Connect with the Libraries
Have an idea for Subject of the Month?
March's Subject of the Month
Women Writers
Selectors: Sarah Henry Boggs and Lily Wiest
The 2023 Women's History Month theme is "Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories." According to the National Women's History Alliance, the purpose of this celebration is to "encourage recognition of women, past and present, who have been active in all forms of media and storytelling... The timely theme honors women in every community who have devoted their lives and talents to producing art, pursuing truth, and reflecting the human condition decade after decade.
From the earliest storytellers through pioneering journalists, our experiences have been captured by a wide variety of artists and teachers... Women have long been instrumental in passing on our heritage in word and in print to communicate the lessons of those who came before us. Women’s stories, and the larger human story, expand our understanding and strengthen our connections with each other."
Notable Firsts
|
Image Source: Penguin Random House |
Image Source: Penguin Random House |
|
World's First Novel If you love reading fiction, thank women! Or more specifically, thank Murasaki Shikibu. Widely considered to be the world's first novel, Shikibu's The Tale of Genji is a work of fiction based on her own experiences in the Heian court of Japan during the early eleventh century. Though novels did not gain widespread popularity until many centuries later, the format has continued to be associated primarily with women. |
First English Autobiography The earliest surviving autobiography in English was also penned by a woman. Though medieval laywoman Margery Kempe could not read or write, her dictated life story The Book of Margery Kempe continues to be read today. In this classic text, Kempe speaks frankly about her marriage, business, desires, and the strong faith which ultimately led to her divine visions and a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. |
Popular Press Books
My Beloved World by 
This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9780307594884Publication Date: 2013The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself.
Detransition, Baby by ISBN: 9780593133378Publication Date: 2021The lives of three women--transgender and cisgender--collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires in "one of the most celebrated novels of the year" (Time). Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel. In 2021, this book was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, making Torrey Peters the first trans woman to be nominated for the award.
Ida B. the Queen by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9781982129811Publication Date: 2021Journalist. Suffragist. Antilynching crusader. In 1862, Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi. In 2020, she won a Pulitzer Prize. Ida B. Wells committed herself to the needs of those who did not have power. In the eyes of the FBI, this made her a "dangerous negro agitator." In the annals of history, it makes her an icon. Ida B. the Queen tells the awe-inspiring story of an pioneering woman who was often overlooked and underestimated--a woman who refused to exit a train car meant for white passengers; a woman brought to light the horrors of lynching in America; a woman who cofounded the NAACP. Written by Wells's great-granddaughter Michelle Duster, this "warm remembrance of a civil rights icon" (Kirkus Reviews) is a unique visual celebration of Wells's life, and of the Black experience. A century after her death, Wells's genius is being celebrated in popular culture by politicians, through song, public artwork, and landmarks. Like her contemporaries Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, Wells left an indelible mark on history--one that can still be felt today.
Susan, Linda, Nina and Cokie by ISBN: 1647001072Publication Date: 2021A group biography of four beloved women who fought sexism, covered decades of American news, and whose voices defined NPR. 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. Susan, 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. 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.
Before We Were Free by ISBN: 9780440237846Publication Date: 2004Anita de la Torre never questioned her freedom living in the Dominican Republic. But by her 12th birthday in 1960, most of her relatives have emigrated to the United States, her Tío Toni has disappeared without a trace, and the government's secret police terrorize her remaining family because of their suspected opposition of el Trujillo's dictatorship. Using the strength and courage of her family, Anita must overcome her fears and fly to freedom, leaving all that she once knew behind. From renowned author Julia Alvarez comes an unforgettable story about adolescence, perseverance, and one girl's struggle to be free.
Becoming by - This link opens in a new window
ISBN: 9781524763138Publication Date: 2018An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America--the first African American to serve in that role--she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare. In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her--from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it--in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations--and whose story inspires us to do the same.
Video: Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English writer known for her complex, modernist characters. Learn about her personal and professional life in this short video.
Awards
Image source: © 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction
There are several awards and prizes specifically for women writers from all around the world. The website Awards for Women Writers describes some of the most prominent accolades.
Examples include:
- Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction
- Darlene Clark Hine Award for a title in African American Women's and Gender History
- Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz for books by women writers in the Spanish language
- Washington Women Award for women journalists
Reuther Archives: Camille Colatosti Papers
Explore the Camille Colatosti papers at the Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs.
