Here are 100 books that My Life on the Road fans have personally recommended if you like
My Life on the Road.
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When I went to law school, so many of the stories we heard in class treated menâs experiences as the ordinary baseline and womenâs experiences as something to skip over or briefly mention as a footnote. This narrow perspective warps our understanding of the past, present, and future, and helps perpetuate womenâs inequality. I have been studying and writing about sex discrimination for more than two decades. I wanted to write a book that included women in the center of American law and history. In the process, I learned about scores of fascinating women who Americans know too little about or forget entirely.
Another common misconception is that the Nineteenth Amendment extended the vote to all American women. In fact, many womenâespecially women of colorâremained disenfranchised after the Amendmentâs ratification in 1920.
Jonesâs engaging book tells the story of the black women who continued to fight for enfranchisement and equal rights for decades after the Amendment.
âAn elegant and expansive historyâ (New YorkTimes)of African American womenâs pursuit of political powerâand how it transformed America   InVanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American womenâs political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work ofBlackwomenâMaria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and moreâwhoâŚ
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn theâŚ
I have been writing about the history of women's rights and women's suffrage for over fifty years. Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote offers a comprehensive history of the full three-quarters of a century of women's persistent suffrage activism. I began my work inspired by the emergence of the women's liberation movement in the 1970s and this most recent history appeared in conjunction with the 2020 Centennial of the Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. My understanding of the campaign for full citizenship for women repeatedly intersects with the struggles for racial equality, from abolition to Jim Crow. Today, when American political democracy is under assault, the long history of woman suffrage activism is more relevant than ever.
I am recommending this book because it is a beautifully written, originally argued overview of womenâs rights long history.
Stansell organizes her compelling history of womenâs rights around the shift from mothersâ perspectives (nineteenth-century feminism) to daughtersâ perspectives (twentieth century). She writes beautifully and sweeps over this long tradition without minimizing the disagreements, shifts, and changes, all the while emphasizing the consistent theme of womenâs individual freedom and collective struggle.
âA unique, elegant, learned sweep through more than two centuries of womenâs efforts to overcome the most fundamental way that human beings have been wrongly divided into the leaders and the led. Itâs full of surprises from the past and guiding lights for the future.ââGloria Steinem
For more than two centuries, the ranks of feminists have included dreamy idealists and conscientious reformers, erotic rebels and angry housewives, dazzling writers,shrewd political strategists, and thwarted workingwomen. Well-known leaders are sketched from new angles by Stansell, with her bracingeye for character: Mary Wollstonecraft, the passionate English writer who in 1792 published the firstâŚ
I have always been passionate and outspoken about fairness. This passion evolved into my attention to words and laws and a belief that they could affect behavior. This passion evolved into my passion for social change. Finally, it evolved into a passion for public service, where I could make things happen that I believed would help people. My first action as Chief Ranger for Legislation in the Boston office of the National Park Service was proposing a new park for womenâs history, which eventually became the Womenâs Rights National Historical Park.
I found a quote from my father written in 1982 in my tattered copy of Stantonâs biography when I was appointed the first superintendent of the new park. He asked, âHow do you know all this?â A perfect question from a well-educated and well-read father who was then 70. He surely never studied womenâs history.
I, a graduate of the Arts College at Cornell University just 40 miles away from Seneca Falls, had never heard of Stanton or Seneca Falls until 20 years after my graduation. Itâs remarkable how little awareness there was, even in such close proximity, about these historical figures and events that would become so central to my work. My personal knowledge of womenâs history was practically non-existent at the time.
I began as superintendent in 1982, and of the very fine books here recommended, only one had been published in 1982: Stantonâs autobiography. Stantonâs descriptions, supplementedâŚ
The autobiography of women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton-published for the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage-including an updated introduction and afterword from noted scholars of women's history Ellen Carol DuBois and Ann D. Gordon.
Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897, is one of the great American autobiographies. There is really no other American woman's autobiography in the nineteenth century that comes near it in relevance, excellence, and historical significance.
In 1848, thirty-three-year-old Stanton and four others organized the first major women's rights meeting in American history. Together with Susan B. Anthony, her partner in the cause, she led the campaignâŚ
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa storiesâall reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argueâŚ
When I was at university in the 1980s, I thought I wanted to become the ambassador to France. Then one of my roommates made me promise to take a womenâs studies classâany classâbefore I graduated. I opted for âThe History of Womenâs Peace Movements.â Descending into historical archives for the first time, I held in my hands crumbling, 100-year-old letters of World War I-era feminists who audaciously insisted that for a peaceful world to flourish, women must participate in its construction. My life changed course. I became a professor and a historian, and I have been following the trail of feminist, internationalist, social justice pioneers ever since.
