March 17, 2025 – March is Women's History Month – here are ten newer nonfiction picks that tell stories of women's lives and impact, from ancient Greece to New York in the 1970s. Some figures documented in these stories, like Harriet Tubman, are well known. Others, like three of the first women to earn medical degrees, are less so. All illustrate the determination of their subjects to impact the societies and world around them.
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"A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune" by Noliwe Rooks (2024)
When Mary MacLeod Bethune died, many of the tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the "Mount Rushmore" of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capital, and yet for most Americans, she remains a marble figure from the dim past. Her success was unlikely: the 15th of 17 children and the first born into freedom, Bethune survived brutal poverty and caste subordination to become the first in her family to learn to read and to attend college. She gave that same gift to others when in 1904, at age 29, Bethune welcomed her first class of five girls to the Daytona, Florida school she herself had founded. In short order, the school enrolled hundreds of children and eventually would become the university that bears her name to this day.
"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" by Phippa Gregory (2023)
Did women do nothing to shape England’s culture and traditions during nine centuries of political turmoil, plague, famine, prosperity, religious reform? Philippa Gregory answers this question by telling stories of the soldiers, guild widows, highwaywomen, pirates, miners and ship owners, international traders, theatre impresarios, social campaigners and ‘female husbands’ who did much to build the fabric of their society and in ways as diverse and varied as the women themselves.
"Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson" by Tourmaline (2025)
Black trans luminary Tourmaline brings to life the first definitive biography of the revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most important and remarkable figures in LGBTQ+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy. Through nearly two decades of research, Tourmaline brings this fabulous, scandalous, essential justice warrior to life in full color, for the first time. This book will take readers into Marsha's childhood as she struggled with gender identity in the 1950s, to her dramatic and essential involvement in the Stonewall Riots and her activism for trans rights through the 1970s to the AIDS crisis, and finally, it will explore her mysterious and still unresolved death. Marsha didn't wait to be freed; she declared herself free and told the world to catch up. Marsha was not merely an activist, she was an artist and a performer, a lover and a mentor, a mischievous and transgressive queen.
"Off with Her Head: Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power" by Eleanor Herman (2022)
There is a particular kind of rage – let's call it unadulterated bloodlust – usually reserved for women, especially women in power or vying for it. From the ancient world, through the European Renaissance, up to the most recent U.S. elections, the Misogynist's Handbook, as Eleanor Herman calls it, has been wielded to put uppity women in their place. In a story that is shocking, eye-opening, and a powerful force for change, Eleanor Herman's signature wit and humor explores the patterns that have been operating for more than three thousand years – and are still operating toda – -against powerful women across the globe, including Cleopatra, Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and more.
"Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People" by Tiya Miles (2024)
Harriet Tubman is, if surveys are to be trusted, one of the ten most famous Americans ever born, and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she's a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero – the woman who, despite being barely five-feet tall, illiterate, and suffering from a brain injury, managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others North to freedom, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some 750 people without loss of life.
"The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women's Movement" by Susannah Gibson (2024)
In England in the 1700s, a woman who was an intellectual, spoke out, or wrote professionally was considered unnatural. After all, as the wisdom of the era dictated, a clever woman―if there were such a thing―would never make a good wife. But a circle of women called the Bluestockings did something extraordinary: coming together in glittering salons to discuss and debate as intellectual equals with men, they fought for women to be educated and to have a public role in society. Gibson reveals the close and complicated relationships between these women, how they supported and admired each other, and how they sometimes judged and exploited one another. Some rebelled quietly, while others defied propriety with adventurous and scandalous lives. With moving stories and keen insight, "The Bluestockings" uncovers how a group of remarkable women slowly built up an eviscerating critique of their male-dominated world that society was not yet ready to hear.
"The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and the Reclamation of Their Groundbreaking History" by Karen Valby (2024)
At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Lydia Abarça was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company – the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She was the first Black ballerina on the cover of Dance magazine, an Essence cover star, cast in The Wiz and on Broadway with Bob Fosse. She performed in some of ballet's most iconic works with her closest friends – founding members of the company, the Swans of Harlem, Gayle McKinney, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells, and Karlya Shelton – for the Queen of England and Mick Jagger, with Josephine Baker, at the White House, and beyond. Some forty years later, when Lydia's granddaughter wanted to show her own ballet class evidence of her grandmother's success, she found almost none, but for some yellowing photographs and programs in the family basement. Lydia had struggled for years to reckon with the erasure of her success, as all the Swans had. Still united as sisters in the present, they decided it was time to share their story themselves.
"The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World" by Daisy Dunn (2024)
Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women — whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power — were up to something much more interesting than other histories would lead us to believe. Together, these women helped to make antiquity as we know it. Spanning three thousand years, the story moves from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, from Lesbos to Asia Minor, from the Persian Empire to the royal court of Macedonia, and concludes with Rome and its growing empire. The women of antiquity are undeniably woven throughout the fabric of history, and in "The Missing Thread" they finally take center stage.
"The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison" by Hugh Ryan (2022)
The Women's House of Detention, Greenwich Village's most forbidding and forgotten queer landmark, stood from 1929 to 1974, imprisoning tens of thousands from all over New York City. The "House of D" acted as a nexus, drawing queer women down to Greenwich Village from every corner of the city. Some of these women – Angela Davis, Grace Paley, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur – were famous, but the majority were working-class people, incarcerated for the "crimes" of being poor and improperly feminine. "The Women's House of Detention" highlights how queer relation and autonomy emerged in the most dire of circumstances: from the lesbian relationships and communities forged through the House of D, to a Black socialist's fight for a college education during the Great Depression, to the forgotten women who rioted inside the prison on the first night of the Stonewall Uprising nearby. This is the story of one building and so much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.
"Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine" by Olivia Campbell (2021)
In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness — a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society. Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. These three pioneering women, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same.