Women have a long history of being absent in history.
Instead of finding inclusion in history classes, women, along with other minorities, are set aside for month-long celebrations or class electives.
This year Women's History Month seeks to celebrate the storytellers; the women, past and present, who investigate, who report, and who share.
These are the women, whose work keeps other women, past and present, from being erased.
https://femlens.com/blog-post/the-root-of-female-erasure-from-storytelling/
"Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend, from Byron and Shelley to Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the world's most celebrated female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their investigations into a wealth of surprising collaborations: the friendship between Jane Austen and one of the family servants, amateur playwright Anne Sharp; the daring feminist author Mary Taylor, who shaped the work of Charlotte Brontë; the transatlantic friendship of the seemingly aloof George Eliot and the ebullient Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, most often portrayed as bitter foes, but who, in fact, enjoyed a complex friendship fired by an underlying erotic charge. Drawing on letters and diaries, some of which have never been published before, A Secret Sisterhood resurrects these stories of female friendships and literary collaborations. They were sometimes scandalous and volatile, sometimes supportive and inspiring, but always--until now--tantalizingly consigned to the shadows."--Jacket flap.
"A family memoir that traces the myths, legends, and secrets of seven generations of remarkable women. All families have their myths and legends. For many years Juliet Nicolson accepted hers--the dangerous beauty of her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother Pepita, the flirty manipulation of her great-grandmother Victoria, the infamous eccentricity of her grandmother Vita Sackville-West, her mother's Tory-conventional background. But then Juliet, a distinguished historian, started to question. As she did so, she sifted fact from fiction, uncovering details and secrets long held just out of sight. A House Full of Daughters takes us through seven generations of women. In the nineteenth-century slums of Malaga, the salons of fin-de-siecle Washington D.C., an English boarding school during the Second World War, Chelsea in the 1960s, the knife-edge that was New York City in the 1980s, these women emerge for Juliet as people in their own right, but also as part of who she is and where she has come from. A House Full of Daughters is one woman's investigation into the nature of family, memory, and the past. As Juliet finds uncomfortable patterns reflected in these distant and more recent versions of herself, she realizes her challenge is to embrace the good and reject the hazards that have trapped past generations"-- Provided by publisher.
Born in 1864, Nellie Bly was a woman who did not allow herself to be defined by the time she lived in, she rewrote the narrative and made her own way.
Luciana Cimino's meticulously researched graphic-novel biography tells Bly's story through Miriam, a fictionalized female student at the Columbia School of Journalism in 1921. While interviewing the famous journalist, Miriam learns not only about Bly's more sensational adventures, but also about her focus on self-reliance from an early age, the scathing letter to the editor that jump-started her career as a newspaper columnist, and her dedication to the empowerment of women. In fact, in 1884, Bly was one of the few journalists who interviewed Belva Ann Lockwood, who was the first woman candidate for a presidential election-a contest that was ultimately won by Grover Cleveland-and Bly predicted correctly that women would not get the vote until 1920.
Of course Bly's most well-known exploits are also covered-how she pretended to be mad in order to get institutionalized so she could carry out an undercover investigation in an insane asylum, and Bly's greatest feat of all, her journey around the world in 72 days-alone-which was unthinkable for a woman in the late 19th century. As Miriam learns more of Bly's story, she realizes that the most important stories are necessarily the ones with the most dramatic headlines, but the ones that, in Nellie's words, "come from a deep feeling."
This beautifully executed graphic novel paints a portrait of a woman who defied societal expectations-not only with her investigative journalism, but with her keen mind for industry, and her original inventions.
"Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen's heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters-exact contemporaries of Jane Austen-were brilliant, attractive, self-made single women of polite reputation who between them published twenty-six books and achieved global fame. They socialized among the rich and famous, tried to hide their family's considerable debt, and fell dramatically in and out of love. Their moving letters to each other confess every detail. Because the celebrity sisters expected their renown to live on, they preserved their papers, and the secrets they contained, for any biographers to come. But history hasn't been kind to the Porters. Credit for their literary invention was given to their childhood friend, Sir Walter Scott, who never publicly acknowledged his debt to their ideas. With Scott's more prolific publication and even greater renown, the Porter sisters gradually fell from the pinnacle of celebrity to eventual obscurity. Now, Professor Devoney Looser, a Guggenheim fellow in English Literature, sets out to re-introduce the world to the authors who cleared the way for Austen, Mary Shelley, and the Brontë sisters. Capturing the Porter sisters' incredible rise, from when Anna Maria published her first book at age fourteen in 1793, through to Jane's fall from prominence in the Victorian era, and then to the auctioning off for a pittance of the family's massive archive, Sister Novelists is a groundbreaking and enthralling biography of two pioneering geniuses in historical fiction"--Book jacket flap.
