The best books that will blow your mind about US women’s history

On one level, this is a book about housework in the pre-Civil War northern United States. Much more profoundly, it shatters ideas about unpaid labor in early industrial capitalism. It completely changed my—and many readers’—ideas of what constitutes “work,” what it means to contribute to a household economy, and how ideas about wages (and, especially, work done by men outside the home) obscured early capitalists’ dependence on women’s unwaged work. After reading this, you’ll never refer to “women who worked” and “women who didn’t” again.  It should be essential reading not only for women’s historians, but for anyone interested in ideologies of labor, capitalism, and the history of work.

[Full disclosure: I met Jeanne Boydston on my second day of graduate school and we collaborated closely on our dissertations (later books). She was my best friend and best teacher until her much-too-early death in 2008.]

I think it is impossible to step away from this book without seriously reconsidering the history—and very definition—of reproductive rights. In this now-classic work, sociologist and legal scholar Dorothy Roberts exposes the systematic degradation of Black women’s reproduction. From the era of enslavement (in which enslaved women, and only enslaved women, could through their reproduction increase an enslaver’s wealth) to the eugenics movement to early birth control advocacy to forced sterilization to the panic about “crack babies,” she redefines the very nature of reproductive justice.

How we shape historical memory is central to how we understand history, and breaking down myths about the past is a crucial step. This book takes on the standard account of the movement for women’s rights—where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony play all the leading roles—and shows how they explicitly went about shaping that legacy. In editing (with Matilda Joslyn Gage) the multi-volume History of Woman Suffrage, they offered access to thousands of documents about that movement, but also, and explicitly, consolidated their own leadership in ways that diminished the work of grassroots activists and movement rivals. This book (like the McGuire, next on my list) is critical for anyone who thinks about, or works in, grassroots movements for social justice.

When I ask a well-read, nonhistorian about a book that changed their view of U.S. history, they often mention At the Dark End of the Street. This book addresses a deeply-embedded movement myth: the idea that Rosa Parks came to activism and fame when she refused to move to the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus. As McGuire shows, a long history of challenging the sexual assault of Black women by white men shaped Parks’s—and many other women’s—activism in the Black freedom struggle of the mid-20th century. That they were largely erased from the movement’s story of its leaders—and that the frequency of sexual assault remained largely obscured—makes this dramatic story all the more essential.

When I first read this book, I thought “This is the book I’ve been waiting for!” Focused on New York and Philadelphia at the beginning of the 20th century, it explores the intimate lives of Black women who have been largely invisible in Black women’s history: girls and women who did not fit the definitions of Black “respectability.” Using sources in ways creative and thrilling, it explores how those women imagined a “free life” within a world shaped by racism, sexual abuse, single motherhood, and economic insecurity. Sometimes their new forms of intimacy involved “ordinary refusals”—to follow the law, to do menial labor, to submit—while at other times their challenges to Victorian beliefs and practices involved song, luxury, and sex. Hartman’s book is a gorgeous read.