Women’s History Month is observed annually in March to recognize and celebrate their achievements and contributions.
Photo Credit: Anders Hellberg
(January 3, 2003 – Present)
Thunberg is a well-known climate activist. She began spending her Friday’s outside Swedish Parliament in 2018 to call for stronger action on climate change while skipping her classes. a movement called “School Strike for Climate.” Because of this movement, she is well known for challenging world leaders for immediate action for climate change and has spoken at the U.N. summit, met with the Pope, the President of the United States, and inspired more than 4 million people to join the global climate strike.
Source: https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta-thunberg/
Photo Credit: Public Domain
(November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934)
Curie’s work is reflected in the numerous awards bestowed on her. She received many honorary science, medicine and law degrees and honorary memberships of learned societies throughout the world. Together with her husband, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity. She also received, jointly with her husband, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1903 and, in 1921, President Harding of the United States, on behalf of the women of America, presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her service to science.
Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1903/marie-curie/biographical/
Photo Credit: U.S. House Office of Photography, Public Domain
(October 13, 1989 – present)
AOC is an American politician and activist. She has served as the U.S. representative for New York's 14th congressional district since 2019, as a member of the Democratic Party. Ocasio-Cortez is also the youngest woman ever to serve in the United States Congress. As an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America who also helped organize for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in 2016, Ocasio-Cortez ran on a progressive platform — abolishing ICE, criminal justice reform, tuition-free college and universal healthcare.
Photo Credit: NASA, Public Domain
(August 26, 1918 – February 24, 2020)
Katherine Johnson, also known as Kathrine Goble, became the first black woman to work for NASA. She worked at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)’s West Area Computing unit, a group of African American women that manually preformed math calculations for NASA’s engineers. She worked alongside Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, who later became known as computers. Johnson successfully calculated the trajectories that led the Apollo 11 to the moon, one of America’s greatest scientific accomplishments.
Source: https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography
Photo Credit: NASA, Public Domain
(May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012)
Ride was one of five crew members aboard the space shuttle Challenger STS-7. On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space and the youngest American in space at that time. During the mission, Ride was the flight engineer. She launched two communication satellites and operated the shuttle’s mechanical arm as well as conducted experiments. Not only is Ride the first American woman in space, she is also the first acknowledged gay astronaut. In 2013, President Obama posthumously honored Ride with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and O’Shaughnessy accepted the award.
Source: https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sally-ride
Photo Credit: Bianca Fioretti, Hallbauer & Fioretti
(1968 – Present)
Charpentier and Doudna discovered how Cas9 is guided by both the tracrRNA and an RNA matching a viral sequence, using it to seek out and destroy matching viral DNA. They engineered the two-piece RNA into a single guide RNA and showed that it could be designed to pinpoint any gene, allowing the Cas9 protein to cut at that spot. Charpentier and Doudna then proposed that CRISPR-Cas9 can be re-engineered as a programmable gene editing tool to delete or add specific strands of DNA. CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology has applications across scientific fields including human and veterinary medicine, agriculture and biotechnology. It has been rapidly adopted by the scientific community due to its broad applicability, versatility and ease of use.
Source: https://www.invent.org/inductees/emmanuelle-charpentier
Photo Credit: pelosi.house.gov
(March 26, 1940 – Present)
Nancy Pelosi made history after being elected to be the first woman to serve as the speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 2007-2011. She made history again in 2019 when she was re-elected for the speaker position and held that until 2023. She served as the 52nd speaker and has been in Congress since 1987. She has worked in crafting the American Rescue Plan, which helped to get vaccinations to millions of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo Credit: Unknown / Anefo
(June 16, 1917 – July 17, 2001)
She was one of the first female publishers of an American newspaper and the first-ever female chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company. Graham defied the U.S. government to publish both the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate story, two of the century’s biggest scoops. During the decades she directed The Washington Post Company’s business, revenue grew by more than $1 billion and the stock price soared, solidifying Graham’s status as one of the county’s most savvy business leaders. In later life, she proved a talented storyteller in her own right, winning a Pulitzer Prize for her autobiographical narrative, “Personal History.”
