I’d love to read more history, but often I’ll read the introduction/back copy of a history book and get discouraged because women seem to be invisible (beyond maybe a wife here or there).
I don’t necessarily want to read “women’s history”; I’d just like to find history books that are written on the assumption that women make history too, even when they aren’t in political leadership.
One example I can think of is The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans. A lot of men in that book, obvs, but Evans draws on a variety of sources to show you what the period was like; one of the scenes I remember most clearly is a passage from a woman’s diary.
Thanks for your help!!
by Confused5423
7 Comments
Recent books I’ve read and loved that include/focus on women were: A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell, The Radium Girls by Kate Moore, and A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan. All absolutely fascinating and eye-opening.
Another one by Kate Moore: The Woman They Could Not Silence.
The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich. About Russian women during the second world war from the personal perspective of the survivors.
The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos
by Judy Batalion
Selina Todd: the People – Rise and Fall of the Working Class.
Fighting in the Shadows: Untold Stories of Deaf People in the Civil War by Harry G Lang comes to mind!
*Confederate Reckoning* by Stephanie McCurry is a really interesting study of the population of the Confederate states, and who exactly counted as people and part of the political body. And then she spends a while talking about how it took a while for both armies to figure out how to deal with women who made trouble for them, and then the Confederate president also had tons of letters from women whose husbands had gone to war and couldn’t grow anything to eat, and what little they had was stolen by soldiers on both sides. Women led food riots across the South during the war and both women and enslaved people kind of forced the Confederate governments to pay attention to them.
(I say governments because the Confederate’s focus on state’s rights hamstrung the Confederate war effort before the war even started, because each state approached things differently, including the war, and Jeff Davis was stuck trying to persuade the governors to actually like send troops and supplies.)
*Cherokee Women* by Theda Purdue is a really interesting books on Cherokee gender roles and power dynamics, and how trade with white colonizers impacted gender in Cherokee society.
*Gender and Jim Crow* by Glenda Gilmore is really good, she talks about the brief rise of a Black middle class in the South, and how women spearheaded racial uplift movements during the time, before Black Southerners were disenfranchised and they lost their political power.
Women’s Letters: America from the Revitionary War to the Present.
A collection of letters written by women, usually to other women throughout American history. Some of the women were famous or influential, some were people who lived through or witnessed an extraordinary event, and some were just regular people writing to family about their everyday life. There are letters from a First Lady, someone who survived the Donner Party, a woman who had a mastectomy in the 1700’s, pioneer women writing to update family they had left back east, right up to emails sent by women serving in Operation Desert Storm.
I loved this book because all of these snippets add up to a first person overview of American history, but it can be read in short bursts. You can read one letter a night, read one or two while on hold with the cable company, or sit and read for an hour. It’s also a great book for those with short attention spans for reading because the longest letter is still under two pages long.
https://www.amazon.com/Womens-Letters-America-Revolutionary-Present/dp/0385335563