The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear by Kate Moore

Bestselling author Kate Moore brings her sparkling narrative voice to The Woman They Could Not Silence, an unputdownable story of the forgotten woman who courageously fought for her own freedom―and in so doing freed millions more. Elizabeth’s refusal to be silenced and her ceaseless quest for justice not only challenged the medical science of the day, and led to a giant leap forward in human rights, it also showcased the most salutary lesson: sometimes, the greatest heroes we have are those inside ourselves.

Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt’s Ancient Temples from Destruction by Lynne Olson

The remarkable story of the intrepid French archaeologist who led the international effort to save ancient Egyptian temples from the floodwaters of the Aswan Dam.

Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist by Jennifer Wright

This is the story of one of the boldest women in American history: self-made millionaire, a celebrity in her era, a woman beloved by her patients and despised by the men who wanted to control them.

An industrious immigrant who built her business from the ground up, Madame Restell was a self-taught surgeon on the cutting edge of healthcare in pre-Gilded Age New York, and her bustling “boarding house” provided birth control, abortions, and medical assistance to thousands of women—rich and poor alike. 

Code Name Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII’s Most Highly Decorated Spy by Larry Loftis

The extraordinary true story of Odette Sansom, the British spy who operated in occupied France and fell in love with her commanding officer during World War. 

In Code Name: Lise, Larry Loftis paints a portrait of true courage, patriotism, and love—of two incredibly heroic people who endured unimaginable horrors and degradations. He seamlessly weaves together the touching romance between Odette and Peter and the thrilling cat and mouse game between them and Sergeant Bleicher. 

The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America by John Sweet Wood

On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel―the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before: she charged a gentleman with rape.

A riveting Revolutionary Era drama of the first published rape trial in American history and its long, shattering aftermath, revealing how much has changed over two centuries―and how much has not.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. 

Untold Power: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson by Rebecca Boggs Roberts

While this nation has yet to elect its first woman president—and though history has downplayed her role—just over a century ago a woman became the nation’s first acting president. In fact, she was born in 1872, and her name was Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. She climbed her way out of Appalachian poverty and into the highest echelons of American power and in 1919 effectively acted as the first woman president of the U.S. (before women could even vote nationwide) when her husband, Woodrow Wilson, was incapacitated. Beautiful, brilliant, charismatic, catty, and calculating, she was a complicated figure whose personal quest for influence reshaped the position of First Lady into one of political prominence forever. And still nobody truly understands who she was.

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs

Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin’s son James, about Alberta King’s son Martin Luther, and Louise Little’s son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them. In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America’s most pivotal heroes.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

A compelling account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies. Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, Doudna would help to make the most important biological advance since his codiscovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies by Jason Fagone

Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II.

The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth by Josh Levin

In the 1970s, Linda Taylor became a fur-wearing, Cadillac-driving symbol of the undeserving poor – the original ‘welfare queen’. In the press she was the ultimate template for this insidious stereotype; Ronald Reagan himself cited her criminal behaviour in his presidential campaign, turning public opinion firmly against state benefits and those who used them.

But Taylor was demonized for the least of her crimes. She was a con artist, a thief, a kidnapper, maybe even a murderer – and certainly one of the most gifted and deranged criminals of modern times. The Queen is the never-before-told story of a beguilingly complex American character, lost in the rush to create a vicious stereotype.

The Princess Spy: The True Story of World War II Spy Aline Griffith, Countess of Romanones by Larry Loftis

The Princess Spy follows the hidden history of an ordinary American girl who became one of the OSS’s most daring World War II spies before marrying into European nobility. The Princess Spy brings to vivid life the dazzling adventures of a spirited American woman who risked everything to serve her country.

The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos by Judy Batalion

One of the most important stories of World War II, already optioned by Steven Spielberg for a major motion picture: a spectacular, searing history that brings to light the extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who became resistance fighters—a group of unknown heroes whose exploits have never been chronicled in full, until now.

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler

The astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade.

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the hidden social history of adoption before Roe v. Wade – and its lasting legacy. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.

Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America by Mayukh Sen

Who’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honors seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from World War II to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes. Weaving together histories of food, immigration, and gender, Taste Makers will challenge the way readers look at what’s on their plate―and the women whose labor, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible.

Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy by Barbara Ehrenreich & Arlie Russell Hochschild

Confronting a range of topics from the fate of Vietnamese mail-order brides to the importation of Mexican nannies in Los Angeles, Global Woman offers an original look at a world increasingly shaped by mass migration and economic exchange.

