Women's History Month - Beaverdale Books

Recommendations March 10, 2025

Daughter of Daring: The Trick-Riding, Train-Leaping, Road-Racing Life of Helen Gibson, Hollywood’s First Stunt Woman
Mallory O’Meara
Hanover Square Press

Helen Gibson was a woman willing to do anything to give audiences a thrill. Advertised as “The Most Daring Actress in Pictures,” Helen emerged in the early days of the twentieth-century silent film scene as a rodeo rider, background actor, stunt double, and eventually one of the era’s biggest action stars. Her exploits on motorcycles, train cars, and horseback were as dangerous as they were glamorous, featured in hundreds of films and serials–yet her legacy was quickly overshadowed by the increasingly hypermasculine and male-dominated evolution of cinema in the decades that would follow her.

Fearless and Free
Josephine Baker
Tiny Reparations Books

Josephine Baker’s autobiography is filled with her effervescent personality, and her voice rings as boldly today as when she first wrote to her admirers, “Stay young, lively, fearless, free, and go fast.”

After stealing the spotlight as a teenaged Broadway performer during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Josephine then took Paris by storm, dazzling audiences across the Roaring Twenties. In her famous banana skirt, she enraptured royalty and countless fans—Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso among them. She strolled the streets of Paris with her pet cheetah wearing a diamond collar. With her signature flapper bob and enthralling dance moves, she was one of the most recognizable women in the world.

During World War II, Josephine became a spy for the French Résistance. Her celebrity worked as her cover, as she hid spies in her entourage and secret messages in her costumes as she traveled. She later joined the Civil Rights movement in the US, boycotting segregated concert venues, and speaking at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr.

First published in France in 1949, her memoir will now finally be published in English. At last we can hear Josephine in her own voice: charming, passionate, and brave. Her words are thrilling and intimate, like she’s talking with her friends over after-show drinks in her dressing room. Through her own telling, we come to know a woman who danced to the top of the world and left her unforgettable mark on it.

American Poison: A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who Battled for Environmental Juustice
Daniel Stone
Dutton

At noon on October 27, 1924, a factory worker was admitted to a hospital in New York, suffering from hallucinations and convulsions. Before breakfast the next day, he was dead. Alice Hamilton was, perhaps, the only person who could prevent tragedy from happening again.

When Alice Hamilton arrived at the lead factory, she stood as a doctor who had pioneered the field of industrial medicine in the United States. Hamilton specialized in workplace safety years before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created. She was the first female faculty member at Harvard. She guided numerous studies on the dangers of lead. She had saved countless lives, changing industrial practices at a time when exposing workers to hazardous chemicals commonly led to strange and frightening deaths. But this time, she was up against a formidable new foe: America’s relentless push for progress, regardless of the cost.

The 1920s were an exciting time. Industry was booming. New inventions seemed to be everywhere, including automobiles. And in a laboratory, hunched over his periodic table, Thomas Midgley triumphantly found just the right chemical to improve the engines of those vehicles, setting himself up for a financial windfall and the sort of fame that would land his name in the history books: Leaded gasoline.

Soon, Hamilton would be on a collision course with Thomas Midgley, fighting with all her might against his invention, which poisoned the air we breathe, the water we drank, and the basic structure of our brains.

American Poison is the gripping story of the shocking lengths some will go to in the name of innovation—and the ramifications that continue to echo today.

Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
Tori Telfer
Harper Perennial

Inspired by author Tori Telfer’s Jezebel column “Lady Killers,” this thrilling and entertaining compendium investigates female serial killers and their crimes through the ages

When you think of serial killers throughout history, the names that come to mind are ones like Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what about Tillie Klimek, Moulay Hassan, Kate Bender? The narrative we’re comfortable with is the one where women are the victims of violent crime, not the perpetrators. In fact, serial killers are thought to be so universally, overwhelmingly male that in 1998, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference, “There are no female serial killers.”

Lady Killers, based on the popular online series that appeared on Jezebel and The Hairpin, disputes that claim and offers fourteen gruesome examples as evidence. Though largely forgotten by history, female serial killers such as Erzsébet Báthory, Nannie Doss, Mary Ann Cotton, and Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova rival their male counterparts in cunning, cruelty, and appetite for destruction.

Each chapter explores the crimes and history of a different subject, and then proceeds to unpack her legacy and her portrayal in the media, as well as the stereotypes and sexist clichés that inevitably surround her. The first book to examine female serial killers through a feminist lens with a witty and dryly humorous tone, Lady Killers dismisses easy explanations (she was hormonal, she did it for love, a man made her do it) and tired tropes (she was a femme fatale, a black widow, a witch), delving into the complex reality of female aggression and predation. Featuring 14 illustrations from Dame Darcy, Lady Killers is a bloodcurdling, insightful, and irresistible journey into the heart of darkness.

Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America
Dahlia Lithwick
Penguin Books

In the immediate aftershocks of Donald Trump’s victory over Hilary Clinton in 2016, women lawyers across the country, independently of one another, sprang into action. They were determined not to stand by while the Republican party did everything in their power to pursue devastating and often retrograde policies.

In Lady Justice, Dahlia Lithwick, one of the nation’s foremost legal commentators, illuminates these many heroes of the Trump years. From Sally Yates and Becca Heller, who fought the Muslim travel ban, to Roberta Kaplan, who sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, to Stacey Abrams, who worked to protect the voting rights of millions of Georgians, Lithwick dramatizes in thrilling detail the women lawyers who worked tirelessly to hold the line against the most chaotic presidency in living memory.

A celebration of the legal ingenuity and indefatigable spirit of the women whose work all too often went unrecognized at the time, Lady Justice is destined to be treasured and passed from hand to hand for generations to come.

Dancing Woman
Elaine Neil Orr
Blair

It’s 1963 and Isabel Hammond is an expat who has accompanied her agriculture aid worker husband to Nigeria, where she is hoping to find inspiration for her art and for her life. Then she meets charismatic local singer Bobby Tunde, and they share a night of passion that could upend everything. Seeking solace and distraction, she returns to her painting and her home in a rural town where she plants a lemon tree and unearths an ancient statue buried in her garden. She knows that the dancing female figure is not hers to keep, yet she is reluctant to give it up, and soon, she notices other changes that make her wonder what the dancing woman might portend.

Against the backdrop of political unrest in Nigeria, Isabel’s personal situation also becomes precarious. She finds herself in the center of a tide of suspicion, leaving her torn between the confines of her domestic life and the desire to immerse herself in her art and in the culture that surrounds her. The expat society, the ancient Nigerian culture, her beautiful family, and even the statue hidden in a back room—each trouble and beguile Isabel. Amid all of this, can she finally become who she wants to be?

In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial
Mona Chollet
St. Martin’s Griffin

Centuries after the infamous witch hunts that swept through Europe and America, witches continue to hold a unique fascination for many: as fairy tale villains, practitioners of pagan religion, as well as feminist icons. Witches are both the ultimate victim and the stubborn, elusive rebel. But who were the women who were accused and often killed for witchcraft?

Celebrated feminist writer Mona Chollet explores the types of women who were accused of witchcraft and persecuted: the independent woman, the childless woman, and the elderly woman, who for centuries have been censored, repressed, and even killed. Chollet concludes that rather than being a brief moment in history, these women continue to be harassed and oppressed. Women today are direct heirs to those who were hunted down and killed for their thoughts and actions, facing the same sort of judgements and stereotypes that women have battled for centuries. With fiery prose and arguments that range from the scholarly to the cultural, In Defense of Witches seeks to unite the mythic image of the witch with modern women who seek to live their lives on their own terms.

A Rome of One’s Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire
Emma Southon
Harry N. Abrams

This is a history of women who caused outrage, led armies in rebellion, wrote poetry; who lived independently or under the thumb of emperors. Told with humor and verve as well as a deep scholarly background, A Rome of One’s Own highlights women overlooked and misunderstood, and through them offers a fascinating and groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient world.

The history of Rome has long been narrow and one-sided, essentially a history of “the Doing of Important Things.” And as far as Roman historians have been concerned, women don’t make that history.

From Romulus through the political stab-fest of the late Republic, and then on to all the emperors, Roman historians may deign to give you a wife or a mother to show how bad things become when women get out of control, but history is more than that.

Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own is the best kind of correction. This is a retelling of the history of Rome with all the things Roman history writers have relegated to the background, or designated as domestic, feminine, or worthless.

Good Girl
Aria Aber
Hogarth Press

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.

Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial, anti-immigrant tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila’s stops to ask herself the most important question: who does she want to be?

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.

Becoming Elizabeth Arden: The Woman Behind the Global Beauty Empire
Stacy A Cordery
Viking

Elizabeth Arden was a household name on six continents and a millionaire several times over before her death in 1966. Arden counted British royalty and social elites from the overlapping worlds of New York, Hollywood, London, and Paris among her clients. She revolutionized skin care and cosmetics, making it acceptable for all women to embrace glamour and wear makeup—not just actresses and prostitutes. She created a successful international business empire before women gained the vote and at a time when virtually no woman owned or ran a national company. She developed the first luxury spa and insisted on a holistic understanding of health and beauty. Unconventional and driven, Arden fervently believed that every woman could be beautiful.

