Women

As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium....

A never-before-told story of Virginia Hall, the American spy who changed the course of World War II, from the author of Clementine....

Deeply researched and rich with detail, Lincoln’s Lady Spymaster is a remarkable true story of courage, ingenuity, and resistance. Gerri Willis pulls back the curtain on one of the most fearless heroes of the Civil War, restoring her to her rightful place as an American icon.

Clear-eyed, impassioned, and ultimately hopeful, We Refuse offers a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience, and a path toward liberation.

From the best-selling author of The Radium Girls comes another dark and dramatic but ultimately uplifting tale of a forgotten woman whose inspirational journey sparked lasting change for women’s rights and exposed injustices that still resonate today....

Sisters in Science tells the extraordinary true story of four women pioneers in physics during World War II and their daring escape out of Nazi Germany.

The #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opus—a landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history....

A riveting and stylish saga set in Paris during World War II, The Art Spy uncovers how an unlikely heroine infiltrated the Nazi leadership to save the world's most treasured masterpieces.

New York Times bestselling author of Madame Fourcade's Secret War Lynne Olson tells the extraordinary true story of a small group of Frenchwomen, all Resistance members, who banded together in a notorious all female concentration camp to defy the Nazis and stay alive

For fans of Radium Girls and history and WWII buffs, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line takes you inside the lives and experiences of 15 unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII....

Every Tudor Queen had ladies-in-waiting. They were her confidantes and her chaperones. Only the Queen's ladies had the right to enter her most private chambers, spending hours helping her to get dressed and undressed, caring for her clothes and jewels, listening to her secrets.

The twentieth century American department store: a palace of consumption where every wish could be met under one roof – afternoon tea, a stroll through the latest fashions, a wedding (or funeral) planned.

The phenomenal true story of the Black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space....

Journalist Elise Loehnen explores the ancient rules women unwittingly follow in order to be considered “good,” revealing how the Seven Deadly Sins still control and distort our lives and illuminating a path toward a more balanced, spiritually complete way to live....

The electrifying true story of a young couple shipwrecked at sea: a mind-blowing tale of obsession, survival, and partnership stretched to its limits.

Created in the aftermath of World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency relied on women even as it attempted to channel their talents and keep them down....

In the wake of World War II, four agents were critical in helping build a new organization that we now know as the CIA. Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier, called the “wise gals” by their male colleagues because of their sharp sense of humor....

At the height of World War II, LOOK Magazine profiled a small American community for a series of articles portraying it as the wholesome, patriotic model of life on the home front.

From the author of In the Shadow of the Empress comes the chronicle of two of the most influential and glamorous women in nineteenth-century Europe—Elisabeth, empress of Austria, and Eugénie, empress of France—and their efforts to rule amid the scandal, intrigue, tragedy, and violence of their era.

The heart-pounding true story of the daring American women who piloted the most dangerous aircraft of World War II through the treacherous skies of Britain.

Acclaimed journalist, podcaster, and true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson tells the true story of the scandalous murder investigation that became the inspiration for both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and the first true-crime book published in America.

A trailblazing, conversation-starting history of women’s health - from the earliest medical ideas about women’s illnesses to hormones and autoimmune diseases - brought together in a fascinating, sweeping narrative....

Now is the time for a new women’s history - for the famous, infamous, and unsung women to get their due - from the Enlightenment to the #MeToo movement....

Recruited by the US Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than 10,000 women served as codebreakers during World War II....

The imprisonment and execution of Queen Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, in 1536 was unprecedented in English history and never before has there been a book devoted entirely to her fall.

Deeply researched and rich with detail, Lincoln’s Lady Spymaster is a remarkable true story of courage, ingenuity, and resistance. Gerri Willis pulls back the curtain on one of the most fearless heroes of the Civil War, restoring her to her rightful place as an American icon.

In Penelope’s Bones, award-winning classicist and historian Emily Hauser pieces together compelling evidence from archaeological excavations and scientific discoveries to unearth the richly textured lives of women in Bronze Age Greece—the era of Homer’s heroes. Here, for the first time, we come to understand the everyday lives and experiences of the real women who stand behind the legends of Helen, Briseis, Cassandra, Aphrodite, Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso, Penelope, and more.

Decades after the end of World War II, the name Ravensbrück still evokes horror for those with knowledge of this infamous all-women’s concentration camp, better known since it became the setting of Martha Hall Kelly’s bestselling novel, Lilac Girls. Particularly shocking were the medical experiments performed on some of the inmates. Ravensbrück was atypical in other ways as well, not just as the only all-female German concentration camp, but because 80 percent of its inmates were political prisoners, among them a tight-knit group of women who had been active in the French Resistance.

Through exclusive interviews with current and former female CIA officers, many of whom have never spoken publicly, Agents of Change tells an enthralling and, at times, disturbing story set against the backdrop of the evolving women’s movement. It was the 1960s, a “secretarial” era, when women first gained a foothold and pushed against the one-dimensional, pop-culture trope of the sexy Cold War Bond Girl. Underestimated but undaunted, they fought their way, decade-by-decade, through adversity to the top of the spy game.

Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine are two of the most recognisable figures of the Middle Ages, and almost certainly the best-known couple. The lives of their sons have been examined in detail many times, but their daughters are barely known despite the influence they exerted on the world around them. Joanna, the youngest daughter, led an extraordinary life full of travel, adventure, danger, and controversy. Her story is told here in full for the first time.

In 2008, academic and scholar Susan Gubar was told by a trusted oncologist that she had only a few years left to live. Though she outlived that dire prognosis, this brush with mortality refocused her attention on the boons of a longevity she did not expect to experience. She began to think: In the last years of our lives, can we shape and change our creative capabilities? The resulting volume, Grand Finales, answers this question with a resounding yes.

In this rich and definitive study, renowned scholar Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks explores the history of women and the Reformations in full for the first time. Wiesner-Hanks travels the globe, examining well-known figures like Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth I, and Anne Hutchinson, as well as women whose stories are only now emerging.

SHE DOMINATED MEN IN THE RING… AND WROTE THE RULES OF #METOO 80 YEARS BEFORE THE HASHTAG The explosive sport biography reveals how Mildred Burke, the forgotten pioneer of girl wrestling, women wrestling, and pro-wrestling, invented sports feminism… and gives you the tools to smash your own limits. Step into vintage 1930s America, where a 5'2" waitress defied gender stereotypes, dominated male wrestlers twice her size in mixed wrestling (woman wrestling man) and catch wrestling (catch-as-catch-can), and became the first million-dollar female athlete. She built the first all-female ...

Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age. Between 1870 and 1900, the United States’ population doubled, accompanied by an unparalleled industrial expansion and an explosion of wealth. America was the foremost nation of the world, and New York City was its beating heart. There, the richest and most influential—Thomas Edison, J. P. Morgan, Edith Wharton, the Vanderbilts, Andrew Carnegie, and more—became icons, whose comings and goings were breathlessly reported in the papers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. It was a time of abundance, but also bitter rivalries.

A Princess Chosen, A Heart Betrayed – The Untold Story Behind the Royal Curtain She was young, beautiful, and innocent—selected by one of the most powerful institutions in the world to serve a role, not to live a life. Thrown to the Side pulls back the velvet curtain on the dramatic true story of Princess Diana, her arranged royal marriage, her quiet rebellion, and the love that ultimately led to her tragic end. This powerful narrative explores the tangled web between Princess Diana, Prince Charles, and Camilla Parker Bowles—from the earliest signs of a royal arrangement to the ...