Reading List: Women’s History Month

This year’s theme for Women’s History Month is “Moving Forward Together! Women Educating & Inspiring Generations”. We are sharing a collection of books that highlight the contributions that women have made to the very fabric of our society.

Thank You for Staying with Me

BAILEY GAYLIN MOORE

This collection of essays navigates the complications of home, mother-daughter relationships, and young motherhood in the conservative and religious landscape of the Ozarks.

Westerns

VICTORIA LAMONT

Using original archival analysis, Westerns: A Women’s History provides a revisionist account of the western genre, proving women writers of popular westerns were instrumental in the formation of the genre and used it to subtly critique patriarchy.

Tiffany Midge’s hilarious and biting collection of essays, written during the COVID-19 pandemic, brims with satiric insight from a Native American perspective. The Dreamcatcher in the Wry entertains while it informs, gleaning wisdom from the incongruities of everyday life and turning over the colonizer’s society and culture for some good old Native American roasting.

Changing Woman

VENETIA HOBSON LEWIS

Changing Woman invokes one of the Southwest’s most infamous massacres, the slaughter of Aravaipa Apaches near Camp Grant in 1871, through the eyes of Valeria Obregón, a settler in Tucson, and Nest Feather, a young Apache woman.

The Better Angels

ROBERT C. PLUMB

This multilayered biography examines five remarkable women (Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, and Sarah Josepha Hale) who made important contributions to the Union cause before, during, and after the defining years of the American Civil War.

Grit & Ghosts

ROBIN FOSTER

Grit and Ghosts tells the stories of eight women from the American West who speak to a shared human experience of struggle and the grit required to move through it.

In a gathering of griot traditions fusing storytelling, cultural history, social, and literary criticism, Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman “re-members” and represents how women of the African diaspora have drawn on ancient traditions to record memory, history, and experience in song, dance, and poetics in performance.

Teacher in Space

COLIN BURGESS

This newly revised book tells the story of Christa McAuliffe and how she graduated from her role as a much-loved high school teacher to occupying a seat on the Challenger, the veteran orbiter’s tenth and last flight into space.

Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez

KAT D. WILLIAMS

Kat D. Williams traces Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez’s life from her childhood in Cuba to her reinvention of herself as a professional American baseball player, illuminating the importance of sport as a source of stability in a life defined by challenges.

The Forgotten Botanist tells the story of Sara Plummer Lemmon, a little-known and underappreciated woman of both science and art who did much of the botanical work attributed to her husband, John Gill Lemmon.

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