Women's History Month - Recommended Readings
Written by Faculty:
Sungyun Lim
Associate Professor - Japan / Modern Korea
Honor Sachs
Associate Professor - Early America
- Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
- "Judith and Hannah, Eighteenth-Century Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia, (US)." In As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, edited by Ball, Erica, Tatiana Seijas and Terri L. Snyder. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Marcia Yonemoto
Professor / Department Chair - Early Modern Japan
Barbara Engel
Distinguished Professor Emerita - Russia / Women's History
- Marriage, Household and Home in Modern Russia: From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
- Breaking the Ties that Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.
- Women in Russia: 1700-2000.Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth Century Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Susan Kent
Professor Emerita - Modern Britain / British Empire
- "Definitions: An Overview." In The Routledge Global History of Feminism, edited by Smith, Bonnie G., Nova Robinson. Abingdon, Oxon;New York, NY;: Routledge, 2022.
- Gender: A World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
"This sweeping, readable global discussion ranges from prehistory to the present, showing how complex and changing this basic human concept turns out to be." - Associate Professor Emeritus Ralph Mann - Queen Victoria: Gender and Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
"This brief, accessible overview dispels myths and puts a powerful and long-lived ruler into global context. An entire era still bears her name." - Associate Professor Emeritus Ralph Mann - Marc Matera, Misty Bastian, and Susan Kingsley Kent. The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
- Gender and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
- Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990. London: Routledge, 1999.
- Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
- Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Lee Chambers
Professor Emerita - Modern World
Marjorie Mcintosh
Distinguished Professor Emerita - Early Modern Britain
- Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.
- Bantebya-Kyomuhendo, Grace and Marjorie Keniston McIntosh. Women, Work & Domestic Virtue in Uganda, 1900-2003. Athens: James Currey, 2006.
- Working Women in English Society, 1300-1620. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Further Recommendations:
- Bayard de Volo, Lorraine. Women and the Cuban Insurrection: How Gender Shaped Castro's Victory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
"Bayard de Volo examines both the central roles women played in Cuban Revolution, especially in the urban underground, and the ways Castro manipulated gendered narratives in the war for hearts and minds. In so doing, she revises the official story of the Revolution, which praises young, bearded guerillas, and provides a deeper understanding of the Revolution's success against the dictator, Fulgencio Batista." - Dr. Julia Ogden - Ginsburg, Ruth Bader. My own words. Simon and Schuster, 2016.
"A collection of works written by Justice Ginsburg throughout her life, focusing on gender, law and the Supreme Court. A fascinating look into her mind and life." - Abi Peters - Glymph, Thavolia. The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2020.
"Filled with fresh research, this prize-winning book shines light on the contrasting experiences of Civil War women--North and South, rich and poor, free and enslaved". - Associate Professor Emeritus Ralph Mann - Johnson, Susan Lee. Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2020.
"A study of two women who wrote about western history as amateur historians during the twentieth century. Much of it sent in and around Denver." - Professor Honor Sachs - Kerber, Linda K. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.
"A compelling and engagingly written account of how claims to special consideration are in tension with full and equal rights, spanning American history from colonial times to the twentieth century." - Dr. Vilja Hulden - Ko, Dorothy. Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. 1st ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
"A revisionist history of footbinding. Resisting simple portrayal of the custom of footbinding as a patriarchal practice that victimized women, Ko invites the readers to the intimate and familial world of footbinding in the inner quarters to try to understand how the women themselves must have regarded the practice. Ko analyzes the multiple layers of cultural imagery that historically exoticized and eroticized the practice in both China and the Western world, and then brings the readers to the materiality of the bound feet themselves, through the beautifully adorned slippers that the women themselves lovingly decorated through embroidery. A thought-provoking read. The author’s affection and admiration for the women with bound feet is very moving." - Professor Sungyun Lim - Law-Yone, Wendy. A Daughter's Memoir of Burma. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
"Law-Yone is actually a novelist, but in this book she traces her father's career as a dissident newspaper editor under various twentieth-century Burmese regimes, its impact on the family, and her own experiences as a refugee/immigrant in the United States." - Professor Miriam Kadia - Radha Kumar. The history of doing: an illustrated account of movements for women's rights and feminism in India 1800-1990. New Delhi: Zubaan, 1993.
"An engaging, image-filled introduction to women's history in India, by a prominent Indian feminist." - Professor Lucy Chester - Mann, Susan. The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
"A master of the historian's craft shows how and why elite "grand families" in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China could not do without women of talent." - Professor Marcia Yonemoto - Soh, Chunghee Sarah. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
"A careful and nuanced history about the Korean “comfort women” mobilized by the Japanese military during the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War. Piercing analysis through multiple layers of discourses on wide-ranging political spectrum from Korea, Japan, and the U.S. the author not only challenges the typical and simplistic portrayal of the “comfort women” as victims, but also exposes the violence of such portrayal on the women themselves. In its stead, Soh highlights the structure of patriarchy in the Japanese empire and Korea, that led to the women’s victimization then and continuously after 1945." - Professor Sungyun Lim - Stanley, Amy. Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World. New York: Scribner, 2020.
"An engrossing and beautifully written book that is also a major feat of historical research, as the author reconstructs from fragmentary evidence the world of a not-well-behaved woman whose remarkable life took her from the snow country of far northeastern Japan to the metropolis of Edo (now Tokyo) in the early nineteenth century." - Professor Marcia Yonemoto - Townsend, Camila. Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
"Malintzin was Hernan Cortes's indigenous interpreter, and a central figure in the success of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. By placing Malintzin in her historical context, Townsend not only humanizes the notorious symbol of "La Malinche," but she also dispels that myth that a "handful of adventurers" took down a vast and mighty empire." - Dr. Julia Ogden