Search Results: Women's Studies from I Cannot Live Without Books

Beyond the Call of Duty: Army Flight Nursing in World War II by Judith Barger
At the height of World War II, five hundred Army flight nurses served with the Army Air Forces as members of thirty-one medical air evacuation squadrons located throughout the world on both the European and Pacific fronts. Their work was not insignificant -- over one million patients were evacuated by air between January 1943 and May 1945. These specially trained Army nurses took nursing to new heights. Often decorated for their accomplishments, they exemplify the ability of a group of nurses to cope successfully with the challenges of war.
In her comprehensive book, author Judith Barger brings together information that is becoming less accessible as the former nurses succumb to age, infirmity, and death. Barger interviewed twenty-five of these pioneering women in 1986, when their recall fo their service experiences was still vivid and informative. Building on Barger's earlier research, their stories and the numerous… Read More

Confident Women: Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion by Tori Telfer
THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES.
From Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Delvey to Frank Abagnale and Charles Ponzi, the history of confidence artists is long, venerable, and wildly compelling. And as Tori Telfer reveals, its female practitioners are some of the best -- or worst -- in the business. Here, Telfer introduces a host of lady swindlers -- some notorious, others forgotten -- whose scams ranged from the outrageous to the deadly and every shade of grift in between.
In 1700s Paris, Jeanne de Saint-Remy tricked the royal jewelers out of a necklace made from six hundred and forty-seven diamonds by pretending she was best friends with Queen Marie Antoinette.
During the Civil War, Lauretta Williams, aka Loreta Janeta Velasquez, claimed to be a Cuban American soldier and convinced people she worked for the Confederacy -- or the Union -- depending on whom she was talking to.
In… Read More

A Cool and Lonely Courage: The Untold Story of Sister Spies in Occupied France by Susan Ottaway
The death of an eccentric recluse is rarely an event for international headlines. But when police were called to the tiny apartment of the elderly Eileen Nearne, they found a small bundle of possessions that told an amazing story.
It was soon discovered that Eileen Nearne had been an agent for the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. Working undercover in Nazi-occupied France, she sent encoded messages of crucial importance for the Allies until her capture by the Gestapo.
Astonishingly, Eileen was not the only spy in the family -- her sister, Jacqueline, was also a British agent, working as a courier for the French Resistance. Rarely had two members of the same family sacrificed so much to do such dangerous work.
A Cool and Lonely Courage pays tribute to these fiercely patriotic women, who fought for freedom at great personal cost. While Jacqueline narrowly avoided capture… Read More

The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans -- A Story of Love and War by Catherine Grace Katz
Tensions at Yalta threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin just as victory was close at hand. Catherine Grace Katz uncovers the dramatic story of the three daughters who were chosen by their fathers to travel with them to Yalta, each bound by fierce family loyalty, political savvy, and intertwined romances that powerfully colored these crucial days. Kathleen Harriman, daughter of U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman, was a war correspondent and champion skier. Sarah Churchill, an actress-turned-RAF officer, was devoted to her brilliant father, who depended on her astute political mind. Roosevelt's only daughter, Anna, chosen instead of her mother, Eleanor, to accompany the president to Yalta, arrived there as keeper of her father's most damaging secrets. Situated in the political maelstrom that marked the… Read More

The Dressmakers of Auschwitz: The True Story of the Women Who Sewed to Survive by Lucy Adlington
At the height of the Holocaust, twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp -- mainly Jewish women and girls -- were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions in a dedicated salon for elite Nazi women. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers.
This fashion workshop -- called the Upper Tailoring Studio -- was established by Hedwig Hoss, the camp commandant's wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz and for ladies from Nazi Berlin's upper crust.
Drawing on diverse sources -- including interviews with the last surviving seamstress -- The Dressmakers of Auschwitz follows the fates of these brave women. Their bonds of family and friendship not only helped them endure persecution but also played their part in camp resistance. Weaving… Read More

