Women's History Month for Adults

Materials about, for, and pertaining to women, women's history, historical or significant female figures

Showing 1 - 20 of 59  There are a total of 178 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "The awakening"
Star rating for The awakening
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
Condemned as "sordid" and "immoral" on its publication in 1899, this story of a woman trapped in her marriage effectively ended Chopin's career but was revived as a proto-feminist classic in the 1970s. What Newsweek calls Chopin's "prophetic psychology" ensures its timeliness today.
Book cover for "The bell jar"
Star rating for The bell jar
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Esther Greenwood, a talented and successful writer, finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take womens aspirations seriously. This extraordinary work--echoing Plath's own experiences as a rising writer/editor in the early 1950s--chronicles the nervous breakdown of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful,...
Book cover for "Beloved"
Star rating for Beloved
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
Book cover for "The bluest eye"
Star rating for The bluest eye
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Book cover for "The Buddha in the attic"
Star rating for The Buddha in the attic
Average Rating:
2.9 stars
Description:
Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.
Book cover for "Calling Invisible Women"
Star rating for Calling Invisible Women
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
A mom in her early fifties, Clover knows she no longer turns heads the way she used to, and she’s only really missed when dinner isn’t on the table on time. Then Clover wakes up one morning to discover she’s invisible—truly invisible. She panics, but when her husband and son sit down to dinner, nothing is amiss. Even though she’s been with her husband, Arthur, since college, her condition goes unnoticed. Her friend Gilda...
Book cover for "The care and management of lies"
Star rating for The care and management of lies
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"By July 1914, the ties between Kezia Marchant and Thea Brissenden, friends since girlhood, have become strained--by Thea's passionate embrace of women's suffrage, and by the imminent marriage of Kezia to Thea's brother, Tom, who runs the family farm. When Kezia and Tom wed just a month before war is declared between Britain and Germany, Thea's gift to Kezia is a book on household management--a veiled criticism of the bride's prosaic life to come....
Book cover for "The chemist"
Star rating for The chemist
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
In this gripping page-turner, an ex-agent on the run from her former employers must take one more case to clear her name and save her life.
She used to work for the U.S. government, but very few people ever knew that. An expert in her field, she was one of the darkest secrets of an agency so clandestine it doesn't even have a name. And when they decided she was a liability, they came for her without warning.
Now she rarely stays in...
Book cover for "China dolls"
Star rating for China dolls
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Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"In 1938, Ruby, Helen and Grace, three girls from very different backgrounds, find themselves competing at the same audition for showgirl roles at San Francisco's exclusive 'Oriental' nightclub, the Forbidden City. Grace, an American-born Chinese girl has fled the Midwest and an abusive father. Helen is from a Chinese family who have deep roots in San Francisco's Chinatown. And, as both her friends know, Ruby is Japanese passing as Chinese. At times...
Book cover for "Circling the sun"
Star rating for Circling the sun
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"Paula McLain, author of the phenomenal bestseller The Paris Wife, now returns with her keenly anticipated new novel, transporting readers to colonial Kenya in the 1920s. Circling the Sun brings to life a fearless and captivating woman--Beryl Markham, a record-setting aviator caught up in a passionate love triangle with safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and Karen Blixen, author of the classic memoir Out of Africa. Brought to Kenya from England as a...
Book cover for "City of women"
Star rating for City of women
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
Hiding her clandestine activities behind the persona of a model Nazi soldier's wife at the height of World War II, Sigrid Schroeder dreams of her former Jewish lover and risks everything to hide a mother and two young children who she believes might be her lover's family. Whom do you trust, whom do you love, and who can be saved? At the height of World War II, Berlin has become a city of women. Sigrid Schröder, the model German soldier's wife,...
Book cover for "The color purple"
Star rating for The color purple
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
The lives of two sisters--Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a Southern woman married to a man she hates--are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years. "Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence"--Back cover.
Book cover for "The daughters of Mars"
Star rating for The daughters of Mars
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
Joining the war effort as nurses in 1915, two spirited Australian sisters, carrying a guilty secret, become the friends they never were at home and find themselves courageous in the face of extreme danger as they serve alongside remarkable women during the first World War. "From the beloved author of Schindler's List, a magnificent, epic novel of two sisters, both nurses during World War I, that has been hailed as perhaps "the best novel of Keneally's...
Book cover for "Difficult women"
Star rating for Difficult women
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Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"A collection of stories of ... hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection"--
Book cover for "Dreams of joy"
Star rating for Dreams of joy
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Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
A continuation of "Shanghai Girls" finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation's intolerant Communist culture.
Book cover for "The dressmaker's war"
Star rating for The dressmaker's war
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"In London, 1939, Ada Vaughan is a young woman with an unusual dressmaking skill, and dreams of a better life for herself. That life seems to arrive when Stanislaus, an Austrian aristocrat, sweeps Ada off her feet and brings her to Paris. When war breaks out, Stanislaus vanishes, and Ada is taken prisoner by the Germans, she must do everything she can to survive: by becoming dressmaker to the Nazi wives. Abandoned and alone as war rages, the choices...

17. Emma

Book cover for "Emma"
Star rating for Emma
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
Content with her life and not interested in marriage, Emma Woodhouse, a rich and beautiful heiress, causes complications with her matchmaking schemes.
Book cover for "Enemy women"
Star rating for Enemy women
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:

For the Colleys of southeastern Missouri, the War between the States is a plague that threatens devastation, despite the family's avowed neutrality. For eighteen-year-old Adair Colley, it is a nightmare that tears apart her family and forces her and her sisters to flee. The treachery of a fellow traveler, however, brings about her arrest, and she is caged with the criminal and deranged in a filthy women's prison.

But young Adair finds that

...
Book cover for "Everything I never told you"
Star rating for Everything I never told you
Author:
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue -- in Marilyn's case that her daughter...
Book cover for "The girls"
Star rating for The girls
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Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their...