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 24  There are a total of 178 valid entries on the list.
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 "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...

7. 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 "The help"
Star rating for The help
Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Description:
In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another. Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women, including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend, and a recently...
Book cover for "Homegoing"
Star rating for Homegoing
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Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the...
Book cover for "The invention of wings"
Star rating for The invention of wings
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
"The story follows Hetty 'Handful' Grimke, a Charleston slave, and Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Grimke family. The novel begins on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership over Handful, who is to be her handmaid. "The Invention of Wings" follows the next thirty-five years of their lives. Inspired in part by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke (a feminist, suffragist and, importantly, an abolitionist), Kidd allows herself to go...
Book cover for "Lilac girls"
Star rating for Lilac girls
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Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"On a September day in Manhattan in 1939, twenty-something Caroline Ferriday is consumed by her efforts to secure the perfect boutonniere for an important French diplomat and resisting the romantic advances of a married actor. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish Catholic teenager, is nervously anticipating the changes that are sure to come since Germany has declared war on Poland. As tensions rise abroad - and in her personal...
Book cover for "Longbourn"
Star rating for Longbourn
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Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
A reimagining of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" from the perspectives of its below-stairs servants captures the drama of the Bennet household from the sideline viewpoint of Sara, an orphaned housemaid. In this irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice, the servants take center stage. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber pots for the Bennet household....
Book cover for "Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule"
Star rating for Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"The New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker and Mrs. Lincoln's Rival imagines the inner life of Julia Grant, beloved as a Civil War general's wife and the First Lady, yet who grappled with a profound and complex relationship with the slave who was her namesake-until she forged a proud identity of her own. In 1844, Missouri belle Julia Dent met dazzling horseman Lieutenant Ulysses S Grant. Four years passed before their parents...
Book cover for "The nightingale"
Star rating for The nightingale
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"Viann and Isabelle have always been close despite their differences. Younger, bolder sister Isabelle lives in Paris while Viann lives a quiet and content life in the French countryside with her husband Antoine and their daughter. When World War II strikes and Antoine is sent off to fight, Viann and Isabelle's father sends Isabelle to help her older sister cope. As the war progresses, it's not only the sisters' relationship that is tested, but also...
Book cover for "Orphan train"
Star rating for Orphan train
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
Penobscot Indian Molly Ayer is close to 'aging out' out of the foster care system. A community service position helping an elderly woman clean out her home is the only thing keeping Molly out of juvie and worse. As she helps Vivian sort through her possessions and memories, Molly learns that she and Vivian aren't as different as they seem to be. A young Irish immigrant orphaned in New York City, Vivian was put on a train to the Midwest with hundreds...
Book cover for "Outlander"
Star rating for Outlander
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Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
Hurtled back through time more than two hundred years to Scotland in 1743, Claire Randall finds herself caught in the midst of an unfamiliar world torn apart by violence, pestilence, and revolution and haunted by her growing feelings for James Fraser, a young soldier

18. Passing

Book cover for "Passing"
Star rating for Passing
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING TESSA THOMPSON AND RUTH NEGGA
Two women in 1920s New York discover how fluid and dangerous our perceptions of race can be in this electrifying classic of the Harlem Renaissance—with an introduction by Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman, finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
“The genius of this book is that its protagonists . . . are complex
...
Book cover for "People of the book"
Star rating for People of the book
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Offered a coveted job to analyze and conserve a priceless Sarajevo Haggadah, Australian rare-book expert Hanna Heath discovers a series of tiny artifacts in the volume's ancient binding that reveal its historically significant origins. A fictionalized account of the turbulent history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript which has survived into the twentieth century thanks to people of various faiths who risked their lives to safeguard...
Book cover for "A piece of the world"
Star rating for A piece of the world
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family's remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best-known paintings of the twentieth century"--Back cover.