If you clicked on this post, you probably don’t only read hidden histories about badass women during the Women’s History Month. You are probably already pretty well-versed in women’s history, and March is just a reason to dive even deeper. So, let’s dive! Here are five nonfiction books about women whose stories deserve to be told, remembered, and commemorated.
I don’t know how information like this ever gets declassified, but I’m here to read it when the statue of limitations eventually runs out. Here we have the memoir of Jonna Hiestand Mendez, who shares the stories of her life as a female spy at the height of the Cold War. She started off as a “contract wife,” essentially as a secretary for the CIA to aid her husband… but they soon realized she had a real talent for espionage, too. This book takes us all over the world in her various tours of duty, and tells how she ultimately rose to Chief of Disguise (which is a real title!) at the CIA’s Office of Technical Service.
Rebecca Donner writes the biography of her great-great-aunt, Mildred Harnack, the only identified American in the leadership of the German resistance. Mildred—originally from Milwaukee—enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and almost immediately observed the rise of the Nazi party. All the while, she held secret activist meetings in her own apartment from 1932-40, and she did everything from recruit working class Germans into the resistance, plot acts of sabotage, and of course, help Jews escape the terrible reign. She also became a spy when the war officially started, and when she was ambushed by the Gestapo during her escape to Sweden, Hitler overruled her initial sentencing of six years in a prison camp and ordered her executed… by guillotine.
This narrative nonfiction memoir sounds absolutely captivating: not only is it a family biography, which is interesting enough in itself, but this family has intrigue! From when she was a little girl, Meryl was the one whom her aunt Mollie entrusted with the family history of their cousin, Franya Winter. Franya defied Hasidic customs and played roles in Vilna’s Yiddish theater like prostitutes, bellhops, lovers, and nuns. Mollie never told Meryl how Vilna died, though, and until recently, Meryl assumed that her aunt took that secret to her grave….
I love a hidden history about a woman rebel, but this one is an epic legacy: it’s not just one woman, it’s a whole line of Iranian women who led rebellions, and their first written iteration dates back to the Persian Empire! This biography is the nonfiction saga of female warriors who bred and trained Caspian horses to aid in their own survival, whether it was to lead refugees of domestic violence into independent mountain colonies, working with the US Green Berets in 2001, even to a contemporary, unique smuggling operation. Their stories have been all but forgotten, especially in the western world. Until now.
La Mutine was what the French called the ship they filled with mutinous women—which is a bit on-the-nose for my taste, but a badass name for a ship in general. The 132 women had been falsely accused of sex crimes in France, so in 1719, they were shackled in the ship’s hold and stored alongside other goods headed toward the French colony of Mississippi. Only 62 of the prisoners survived the voyage, but they went on to climb the social ladder through marriages and property—and they were instrumental in building the communities of New Orleans, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi.
Mary Kay McBrayer is the author of America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster. You can find her short works at Oxford American, Narratively, Mental Floss, and FANGORIA, among other publications. She hosts the podcast about women in true crime, The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told. Follow Mary Kay McBrayer on Instagram and Twitter, or check out her author site here.