This document provides summaries of several books available from the Melrose Park Public Library about women's history and the fight for women's rights. It describes books about American suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It also summarizes books about the women who worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War II to help develop the atomic bomb without knowing the full scope of the project. Additionally, it outlines biographies of figures like Ingrid Betancourt, who was kidnapped in Colombia, and Rosa Parks, who played a key early role in the civil rights movement beyond her famous act of defiance on the bus in Montgomery.

1. Readings in Women’s History
from the Melrose Park Public Library

2. Sisters: the Lives of America's Suffragists by Jean H. Baker
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2005) 324.623 BAK
“They forever changed America: Lucy Stone, Susan
B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances
Willard, Alice Paul. At their revolution's start in the
1840s, a woman's right to speak in public was
questioned. By its conclusion in 1920, the victory in
woman's suffrage had also encompassed the most
fundamental rights of citizenship: the right to
control wages, hold property, to contract, to sue, to
testify in court. Their struggle was confrontational
(women were the first to picket the White House for
a political cause) and violent (women were arrested,
jailed, and force-fed in prisons). And like every
revolutionary before them, their struggle was
personal. For the first time, the eminent historian
Jean H. Baker tellingly interweaves these women's
private lives with their public achievements,
presenting these revolutionary women in three
dimensions, humanized, and marvelously
approachable.”—Publisher description.

3. Women from the Ankle Down: the Story of Shoes and How
They Define Us by Rachelle Bergstein
(New York : HarperCollins, 2012) 391.413 BER
“What is it about a pair of shoes that so enchants women of all ages,
demographics, political affiliations, and style tribes? Part social
history, part fashion record, part pop-culture celebration, Women
from the Ankle Down seeks to answer that question as it unfolds the
story of shoes in the twentieth century. The tale begins in the rural
village of Bonito, Italy, with a visionary young shoemaker named
Salvatore Ferragamo and ends in New York City with a fictional
socialite and trendsetter named Carrie Bradshaw. Along the way it
stops in Hollywood, where Judy Garland first slipped on her ruby
slippers; New Jersey, where Nancy Sinatra heard something special
in a song about boots; and the streets of Manhattan, where a transit-
worker strike propelled women to step into cutting-edge athletic
shoes. Fashion aficionado Rachelle Bergstein shares the stories
behind these historical moments, interweaving the design
innovations and social changes that gave each one its lasting
significance and appeal. Bergstein shows how the story of shoes is
the story of women, told from the ankle down. Beginning with the
well-heeled suffragettes in the 1910s, women have fought for greater
freedom and mobility, a struggle that exploded in the 1960s with the
women's liberation movement and culminated in the new
millennium with our devotion to personal choice. Featuring
interviews with designers, historians, and cultural experts, and a cast
of real-life characters, from Marilyn Monroe to Jane Fonda, from
Gwen Stefani to Manolo Blahnik, Women from the Ankle Down is a
lively, compelling look at the evolution of modern women and the
fashion that reflects--and has shaped--their changing lives.”—
Publisher description.

4. Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the
Colombian Jungle by Ingrid Betancourt
(New York: Penguin Press, 2010) BIOG BET & Media on Demand
“Ingrid Betancourt tells the story of her captivity in the
Colombian jungle, sharing powerful teachings of resilience,
resistance, and faith. Born in Bogotá, raised in France,
Ingrid Betancourt at the age of thirty-two gave up a life of
comfort and safety to return to Colombia to become a
political leader in a country that was being slowly
destroyed by terrorism, violence, fear, and a pervasive
sense of hopelessness. In 2002, while campaigning as a
candidate in the Colombian presidential elections, she was
abducted by the FARC. Nothing could have prepared her
for what came next. She would spend the next six and a
half years in the depths of the jungle as a prisoner of the
FARC. Even Silence Has an End is her deeply personal
and moving account of that time. Chained day and night
for much of her captivity, she never stopped dreaming of
escape and, in fact, succeeded in getting away several
times, always to be recaptured…Freed in 2008 by the
Colombian army, today Betancourt is determined to draw
attention to the plight of hostages and victims of terrorism
throughout the world and it is that passion that motivates
Even Silence Has an End. The lessons she offers here-in
courage, resilience, and humanity-are gifts to treasure.”—
Publisher description.

