Recommendations based on "Women in Science: Then and Now"

Taking us on a journey through science, the book challenges our preconceptions about men and women, investigating the ferocious gender wars that burn in biology, psychology and anthropology. The author revisits the landmark experiments that have informed our understanding, lays bare the problem of bias in research, and speaks to the scientists finally exploring the truth about the female sex. The result is an account of women's minds, bodies and evolutionary history. Interrogating what these revelations mean for us as individuals and as a society, the book unveils a fresh view of science in which women are included, rather than excluded

A collection of writings, speeches, and pamphlets documenting Britain's fight for women's right to voteBringing together the voices of the British women who fought for equal rights and representation - from aristocrats and actresses to mill workers and trade unionists - these speeches, pamphlets, letters and articles form an inspiring testament to the power of a movement.Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives--and upended them. Now Penguin brings you a new set of the acclaimed Great Ideas, a curated library of selections from the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and bestselling author, recounts the astounding revolution in women's lives over the past 50 years, with her usual "sly wit and unfussy style" (People).When Everything Changed begins in 1960, when most American women had to get their husbands' permission to apply for a credit card. It ends in 2008 with Hillary Clinton's historic presidential campaign. This was a time of cataclysmic change, when, after four hundred years, expectations about the lives of American women were smashed in just a generation.A comprehensive mix of oral history and Gail Collins's keen research -- covering politics, fashion, popular culture, economics, sex, families, and work -- When Everything Changed is the definitive book on five crucial decades of progress. The enormous strides made since 1960 include the advent of the birth control pill, the end of "Help Wanted -- Male" and "Help Wanted -- Female" ads, and the lifting of quotas for women in admission to medical and law schools. Gail Collins describes what has happened in every realm of women's lives, partly through the testimonies of both those who made history and those who simply made their way.Picking up where her highly lauded book America's Women left off, When Everything Changed is a dynamic story, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone for which this beloved New York Times columnist is known.Older readers, men and women alike, will be startled as they are reminded of what their lives once were -- Father Knows Best and My Little Margie on TV; daily weigh-ins for stewardesses; few female professors; no women in the Boston marathon, in combat zones, or in the police department. Younger readers will see their history in a rich new way. It has been an era packed with drama and dreams -- some dashed and others realized beyond anyone's imagining.

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation—the oppression of women and girls in the developing world. From the bestselling authors of Tightrope,two of our most fiercely moral voicesWith Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope.They show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel and, with assistance from an aid group, built a thriving retail business that supports her family. The Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time became a surgeon. A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school, earned her doctorate and became an expert on AIDS.Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women’s potential. They make clear how so many people have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part. Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Unleashing that process globally is not only the right thing to do; it’s also the best strategy for fighting poverty.Deeply felt, pragmatic, and inspirational, Half the Sky is essential reading for every global citizen.