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/brand-studio/fox/katharine-graham/
Photo Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images/Kind courtesy Juggernaut
(November 19, 1917 – October 31, 1984)
Indira Gandhi is an Indian politician and stateswoman. She served the first prime minister of India. The congress party came to power when her father took office in 1947, she became a member of its working committee in 1955. She was considered by many to be the strongest prime minister India has ever seen. She was the second longest serving prime minister. India became self sufficient in food production under Indira watch. She was elected in 1966 and quickly gained public support for her agricultural improvements that led to India’s self-sufficiency in food grain. She also was successful in the Pakistan war, which resulted in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. She was assassinated in 1984.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Indira-Gandhi and https://www.history.com/topics/asian-history/indira-gandhi
Photo Credit: NASA, Public Domain
(October 17, 1956 – Present)
Mae Jemison is an American engineer, physician and former NASA astronaut. She became the first black women to travel to space where she served as a mission specialist on the Space Shuttle Endeavour where she conducted experiments in life sciences, material sciences, and was co-investigator in the bone cell research experiment. She is also a trained medical doctor and served as a Medical Officer in the Peace Corps and currently runs a medical technology company called BioSentient Corp.
Source: https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mae-jemison
Women's History Month is observed annually in March to recognize and celebrate their achievements and contributions. Below is a selected list of books available at the B.D. Owen’s Library.
(Thanks to Brandy Brady and Hallie Laning)
NAME and AUTHOR | SUMMARY |
---|---|
Dare to lead like a girl : how to survive and thrive in the corporate jungle / Dalia Feldheim |
A holistic look at how to achieve purpose and joy at work. It is about turning the world of work into a place where empathy, intuition, passion, and resilience take their rightful place, where women can lead like women and men can tap into their more feminine leadership traits and dare to lead (more) like a girl!" |
The political life and times of Matilda Joslyn Gage: activist, historian, publisher, writer / Mary E. Corey. |
In the early years of women's history research, Matilda Joslyn Gage was buried in superlatives. She was deemed "the most logical, scientific and fearless writer of her day," and one of the "best-known writers of the day." She's admired for being "one of the most scholarly of them all," and "one of the most effective and forceful woman's rights lecturers," and "one of the most important of all nineteenth-century feminist historians." |
The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier / April White |
White discusses the phenomenon of migratory divorce in late nineteenth-century Sioux Falls. She focuses on a handful of wealthy white women who sought divorce for reasons ranging from adultery to cruelty to moral turpitude. The South Dakota city had one of the laxer divorce laws in the country, requiring only a 90-day residency. An outspoken bishop, William Hare, was vexed by its reputation as a “Divorce Colony” and succeeded in a campaign to tighten restrictions, eventually expanding the residency requirement to a year. By the 1930s, Nevada, particularly Reno, had supplanted Sioux Falls as the go-to destination for a quickie divorce. More and more women refused to forsake their own happiness or settle for a partnership in which they were subjugated, which was reflected in the country’s booming divorce rate. The author acknowledges that Black women in particular had only recently been granted a legal right to a recognized marriage, and the right to divorce remained out of reach for those without financial means. Despite the book’s somewhat rarified scope, this is a valuable and intriguing contribution to American social history. |
Trauma-Informed Pedagogy: Addressing Gender-Based Violence in the Classroom/ edited by Jocelyn E. Marshall and Candace Skibba |
Gender-based violence is an issue often met with silence, unempathetic discourse, and troublesome visual representation. As educators, mentors, and public facilitators, how can we address this subject in our teaching spaces, curricula, texts, and conversations with greater care and understanding? And, what do we need as resources to cultivate these deeper insights and new roads to increased awareness and dynamic healing? Building decentered and empowering spaces is vital to addressing gender-based violence. In an educational setting, this must take into consideration instructors’, students’, and other professionals’ own histories of and relationships to traumatic experience. |
