100 books like The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

Ernestine Rose, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who was one of the first women to speak out for women’s rights in the United States, was well-known in her time but is little remembered today.

This book, which includes most of her published speeches and some of her letters, made her come alive for me. With lines like “It is time to consider whether what is wrong in one sex, can be right in the other” (referring to the double standard of sexual morality for men and women), it still holds relevance for us today. I’ll never get to hear Ernestine Rose speak in person, so this is the next best thing.

Before I stumbled across this book, I had never heard of Caroline Healey Dall, a prickly but vulnerable and fiercely intelligent Bostonian who knew almost everyone in the various reform movements that swept across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.

On one day, Dall is recording the details of a pregnancy that went horribly wrong; on another, passing along salacious gossip about a lady who propositioned Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May). All the while, she champions the cause of women’s rights while clashing with some of the many strong personalities in the movement.

In 1853, hardware store owner Henry Blackwell proposed marriage to a woman he barely knew: Lucy Stone, who had become prominent as a speaker for the abolitionist and women’s rights movements. Not surprisingly, Lucy refused, but she allowed her younger suitor to write to her, and this collection of letters, spanning the idealistic pair’s courtship and eventual marriage, is the result.

I found it to be a moving portrait of a couple falling in love and managing to stay in love despite the usual ups and downs of wedlock and their quite different personalities. And did you know that Lucy was one of the first American women to keep her own surname upon marriage?

How did Lucretia Mott—the courageous Quaker who was active in so many good causes—find the time to write so many long, intimate letters? I like to dip into this collection; there’s always something of historical or simply human interest.

And given Mott’s small handwriting and her thrifty but maddening habit of “crossing”—saving paper by turning a letter sideways and writing across the existing handwriting on the page—I’m eternally grateful that someone else did the transcription of these letters so we don’t have to struggle with the originals.

Marty Fink’s book is one of the best examples of recent and groundbreaking scholarship on HIV/AIDS.

Fink examines HIV/AIDS histories through critical disability studies discourse to show in a compelling and very readable way how queer and trans people in the 1980s and early 1990s came together to take care of each other when faced with stark and far-reaching state violence.

This book has deep contemporary relevance showing how multifaceted HIV care-giving narratives continue to inform how individuals and our wider society makes sense of gender, disability, and kinship.

Such work is essential in this political moment where we are seeing ever-more challenges to bodily self-determination, for women, queer and, especially for trans people. 

Part of what I love the most about The Lord of the Rings is the way that J.R.R. Tolkien made Middle Earth feel like it could be real. I have to remind myself it’s not history, but fiction. Reading Recorder gives me the same feeling. Sure, technically, it’s science fiction. It’s set in space. But there is a depth and honesty to the world that Cathy McCrumb has created that is rare and worth exploring. It is both a prescient warning about the future of humanity and a powerful story about found family and finding hope when up against impossible odds. Also, the romantic subplot of this book will absolutely shatter you.

This book brings the format of a graphic novel to the subject of women's resistance during enslavement and the trans-Altantic slave trade—and the result is fresh and compelling. As a historian myself, I appreciated the interwtined narratives of Hall's own research quest as a historian following the documentary record—and her reconstruction of the extraordinary revolt of the women held captive in 1772 on the slave-ship Unity. Both the search for truth and the dramatic uprising are conveyed with great skill and emotional power. The account of the Unity revolt calls attention to what we know, how we know it, and what we don't know. But Hall refuses to stop there. Instead, carefully marking speculation as such, Hall offers a fascinating, well-informed, effort to imagine a fuller account of what might have actually happened. We are left with a powerful sense of why this history matters two and a half… show more.

How do we decide what is kept? Every librarian will spend some part of their lives ‘weeding’ items from their collections: a necessary and important task. In this book, Nicholson Baker chronicles, with increasing agitation, what happens when de-accessioning gets out of control, and little foresight is given to weeding. Written from the perspective of a journalist uncovering a major hushed-up conspiracy, Double Fold demonstrates how (mostly American) libraries destroyed much of their historic newspaper stock during the twentieth century, throwing them out in favor of a new and fancy (but now largely obsolete) technology, the microfilm. The book made major waves, and is one of the finest clarion calls for the careful preservation of rare items, such as newspapers, which are often poorly catalogued and stored, but are priceless historical and cultural artefacts.

By looking at three local NOW chapters around the country, Gilmore shows that the leading organization of 1960s feminism wasn’t nearly as centralized as people think. Memphis NOW, for example, was a radical feminist group simply by being a feminist group in the South. San Francisco NOW, by contrast, made coalitions with many more radical groups as they worked together to make change. A great read and an important insight into how NOW actually worked as an organization.

I am recommending this as the most personal of Steinem’s books. No list of books on the history of women’s rights would be complete without something about and by the most courageous, most consistent spokeswoman for feminism over the last half-century. Here Steinem tells the tale of her family, focused – surprisingly – on her eclectic and wandering father. The reader will be left with even great appreciation for Steinem and for the many and various routes women take to find their way to feminism and their full, true selves.