In the years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women in the workplace still found themselves relegated to secretarial positions or locked out of jobs entirely. This was especially true in the news business, a backwater of male chauvinism where a woman might be lucky to get a foothold on the "women's pages." But when a pioneering nonprofit called National Public Radio came along in the 1970s, and the door to serious journalism opened a crack, four remarkable women came along and blew it off the hinges. 0Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie is journalist Lisa Napoli's captivating account of these four women, their deep and enduring friendships, and the trail they blazed to becoming icons. They had radically different stories. Cokie Roberts was born into a political dynasty, roamed the halls of Congress as a child, and felt a tug toward public service. Susan Stamberg, who had lived in India with her husband who worked for the State Department, was the first woman to anchor a nightly news program and pressed for accommodations to balance work and home life. Linda Wertheimer, the daughter of shopkeepers in New Mexico, fought her way to a scholarship and a spot on-air. And Nina Totenberg, the network's legal affairs correspondent, invented a new way to cover the Supreme Court. Based on extensive interviews and calling on the author's deep connections in news and public radio, Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie will be as beguiling and sharp as its formidable subjects.
This collection of twenty-one essays from major YA authors--including award-winning and bestselling writers--touches on a powerful range of topics related to growing up female in today's America, and the intersection with race, religion, and ethnicity. Sure to inspire hope and solidarity to anyone who reads it, Our Stories, Our Voices belongs on every young woman's shelf.
This anthology features essays from Martha Brockenbrough, Jaye Robin Brown, Sona Charaipotra, Brandy Colbert, Somaiya Daud, Christine Day, Alexandra Duncan, Ilene Wong (I.W.) Gregorio, Maurene Goo. Ellen Hopkins, Stephanie Kuehnert, Nina LaCour, Anna-Marie LcLemore, Sandhya Menon, Hannah Moskowitz, Julie Murphy, Aisha Saeed, Jenny Torres Sanchez, Amber Smith, and Tracy Walker.
Presents a social history of women journalists of the Gilded Age who went undercover to champion women's rights and expose corruption and abuse in America.
In the waning years of the nineteenth-century women journalists across the United States risked reputation and their own safety to expose the hazardous conditions under which many Americans lived and worked. They stole into sewing factories to report on child labor, fainted in the streets to test public hospital treatment, posed as lobbyists to reveal corrupt politicians. Todd shows how these "girl stunt reporters" changed laws, helped launch a labor movement, championed women's rights, and redefined journalism for the modern age. -- adapted from jacket
Dorothy Butler Gilliam, whose 50-year-career as a journalist put her in the forefront of the fight for social justice, offers a comprehensive view of racial relations and the media in the U.S.
Most civil rights victories are achieved behind the scenes, and this riveting, beautifully written memoir by a "black first" looks back with searing insight on the decades of struggle, friendship, courage, humor and savvy that secured what seems commonplace today-people of color working in mainstream media.
Told with a pioneering newspaper writer's charm and skill, Gilliam's full, fascinating life weaves her personal and professional experiences and media history into an engrossing tapestry. When we read about the death of her father and other formative events of her life, we glimpse the crippling impact of the segregated South before the civil rights movement when slavery's legacy still felt astonishingly close. We root for her as a wife, mother, and ambitious professional as she seizes once-in-a-lifetime opportunities never meant for a "dark-skinned woman" and builds a distinguished career. We gain a comprehensive view of how the media, especially newspapers, affected the movement for equal rights in this country. And in this humble, moving memoir, we see how an innovative and respected journalist and working mother helped provide opportunities for others.
With the distinct voice of one who has worked for and witnessed immense progress and overcome heart-wrenching setbacks, this book covers a wide swath of media history -- from the era of game-changing Negro newspapers like the Chicago Defender to the civil rights movement, feminism, and our current imperfect diversity. This timely memoir, which reflects the tradition of boot-strapping African American storytelling from the South, is a smart, contemporary consideration of the media.
Ida B. The Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells by Duster, Michelle
Written by her great-granddaughter, a historical portrait of the boundary-breaking civil rights pioneer covers Wells' early years as a slave, her famous acts of resistance, and her achievements as a journalist and anti-lynching activist.
"Reporter for the New York Times; ... foreign correspondent in some of the most dangerous fields; Pulitzer winner; [and] longest jailed correspondent for protecting her sources, Judith Miller ... turns her reporting skills on herself with the intensity of her professional vocation"--Amazon.com.
As a foreign and investigative reporter, Miller is highly respected and controversial. In this memoir she turns her reporting skills on herself, writing about the mistakes she and others made on the existence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction; addressing the motives of some of her sources; describing going to jail to protect her sources in the Scooter Libby investigation of the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame and how the Times subsequently abandoned her. Miller's career is an adventure story, told with bluntness and wryness.
"Illuminating a thrilling untold chapter of the Cold War, The Double Life of Katharine Clark shares the forgotten story of a remarkable woman who pioneered a career in a male-dominated profession. In 1955, Katharine Clark became the first female American wire reporter behind the Iron Curtain, forging a career as a journalist, befriending a leading Communist, and risking her life to smuggle away books that exposed the truth about Communism to the world. This dramatic historical narrative shows how one woman with an unwavering commitment to truth, justice, and freedom of the press put her life on the line to reshape American history"--. Provided by publisher.
https://nationalwomenshistoryalliance.org/
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