Women are moving around the globe as never before. But for every female executive racking up frequent flier miles, there are multitudes of women whose journeys go unnoticed. Each year, millions leave third world countries to work in the homes, nurseries, and brothels of the first world. This broad-scale transfer of labor results in an odd displacement, in which the female energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones―easing a “care deficit” in rich countries, while creating one back home.

The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service by Laura Kaplan

The powerful story of the women who founded and ran the legendary Chicago reproductive rights organization Abortion Counseling Service, otherwise known as Jane, written by one of its members. A compelling testament to a woman’s most essential freedom—control over her own body—and to the power of women helping women

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid

For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in northwestern British Columbia. The corridor is known as the Highway of Tears, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis.

In the vein of the bestsellers I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and The Line Becomes a River, Journalist Jessica McDiarmid meticulously investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate in which Indigenous women and girls are overpoliced yet underprotected. 

A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

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.

The Women’s History of the Modern World: How Radicals, Rebels, and Every Women Revolutionized the Last 200 Years by Rosalind Miles

The internationally bestselling author of Who Cooked the Last Supper? presents a wickedly witty and very current history of the extraordinary female rebels, reactionaries, and trailblazers who left their mark on history from the French Revolution up to the present day.

Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today by Rachel Vorona Cote

Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, “TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much.

In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial by Mona Chollet

Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique fascination for many: as fairy tale villains, practitioners of pagan religion, as well as feminist icons. Witches are both the ultimate victim and the stubborn, elusive rebel. But who were the women who were accused and often killed for witchcraft? What types of women have centuries of terror censored, eliminated, and repressed?

The Genius of Women: From Overlooked to Changing the World by Janice Kaplan

We tell girls that they can be anything, so why do 90 percent of Americans believe that geniuses are almost always men? New York Times bestselling journalist and creator and host of the podcast The Gratitude Diaries Janice Kaplan explores the powerful forces that have rigged the system—and celebrates the women geniuses, past and present, who have triumphed anyway.

All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister

All the Single Ladies is a remarkable portrait of contemporary American life and how we got here, through the lens of the unmarried American woman. Covering class, race, sexual orientation, and filled with vivid anecdotes from fascinating contemporary and historical figures, Rebecca Traister shares her investigation into the sexual, economic, and emotional lives of women.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn

An odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope as they show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. 

Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women’s potential. They make clear how so many people have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part. Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population.

Equality for Women = Prosperity for All: The Disastrous Global Crisis of Gender Inequality by Augusto Lopez-Claros & Bahiyyih Nakhjavani

Gender discrimination is often seen from a human rights perspective; it is a violation of women’s basic human rights. Moreover, there is overwhelming evidence that restrictions and various forms of discrimination against women are also bad economics. Equality for Women = Prosperity for All is a groundbreaking book about the direct relationship between a woman’s rights and freedoms and the economic prosperity of her country.

Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System by Silja J.A. Talvi

More and more women—mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters, and sisters—are doing hard prison time all across the United States. Many of them are facing the prospect of years, decades, even lifetimes behind bars. 

Oddly, there’s been little public discussion about the dramatic increase of women in the prison system. What exactly is happening here, and why? The answers are in Women Behind Bars, in which investigative journalist Silja Talvi sheds light on why American girls and women are being locked up at such unprecedented rates. Talvi travels across the country to weave together interviews with inmates, correctional officers, and administrators, providing readers with a glance at the impact incarceration has on our society. 

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women by Kate Manne

An urgent exploration of men’s entitlement and how it serves to police and punish women, from the acclaimed author of Down Girl. In this bold and stylish critique, Cornell philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny. Ranging widely across the culture, from Harvey Weinstein and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to “Cat Person” and the political misfortunes of Elizabeth Warren, Manne’s book shows how privileged men’s sense of entitlement—to sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, care, bodily autonomy, knowledge, and power—is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences.

Women & Madness by Phyllis Chesler

Feminist icon Chesler’s pioneering work was the first definitive book to address critical questions about women and mental health. Combining patient interviews with an analysis of women’s roles in history, society, and myth Chesler concludes that there is a terrible double standard when it comes to women’s psychology. In this new edition, she addresses head-on many of the most relevant issues to women and mental health today, including eating disorders, social acceptance of antidepressants, addictions, sexuality, postpartum depression, and more. 

The Frailty Myth: Redefining the Physical Potential of Women and Girls by Colette Dowling

Can women be equal to men as long as men are physically stronger? And are men, in fact, stronger? These are key questions that Colette Dowling, author of the bestselling The Cinderella Complex, raises in her provocative new book. The myth of female frailty, with its roots in nineteenth-century medicine and misogyny, has had a damaging effect on women’s health, social status, and physical safety. It is Dowling’s controversial thesis that women succumb to societal pressures to appear weak in order to seem more “feminine.”