Book Review: Hate Speech against Women Online: Concepts and Countermeasures / Louise Richardson-Self. |
Richardson-Self focuses particularly on I social identity power i : where the social imaginary in question inheres in the member of an identity-based group I power-over i another identity-based group, irrespective of whether an individual actually I exercises i that power as an agent (i.e. it can be merely passive, or operate structurally without an agent), and where a plausible case can be made that this capacity to control such a group is unjust. |
Nowhere for very long : the unexpected road to an unconventional life / Brianna Madia. |
Travel writer Madia recounts the highs and lows of life on the road in her quietly moving debut. As she writes, trading in just about everything for Bertha—her orange van with a “propensity for back roads and breakdowns”—made the difference between a humdrum life and a freewheeling lifestyle in which “fear was celebrated.” In their early 20s, Madia and her future husband Neil left their middle-class Connecticut lives and decamped to Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012. |
White tears brown scars : how white feminism betrays women of colour / Ruby Hamad. |
Hamad debuts with a searing and wide-ranging condemnation of "strategic White Womanhood" and "the historical debasement of women of color" in Western culture. Citing her own experiences as an Arab woman working in the "suffocating white Australian media space" and those of other "brown and black women" who have been routinely disbelieved, exoticized, or accused of bullying by white women, Hamad contends that the tears of white women are "a weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built into the system." She analyzes cultural archetypes, including "the lascivious black Jezebel" and "the submissive China Doll," that inhibit women of color, and compares the actions of "BBQ Beckys" who call the police on Black people for noncrimes to the lynching of Black men for "perceived transgressions against the virtuous bodies of white women." Hamad also documents the exclusion of Black women from the suffrage movement and explains why white women's inroads into white male power structures don't benefit women of color. |
Madam C.J. Walker : the making of an American icon / Erica L. Ball. |
Madam C. J. Walker is reputed to be America's first self-made woman millionaire. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in the aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress. By the time of her death in 1919, however, Walker had refashioned herself into one of the most famous African American figures in the nation: the owner and president of a hair-care empire and a philanthropist wealthy enough to own a country estate near the Rockefellers in the prestigious New York town of Irvington-on-Hudson. -- adapted from back of book. |
The daughters of Kobani : a story of rebellion, courage, and justice / Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. |
An admiring, almost fawning portrait of women who fought to free Kurdish towns in northern Syria from the control of the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, in the late 2010s, this book is a useful illustration of the ideological influence of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party and a longtime political prisoner in Turkey. It is organized around the biographies of four Syrian Kurdish women as they grow from unruly teenagers into mature, seasoned, and effective military commanders who were instrumental in the liberation not only of the northern city of Kobani but also of Raqqa and other ISIS-controlled areas in Syria. The stories of unseen snipers, booby-trapped buildings, nighttime river crossings--and, more deeply, of self-doubt and heroism--are well crafted. |
Live form : women, ceramics, and community / Jenni Sorkin. |
Sorkin's book sets out to accomplish three interrelated things. First, she aims to narrate the interlocking histories of ceramics and art in postwar United States through the contributions of three female figures: Marguerite Wildenhain, Mary Caroline (M. C.) Rchards, and Susan Peterson -- women who have been marginalized or simply left out of mainstream craft and art histories. Second, her book endeavors to disrupt the medium-specific rhetoric that dominates craft discourses by positioning ceramics in the language of performance. If analogies can be drawn between the practices of ceramics and theater, poetry, or television, it is because the ceramic classroom is already a space of demonstration; the act of "throwing" a pot, she points out, is a fundamentally performative mode. Third, Sorkin shows how the interdisciplinary communities fostered by the field of ceramics ultimately "set the stage for later, participatory forms of art and feminist collectivism," like Womanhouse. |