Acclaimed biographer Stacy Cordery does full justice to one of America’s greatest entrepreneurs. Canadian-born Florence Nightingale Graham turned herself into Elizabeth Arden, using her uncanny sense of the possible to take full advantage of everything New York City offered, building her company and becoming one with her brand. In an astounding rags-to-riches tale, Elizabeth Arden came to personify sophistication and refinement. Her hard work and innovation made makeup, fitness, and style not only acceptable but de rigueur. Arden prospered throughout the Depression, reimagined women’s needs during two World Wars, and by pioneering new approaches to marketing and advertising, ushered beauty into the modern era. Cordery delivers a compelling picture of a modern CEO whose career provides a model for aspiring businesses to this day.

How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music
Alison Fensterstock & NPR
HarperOne

Turning the Tables, launched in 2017, has revolutionized recognition of female artists, whether it be in best album lists or in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music brings this impressive history and fascinating reshaping to the page and includes material draws from more than fifty years of NPR’s coverage of great musical heroes and intriguing creators. This book is a must-have for music fans, songwriters, feminist historians, and those interested in how artists think and work, including:

Joan Baez talking about nonviolence as a musical principle in 1971
Dolly Parton’s favorite song and the story behind it
Patti Smith describing art as her “jealous mistress” in 1974
Nina Simone, in 2001, explaining how she developed the edge in her voice as a tool against racism.
Taylor Swift talking about when she had no idea if her musical career might work
Odetta on how shifting from classical music to folk allowed her to express her fury over Jim Crow

This incomparable hardcover volume is a vital record of history destined to become a classic and a great gift for any music fan or creative thinker.

Women Living Deliciously
Florence Given
Simon Element

Women Living Deliciously wants us to fall in love with our lives. It will help women uncover the sense of awe and wonder that has been buried by the layers of shame, perfectionism and self-objectification that get piled on us by the patriarchy. For too long we have internalized the belief that our bodies are things to be looked at—instead of lived in. That it’s embarrassing to fully express ourselves. That we cannot trust the parts of ourselves that are so full of desire.

This book will unpack the many barriers women face when trying to access joy so that they can discover the delicious life that’s theirs for the taking.

International-bestselling author Florence Given wants to restore your lust for life and your sense of agency, giving you the courage and permission to inch closer to the wildly expansive life that you FULLY deserve—not in the future, not when you’re perfect, not when you’re prettier—but right now.

The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America
Stephanie Gorton
Ecco Press

In the 1910s, as the birth control movement was born, two leaders emerged: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett. While Sanger would go on to found Planned Parenthood, Dennett’s name has largely faded from public knowledge. Each held a radically different vision for what reproductive autonomy and birth control access should look like in America.

Few are aware of the fierce personal and political rivalry that played out between Sanger and Dennett over decades—a battle that had a profound impact on the lives of American women. Meticulously researched and vividly drawn, The Icon and the Idealist reveals how and why these two women came to activism, the origins of the clash between them, and the ways in which their missteps and breakthroughs have reverberated across American society for generations.

With deep archival scope and rigorous execution, Stephanie Gorton weaves together a personal narrative of two fascinating women and the political history of a country rocked by changing social norms, the Depression, and a fervor for eugenics. Refusing to shy away from the enmeshed struggles of race, class, and gender, Gorton has made a sweeping examination of every force that has come in the way of women’s reproductive freedom.

Brimming with insight and compelling portraits of women’s struggles throughout the twentieth century, The Icon and the Idealist is a comprehensive history of a radical cultural movement.

Mad Wife
Kate Hamilton
Beacon Press

In this electrifying literary memoir, Kate Hamilton deftly traces her complicated journey from loving wife to gaslit victim to furious feminist with an urgent goal: to expose how women are pressured to uphold the institutions of marriage and family, no matter the cost.

In the tradition of Know My Name and The Argonauts, Hamilton braids her own story with cultural criticism to argue that we must face the misogyny lurking in the shadows of marriage in the 21st century. She examines the beliefs and conditioning that held her in an increasingly destructive marriage and unflinchingly documents what she did to keep her family together—therapy, unwanted sex with her husband, swinging, affairs, an abortion—without always knowing what she freely chose. And she considers the damage that was done, to herself and others, until she could acknowledge that to save herself and her sons, she had to destroy her marriage.

Emotionally intense and timely, Mad Wife interrogates how marriage and the institutions that support it provide the perfect ecosystem for abuse of women and children, endangering their lives and denying them autonomy—all in the service of men’s desires.

Women’s History Month

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