An incisive, intersectional look at the mother of all gender biases: a resistance to women’s authority and power.Every woman has a story of being underestimated, ignored, challenged, or patronized in the workplace. Maybe she tried to speak up in a meeting, only to be talked over by male colleagues. Or a client addressed her male subordinate instead of her. These stories remain true even for women at the top of their fields; in the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, female justices are interrupted four times more often than their male colleagues―and 96 percent of the time by men. Despite the progress we’ve made toward equality, we still fail, more often than we might realize, to take women as seriously as men.In The Authority Gap, journalist Mary Ann Sieghart provides a startling perspective on the gender bias at work in our everyday lives and reflected in the world around us, whether in pop culture, media, school classrooms, or politics. With precision and insight, Sieghart marshals a wealth of data from a variety of disciplines―including psychology, sociology, political science, and business―and talks to pioneering women like Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo, renowned classicist Mary Beard, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, and Hillary Clinton. She speaks with women from a range of backgrounds to explore how gender bias intersects with race and class biases.Eye-opening and galvanizing, The Authority Gap teaches us how we as individuals, partners, parents, and coworkers can together work to narrow the gap. Sieghart exposes unconscious bias in this fresh feminist take on how to address and counteract systemic sexism in ways that benefit us all: men as well as women.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by The MillionsA vibrant and illuminating exploration of medieval thinking on women’s beauty, sexuality, and behavior.What makes for the ideal woman? How should she look, love, and be? In this vibrant, high-spirited history, medievalist Eleanor Janega turns to the Middle Ages, the era that bridged the ancient world and modern society, to unfurl its suppositions about women and reveal what’s shifted over time―and what hasn’t.Enshrined medieval thinkers, almost always male, subscribed to a blend of classical Greek and Roman philosophy and Christian theology for their concepts of the sexes. For the height of female attractiveness, they chose the mythical Helen of Troy, whose imagined pear shape, small breasts, and golden hair served as beauty’s epitome. Casting Eve’s shadow over medieval women, they derided them as oversexed sinners, inherently lustful, insatiable, and weak. And, unless a nun, a woman was to be the embodiment of perfect motherhood.In contrast, drawing on accounts of remarkable and subversive medieval women like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Hildegard of Bingen, along with others hidden in documents and court cases, Janega shows us how real women of the era lived. While often mothers, they were industrious farmers, brewers, textile workers, artists, and artisans and paved the way for new ideas about women’s nature, intellect, and ability.In The Once and Future Sex, Janega unravels the restricting expectations on medieval women and the ones on women today. She boldly questions why, if our ideas of women have changed drastically over time, we cannot reimagine them now to create a more equitable future. 11 illustrations

‘An important contribution to our recent history’ ANDREW MARR‘Absorbing and important’ JOAN BAKEWELL‘One of my favourite reads of 2021’ GARETH RUSSELLPoignant and inspiring, Women in the War tells the first-hand stories of ten of the last surviving female members of Britain's 'Greatest Generation'.Whether flying Spitfires to the frontline, aiding code breaking at Bletchley Park, plotting the Battle of the Atlantic or working with Churchill in the Cabinet War Rooms, each of these women made a crucial contribution to the conflict overseas and helped to buttress the home front.Here they recount their remarkable experiences during the Second World War, recalling how their formative years were shaped by danger and trauma, and how friendship and romance fortified their spirits.Drawing on the insight that comes with age, they contemplate how the conflict helped women prove their worth, transforming society and sparking the later battles for equal rights.With a reporter’s eye for detail, Lucy Fisher artfully weaves together moving contemporary interviews with gripping wartime diaries and letters. This is a vivid oral history that will stay with you long after you've put it down.

Blending the journalistic rigor of Masha Gessen with the call to action of We Should All Be Feminists, a searing denunciation of Putin’s Russia, revealing how modern Russia’s history of weaponizing sexual violence against women plays a crucial role in its strategy to retain political influence and dominanceOn March 22, 2023, the Swedish Academy organized a conference on threats to freedom of expression and democracy, featuring a roster of stellar speakers, including Arundhati Roy, Timothy Snyder, and Sofi Oksanen. Oksanen’s address—“Putin's War on Women”—generated such interest that the acclaimed Finnish writer used it as the basis for a larger, in-depth look at Putin’s threat to women. The result is Same River, Twice, a devastating expose that builds on the themes and arguments introduced in Oksanen’s urgent and incisive speech.During the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Oksanen's great aunt was arrested and brutally interrogated—a terrifying experience that permanently traumatized her, leaving her silent for the rest of her life. Same River, Twice uses this family story to illustrate the systematic crimes perpetrated by Russian soldiers and the Russian government for nearly a century. From the Russian military's entry into Berlin in 1945 to its modern invasion of Ukraine, Russia has continually employed violence against women when fighting its enemies—including using rape as an instrument of war. But as Oksanen reveals, such violence has never before been used on such a widespread scale. Life for women in Putin's Russia is little better; gender equality is in decline, women are silenced by the legal system, and rape is used to humiliate victims, especially women in media.Oksanen's sober analysis exposes how, under Putin, genocide and misogyny are inextricably linked: misogyny undergirds Russia’s international alliances, threatening the rights of women and minorities worldwide. As Oksanen ominously reminds us, “In Ukraine, sexual violence is an integral part of genocide. In domestic politics, misogyny is a tool used by the Kremlin to prevent women from rising to power. In international politics, it is a tool of Russian imperialism.”As the threats to democracy grow stronger around the globe, this powerful and timely book is a warning that must not be ignored.Translated from the Finnish by Owen F. Witesman

