This year's theme celebrates the collective strength and influence of women who have dedicated their lives to education, mentorship, and leadership. Through their efforts, they have served as an inspiration for all generations — both past and present. - National Women’s History Alliance (NWHA)
IMPORTANCE & RELEVANCE
Throughout history, the process of information sharing has been a powerful catalyst for change. An honest, open examination of new insights and knowledge can create a framework for collaboration. This, in turn, promotes the well-being of groups, businesses, communities, and society as a whole.
From classrooms to boardrooms, and from grassroots movements to global initiatives, women educators and leaders have played a pivotal role in nurturing minds and inspiring transformative action.
Our 2025 theme spotlights the contributions women have made to the American educational system, the free marketplace of ideas, and the very fabric of our democracy.
GOALS & OBJECTIVES
The books below celebrate women who broke ground and held the door open for the next generation.
The Elements of Marie Curie : how the glow of radium lit a path for women in science
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The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo's Daughter crafts a luminous chronicle of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many remarkable young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own.
Madam C. J. Walker's Gospel of Giving
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Founder of a beauty empire, Madam C. J. Walker was celebrated as America's first self-made female millionaire in the early 1900s. Known as a leading African American entrepreneur, Walker was also devoted to an activist philanthropy aimed at empowering African Americans and challenging the injustices inflicted by Jim Crow. Tyrone McKinley Freeman's biography highlights how giving shaped Walker's life before and after she became wealthy. Poor and widowed when she arrived in St. Louis in her twenties, Walker found mentorship among black churchgoers and working black women. Her adoption of faith, racial uplift, education, and self-help soon informed her dedication to assisting black women's entrepreneurship, financial independence, and activism. Walker embedded her philanthropy in how she grew her business, forged alliances with groups like the National Association of Colored Women, funded schools and social service agencies led by African American women, and enlisted her company's sales agents in local charity and advocacy work. Illuminating and dramatic, Madam C. J. Walker's Gospel of Giving broadens our understanding of black women's charitable giving and establishes Walker as a foremother of African American philanthropy--Provided by publisher.
First Woman: Joanne Simpson and the Tropical Atmosphere
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This book is about Joanne Simpson, the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in meteorology. It encompasses her personal and professional life, her career prospects as a woman in science, and her pioneering contributions in understanding the tropical atmosphere.
Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, first woman of color in Congress
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"The book explores the life and politics of Patsy Takemoto Mink (1927-2002), a third generation Japanese American from Hawai'i, the first woman of color in Congress and the legislative champion of Title IX. Co-authored by her daughter, political scientist Gwendolyn Mink, and historian Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, this work discusses Mink's decades-long work for women's equality, civil rights, environmental humanism, and peace. The book considers Mink's policy and political commitments and contributions and explores how Mink's Pacific World view shaped her politics as a feminist, a civil rights advocate, an environmentalist, and a critic of U.S. militarism. From the late 19th century immigration story of Mink's forbears through Mink's early 21st century advocacy for social justice, this book offers new insights regarding intersectional legislative feminism and Pacific feminism, makes visible one woman's policy activism in the mainstream of U.S. politics, and brings much needed attention to a woman of color who profoundly shaped the politics of race, class, and gender in the second half of the 20th century"--Provided by publisher.
Hidden Figures: the American dream and the untold story of the Black women mathematicians who helped win the space race
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"Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as 'human computers' used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia, and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-black 'West Computing' group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens"--Publisher's description.
Dolores (biography of Dolores Huerta)
Dolores Huerta is among the most important, yet least known, activists in American history. An equal partner in co-founding the first farm workers unions with Cesar Chavez, her enormous contributions have gone largely unrecognized. Dolores tirelessly led the fight for racial and labor justice alongside Chavez, becoming one of the most defiant feminists of the twentieth century - and she continues the fight to this day, at 87. With intimate and unprecedented access to this intensely private mother to eleven, the film reveals the raw, personal stakes involved in committing one's life to social change.
Mary Eliza Mahoney and the legacy of African American nurses
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Mahoney was the first African-American woman to break down the barriers and gain admittance to the nursing profession in the United States.
