Women's History Month
Scholarly Books
Discover and browse over 2300 print or electronic books through WMU Library Search with the links provided below:
Scholarly Articles and Databases
Scholarly Articles
Link to the over 257,000 articles on Women's History Month through Library Search.
Find scholarly articles with these databases
- Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000: Scholar's Edition (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new window
- Women’s Studies Archive: Women’s Issues and Identities This link opens in a new window
Black. Queer. Southern. Women
Available as an ebook only. Click the title for access.
Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society.
Rethinking Normal
Available in the Waldo Library Children's Collection, Fiction and Non-Fiction 92 Hil. Click the title for access.
In her unique, generous, and affecting voice, nineteen-year-old Katie Hill shares her personal journey of undergoing gender reassignment.
The Abolitionist Sisterhood
Available as an ebook and in the Waldo Library General Stacks, E449 .A1555 1994. Click the title for access.
A lively exploration of this nineteenth-century reform movement, The Abolitionist Sisterhood includes chapters on the principal female antislavery societies, discussions of black women's political culture in the antebellum North, articles on the strategies and tactics the antislavery women devised, a pictorial essay presenting rare graphics from both sides of abolitionist debates, and a final chapter comparing the experiences of the American and British women who attended the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.
Figuring
Available in the Waldo Library General Stacks, HQ1397 .P67 2019. Click the title for access.
Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries--beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement.
The Queer Limit of Black Memory
Available as an ebook and in the Waldo Library General Stacks, PN56.L45 R53 2013. Click the title for access.
The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution identifies a new archive of Black women's literature that has heretofore been on the margins of literary scholarship and African diaspora cultural criticism. It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Available as an ebook and in the Waldo Library General Stacks, HQ1237 .C75 2019. Click the title for access.
#1 International Bestseller Winner of the 2019 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Winner of the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems.
Wild Women of Michigan
Available in Zhang Legacy Collections Center Reading Room, Parks Research Collection, HQ1438.M5 L49 2017. Click the title for access.
Wild Women of Michigan commemorates the women of this state who boldly left their marks. Countless Michiganian women performed extraordinary acts that challenged and improved the world.
Women with Visible and Invisible Disabilities
Available as an ebook and in the Waldo Library General Stacks, RC 451.4 .W6 W637 v.26 no.1-4. Click the title for access.
This thoughtful collection addresses the issues faced by women with disabilities, examines the social construction of disability, and makes suggestions for the development and modification of culturally relevant therapy to meet the needs of disabled women.
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics
Available in the Waldo Library General Stacks, HQ1421 .A85 2018. Click the title for access.
Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship.
Being Muslim A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam
Available as an ebook only. Click the title for access.
For Sylvia Chan-Malik, Muslim womanhood is constructed through everyday and embodied acts of resistance, what she calls affective insurgency. In negotiating the histories of anti-Blackness, U.S. imperialism, and women's rights of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Being Muslim explores how U.S. Muslim women's identities are expressions of Islam as both Black protest religion and universal faith tradition.
The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor
Available in the Waldo Library Children's Collection, Fiction and Non-Fiction 92 Sot. Click the title for access.
In this adaptation for middle graders based on her bestselling adult memoir, My Beloved World, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor's extraordinary life inspires. Her achievement serves as a true testament to the fact that no matter the obstacles, dreams can come true.
Black Lotus
Available in the Waldo Library General Stacks, E184.A1 A245 2016. Click the title for access.
A unique and exquisitely wrought story of one multiracial woman's journey to discover and embrace herself in a family that sought to deny her black heritage, Sil Lai Abrams shares her story in Black Lotus: A Woman's Search for Racial Identity--an account that will undoubtedly ignite conversation on race, racial identity, and the human experience.
Disability, Gender and the Trajectories of Power
Available as an ebook and in the Waldo Library General Stacks, HV1569.3.W65 D547 20. Click the title for access.
This book argues for the rights of women with disabilities, who live on the periphery of society, and seeks to eradicate the exclusion and stigma that are part of their lives. It brings together the perspectives of academicians and activists in trying to understand the various social issues faced by women with disabilities and argues for a society where they are not denied respect, equality, and justice. Filling the gap in the existing feminist research, this book seeks to influence the way in which society treats women with disabilities and will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the field of women's rights, disability rights, and rehabilitation.