A pioneer in women's studies and long-term activist for women's issues, and a past president of the Organization of American Historians, Gerda Lerner is one of the founders and foremost scholars of Women's History. The Creation of Patriarchy, the first book in her two-volume magnum opus Women and History (1986) received wide review attention and much acclaim, winning the prestigious Joan Kelly Prize of the American Historical Association for the best work on Women's History that year. Ms hailed the book for providing "a grand historical framework that was impossible even to imagine before the enlightenment about women's place in the world provided by her earlier work and that of other feminist scholars." New Directions for Women said it "may well be the most important work in feminist theory to appear in our generation." Patriarchy traced the development of the ideas, symbols, and metaphors by which men institutionalized their domination of women. Now, in The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, the eagerly awaited concluding volume of Women and History, Lerner documents the twelve-hundred-year struggle of women to free their minds from patriarchal thought, to create Women's History, and to achieve a feminist consciousness. In a richly documented narrative filled with inspiring portraits of women, Lerner ranges from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century, tracing several important ways by which women strove for autonomy and equality. One of the most remarkable sections examines over twelve hundred years of feminist Bible criticism. Since objections to women's thinking, teaching, and speaking in public were based on biblical authority--most notably, passages from Genesis and the writings of St. Paul--women returned again and again to these texts, in an attempt to subvert patriarchal dominance and establish their equality with men. This survey of biblical criticism allows Lerner to illustrate her most important insight--the discontinuity of women's history. She describes how women's history was not passed on from generation to generation, forcing women in effect to reinvent the wheel over and over again. In a series of fascinating portraits of individual women who resisted patriarchal indoctrination, Lerner discusses women mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich and later Protestant mystics, and brings to life the many women of great literary talent, from Christine de Pisan to Louise Labe to Emily Dickinson, who simply bypassed patriarchal thought and created alternate worlds for themselves. Documenting the 1,200 year struggle of women to free their minds from patriarchal thought, create a women's history, and achieve a feminist consciousness, this brilliant work charts new ground for feminist theory, the history of ideas, and the development of women's place in our intellectual tradition.

A raw and lyrical exploration of the confining expectations of womanhood and, if we dare, what lies beyond those limitations--from a writer Roxane Gay calls "vibrant and thoughtful." Gorgeous, badass, and practically waiting to pounce, Good Woman: A Reckoning is acclaimed essayist Savala Nolan's follow-up to her "standout collection" (New York Times Book Review) Don't Let It Get You Down. A lifetime of playing by the rules of female social conditioning is not what it's cracked up to be for Nolan. The years of making herself smaller (literally and metaphorically); the sexual advances that led to more than she wanted; the bad marriage she fought like hell to keep; all the ways others questioned her identity or choices and she let it slide to keep the peace; her silence when requested; her body when desired--none of it worked. None of it protected her the way it was advertised to. Nolan noticed the same was true for the women around her and the women in history she read about. Across time and location, they were raised to be agreeable and "good." Hyper-visible as sexual objects but invisible as full people. Living in a physical world created by men for men. Taking on the ultimate role of birth-giver and caretaker, yet seeing it remain an unsung act, even as it's a God-like endeavor. Only in midlife did Nolan begin to realize she was capable of living outside these cages of conditioning so slyly insidious that they're nearly invisible. Good Woman elegantly probes the knotty conditions themselves, the costs of adhering to them, and what happens when one refuses to comply. The twelve stunning and unforgettable essays blend memoir, reportage, and history to create a collection that is alternately bold, brash, and explosive ... and ravishingly tender, sensual, and joyous. Nolan takes aim at big and old ideas, and she does not miss. Hers is a testimony to witness and to savor.