5. Elizabeth Cady Stanton: an American Life by Lori D.
Ginzberg (New York : Hill and Wang, 2009) 305.42 GIN
“Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a brilliant activist-intellectual.
That nearly all of her ideas-that women are entitled to seek an
education, to own property, to get a divorce, and to vote-are
now commonplace is in large part because she worked tirelessly
to extend the nation's promise of radical individualism to
women. In this subtly crafted biography, the historian Lori D.
Ginzberg narrates the life of a woman of great charm, enormous
appetite, and extraordinary intellectual gifts who turned the
limitations placed on women like herself into a universal
philosophy of equal rights. Few could match Stanton's self-
confidence; loving an argument, she rarely wavered in her
assumption that she had won. But she was no secular saint, and
her positions were not always on the side of the broadest
possible conception of justice and social change. Elitism runs
through Stanton's life and thought, defined most often by class,
frequently by race, and always by intellect. Even her closest
friends found her absolutism both thrilling and exasperating,
for Stanton could be an excellent ally and a bothersome menace,
sometimes simultaneously. At once critical and admiring,
Ginzberg captures Stanton's ambiguous place in the world of
reformers and intellectuals, describes how she changed the
world, and suggests that Stanton left a mixed legacy that
continues to haunt American feminism.”—Publisher
description.

6. The Girls of Atomic City: the Untold Story of the Women
Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan
(New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2013) 976.8 KIE
“The incredible story of the young women of Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, who unwittingly played a crucial role in one of
the most significant moments in US history. At the height
of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was home to
75,000 residents, consuming more electricity than New
York City. But to most of the world, the town did not exist.
Thousands of civilians-many of them young women from
small towns across the South-were recruited to this secret
city, enticed by solid wages and the promise of war-ending
work. Kept very much in the dark, few would ever guess
the true nature of the tasks they performed each day in the
hulking factories in the middle of the Appalachian
Mountains. That is, until the end of the war-when Oak
Ridge's secret was revealed. Drawing on the voices of the
women who lived it-women who are now in their eighties
and nineties-The Girls of Atomic City rescues a
remarkable, forgotten chapter of American history from
obscurity.”—Publisher description.

7. Called to Serve: a History of Nuns in America
by Margaret M. McGuinness
(New York: New York University Press, 2013) 271.90073 MCG
“For many Americans, nuns and sisters are the face of the Catholic
Church. Far more visible than priests, Catholic women religious teach
at schools, found hospitals, offer food to the poor, and minister to
those in need. Their work has shaped the American Catholic Church
throughout its history. Yet despite their high profile, a concise history
of American Catholic sisters and nuns has yet to be published. In
Called to Serve, Margaret M. McGuinness provides the reader with an
overview of the history of Catholic women religious in American life,
from the colonial period to the present. The early years of religious
life in the United States found women religious in immigrant
communities and on the frontier, teaching, nursing, and caring for
marginalized groups. In the second half of the twentieth century,
however, the role of women religious began to change. They have
fewer members than ever, and their population is aging rapidly. And
the method of their ministry is changing as well: rather than merely
feeding and clothing the poor, religious sisters are now working to
address the social structures that contribute to poverty, fighting what
one nun calls ‘social sin.’ In the face of a changing world and shifting
priorities, women religious must also struggle to strike a balance
between the responsibilities of their faith and the limitations imposed
upon them by their church. Rigorously researched and engagingly
written, Called to Serve offers a compelling portrait of Catholic
women religious throughout American history.”—Publisher
description.

