92 books like Public Vows

By Nancy F. Cott,

Here are 92 books that Public Vows fans have personally recommended if you like Public Vows. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Book cover of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship

Rebecca DeWolf Author Of Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920-1963

From my list on how gender has shaped citizenship in the US.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian with a PhD in history from American University. My research has focused on the changing nature of U.S. citizenship after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In particular, my newly released book, Gendered Citizenship, sheds light on the competing civic ideologies embedded in the original conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from the 1920s through the 1960s. My research has won recognition through several grants and fellowships and my writing has appeared in the Washington Post, History News Network, New America Weekly, Gender on the Ballot, and Frontiers

Rebecca's book list on how gender has shaped citizenship in the US

Rebecca DeWolf Why did Rebecca love this book?

Linda Kerber’s No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies offers a fantastic insight into the maleness of rights-bearing citizenship embedded within the United States legal tradition. As Kerber demonstrates, the notion that women were incapable of performing certain civic obligations formed a central reason for why early U.S. political and legal authorities had excluded women from certain rights of citizenship. I found Kerber’s study especially helpful for dissecting the history of the common law tradition of domestic relations, or the doctrine known as coverture. As I discuss in the first chapters of my own book, and as Kerber brilliantly illustrates in No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies, the doctrine of coverture deprived women of having self-ownership over their own bodies, which led to intense restrictions on women’s opportunities and their overall civic autonomy. 

By Linda K. Kerber,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This pioneering study redefines women's history in the United States by focusing on civic obligations rather than rights. Looking closely at thirty telling cases from the pages of American legal history, Kerber's analysis reaches from the Revolution, when married women did not have the same obligation as their husbands to be "patriots," up to the present, when men and women, regardless of their marital status, still have different obligations to serve in the Armed Forces.

An original and compelling consideration of American law and culture, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies emphasizes the dangers of excluding women from other civic…


Book cover of A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics

Rebecca DeWolf Author Of Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920-1963

From my list on how gender has shaped citizenship in the US.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian with a PhD in history from American University. My research has focused on the changing nature of U.S. citizenship after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In particular, my newly released book, Gendered Citizenship, sheds light on the competing civic ideologies embedded in the original conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from the 1920s through the 1960s. My research has won recognition through several grants and fellowships and my writing has appeared in the Washington Post, History News Network, New America Weekly, Gender on the Ballot, and Frontiers

Rebecca's book list on how gender has shaped citizenship in the US

Rebecca DeWolf Why did Rebecca love this book?

While other scholars have focused on how various definitions of womanhood influenced the formation of the United States’ political and legal systems, Mark Kann pays closer attention to how perceptions of manhood shaped the creation of the U.S. during the early republic. In A Republic of Men, Kann contends that the U.S.’s founders sought to establish a republic based on male authority and female subordination. During the early years of the republic, as Kann describes it, political and legal authorities connected white men to productivity and reason while linking all women to inherent weakness and dependency. I found Kann’s book especially helpful for understanding how American political and legal authorities sought to institutionalize rights and privilege for white men only. 

By Mark E. Kann,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Republic of Men as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What role did manhood play in early American Politics? In A Republic of Men, Mark E. Kann argues that the American founders aspired to create a "republic of men" but feared that "disorderly men" threatened its birth, health, and longevity. Kann demonstrates how hegemonic norms of manhood-exemplified by "the Family Man," for instance--were deployed as a means of stigmatizing unworthy men, rewarding responsible men with citizenship, and empowering exceptional men with positions of leadership and authority, while excluding women from public life.
Kann suggests that the founders committed themselves in theory to the democratic proposition that all men were created…


Book cover of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America

Rebecca DeWolf Author Of Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920-1963

From my list on how gender has shaped citizenship in the US.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian with a PhD in history from American University. My research has focused on the changing nature of U.S. citizenship after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In particular, my newly released book, Gendered Citizenship, sheds light on the competing civic ideologies embedded in the original conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from the 1920s through the 1960s. My research has won recognition through several grants and fellowships and my writing has appeared in the Washington Post, History News Network, New America Weekly, Gender on the Ballot, and Frontiers

Rebecca's book list on how gender has shaped citizenship in the US

Rebecca DeWolf Why did Rebecca love this book?