The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science
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From the Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist who broke the story, the inspiring account of the sixteen female scientists who forced MIT to publicly admit it had been discriminating against its female faculty for yearssparking a nationwide reckoning with the pervasive sexism in science. In 1999, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted to discriminating against women on its faculty, forcing institutions across the country to confront a problem they had long ignored: the need for more women at the top levels of science. Written by the journalist who broke the story for The Boston Globe, The Exceptions is the untold story of how sixteen highly accomplished women on the MIT faculty came together to do the work that triggered the historic admission. The Exceptions centers on the life of Nancy Hopkins, a reluctant feminist who became the leader of the sixteen and a hero to two generations of women in science. Hired to prestigious universities at the dawn of affirmative action efforts in the 1970s, Dr. Hopkins and her peers embarked on their careers believing that discrimination against women was a thing of the pastthat science was, at last, a pure meritocracy. For years they explained away the discrimination they experienced as the exception, not the rule. Only when these few women came together after decades of underpayment and the denial of credit, advancement, and equal resources to do their work did they recognize the relentless pattern: women were often marginalized and minimized, especially as they grew older. Meanwhile, men of similar or lesser ability had their career paths paved and widened. The Exceptions is a powerful yet all-too-familiar story that will resonate with all professional women who experience what those at MIT called ';21st-century discrimination'a subtle and stubborn bias, often unconscious but still damaging. As in bestsellers from Hidden Figures to Lab Girl and Code Girls, we are offered a rare glimpse into the world of high-level scientific research and learn about the extraordinary female scientists whose work has been overlooked throughout history, and how these women courageously fought for fair treatment as they struggled to achieve the recognition they rightfully deserve.
A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South
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In the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century a small group of women overcame personal and professional hardships to gain national prominence as educational reformers and social activists. This book takes a biographical look at Lucy Craft Laney, Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown. The four women knew each other through the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. The other four women founded schools for African-American children, as well as being activists, lecturers, and suffragists, and the book includes interviews with students who came from around the country to attend these groundbreaking, historic schools.
The Radical Lives of Helen Keller
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A political biography that reveals new sides to Helen Keller Several decades after her death in 1968, Helen Keller remains one of the most widely recognized women of the twentieth century. But the fascinating story of her vivid political life—particularly her interest in radicalism and anti-capitalist activism—has been largely overwhelmed by the sentimentalized story of her as a young deaf-blind girl. Keller had many lives indeed. Best known for her advocacy on behalf of the blind, she was also a member of the socialist party, an advocate of women's suffrage, a defender of the radical International Workers of the World, and a supporter of birth control—and she served as one of the nation's most effective but unofficial international ambassadors. In spite of all her political work, though, Keller rarely explored the political dimensions of disability, adopting beliefs that were often seen as conservative, patronizing, and occasionally repugnant. Under the wing of Alexander Graham Bell, a controversial figure in the deaf community who promoted lip-reading over sign language, Keller became a proponent of oralism, thereby alienating herself from others in the deaf community who believed that a rich deaf culture was possible through sign language. But only by distancing herself from the deaf community was she able to maintain a public image as a one-of-a-kind miracle. Using analytic tools and new sources, Kim E. Nielsen's political biography of Helen Keller has many lives, teasing out the motivations for and implications of her political and personal revolutions to reveal a more complex and intriguing woman than the Helen Keller we thought we knew.
Oregon's Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism
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Esther Clayson Pohl Lovejoy, whose long life stretched from 1869 to 1967, challenged convention from the time she was a young girl. Her professional life began as one of Oregon's earliest women physicians, and her commitment to public health and medical relief took her into the international arena, where she was chair of the American Women's Hospitals after World War I and the first president of the Medical Women's International Association. Most disease, suffering, and death, she believed, were the result of wars and social and economic inequities, and she was determined to combat those conditions through organized action. Lovejoy's early life and career in the Pacific Northwest gave her key experiences and strategies to use for what she termed "constructive resistance," the ability to take effective action against unjust power. She took a political and pragmatic approach to what she called "woman's big job"-achieving a full female citizenship-and emphasized the importance of votes for women. In this engaging biography, Kimberly Jensen tells the story of this important western woman, exploring her approach to politics, health, and society and her civic, economic, and medical activism.