The Lost Girls: Love & Literature in Wartime London by D.J. Taylor
Who were the Lost Girls? Chic, glamorous, and bohemian, as likely to be found living in a rat-haunted maisonette as dining at the Ritz, Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton, and Janetta Parlade cut a swath through English literary and artistic life at the height of World War II.
Three of them had affairs with Lucian Freud. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt. All of them were associated with the decade's most celebrated literary magazine, Horizon.
They had very different -- and sometimes explosive -- personalities. But taken together, they form a distinctive part of the wartime demographic: bright, beautiful, independent-minded women with tough upbringings who were determined to make the most of their lives in a chaotic time.
Ranging from Bloomsbury and Soho to Cairo and the couture studios of Schiaparelli and Hartnell, the Lost Girls would inspire the work of George Orwell,… Read More

Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast by Joan DeJean
In 1719, a ship named La Mutine sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the place the French called "the Mississippi." It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women.
Falsely accused of sex crimes -- some for reporting rape, others because their families were obscenely poor and it financially expedient to imprison them -- the women were prisoners, shackled in the ship's hold. Of the 132 women who were transported this way, only sixty-two survived.
Even though most were of modest origins, many achieved unlikely triumphs across the Atlantic. They managed to carve out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and… Read More

Nazi Wives: The Women at the Top of Hitler's Germany by James Wyllie
Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Hess, Bormann -- these names were synonymous with power and influence in the Third Reich. Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margaret, Lina, Ilse, and Gerda.
These are the women behind the infamous men -- complex individuals with distinctive personalities who were captivated by Hitler and whose everyday lives were governed by Nazi ideology. Throughout the rise and fall of Nazism, these women raised families, fell in and out of love, and quarreled with their husbands and one another, all the while jostling for position with the Fuhrer himself. Until now, they have been treated as minor characters, their significance ignored, as if they were unaware of their husbands' murderous acts, despite the evidence that was all around them: the stolen art on their walls, the slave labor in their homes, and the produce grown in concentration camps on their tables.
James Wyllie's Nazi Wives explores… Read More

Poor Richard's Women: Deborah Read Franklin and the Other Women Behind the Founding Father by Nancy Rubin Stuart
We can't seem to get enough of Ben Franklin -- the thrifty inventor-statesman of the revolutionary era with remarkable achievements in publishing, business, politics, diplomacy, and invention. A man so confident in his own immortality that he tempted lightning to strike the same place twice. We know all about the key and the kite, the post offices, the libraries, the bifocals, the fire departments, and the almanacs. But what about the woman who raised his children, ran his businesses, built their house, and fought off angry mobs at gunpoint while he traipsed about England?
In Poor Richard's Women, author and journalist Nancy Rubin Stuart reveals the long-neglected voices of the women Ben loved and lost during his lifelong struggle between passion and prudence. The most prominent among them was Deborah Read Franklin, his common-law wife, and partner for forty-four years. While she was long… Read More

Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule by Katherine Pangonis
In 1187, Saladin's armies besieged the holy city of Jerusalem. He had previously annihilated Jerusalem's army at the Battle of Hattin, and behind the city's high walls a last-ditch defense was being led by an unlikely trio -- including Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem. They could not resist Saladin, but, if they were lucky, they could negotiate terms that would save the lives of the city's inhabitants.
Queen Sibylla was the last of a line of formidable female rulers in the Crusader States of Outremer. Yet for all the books written about the Crusades, one aspect is conspicuously absent: the stories of women. Queens and princesses tend to be presented as passive transmitters of land and royal blood. In reality, women ruled, conducted diplomatic negotiations, made military decisions, forged alliances, rebelled, and undertook architectural projects. Sibylla's grandmother Queen Melisende was the first queen to seize real political agency in… Read More

Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America by Karen Cook Bell
Running from Bondage tells the compelling stories of enslaved women, which they fled or attempted to flee bondage during and after the Revolutionary War. Karen Cook Bell's enlightening and original contribution to the study of slave resistance in eighteenth-century America explores the individual and collective lives of these women and girls of diverse circumstances, while also providing details about what led them to escape. She demonstrates that there were in fact two wars being waged during the Revolutionary Era: a political revolution for independence from Great Britain and a social revolution for emancipation and equality in which Black women played an active role. Running from Bondage broadens and complicates how we study and teach this momentous event, one that emphasizes the chances taken by these "Black founding mothers" and the important contributions they made to the cause… Read More