Camille Colatosti worked during the 1990s as a writer and as an advocate for working women. Originally writing as a staff member at Labor Notes, a Detroit-based labor journal, Colatosti left in 1992 but continued her writings for journals and publications focusing on labor and women, among other topics. During her time at Labor Notes, Colatosti wrote Stopping Sexual Harassment: A Handbook for Union and Workplace Advocates, and began to run workshops on this topic, raising awareness and knowledge of this issue. After leaving Labor Notes, Colatosti established the Working Women's Project, seeking to provide leadership training and support to working women, and provide them with information needed to achieve equality in the workplace. Through this Project, she continued her work against sexual harassment and traveled around the country providing harassment workshops to various groups including unions. Camille Colatosti also worked as an educator at local Metro-Detroit colleges and with Operation ABLE, an organization with which she taught basic computer skills to help adults with employment.
Featured Website
Literary Ladies Guide
An Archive Dedicated to Classic Women Writers and Their Work
Image Source: Literary Ladies Guide
"Literary Ladies Guide was started in 2012 as an outgrowth of Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life, a book by Nava Atlas, writer, visual artist, designer — and major book nerd." Focusing on deceased women writers of the past, the website aims to be "the web’s most comprehensive resource on classic women’s literature, focusing mainly on women who wrote in the English language, as well as global authors who were translated extensively." Explore the site and read over 100 biographies of pioneering women authors, journalists, and creators.
Video: Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was an African American woman journalist who used her voice to speak out against lynching.
Featured Article
"Writers’ earnings have plummeted – with women, Black and mixed race authors worst hit" by Sarah Shaffi for The Guardian, Dec 2022
Podcasts
A monthly podcast hosted by Clara Cook exploring the role of women and gender in film, television and fiction.
A podcast covering women's contributions to all kinds of speculative fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Breaking the Glass Slipper won Best Audio in the 2019 British Fantasy Awards and was nominated for a Hugo Award.
"A bi-monthly podcast that talks books by and about Black women. Each month, we host an in-depth look at a title written by a Black woman and its author. We read across genres and forms, including literary fiction, non-fiction, YA, poetry and urban fiction."
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast
"A show about queer women in history and historic literature, plus coverage of the field of sapphic historical fiction."
"Fated Mates is a romance novel podcast co-hosted by author Sarah MacLean and romance critic Jen Prokop. Weekly episodes include romance novel read-alongs and discussions of the work of the genre, highlighting the romance novel as a powerful tool in fighting patriarchy…with absolutely no kink shaming."
"A radio-dramatic podcast that celebrates and produces short horror stories by BIPOC authors."
Hosted by author Lainey Cameron and book blogger Ashley Hasty, this podcast series features short interviews with bestselling and debut women’s fiction authors.
Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast
A weekly podcast hosted by author, journalist, and radio presenter Vick Hope on the best books written by women, especially those shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction award.
Academic eBooks
Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century by ISBN: 9780429510502Publication Date: 2019This volume presents a collection of essays that offer a fresh perspective and original analyses of texts by American women writers of the long nineteenth century. The essays, which are written both by European and American scholars, discuss fiction by marginalized authors including Yolanda DuBois (African American fairy tales), Laura E. Richards (children's literature), Metta Fuller Victor (dime novels/ detective fiction), and other pioneering writers of science fiction, gothic tales, and life narratives. The works covered by this collection represent the rough and ragged realities that women and girls in the nineteenth century experienced; the writings focus on their education, family life, on girls as victims of class prejudice as well as sexual and racial violence, but they also portray girls and women as empowering agents, survivors, and leaders. They do so with a high-voltage creative charge. As progressive pioneers, who forayed into unknown literary terrain and experimented with a variety of genres, the neglected American women writers introduced in this collection themselves emerge as role models whose innovative contribution to nineteenth-century literature the essays celebrate.
Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement by ISBN: 9781621039174Publication Date: 2012A disproportionate number of male writers, including such figures as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Maulana Karenga, and Haki Madhubuti, continue to be credited for constructing the iconic and ideological foundations for what would be perpetuated as the Black Art Movement. Though there has arisen an increasing amount of scholarship that recognizes leading women artists, activists, and leaders of this period, these new perspectives have yet to recognize adequately the ways women aspired to far more than a mere dismantling of male-oriented ideals. In Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement, Carmen L. Phelps examines the work of several women artists working in Chicago, a key focal point for the energy and production of the movement. Angela Jackson, Johari Amini, and Carolyn Rodgers reflect in their writing specific cultural, local, and regional insights, and demonstrate the capaciousness of Black Art rather than its constraints. Expanding from these three writers, Phelps analyzes the breadth of women's writing in the BAM. In doing so, Phelps argues that these and other women attained advantageous and unique positions to represent the potential of the BAM aesthetic, even if their experiences and artistic perspectives were informed by both social conventions and constraints.