Alice Kessler-Harris’s In Pursuit of Equity is an essential book for anyone who is interested in studying how gendered ideas have shaped the history of rights and citizenship in the United States. As Harris reveals, for much of the U.S.’s history, men were defined as the primary rights-bearing citizens in U.S. society while women were defined as family members who were in need of extra-legal supervision and protection. This contrast has not only created stark differences in how the government and laws have treated men and women citizens, but it has also created striking limitations on women’s range of choices for how to participate in public life. Harris’s book first opened my eyes to the various ways our assumptions about gender have influenced men and women’s social roles as well as impacting the very concept of rights and citizenship in the United States. 

By Alice Kessler-Harris,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked In Pursuit of Equity as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this volume, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the transformation of some of the United States' most significant social policies. Tracing changing ideals of fairness from the 1920s to the 1970s, she shows how a deeply embedded set of beliefs, or "gendered imagination" shaped seemingly neutral social legislation to limit the freedom and equality of women. Law and custom generally sought to protect women from exploitation, and sometimes from employment itself; but at
the same time, they assigned the most important benefits to wage work. Most policy makers (even female ones) assumed from the beginning that women would not be breadwinners. Kessler-Harris…


Book cover of Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor

Rebecca DeWolf Author Of Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920-1963

From my list on how gender has shaped citizenship in the US.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian with a PhD in history from American University. My research has focused on the changing nature of U.S. citizenship after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In particular, my newly released book, Gendered Citizenship, sheds light on the competing civic ideologies embedded in the original conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from the 1920s through the 1960s. My research has won recognition through several grants and fellowships and my writing has appeared in the Washington Post, History News Network, New America Weekly, Gender on the Ballot, and Frontiers

Rebecca's book list on how gender has shaped citizenship in the US

Rebecca DeWolf Why did Rebecca love this book?

In Unequal Freedom, Nakano Glenn provides a brilliant analysis of how the multiple axes of power relations, including race, gender, and labor, have shaped the terms of citizenship in the United States. In the process, Glenn unpacks how the history of the concept of citizenship is a powerful tool for understanding the various ways power dynamics have influenced the terms of belonging to a national community. Glenn’s book is an inspiring study that has pushed me to think more deeply about the notion of citizenship and to understand that the concept of citizenship involves more than just indicating one’s nationality status. As Glenn shows, citizenship denotes a system of deeply entrenched boundaries that have determined not only who is allowed to be a member of a certain community, but also who is allowed to be an active participant in governing that community. 

By Evelyn Nakano Glenn,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Unequal Freedom as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The inequalities that persist in America have deep historical roots. Evelyn Nakano Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. During this era the country experienced enormous social and economic changes with the abolition of slavery, rapid territorial expansion, and massive immigration, and struggled over the meaning of free labor and the essence of citizenship as people who previously had been excluded sought the promise of economic freedom and full political rights.

After a lucid overview of the concepts of the free worker and the…


Book cover of The Lost Wife

Marc Klein Author Of The In Between

From my list on to make you cry.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve devoted my career to writing love stories. I’ve analyzed and dissected most of the great ones, always with the intention of writing something to join their ranks. Along the way, I noticed something interesting: the books that make people cry often stick with them, long after they’ve finished reading them. Perhaps this is because we all need to release feelings that are not socially acceptable? Whatever the reason, if you’re like me and love a good cry, then you’ll most certainly enjoy the books on my list.

Marc's book list on to make you cry

Marc Klein Why did Marc love this book?

Until I wrote my book I was exclusively a screenwriter. And throughout my career, I’ve been hired to adapt a variety of different novels, mostly love stories and romantic comedies. But nothing I’ve ever worked on has haunted me quite like Alyson Richman’s tale of first love – a love ripped apart by the brutality of the Nazis and their “Final Solution.” And yet, even as the horrors unfold, Richman always manages to find pinpoints of light in the darkness. Her prose is both elegant and poetic – and the tale she weaves will undoubtedly call forth the waterworks.

By Alyson Richman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Lost Wife as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A rapturous novel of star-crossed love in a time of war-from the international bestselling author of The Secret of Clouds.

During the last moments of calm in prewar Prague, Lenka, a young art student, and Josef, who is studying medicine, fall in love. With the promise of a better future, they marry-only to have their dreams shattered by the imminent Nazi invasion. Like so many others, they are torn apart by the currents of war.

Now a successful obstetrician in America, Josef has never forgotten the wife he believes died in the war. But in the Nazi ghetto of Terezin,…


Book cover of Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage

Liz Heinecke Author Of Radiant: The Dancer, the Scientist, and a Friendship Forged in Light

From my list on meeting fascinating historical figures.