Sisters in Resistance: How a German Spy, a Banker's Wife, and Mussolini's Daughter Outwitted the Nazis by Tilar J. Mazzeo
In 1944, news of secret diaries kept by Italy's foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano had permeated the public consciousness. What wasn't reported, however, was how three women -- a fascist leader's daughter, a German spy, and an American socialite -- risked their lives to ensure the diaries would reach the Allies, who would later use them as evidence against the Nazis at Nuremberg.
In 1944, Benito Mussolini's daughter, Edda, gave Hitler and her father an ultimatum: Release her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, from prison, or risk her leaking her husband's journals to the press. To avoid the peril of exposing Nazi lies, Hitler and Mussolini hunted for the diaries for months, determined to destroy them.
Hilde Beetz, a German spy, was deployed to seduce Ciano to learn the diaries' location and take them from Edda. But the seducer became the seduced. Hilde converted and became a double agent,… Read More

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones
Popular accounts of the suffrage crusade often begin in Seneca Falls in 1848 and end with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women's movement did not win the vote for most Black women. To secure their rights, Black women needed a movement of their own.
In Vanguard, prizewinning historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women who were the vanguard of women's rights: the pioneering lecturer Maria Stewart, abolitionist and suffrage advocate Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, community organizer… Read More

We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Covergirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement by Andi Zeisler
Feminism has hit the big time. Once a dirty word brushed away with a grimace, "feminist" has been rebranded as a shiny label sported by movie and pop stars, fashion designers, and multi-hyphenate powerhouses like Beyonce. It drives advertising and marketing campaigns for everything from wireless plans to underwear to perfume, presenting what's long been a movement for social justice as just another consumer choice in a vast market. Individual self-actualization is the goal, shopping more often than not the means, and celebrities the mouthpieces.
But what does it mean when social change becomes a brand identity? Feminism's splashy arrival at the center of today's media and pop-culture marketplace, after all, hasn't offered solutions to the movement's unfinished business. Planned Parenthood is under sustained attack, women are still paid 77 percent -- or less -- of the man's dollar, and… Read More

The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear by Kate Moore
1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife, and mother of six is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Her husband of twenty-one years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened -- by Elizabeth's intellect, independence, and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. So Theophilus makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum.
The horrific conditions inside the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois, are overseen by Dr. Andrew McFarland, a man who will prove to be even more dangerous to Elizabeth than her traitorous husband. But most disturbing is that Elizabeth is not the only sane woman confined to the institution. There are many rational women on her ward who tell the same… Read More

A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot by Mary Walton
THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES.
Alice Paul began her life as a studious girl from a strict Quaker family in New Jersey. In 1907, a scholarship took her to England, where she became passionately devoted to the suffrage movement. Upon her return to the United States, Alice became the leader of the militant wing of the American suffrage movement. Calling themselves "Silent Sentinels," she and her followers were the first protesters to picket the White House. Arrested and jailed, they went on hunger strikes and were force-fed and brutalized. Years before Gandhi's campaign of nonviolent resistance, and decades before civil rights demonstrations, Alice Paul practiced peaceful civil disobedience in the pursuit of equal rights for women.
With her daring and unconventional tactics, Alice Paul eventually succeeded in forcing President Woodrow Wilson and a reluctant U.S. Congress to pass the Nineteenth… Read More

You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War by Elizabeth Becker
Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances Fitzgerald, a blue-blood American intellectual arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations.
In You Don't Belong Here, Elizabeth Becker uses these women's work and lives to illuminate the Vietnam War from the 1965 American buildup, the expansion into Cambodia, and the American defeat and its aftermath. Arriving herself in the last years of the war, Becker writes as a historian and a witness of the times.
What emerges is an unforgettable story of three journalists forging… Read More