March is Women’s History Month, and Penn Press is marking the occasion by offering 40% off all books in our collection of books in women’s history and studies that we have published in the past five years. In today’s post, we’re sharing a handful of highlights from the collection—browse the list below, and use code WHM2023-FM at checkout to get your discount!
Women Healers
Susan H. Brandt
Women Healers recovers the medical practices of Euro-American, Native American, and Black women in early Philadelphia. Rather than declining in influence, women healers continued their authoritative work, engaged in the healthcare marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them well into the nineteenth century.
I’ve Been Here All the While
Alaina E. Roberts
Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of “40 acres and a mule”—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I’ve Been Here All the While, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction.
A Marsh Island
Sarah Orne Jewett
In 1901, Sarah Orne Jewett declared her “best story” to be A Marsh Island, a novel about queer kinship. Written a few years into her decades-long companionship with Annie Fields, the novel envisions the saltmarsh as a figure for valuing both individuality and a porous openness to the gifts of others.
Equality on Trial
Katherine Turk
In 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act outlawed workplace sex discrimination, but its practical meaning was uncertain. Equality on Trial examines how a generation of workers and feminists fought to infuse the law with broad notions of sex equality, reshaping workplaces, activist channels, state agencies, and courts along the way.
U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights
Kelly J. Shannon
U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights explores the integration of American concerns about women’s human rights into U.S. policy toward Islamic countries since 1979, reframing U.S.-Islamic relations and challenging assumptions about the drivers of American foreign policy.
The Silver Women
Joan Flores-Villalobos
The Silver Women argues that Black West Indian women made the construction of the Panama Canal possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. The book links this labor to the histories of U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.
Her Neighbor’s Wife
Lauren Jae Gutterman
Through interviews, diaries, memoirs, and letters, Her Neighbor’s Wife explores the personal experiences and public perceptions of women who struggled to balance marriage and same-sex desire in the postwar United States.
Let the Wind Speak
Carol Shloss
Carol Loeb Shloss creates a compelling portrait of a complex relationship between a daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, and her literary-giant father, Ezra Pound. It is a masterful biography that asks us to consider cultures of secrecy, frayed allegiances, and the boundaries that define nations, families, and politics.
Set the World on Fire
Keisha N. Blain
Set the World on Fire highlights the black nationalist women who fought for national and transnational black liberation from the early to mid-twentieth century.
Women at the Wheel
Katherine J. Parkin
Women at the Wheel explores women’s historical experience with automobiles. Katherine Parkin argues that in every regard, from learning to drive to repairing cars, from being a passenger to taking the wheel, women had a distinct experience with cars in American culture.
Wicked Flesh
Jessica Marie Johnson
Unearthing personal stories from the archive, Wicked Flesh shows how black women, from Senegambia in West Africa to the Caribbean to New Orleans, used intimacy and kinship to redefine freedom in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Their practices laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century.