When global diplomats formed the League of Nations in 1919, feminists were forced to lobby for womenâs rights from outside the halls of power. As a small measure of progress, after World War II six states would appoint women to the 1945 conference charged with drafting a charter to govern the Leagueâs successor: the United Nations. Half of the female delegates were appointed by Latin American nations, and together, the three feministaswould lobby tirelessly to ensure that the UN Charter bound the body to promote human rights âwithout distinction as to race, language, religion, or sex.â Marinoâs fabulous book explains why, in the 1920s and 1930s, Latin American feminists came to play such an outsized role in the global quest for sexual equality and human rights.
This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domingez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara Gonzalez; from Chile,âŚ
I am a writer of biographical historical fiction, with some of my novels set in medieval and Tudor England, others set in nineteenth-century America. In researching my books, I try to immerse myself in my charactersâ world, and that means reading primary sources, such as newspapers, periodicals, letters, diaries, and memoirs. I especially like to read my charactersâ own words. Fortunately, the nineteenth-century feminists featured in this list left a lot of words behind them!
Ernestine Rose, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who was one of the first women to speak out for womenâs rights in the United States, was well-known in her time but is little remembered today.
This book, which includes most of her published speeches and some of her letters, made her come alive for me. With lines like âIt is time to consider whether what is wrong in one sex, can be right in the otherâ (referring to the double standard of sexual morality for men and women), it still holds relevance for us today. Iâll never get to hear Ernestine Rose speak in person, so this is the next best thing.
Susan B. Anthony hung a picture of Rose on her wall. Elizabeth Cady Stanton publicly eulogized her as indispensable. Unique among the founders of the womenâs rights movement because she was a Polish immigrant of Jewish background, celebrated orator Ernestine Rose (1810-1882) won the title "Queen of the Platform" for her brilliant speeches, advocating and linking women's rights, religious freedom, and the abolition of slavery.
As a person who reads solely for pleasure regardless of research, I make it a mission while writing to read books I actually enjoy on topics I wanna learn more about. I chose the books on this list because Iâm also a person who reads multiple books at once in various genres, it keeps me honest; aware of holes and discrepancies in my own work and pushes me towards some semblance of completion. All the writers on this list do multiple things at once and I admire their skill and risk in coupling creativity with clarity.
What bell hooks has shown me about the possibility of personal narrative and memoir writing is endless because she consistently shows that your story is never-ending. But mostly bell hooks likes to hurt me on purpose. This is my favorite memoir by her because it centers on two of my favorite topics: words and whirlwind romance that refuses to interfere with the words at stake, and I knew this book would be one I would return to in order to figure out my own priorities once I read, âIâm willing to give up everything I love if it means I wonât be crazy.â
âbell hooksâs brave memoir of struggling to find her own work, love, and independence.â âGloria Steinem With her customary boldness and insight, brilliant social critic and public intellectual bell hooks traces her writerâs journey in Wounds of Passion. She shares the difficulties and triumphs, the pleasures and the dangers, of a life devoted to writing. hooks lets readers see the ways one woman writer can find her own voice while forging relationships of love in keeping with her feminist thinking. With unflinching courage and hard-won wisdom, hooks reveals the intimate details and provocative ideas of the life path she carvedâŚ
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother hadâŚ
I have loved history since I was a girl, visiting my grandparents in Virginia and reading American Girl books. I began to focus on womenâs history when I learned in college just how much the womenâs movement of the generation before mine had made my life possible. So much changed for American women in the ten years before I was born, and I wanted to know how that happened and how it fit into the broader political changes. That connection, between women making change and the bigger political scene, remains the core of my research. I have a B.A. in history and English from the University of Kentucky, and a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Virginia.
By looking at three local NOW chapters around the country, Gilmore shows that the leading organization of 1960s feminism wasnât nearly as centralized as people think. Memphis NOW, for example, was a radical feminist group simply by being a feminist group in the South. San Francisco NOW, by contrast, made coalitions with many more radical groups as they worked together to make change. A great read and an important insight into how NOW actually worked as an organization.
Groundswell: Grassroots Feminist Activism in Postwar America offers an essential perspective on the post-1960 movement for women's equality and liberation. Tracing the histories of feminist activism, through the National Organization of Women (NOW) chapters in three different locations: Memphis, Tennessee, Columbus, Ohio, and San Francisco, California, Gilmore explores how feminist identity, strategies, and goals were shaped by geographic location.
