Showing titles in Women

Brought to you by Penguin. A lost princess and a vanished world: a remarkable true story that moves from the Punjab of the Raj to 1930s Paris and the Second World War In a Mumbai museum in 2007, Livia Manera Sambuy encounters a photograph that will change her life forever. The caption claims...

A vivid biography of former first lady Barbara Bush, one of the most influential and underappreciated women in American political history.

The most famous trial of the twentieth century - told through the eyes of the women history forgot. In November 1945, the world turned its gaze to Nuremberg. Inside a courtroom built by and for men, justice was being sought for crimes almost beyond comprehension. The spotlight fell on Nazi leaders, Allied prosecutors and military judges - but in the shadows, women were recording, interpreting, witnessing, painting, testifying. Yet their names were often missing from the headlines. Eighty years on, this book finally returns them to the centre of the story.

Trawling through a vast family archive and arcane sources in half a dozen languages, Adam Zamoyski has revealed the dramatic life of his great-great-great grandmother, an uneducated, vulnerable girl cast into a man’s world. Her aristocratic position enmeshed her in high politics and close encounters with Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau, Joseph II, Marie-Antoinette and Tsar Alexander I, and earned her the enmity of Catherine the Great.

Stephanie Racine narrates Women: Our History, which reexamines history from a female perspective. Packed full of evocative facts, and with a foreword by Lucy Worsley, this audiobook reveals the key events in women's history - from early matriarchal societies through women's suffrage, the Suffragette movement, 20th-century feminism and gender politics, to recent movements such as #MeToo and International Women's Day - and the key role women have had in shaping our past.

The tried and tested 'On This Day in History' format has elevated the stories of many people and their impact on the wider world. However, of those considered noteworthy by the Establishment, just a fraction are women. But this is not the whole story - not by half. Our past is full of influential women many of whom have been unfairly confined to the margins of history. Politicians, troublemakers, explorers, artists, writers, scientists and even the odd murderer; these women have shaped society around the globe.

In 1611, 34-year-old Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the 20th and favorite wife of Emperor Jahangir, who ruled the vast Mughal Empire. Nur's confident assertion of talent and power is revelatory; it far exceeded the authority of her female contemporaries in Renaissance Europe, including Elizabeth I. Here, she finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.

Lydia Hamilton Smith (1813-1884) was a prominent mixed-race businesswoman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the longtime housekeeper, life companion, and collaborator of the state’s abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens. In his biography of this remarkable woman, Mark Kelley reveals how Smith served the cause of abolition, managed Stevens’s household, acquired property, and crossed racialized social boundaries.

On 17 July 1918, four young women walked down twenty-three steps into the cellar of a house in Ekaterinburg. The eldest was twenty-two, the youngest only seventeen. Together with their parents and their thirteen-year-old brother, they were all brutally murdered. Their crime: to be the daughters...

In 17th century Paris, a group of women who called themselves conteuses (female storytellers) came together to weave the very first fairy tales. One of them, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, coined the term "fairy tale," and some of these stories contain many familiar elements that appear in tales like Rapunzel and Beauty and the Beast. Unfortunately, these women and their tales have mostly been forgotten to history. Women of the Fairytale Resistance uncovers seven of these writer’s biographies—which are just as compelling as their fairy tales—and retells 12 of their original stories.

Created in the aftermath of World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency relied on women even as it attempted to channel their talents and keep them down. Women sent cables, made dead drops, and maintained the agency's secrets. Despite discrimination—even because of it—women who started as clerks, secretaries, or unpaid spouses rose to become some of the CIA's shrewdest operatives. They were unlikely spies—and that's exactly what made them perfect for the role.

When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that has the potential to pose a serious challenge to the status quo. In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future.

Across six revealing lectures, Professor Jessica Hooten Wilson will introduce you to one of the 20th century’s most fascinating and divisive writers in Flannery O’Connor and the Scandal of Faith. Beginning with an overview of her brief but remarkable life, Professor Wilson will then take you through an exploration of themes in O’Connor’s work and the hallmarks of her literary style. You’ll get a clearer picture of O’Connor’s historical and geographical context while digging into how her stories can transcend time and place.

Wie Frauen Geschichte schrieben – und Männer dafür den Ruhm bekamen. Muse, Sekretärin, Ehefrau – es gibt viele Bezeichnungen für Frauen, deren Einfluss aus der Geschichte radiert wurde. Für deren Leistungen Männer die Auszeichnungen und den Ruhm bekamen. Männer, wie Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht oder Albert Einstein, deren Bekannte, Töchter oder Geliebte an ihren Werken mitwirkten – und deren Namen damals wie heute kaum jemand kennt.

In this fascinating and insightful book, feminist curator Rachael Lennon provides an intimate and intersectional examination of the history of marriage around the world.

The lives of the sons of Eleanor of Aquitaine are the stuff of legend. Her daughters, however, are less well known, and the fascinating personalities of her daughters-in-law have been almost entirely overlooked, as have those of the daughters she bore Louis VII of France. The Families of Eleanor of Aquitaine redresses this balance and showcases the lives, travels, and careers of these ten very different women, who formed a great international network of political alliances that linked their parents, siblings, husbands, and children all across Europe and the Holy Land.

Heroines in History: A Thousand Faces moves beyond stories of individual heroines, taking a thematic, synthesizing, and global in scope approach to challenge previous understandings of heroines in history. Responding to Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, Katie Pickles explores the idea of a transcultural heroine archetype that recurs through time. Each chapter addresses an archetypal theme important for heroines in history.

In 1943, Kathleen, then thirty, was a nurse-in-training at the Blackburn Royal Infirmary. For the next three years, she kept a meticulous diary of her day-to-day existence, leaving behind a vivid record of the real-time concerns of a busy, thoughtful woman on the frontline of the war at home. Kathleen’s days were never the same. She writes in clear and lively prose about life in the hospital: of her fellow nurses, her patients, about death and dying, and the progress of the war as wounded soldiers returned from Normandy in the summer of 1944.

From royalty to suffragettes and from campaigners to contemporary rebels, Sky News Presenter Sophy Ridge explains the ways that women have changed the face of politics. Sophy Ridge has uncovered the extraordinary stories of the women who have shaped British politics. Never has the role of women in the political world ever been more on the news agenda, and Sophy has interviewed current and former MPs to gain exclusive insight into the role women play in politics at the highest level.

Nawal El Saadawi writes out of a powerful sense of the violence and injustice which permeated her society. Her experiences working as a doctor in villages around Egypt, witnessing prostitution, honour killings and sexual abuse, including female circumcision, drove her to give voice to this suffering. She goes on to explore the causes of the situation through a discussion of the historical role of Arab women in religion and literature. Saadawi argues that the veil, polygamy and legal inequality are incompatible with the essence of Islam or any human faith.