Why am I passionate about this?

I adore non-fiction books that read like novels. After ten years of working in research labs, my master’s degree in biology led me to a new career in science writing. I recently dove into the worlds of narrative non-fiction and history when I wrote Radiant, the Dancer, The Scientist and a Friendship Forged in Light. Immersing myself in Belle Époque Paris to research and intertwine the stories of Marie Curie and the inventor/dancer Loie Fuller helped me discover a passion for telling the stories of important figures forgotten by history. 

Liz's book list on meeting fascinating historical figures

Liz Heinecke Why did Liz love this book?

In Portrait of a Marriage, Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw beautifully brings John Steinbeck’s first wife Carol into the spotlight. The impeccably researched narrative lays out the path of a ten-year marriage doomed to fail, even as Carol shapes John into one of America’s great writers. I couldn’t put it down. 

By Susan Shillinglaw,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Carol and John Steinbeck as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Carol Henning Steinbeck, writer John Steinbeck's first wife, was his creative anchor, the inspiration for his great work of the 1930s, culminating in The Grapes of Wrath. When they met at Lake Tahoe in 1928, their attachment was immediate, their personalities meshing in creative synergy. Carol was unconventional, artistic, and compelling. During the formative years of Steinbeck's career, when they lived in San Francisco, Pacific Grove, and Los Gatos, their modernist circle included Ed Ricketts, Joseph Campbell, and Lincoln Steffens. In many ways Carol's story is all too familiar: a creative and intelligent woman subsumes her own life and work…


Book cover of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage

Rui Diogo Author Of Meaning of Life, Human Nature, and Delusions: How Tales about Love, Sex, Races, Gods and Progress Affect Our Lives and Earth's Splendor

From my list on understand human nature and sexuality.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an unusual scientist in the sense that I have doctorates in both biology and anthropology, so I am very interested in the dichotomy between what our bodies truly want (biology) and how we are supposed to behave, or tell others to behave, in our cultural settings (cultural anthropology). Amazingly, studies show that we spend more time and attention in our lives living for others for what they think of us, than doing what we truly want, and that we often regret that, when we are close to dying. These books make us reconsider that way of living, so we can change this before it is too late. 

Rui's book list on understand human nature and sexuality

Rui Diogo Why did Rui love this book?

The book is, to my knowledge, the only one that fully covers the evolution of marriage in the West, including historical details and interesting biological and anthropological data; it changes the way we are indoctrinated to think by showing that sex, love, and marriage were for most of the time completely separate things, while we now try as much to force the three items to be always together.

The most surprising part for people who have not been familiar with the history of these topics is how recent and geographically localized it is the expectation that love, sex, and marriage should be together.

By Stephanie Coontz,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Marriage, a History as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Just when the clamor over "traditional" marriage couldn’t get any louder, along comes this groundbreaking book to ask, "What tradition?" In Marriage, a History, historian and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz takes readers from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the torments of Victorian lovers to demonstrate how recent the idea of marrying for love is—and how absurd it would have seemed to most of our ancestors. It was when marriage moved into the emotional sphere in the nineteenth century, she argues, that it suffered as an institution just as it began to thrive as a personal relationship. This enlightening…


Book cover of War Brides: A Novel

Susan Tate Ankeny Author Of The Girl and the Bombardier: A True Story of Resistance and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied France

From my list on women during WW2.

Why am I passionate about this?

Susan Tate Ankeny left a career in teaching to write the story of her father’s escape from Nazi-occupied France. In 2011, after being led on his path through France by the same Resistance fighters who guided him in 1944, she felt inspired to tell the story of these brave French patriots, especially the 17-year-old- girl who risked her own life to save her father’s. Susan is a member of the 8th Air Force Historical Society, the Air Force Escape and Evasion Society, and the Association des Sauveteurs d’Aviateurs Alliés. 

Susan's book list on women during WW2

Susan Tate Ankeny Why did Susan love this book?

War Brides is a work of historical fiction that explores the lives of five young women from differing backgrounds who meet in a small English village in 1939. I love World War II stories about ordinary people on the Homefront. Despite a slightly misleading title, I was drawn to the strong characters who face the horrors surrounding them with the unwavering support of one another. Bryan has done extensive research into the time period and the traumatic effect the war had on British citizens. What sets this story apart is the inspiring friendship the women develop that endures over time despite the challenges of their differences, the terror of bombing raids that cause the deaths of their neighbors and friends, and an unforgivable deception.