Departing from the usual conversation about the national icons and events of second wave feminism, this book concentrates on local histories, and asks the questions that must be answered on the micro level: Who joined? Who did not? What did theyâŚ
I was raised to believe that I could do everything a man could do, just as Ginger Rodgers did, âbackwards and in high heels.â My discovery that social expectations and boundaries for women were vastly different than those for men came as an enormous shock, and struck me as deeply, tragically unfair. I take strength from women in history, as well as from fictional female characters, who passionately pursue roles in a manâs world that are considered transgressive or forbidden. As a glass-ceiling-shattering female film and television director I take inspiration from women who have the gritty determination to live on their own terms. And then tell it as they lived it.
I read The Golden Notebook when I was in my early twenties, facing the elation and terror of life as an adult. I remember vividly the state of excitement and awe in which I read it. Here was a writer who thought the unthinkable about the experience of being a woman in a manâs world, and fearlessly wrote it down in all its raw beauty.
To this day, if a friend of mine is in trouble, The Golden Notebook is the gift I give them, saying, âThis book changed my life. â
One of the most important books of the growing feminist movement of the 1950s, The Golden Notebook was brought to the attention of a wider public by the Nobel Prize award to Doris Lessing in 2007.
Author Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writerâs block by writing a comprehensive "golden notebook" that draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook: sources of her creative inspiration in a black book, communism in a red book, the breakdown of her marriage in a yellow book, and day-to-day emotions and dreams in a blue book. AnnaâsâŚ
I write about contemporary art, and much of the work Iâve been drawn to was made by women and by artists in other sidelined communities. Early on, I also focused on marginalized disciplines: artistsâ books, performance, and art that responded directly to the vacant sites that abounded in New York City when I started out in the late 1970s. It was an enormously exciting time, but also a tough one. Violence was very hard to avoid. I didnât focus on that at the time, but ultimately, I realized I needed to look more directly at trouble, and how artists respond to it.
I didnât read Last Days ofHot Slit in time to include it in my own book about sexual violence. In truth, I could have (barely; it was published just before I finished). But I felt comfortable with my aversion to Dworkin, a crusader against assault who had found common cause with conservative activists. And Dworkin was a self-defeating font of vituperation, wasnât she? Well, no. She was in fact altogether brilliant. Fatemanâs wonderfully lucid, deeply researched introduction and the careful selection she and Scholder made of Dworkinâs surprisingly wide-ranging work, demonstrate the force and courage not just of this radical feministâs writing, but also of her character.She was dauntless.
Selections from the work of radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin, famous for her antipornography stance and role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s.
Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. She still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom, evoked as a censorial demagogue, more than a decade after her death. Among the very first writers to use her own experiences of rape and batteryâŚ
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to runâŚ
Iâm Allison Lange, and Iâm a historian who writes, gives talks, teaches, and curates exhibitions. For the 19th Amendment centennial, I served as Historian for the United States Congressâs Womenâs Suffrage Centennial Commission. I am also creating the first filmed series on American womenâs history for Wondrium (formerly The Great Courses).
My first book, Picturing Political Power: Images in the Womenâs Suffrage Movement focuses on the ways that womenâs voting rights activists and their opponents used images to define gender and power. My next book situates current iconic pictures within the context of historical ones to demonstrate that todayâs visual debates about gender and politics are shaped by those of the past.
You might be surprised to learn that some prominent suffrage leaders had intimate relationships with women, including Susan B. Anthony and Jane Addams. However, some of these women destroyed their papers to make it difficult for historians to learn about their personal lives (ahem, Anthony and Addams). Scholars are in the process of recovering these stories as much as possible, and Anya Jabourâs Sophonsiba Breckenridge gives us an amazing glimpse into one womanâs experiences. Born in 1868, Breckinridge became one of the first American women to earn a PhD in Political Science. She was a prominent social worker, peace activist, and womenâs rights activist until she died in 1948. Breckinridge navigated the spotlight and same-sex relationships, and Jabour tells us how she did it.
Sophonisba Breckinridge's remarkable career stretched from the Civil War to the Cold War. She took part in virtually every reform campaign of the Progressive and New Deal eras and became a nationally and internationally renowned figure. Her work informed women's activism for decades and continues to shape progressive politics today. Anya Jabour's biography rediscovers this groundbreaking American figure. After earning advanced degrees in politics, economics, and law, Breckinridge established the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration, which became a feminist think tank that promoted public welfare policy and propelled women into leadership positions. In 1935, Breckinridge's unremitting effortsâŚ