A Black Women's History of the United States
Available as an ebook only. Click the title for access.
In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today.
In the Belly of a Laughing God: Humour and Irony in Native Women's Poetry
Available as an ebook and in the Waldo Library General Stacks, PS591.I55 A64 2011. Click the title for access.
How can humour and irony in writing both create and destroy boundaries? In the Belly of a Laughing God examines how eight contemporary Native women poets in Canada and the United States - Joy Harjo, Louise Halfe, Kimberly Blaeser, Marilyn Dumont, Diane Glancy, Jeannette Armstrong, Wendy Rose, and Marie Annharte Baker - employ humour and irony to address the intricacies of race, gender, and nationality.
Latin American Women and the Literature of Madness
Available in the Waldo Library General Stacks, HQ1460.5 .S356 2015. Click the title for access.
At the turn of the millennium, narrative works by Latin American women writers have represented madness within contexts of sociopolitical strife and gender inequality. This book explores contemporary Latin American realities through madness narratives by prominent women authors, including Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Lya Luft (Brazil), Diamela Eltit (Chile), Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico), Laura Restrepo (Colombia) and Irene Vilar (Puerto Rico). Close reading of these works reveals a pattern of literary techniques--a ""poetics of madness""--employed by the writers to represent conditions that defy language, make sociopolitical crises tangible and register cultural perceptions of mental illness through literature.
Life Stages and Native Women
Available as an ebook and in the Waldo Library General Stacks, E99.A35 A53 2011. Click the title for access.
A rare and inspiring guide to the health and well-being of Aboriginal women and their communities.The process of "digging up medicines" - of rediscovering the stories of the past - serves as a powerful healing force in the decolonization and recovery of Aboriginal communities.
Many Strides to Freedom: African American Women's Unsung Contributions and Legacies
Available as an ebook only. Click the title for access.
"To struggle and battle and overcome and absolutely defeat every force designed against us is the only way to achieve."- Nannie Helen Burroughs. African American women have been integral to the various fights for equality throughout American history. Their importance to the movement occurred long before lifelong activist Rosa Parks became the catalyst in the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. Who are the countless and often nameless black women who risked their lives and worked tirelessly to fight for the equality of black people in this country? From slavery to the modern day civil rights movement, the contributions of African American women are often overlooked in the retelling of history, but their contributions were critical in the battle for racial equality.
No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History
Available in the Waldo Library General Stacks, HQ1410 .C589 2019. Click the title for access.
In her lively social history of American women and aging, acclaimed New York Times columnist Gail Collins illustrates the ways in which age is an arbitrary concept that has swung back and forth over the centuries. From Plymouth Rock (when a woman was considered marriageable if "civil and under fifty years of age"), to a few generations later, when they were quietly retired to elderdom once they had passed the optimum age for reproduction, to recent decades when freedom from striving in the workplace and caretaking at home is often celebrated, to the first female nominee for president, American attitudes towards age have been a moving target. Gail Collins gives women reason to expect the best of their golden years.
Queen of Physics
Available in the Waldo Library Children's Collection, Fiction and Non-Fiction 92 Wu. Click the title for access.
This engaging biography follows Wu Chien Shiung as she battles sexism and racism to become what Newsweek magazine called the "Queen of Physics" for her work on beta decay. Along the way, she earned the admiration of famous scientists like Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer and became the first woman hired as an instructor by Princeton University, the first woman elected President of the American Physical Society, the first scientist to have an asteroid named after her when she was still alive, and many other honors. Winner - 2020 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature Picture Book! An NCTE Orbis Pictus Recommended book!
Women with Intellectual Disabilities
Available as an ebook and in the Waldo Library General Stacks, HV3009.5.W65 W66 2000. Click the title for access.
This book provides the first comprehensive exploration of the issues affecting the lives of women with intellectual disabilities. Women from all over the world, with and without intellectual disabilities, have collaborated to write about their lives, their experiences and their hopes for the future.