By Lois Battle,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked War Brides as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A vibrant novel set in postwar America from the New York Times bestselling author of The Florabama Ladies' Auxiliary and Sewing Circle

World War II is over, but for three young Australian women who meet on their way to new lives and new husbands in America, the adventure is just beginning. Sheila, Dawn, and Gaynor will need to reacquaint themselves with the military men they swore to love when peace seemed like a lifetime away. But the world that awaits them is filled with new challenges, and each woman will be forced to summon courage and strength she never knew…


Book cover of Mr. Fox

Kimberly J. Lau Author Of Erotic Infidelities: Love and Enchantment in Angela Carter's the Bloody Chamber

From my list on fairy tale adaptations with verve and edge.

Why am I passionate about this?

Long before I became a “fairy tale scholar,” I was keenly aware of the ways that fairy tales saturate our cultural landscape. Given their ubiquity, who isn’t? But my awareness was always a discomfiting one, an unnerving at the fairy tale’s insistent cheeriness; it was this unnerving that made me fall deeply in love with The Bloody Chamber, the collection that so beautifully flays the fairy tale to reveal its dark and sordid heart. In researching The Bloody Chamber, I saw ever more clearly that the fairy tale’s grim underbelly involves not only twisted ideas about gender and desire and love but also about race, and this discovery has motivated my research over the past decade.

Kimberly's book list on fairy tale adaptations with verve and edge

Kimberly J. Lau Why did Kimberly love this book?

Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox is a complex, enthralling pastiche of a novel. Interweaving adaptations of Bluebeard, Fitcher’s Bird, Mr. Fox, and the ballad of Reynardine, Mr. Fox invites readers into a vertiginous wonderland where Oyeyemi’s adaptations interrogate the workings of gender and race, romance and desire, imperialism and geopolitics. Moving slipstream-style across the twentieth century, Mr. Fox offers a transnational circuit of stories and characters that connect gendered and raced cultural conventions with the misogyny and violence of the Bluebeard tradition, ultimately challenging readers to consider (and reconsider) European literary and artistic traditions as well as their underlying ideological structures.

By Helen Oyeyemi,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Mr. Fox as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction
One of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists

From the prizewinning young writer of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Gingerbread, and Peaces comes a brilliant and inventive story of love, lies, and inspiration.

Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding, and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, the celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins…


Book cover of Best Day Ever

Regina Buttner Author Of Absolution

From my list on women taking back their power from controlling men.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was raised in a loving but strict Catholic family in the 1970s, when girls like me were still expected to grow up to become traditional wives and mothers, rather than go to college and pursue a career. In a Pre-Cana class intended to prepare me and my fiancé for marriage (it didn’t work so well, as evidenced by our rancorous divorce twelve years later), I learned the concept of “family of origin,” and the profound impact a person’s upbringing has on them as an adult. I became fascinated by the psychic baggage each of us carries around, and how it affects our personal relationships and life choices.

Regina's book list on women taking back their power from controlling men

Regina Buttner Why did Regina love this book?

The story of a flamingly narcissistic man plotting to betray his wife shouldn’t be funny at all, but Kaira Rouda definitely pulls it off with impressive skill and verve. Husband Paul is so insanely self-centered that I couldn’t stop laughing at the stream of inanities flying around in his egotistical brain as he drives his wife Mia to their lake house for what’s supposed to be the most memorable day of their lives. And is it ever, thanks to Mia’s moxie. You go, girl!

By Kaira Rouda,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Best Day Ever as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Compelling' Hello!

'[A] deliciously dark story shot through with black humour.' Sunday Mirror

A loving husband. The perfect killer?

'I wonder if Mia thinks I have a dark side. Most likely as far as she knows, I am just her dear loving husband.'

Paul Strom has spent years building his perfect life: glittering career, beautiful wife, two healthy boys and a big house in the suburbs.

But he also has his secrets. That's why Paul has promised his wife a romantic weekend getaway. He proclaims this day, a warm Friday in May, will be the best day ever.

Paul loves…


Book cover of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship
Book cover of A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics
Book cover of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,225

readers submitted
so far, will you?

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in marriage, prostitution, and the New Deal?

Marriage 131 books
Prostitution 79 books
The New Deal 34 books