Women's History Month: Books

An empowering and intersectional history that centers the stories of African American women across 400+ years, showing how they are--and have always been--instrumental in shaping our country.

Jenn M. Jackson has been known to bring deep historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work: Why has Black women's freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost in the meantime?

So what if it's true that Black women are mad as hell? They have the right to be. In the Black feminist tradition of Audre Lorde, Brittney Cooper reminds us that anger is a powerful source of energy that can give us the strength to keep on fighting. Yet too often Black women's anger has been caricatured into an ugly and destructive force that threatens the civility and social fabric of American democracy. But Cooper shows us that there is more to the story than that. Black women's eloquent rage is what makes Serena Williams such a powerful tennis player. It's what makes Beyoncé's girl power anthems resonate so hard. It's what makes Michelle Obama an icon. Eloquent rage keeps us all honest and accountable.

Unapologetic is a 21st century activists' guide to upending mainstream ideas about race, class, and gender-- through a Black, queer, feminist lens-- carving out a path to collective liberation.Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements

Pt. I. Feminist theory in the flesh. 'Other' paradigms and postcolonial connections -- The cultural and political practices of Afrocentric feminism -- Bridging the (de)constructions: Black feminism and feminist postmodernism -- Pt.II. Symbolic and historical flashpoints of otherness. Gender tyranny: coded bodies, femininity, and Black womanhood -- 'Now I am here' : Black women and the first wave of feminism -- Pt. 3. Crossover dreams: toward a multicultural feminist politics of solidarity.

Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.

From the coeditor of the best-selling Four Hundred Souls, a galvanizing anthology for those seeking to build an inclusive democracy.In 1968, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer called for Americans to "wake up" if they wanted to "make democracy a reality.

Angela Y. Davis has been a political activist at the cutting edge of the Black liberation, feminist, queer, and prison abolitionist movements. Fifty years after its original publication, the author revisits her life's story in print.

Keisha N. Blain situates Fannie Lou Hamer as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks and demonstrates how her ideas remain salient for a new generation of activists committed to dismantling systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe. Despite her limited material resources and the myriad challenges she endured as a Black woman living in poverty in Mississippi, Hamer committed herself to making a difference in the lives of others.

n Eve, Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not just a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long.

This book looks far into our evolutionary past, illuminating how and why the female form has transformed over millions of years."Knowledge is the most powerful weapon. As the female body is constantly being politicized and policed, it is now more than ever that people must understand the inner workings of women's body. Written by an evolutionary geneticist, Deena Emera, Ph.D., in an accessible, nonjudgmental tone, A Brief History of the Female Body unravels misconceptions women have about their own bodies and supplies evolutionary-backed scientific analysis that provides a more complete understanding of women's bodies.

The rousing, captivating story of a Black physician, her career in medicine, and the deep inequities that still exist in the U.S. healthcare system Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives.

Today's feminist movement has a glaring blind spot, and paradoxically, it is women. Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues.

An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid.

Mrs. Obama offers readers a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power, including her belief that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress. Drawing from her experiences as a mother, daughter, spouse, friend, and First Lady, she shares the habits and principles she has developed to successfully adapt to change and overcome various obstacles--the earned wisdom that helps her continue to "become."

From the moment Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat a ten-term incumbent in the primary election for New York's 14th, her journey to the national, if not world, stage, was fast-tracked. Six months later, as the youngest Congresswoman ever elected, AOC became one of a handful of Latina politicians in Washington, D.C. Just thirty, she represents her generation, the millennials, in many groundbreaking ways: proudly working class, Democratic Socialist, of Puerto Rican descent, master of social media, not to mention of the Bronx, feminist--and a great dancer.

The Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the anti-racist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.