Reading List for Women’s Equality Day

Happy Women’s Equality Day! To celebrate, we’ve created a reading list of books covering a range of topics including women’s suffrage, workplace equality, human rights, and more.

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Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement by Cathleen D. Cahill

Honorable Mention, 2020 Armitage-Jameson Prize, Coalition for Western Women’s History

Honorable Mention, 2022 President’s Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

“This spirited history situates the campaign for female suffrage within the broader narrative of civil rights. . . . Cahill’s widened focus links the battle for enfranchisement to currents of exclusion and empowerment that continue to shape the vote today.”—The New Yorker

This Grant Experiment: When Women Entered the Federal Workforce in Civil War–Era Washington, D.C. by Jessica Ziparo

“This Grand Experiment is well researched, with Ziparo having traced about three thousand women who worked for the government in the 1860s.”—Journal of Southern History

“Provides an excellent, detailed look at another group of women who need to be added to the list of essential war workers: the thousands who sought and gained employment in the federal government from 1861 until the early 1870s.”—Journal of the Civil War Era

Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945–1980 by Tonya L. Roth

“An important contribution to military history, women’s history, and U.S. social and cultural history.”—Heather Marie Stur, author of Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era

“Tanya L. Roth skillfully and seamlessly restores ‘womanpower’ to its central place in the history of the American military and the women’s movement, demonstrating once and for all the irretractable ties between second-wave feminism and Cold War national defense.”—Kara Dixon Vuic, author of The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines

Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement by Katherine M. Marino

Ida Blom-Karen Offen Prize, International Federation for Research in Women’s History

2020 Luciano Tomassini Book Award, Latin American Studies Association

2020 Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award, Western Association of Women Historians

“A brilliant and ambitious new account of the origins of global feminism”—International Feminist Journal of Politics

Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women’s Movement, 1870–1967 by Joan Marie Johnson

“A riveting new vantage point on the fight for women’s rights in the twentieth century.”—Reviews in American History

“This compelling work of original and much-needed research [will] be of interest not only to those who study the history of feminist activism but to those with an interest in the power that private money wields in social justice circles.”—Library Journal starred review

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