In 1980, the National Women’s History Project successfully gained national recognition for Women’s History Week, issued by President Jimmy Carter. Women’s History Month, later established by Congress in 1987, commemorates the central role of women in American history and contemporary culture.1
From biographies of women activists to histories of feminist art movements, our Women’s History Month reading list contains ten compelling works to read this month and beyond.
Merze Tate
The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar
Barbara D. Savage
A powerful and inspiring biography of Merze Tate, a trailblazing Black woman scholar and intrepid world traveler
Betty Friedan
Magnificent Disrupter
Rachel Shteir
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography
A new portrait of Betty Friedan, the author and activist acclaimed as the mother of second-wave feminism
Vagabond Princess
The Great Adventures of Gulbadan
Ruby Lal
A captivating biography of one of the world’s greatest adventurers, the itinerant Mughal Princess Gulbadan, based on her long-forgotten memoir
Talking Back
Native Women and the Making of the Early South
Alejandra Dubcovsky
A pathbreaking look at Native women of the early South who defined power and defied authority
Women Artists Together
Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation
Amy Tobin
A fresh perspective on collaboration, collectivity, and conflict in the women’s art movement of the 1970s
Women, Work, and Politics
The Political Economy of Gender Inequality
Torben Iversen and Frances McCall Rosenbluth
The first book to integrate the micro-level of families with the macro-level of national institutions
Woman
The American History of an Idea
Lillian Faderman
A comprehensive history of the struggle to define womanhood in America, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century
The Women’s Khutbah Book
Contemporary Sermons on Spirituality and Justice from around the World
Sa’diyya Shaikh and Fatima Seedat
A first-ever collection of contemporary Muslim women’s khutbahs (sermons) drawing on their social, religious, and spiritual experiences and framed by original reflections on an emerging Muslim feminist ethics
Women in Intelligence
The Hidden History of Two World Wars
Helen Fry
A groundbreaking history of women in British intelligence, revealing their pivotal role across the first half of the twentieth century
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
I Will Not Bend
Edited by Sarah Ganz Blythe, Dominic Molon and Kajette Solomon
Exploring the career and legacy of the artist Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, whose sculptural figures embody her uncompromising sovereignty over her work and life
- History Women’s History Month, The Women’s History Museum. ↩︎
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