March is Women's History Month. In 1978, recognizing that knowledge of women's history was lacking in the public consciousness, the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women initiated a Women's History Week celebration to coincide with International Women's Day on March 8. It grew into a full month in 1987 when the National Women's History Project petitioned the U.S. Congress to do so. It is a time to think about and learn from the economic, political, and social achievements of women past and present. In that spirit, here are some books from the library collection about and by women that relate the experiences of women from around the world, commemorate great accomplishments, and ask difficult questions.
Nadje Al-Ali & Nicola Christine Pratt. (2009). What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq.
Based on extensive research and on interviews with over one hundred Iraqi women actively involved in the public life of their country, this book is the first to relate their experiences of the violence, political turmoil, and economic catastrophe that resulted from the U.S.-led military intervention and occupation. It examines how, in spite of repeatedly stated U.S. aims of liberating Iraqi women, the forces unleashed by and inherent to the invasion have led to a deterioration of women's circumstances and subjected them to new and often more violent forms of oppression. The authors also show the rich and varied strategies Iraqi women have pursued to resist these forces and be a part of the reconstruction.
Lisa Shannon. (2010). A Thousand Sisters: My Journey of Hope into the Worst Place on Earth to be a Woman.
When Lisa Shannon learned about the brutal atrocities being inflicted upon Congolese women in that country's interminable fighting, she responded by raising money first with a solo 30-mile run and then founding the nonprofit organization Run for Congo Women, a global run/walk movement benefiting Women for Women International’s Congo program. This memoir also chronicles her later journeys to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to meet many of the women she sponsored and to listen firsthand to their stories of courage and resilience, shining light on suffering that the world has long ignored.
Ida Rae Egli, ed. (1992). No Rooms of Their Own: Women Writers of Early California.
No Rooms of Their Own collects together writings from a diverse selection of women who lived and worked in California in the period from its rapid settlement beginning with the Gold Rush to the end of its isolation with the arrival of the transcontinental railroad. Freed from traditional roles in a frontier society, women writers were part of the creation of novel literary traditions that sought to reflect the unique experiences and ideas of the peoples settling in the varied landscapes of the young state. The fiction, essays, poetry, memoirs, and diary entries of both well-known authors and ones long obscured describe the challenges they faced in an extraordinary new world.
Margaret Randall. (1981, revised 1995). Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle. & (1994). Sandino's Daughters Revisited: Feminism in Nicaragua.
From 1979-80, commissioned by the Nicaraguan Ministry of Culture, Margaret Randall wrote Sandino's Daughters. Based on interviews with women who had been active at all levels in the Nicaraguan revolution, this initial work portrayed that struggle from a woman’s perspective and explored the links between women's liberation and national liberation. She returned in 1991 after the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, to again interview the women of the revolutionary struggle about their lives during the intervening years, concluding in Sandino’s Daughters Revisited that the Sandinista’s leaders failures to confront feminism and adopt a feminist understanding contributed greatly to their defeat and the defeat of the revolutionary project. Together, they are landmark studies of the relationship between feminism and revolution, drawing to the fore questions of gender, violence, human rights, and national struggle in twentieth-century Latin America.
Joan Dash. (1996). We Shall Not be Moved: The Women's Factory Strike of 1909.
In November 1909, after years of unfair wages and working conditions, teenage girls led some 30,000 shirt cutters, pressers, and finishers in the first large successful strike of female workers in U.S. history. Dash's narrative account describes how they organized at a time when union's resisted women's participation, and how they came together with college-educated suffragists and women in high society in an effort that ultimately led to a settlement between more than 300 manufacturers and the newly formed International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
Rebecca Skloot. (2010). The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black mother when she died of cervical cancer in 1951. While treating her, doctors took tissue samples for research without her knowledge, and from these samples they began growing in culture the first viable line of “immortal” human cells, known as HeLa. HeLa cells have since been used extensively in many areas of scientific and medical research, aiding in the development of the polio vaccine, AIDS treatments, in vitro fertilization methods, and much more. The Lacks family, however, has derived no benefit from this use of her cells and today lack basic health insurance. Skloot tells the story of this woman, her family, and HeLa, illuminating the human side of issues of scientific ethics, race, poverty, privacy, and the sanctity of the human body.
