Showing titles in Women

In 2010, for the first time since the Soviets, Afghanistan allowed women to join the armed forces, and Niloofar entered Afghanistan’s military academy. Niloofar had to break through social barriers to demonstrate confidence, leadership, and decisiveness - essential qualities for a combat pilot. Niloofar performed the first solo flight of her class - ahead of all her male classmates - and in 2013 became Afghanistan’s first female fixed-wing air force pilot.

A heroine for our times, Etta Lemon campaigned for 50 years against the worldwide slaughter of birds for extravagantly feathered hats. Her legacy is the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (the RSPB), grown from an all-female pressure group of 1889 with the splendidly simple pledge: Wear No Feathers. Etta’s long battle against ‘murderous millinery’ triumphed with the Plumage Act of 1921 - but her legacy has been eclipsed by the more glamorous campaign for the vote, led by the elegantly plumed Emmeline Pankhurst.

Hundreds of women studied and interpreted the Bible between the years 100-2000 CE, but their stories have remained largely untold. In this book, Schroeder and Taylor introduce listeners to the notable contributions of female commentators through the centuries. They unearth fascinating accounts of Jewish and Christian women from diverse communities—rabbinic experts, nuns, mothers, mystics, preachers, teachers, suffragists, and household managers—who interpreted Scripture through their writings.

When Ohio newspapers published the story of Alice Chenoweth's affair with a married man, she changed her name to Helen Hamilton Gardener, moved to New York, and devoted her life to championing women's rights and decrying the sexual double standard. She became one of the most sought-after speakers on the 19th-century lecture circuit, published seven books and countless essays, supported herself, hobnobbed with the most interesting thinkers of her era, visited 22 countries, and was celebrated for her audacious ideas and keen wit.

Journeying through the decades, this book profiles a diverse array of influential hostesses. With each historic era comes iconic recipes, featuring a total of forty main cocktails and more than 100 variations that listeners can make at home. Whether its happy hour punch a la Martha Washington or a Harlem Renaissance-inspired Green Skirt, listeners will find that many of the ingredients and drinks they're familiar with today wouldn't be here without the hostesses who served them first.

An unexpectedly uplifting account of women’s suffering and resilience in Stalin’s forced-labor camps, diligently transcribed in the kitchens and living rooms of nine survivors.

In 1993, U.S. women earned the right to fly in combat, but the full story of how it happened is largely unknown. The Fly Girls Revolt chronicles the actions of a band of women who overcame decades of discrimination and prevailed against bureaucrats, chauvinists, anti-feminists, and even other military women. Drawing on extensive research, interviews with women who served in the 1970s and 1980s, and her personal experiences in the Air Force, Eileen Bjorkman weaves together a tale of the women who fought for the right to enter combat and be treated as equal partners in the U.S. military.

You won't be familiar with every one of the huge array of women featured in this book, but all, familiar or not, leave unanswered questions behind them—from Cleopatra to Ruth Ellis, from Boudicca to Bonnie Parker, from Lady Caroline Lamb to Moll Cutpurse, from Jezebel to Ava Gardner. The risqué, the adventurous and the outrageous, the downright nasty and the downright desperate—all human (female!) life is here. Wicked? Misunderstood? Naïve? Foolish? Predatory? Manipulative? Or just out of their time? Listen and decide.

Spies played significant roles on both sides of the American Civil War, and many were women. These fascinating women contributed to the war effort when women could not vote or own property. Yet, Union or Confederate, all of these women had conviction. This audiobook explores the experiences of women whose courage and conviction played a key role in the outcome of the Civil War battle strategies and tactics. Their stories of courage, betrayal, and even love still resonate with women of today. North or South, all the women within lived fascinating lives that deserve to be told.

For forty years in the mid-nineteenth century, “Madame Restell,” the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth-control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. It was the abortions that made her famous. “Restellism” became the term her detractors used to indict her. A story that is all too relevant, The Trials of Madame Restell paints an unforgettable picture of the changing society of nineteenth-century New York.

In 1955, the AP thrummed with the news of Lulu Bell Parr's death. The incongruity of her final years as a pauper in a shack with her time as a Wild West star could not be ignored. Then, she was forgotten. Nearly fifty years later, small town history buffs stumbled upon her unmarked grave and set out to give her the recognition she deserved. They raised over seven thousand dollars, erected a monument on her grave (with a parade through town and celebration), and then went on to have her inducted in the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame.

When we think of slavery, most of us think of the American South. We think of back-breaking fieldwork on plantations. We don't think of slavery in the North, nor do we think of the grueling labor of urban and domestic slaves. Rachel May's rich new book explores the far reach of slavery, from New England to the Caribbean, the role it played in the growth of mercantile America, and the bonds between the agrarian South and the industrial North in the antebellum era - all through the discovery of a remarkable quilt.

All too often the focus of mainstream feminism is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. Meeting basic needs is a feminist issue. Food insecurity, the living wage and access to education are feminist issues. The fight against racism, ableism and transmisogyny are all feminist issues. White feminists often fail to see how race, class, sexual orientation and disability intersect with gender. How can feminists stand in solidarity as a movement when there is a distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others?

Weaving in and out of these myriad lives, sharing her own memories of otherworldly experiences, Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art. A radical reappraisal of a marginalised group of artists, The Other Side is an intoxicating blend of memoir, biography and art history.

What was life really like for women in the medieval period? How did they think about sex, death and God? Could they live independent lives? And how can we hear the stories of women from this period?

Thirty-year-old Catriona Menzies-Pike defined herself in many ways: voracious reader, pub crawler, feminist, backpacker, and, since her parents' deaths a decade earlier, orphan. "Runner" was nowhere near the list. Yet when she began training for a half marathon on a whim, she found herself an instant convert. Soon she realized that running, "a pace suited to the precarious labor of memory", was helping her to grieve the loss of her parents in ways that she had been, for 10 messy years, running away from.

In a voice as candid as it is evocative, Gail Caldwell traces a path from her West Texas girlhood through her emergence as a young daredevil, then as a feminist - a journey that reflected seismic shifts in the culture itself. Caldwell's travels took her to California and Mexico and dark country roads, and the dangers she encountered were rivaled only by the personal demons she faced.

Raised in Jamaica, Mary Seacole first came to England in the 1850s after working in Panama. She wanted to volunteer as a nurse and aide during the Crimean War. When her services were rejected, she financed her own expedition to Balaclava, where her reputation for her nursing—and for her compassion—became almost legendary. Popularly known as “Mother Seacole,” she was the most famous Black celebrity of her generation—an extraordinary achievement in Victorian Britain.

Given her incredible tenure as a Supreme Court justice as well as her monumental impact on the modern women’s rights movement, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become one of the most prominent political leaders of today. To complement her judicial significance, she has also become one of the most culturally popular political figures in US history. Not only has her workout routine gone viral (and been detailed in a book by her trainer), but RBG’s story has been featured in multiple critically acclaimed films.

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. Women sent cables, made dead drops, and maintained the agency's secrets. Despite discrimination—even because of it—women who started as clerks, secretaries, or unpaid spouses rose to become some of the CIA's shrewdest operatives. They were unlikely spies—and that's exactly what made them perfect for the role.