Seven Must-Read Books for Women’s History Month 2025
Each March, we come together to honor and recognize the legacy of women in history, society, and culture and to reflect on the ongoing fight for gender equality. This year’s theme for Women’s History Month, “Moving Forward Together! Women Educating and Inspiring Generations,” celebrates the women who dedicated their lives to education, mentorship, and leadership. From national and international advocacy to community organization and more, these books are must-reads for those interested in how women collaborate to accomplish social, economic, and political change.
We Are Each Other’s Business
Black Women’s Intersectional Political Consumerism During the Chicago Welfare Rights Movement
Nicole M. Brown
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Welfare Rights Movement organized at both local and national levels, advocating for poor people’s inclusion, dignity, and autonomy. We Are Each Other’s Business examines Black women’s leadership within the Chicago Welfare Rights Movement, recasting their consumer activism as a form of Black feminist technology. Bringing together historical sociology, computational methods, and intersectional Black feminist theory, this book offers innovative and generative insights into Black women’s struggle for political and economic equity. Read more about the book in this interview.
The Feminist Pacific
International Women’s Networks in Hawai’i, 1820–1940
Rumi Yasutake
The Feminist Pacific examines transnational networks in Hawai’i beginning in 1820, with the arrival of American missionary wives, and through the rise of women’s internationalism in the interwar years. Bridging nineteenth-century Protestant churchwomen’s evangelism with twentieth-century feminist internationalism, this book recasts women’s global organizing from the perspective of the Pacific. Read more about how Hawai’i became the Pacific crossroads of women’s movements to generate pan-Pacific feminism in this Q&A with Rumi Yasutake.
Women in Black
Against Violence, for Peace with Justice
Cynthia Cockburn and Sue Finch
Fernwood Publishing
Women in Black is a worldwide network of women “committed to peace with justice and actively opposed to injustice, war, militarism, and other forms of violence.” The late feminist solidarity activist Cynthia Cockburn tells the story of this indispensable global antiviolence movement known around the world for staging dramatic actions that seek to expose and denounce war, rape, militarism, and apartheid. An inspiring account of a networked feminist struggle, this book also presents a template for analysis and action in our era of multiplying wars, surging military spending, and rampant gendered violence.
The Sisterhood
How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture
Courtney Thorsson
One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan’s Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about their work. Calling themselves “The Sisterhood,” the group would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation. The Sisterhood tells the story of how this remarkable community transformed American writing and cultural institutions. Highlighting the organizing, networking, and community building that nurtured Black women’s writing, this book demonstrates that the Sisterhood offers an enduring model for Black feminist collaboration. Learn about some of the lesser-known members of the group.
The Rise of Corporate Feminism
Women in the American Office, 1960–1990
Allison Elias
In the 1960s, ideas about sex equality spurred some clerical workers to organize, demanding “raises and respect,” while others pushed for professionalization through credentialing. By the 1990s, corporate support for professional women resulted in an individualistic feminism that focused on the needs of those at the top. The Rise of Corporate Feminism considers changes in the workplace surrounding affirmative action, human resource management, automation, and unionization by groups such as 9to5.
Banking on Freedom
Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal
Shennette Garrett-Scott
Between 1888 and 1930, African Americans opened more than a hundred banks and thousands of other financial institutions. In this book, Shennette Garrett-Scott offers an unparalleled account of how black women carved out economic, social, and political power in contexts shaped by sexism, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation. The first book to center black women’s engagement with the elite sectors of banking, finance, and insurance, Banking on Freedom reveals the ways gender, race, and class shaped the meanings of wealth and risk in U.S. capitalism and society. You can also learn more about five African American women pioneers in U.S. finance and U.S. property restrictions and finance after the Civil War.
The Fury Archives
Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes
Juno Jill Richards
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical women’s movements and the avant-gardes were often in contact with one another, brought together through the socialist internationals. Juno Jill Richards argues that these movements were not just socially linked but also deeply interconnected. Each offered the other an experimental language that could move beyond the nation-state’s rights of man and citizen, suggesting an alternative conceptual vocabulary for women’s rights. The Fury Archives argues that the relationship between women’s rights movements and the avant-gardes offers a radical alternative to liberal discourses of human rights in formation at the same historical moment. Read more in this conversation with Jill Richards, Sangina Patnaik, and Kelly Mee Rich.
