Women’s History Month Reading List
Explore women’s impact throughout hundreds of years of history and how they’re changing the future with titles from Basic Books and our sister imprint Seal Press.
The first biography of Elsie Robinson, the most influential newspaper columnist you’ve never heard of
“Scheeres and Gilbert attempt to resurrect Elsie, fill in her biography and place her in the pantheon of women we should know about. The result is an engaging tale that doesn’t gloss over the extreme adversity and restrictions Robinson faced as a woman of much ambition and few means.”—New York Times
“Before We Were Trans is a thoughtful, fun, and refreshingly readable romp through the history of gender variance before the invention of contemporary ‘transgender’ categories and concepts.”—Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History
The dazzling story of the Greenwich Village feminists who blazed the trail for the movement’s most radical ideas
“A deeply researched and kinetic historical telling.”—Washington Post
The secret history of the rebellious Frenchwomen who were exiled to colonial Louisiana and found power in the Mississippi Valley
“Gripping from its opening scene of a corpse discovered on a Paris side street, Joan DeJean’s Mutinous Women tells the stories of these French women, deported as unwanted criminals to what would become, less than a century later, part of the United States.”—Wall Street Journal
The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation’s first HBCUs
“Rescued from the horror of slavery and the neglect of history, Mary Lumpkin’s life story in The Devil’s Half Acre is one of tenacity, endurance, courage, and achievement.”
—Margot Lee Shetterly, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Hidden Figures
“An elegant and expansive history” (New York Times) of African American women’s pursuit of political power—and how it transformed America
“In her important new book, Jones shows how African American women waged their own fight for the vote, and why their achievements speak mightily to our present moment as voters, regardless of gender or race.”—Washington Post
A historian of gender explores the complicated relationship between womanhood and motherhood
“A timely, refreshingly open-hearted study of the choices women make and the cards they’re dealt.”—Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can’t Sleep
The vibrant and surprising lives of the women in Augustine’s Confessions
“With a rare balance of state-of-the-art erudition and felicitous hypotheses, Kate Cooper has brought the hidden women in Augustine’s early life into the light.”—Peter Brown, author of Augustine of Hippo: A Biography
A renowned feminist thinker argues we need to get in the way of happiness, our own and other people’s, to build a more just world
“This book is a great gift, enormously important for overcoming this vicious trans/feminist divide, showing how anti-racism and the struggle for disability rights is central to feminist and queer thinking and politics.”—Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble