world: a utopia in which men rather than women are relegated to the domestic sphere. Women, now free to explore the outside world at will and pursue an education, run a peaceful and just society, using scientific principles to harvest energy from the sun and live in harmony with nature. Sultana’s Dream was published in 1905 in the Indian Ladies Magazine, the first English language periodical edited by, and targeted at, Indian women. Like the periodical, the story broke new ground.

This book restores a little-known advocate of Indian rights to her place in history. In June 1889 a widowed Brooklyn artist named Catherine Weldon traveled to the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota Territory to help Sitting Bull hold on to land that the government was trying to wrest from his people. Her efforts were counterproductive; she was ordered to leave the reservation, and the Standing Rock Sioux were bullied into signing away their land. But she returned with her teenage son, settling at Sitting Bull's camp on the Grand River.

Soldier Girls follows the lives of three women on their paths to the military. These women, who are quite different in every way, become friends, and we watch their interaction and also what happens when they are separated. We see their families, their lovers, their spouses, their children. We see them work extremely hard, deal with the attentions of men on base and in war zones, and struggle to stay connected to their families back home.

50 Things to Know About the First Ladies by author Margaret Strolle offers a approach to learning about the first ladies that is simple yet informative. Most books on first ladies tell you anecdotes about all the first ladies individually. Although there's nothing wrong with that, this audiobook streamlines the information for the casual first-ladies scholar, teaching you the highlights in easily digestible paragraphs. Based on knowledge from the world's leading experts, this audiobook will help you sound like an expert on the first ladies.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types - extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving - has inspired television shows, Online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results - no less account for its success.

A group of foreign mercenaries hired as deniable assets by a newly-formed humanitarian division of the CIA is tasked with saving Mali’s persecuted Dogon people from genocide. The operation must be carried out in stealth while journeying across some of West Africa’s most hostile terrain. As if all that’s not enough, they are also instructed to help solve an ancient astronomical mystery linked to the pyramids of Egypt. Mission impossible? Duh! Nicknamed the Deniables because their existence isn’t officially acknowledged by the CIA, the mercenaries are crazy enough to accept the ...

While sportswriters rushed into Major League Baseball locker rooms to talk with players, MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn barred the lone woman from entering along with them. That reporter, twenty-six-year-old Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke, charged Kuhn with gender discrimination, and after the lawyers argued Ludtke v. Kuhn in federal court, she won. Her 1978 groundbreaking case affirmed her equal rights, and the judge's order opened the doors for several generations of women to be hired in sports media.

For fans of The Astronaut Wives Club, The Mercury 13 reveals the little-known true story of the remarkable women who trained for NASA space flight. In 1961, just as NASA launched its first man into space, a group of women underwent secret testing in the hopes of becoming America’s first female astronauts. They passed the same battery of tests at the legendary Lovelace Foundation as did the Mercury 7 astronauts, but they were summarily dismissed by the boys’ club at NASA and on Capitol Hill.