Modern Jewish Women Writers in America by ISBN: 1403978042Publication Date: 2007This collection includes groundbreaking essays, and interviews with scholars and writers which reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from their heritage.
A Companion to Latin American Women Writers by ISBN: 9781846158308Publication Date: 2012This volume offers a critical study of a representative selection of Latin American women writers who have made major contributions to all literary genres and represent a wide range of literary perspectives and styles. Many of these women have attained the highest literary honours: Gabriela Mistral won the Nobel Prize in 1945; Clarice Lispector attracted the critical attention of theorists working mainly outside the Hispanic area; others have made such telling contributions to particular strands of literature that their names are immediately evocative of specific currents or styles. Elena Poniatowska is associated with testimonial writing; Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel are known for the magical realism of their texts; others, such as Juana de Ibarbourou and Laura Restrepo remain relatively unknown despite their contributions to erotic poetry and to postcolonial prose fiction respectively. The distinctiveness of this volume lies in its attention to writers from widely differing historical and social contexts and to the diverse theoretical approaches adopted by the authors.
Women Writers of the Beat Era by ISBN: 9780813941233Publication Date: 2018The Beat Generation was a group of writers who rejected cultural standards, experimented with drugs, and celebrated sexual liberation. Starting in the 1950s with works such as Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, the Beat Generation defined an experimental zeitgeist that endures to today. Yet left out of this picture are the Beat women, who produced a large body of writing from the 1950s through the 1970s and beyond. In Women Writers of the Beat Era, Mary Paniccia Carden gives voice to these female writers and demonstrates how their work redefines our understanding of "Beat." The first single-authored study on female writers of this generation, the book offers vital analysis of autobiographical works by Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, and others, introducing the reader to new voices that interact with and reconfigure the better-known narratives of the male Beat writers. In doing so, Carden demonstrates the significant role women played in this influential and dynamic literary movement.
Two Centuries of Manchu Women Poets by ISBN: 9780295999869Publication Date: 2017This anthology presents substantial selections from the work of twenty Manchu women poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The poems, inspired by their daily life and reflections, provide fascinating insights into the experiences and emotions of these women, most of whom belonged to the elite families of Manchu society. Each selection is accompanied by biographical material that illuminates the life stories of the poets. The volume's introduction describes the printing history of the collections from which these poems are drawn, the authors? practice of poetry writing, ethnic and gender issues, and comparisons with the poetry of women in South China and of male authors of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).
Raising Her Voice by ISBN: 0813108306Publication Date: 1994Each chapter is a biographical sketch of an influential black woman who has written for American newspapers or television news, including Maria W. Stewart, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Josephine St.Pierre Ruffin, Delilah L. Beasley, Marvel Cooke, Charlotta A. Bass, Alice Allison Dunnigan, Ethel L. Payne, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
Databases
- Independent Voices This link opens in a new windowIndependent Voices is a digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
- Perdita Manuscripts This link opens in a new windowThe Perdita Project is based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University. Perdita means "lost woman," and the quest of the Perdita Project has been to find early modern women authors who were lost because their writing exists only in manuscript form.
- SylviaInspired by Sylvia Plath's tenacity and curiosity, this growing resource of hand-selected entries identifies recent books for researchers, scholarly editions, selected memoirs, and notable works for a general audience, all on the subject of gender and feminism. Sylvia is maintained by the Office of the Gender and Women's Studies Librarian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Journals
- LegacyLegacy is the official journal of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. It is the only journal to focus specifically on American women's writings from the seventeenth through the midtwentieth century. Each issue's articles cover a wide range of topics: examinations of the works of individual authors; genre studies; analyses of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexualities in women's literature; and historical and material cultural issues pertinent to women's lives and literary works. In addition, Legacy regularly publishes profiles of lesser-known or newly recovered authors, reprints of primary works in all genres, and book reviews covering current scholarship in the field.
- Tulsa Studies in Women's LiteratureTulsa Studies in Women's Literature is a scholarly journal devoted to the study of the relations between women and writing of every period and in all languages. Publishing articles, notes, archival research, and reviews, Tulsa Studies seeks path-breaking literary, historicist, and theoretical work by both established and emerging scholars.
- The Women's Review of BooksSince 1983 the Women's Review of Books has provided a forum for serious, informed discussion of new writing by and about women. Women's Review of Books provides a unique perspective on today's literary landscape and feature essays and in-depth reviews of new books by and about women.