8. At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle L. McGuire
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010) 323.1196 MCG & Media on Demand
“Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused
her to defy segregation on Montgomery's city buses, and whose supposedly solitary,
spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The
truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from
anything previously written. In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire
writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor,
who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness
Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the
young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the
local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was
Rosa Parks. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that ultimately changed the
world. The author gives us the never-before-told history of how the civil rights movement
began; how it was in part started in protest against the ritualistic rape of black women by
white men who used economic intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom
movement; and how those forces persisted unpunished throughout the Jim Crow era when
white men assaulted black women to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy. Black
women's protests against sexual assault and interracial rape fueled civil rights campaigns
throughout the South that began during World War II and went through to the Black Power
movement. The Montgomery bus boycott was the baptism, not the birth, of that struggle.” —
Publisher description.

9. The Maid's Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the
American Dream by Mary Romero
(New York : New York University Press, 2011) 331.4 ROM
“At a very young age, Olivia left her family and traditions in
Mexico to live with her mother, Carmen, in one of Los
Angeles's most exclusive and nearly all-white gated
communities. Based on over twenty years of research, noted
scholar Mary Romero brings Olivia's remarkable story to life.
We watch as she struggles through adolescence, declares her
independence and eventually goes off to college and becomes
a successful professional. Much of her extraordinary story is
told in Olivia's voice and we hear of both her triumphs and
her setbacks. In The Maid's Daughter, Mary Romero
explores this complex story about belonging, identity, and
resistance, illustrating Olivia's challenge to establish her
sense of identity, and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion
in her life. Romero points to the hidden costs of paid
domestic labor that are transferred to the families of private
household workers and nannies, and shows how everyday
routines are important in maintaining and assuring that
various forms of privilege are passed on from one generation
to another. Through Olivia's story, Romero shows how
mythologies of meritocracy, the land of opportunity, and the
American dream remain firmly in place while simultaneously
erasing injustices and the struggles of the working poor.”—
Publisher description.

10. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
(New York : Crown Publishers, 2010) 616.02774 SKL & Media on Demand
“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…Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an
extraordinary journey, from the ‘colored’ ward of Johns
Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories
with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta's small, dying
hometown of Clover, Virginia--a land of wooden slave
quarters, faith healings, and voodoo--to East Baltimore today,
where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with
the legacy of her cells. Henrietta's family did not learn of her
‘immortality’ until more than twenty years after her death,
when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband
and children in research without informed consent. And
though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry
that sells human biological materials, her family never saw
any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the
story of the Lacks family--past and present--is inextricably
connected to the dark history of experimentation on African
Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over
whether we control the stuff we are made of.”—Publisher
description.

11. Flapper: a Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the
Women who Made America Modern by Joshua Zeitz
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2006) 973.91 ZEI
“Blithely flinging aside the Victorian manners that kept her disapproving mother
corseted, the New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her
hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she
earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern
women take for granted. Her newfound freedom heralded a radical change in
American culture. Whisking us from the Alabama country club where Zelda Sayre
first caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald to Muncie, Indiana, where would-be
flappers begged their mothers for silk stockings, to the Manhattan speakeasies where
patrons partied till daybreak, historian Joshua Zeitz brings the era to exhilarating
life. This is the story of America's first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool,
its first celebrities, and its most sparkling advertisement for the right to pursue
happiness. The men and women who made the flapper were a diverse lot. There was
Coco Chanel, the French orphan who redefined the feminine form and silhouette,
helping to free women from the torturous corsets and crinolines that had served as
tools of social control. Three thousand miles away, Lois Long, the daughter of a
Connecticut clergyman, christened herself ‘Lipstick’ and gave New Yorker readers a
thrilling entrée into Manhattan's extravagant Jazz Age nightlife. In California, where
orange groves gave way to studio lots and fairytale mansions, three of America's first
celebrities--Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks, Hollywood's great flapper
triumvirate--fired the imaginations of millions of filmgoers… Towering above all
were Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, whose swift ascent and spectacular fall embodied
the glamour and excess of the era that would come to an abrupt end on Black
Tuesday, when the stock market collapsed and rendered the age of abundance and
frivolity instantly obsolete. With its heady cocktail of storytelling and big ideas,
Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who launched the first truly modern
decade.”—Publisher Description.

12. Find these and other titles in women’s history
in the Adult Services Department at your
library.