Elaine F. Weiss' upcoming The Woman's Hour: The Last Furious Fight to Win the Vote recounts the history of one of the greatest political victories in American history: the down and dirty campaign to get the last state to ratify the 19th amendment, granting women the right to vote. In honor of Women's History Month, Weiss is recommending more great women's histories. Check out her picks below!
I've never liked fairy tales or shape-shifting fantasy stories, I admit with some trepidation…no spectacular sci-fi for me. Even as a child, eager as I was to lose myself in books—the library allowed me to check out ten at a time—I wanted to burrow into stories grounded in the real world, populated by fascinating people having adventures that actually happened, set in a whole other time. Narrative history, I eventually learned, was the term for the kind of book I liked. And, many years later, that's the kind of book I write. In celebration of Women's History Month, then, as the March winds begin to blow, narrative history is the type of book I'm going to suggest you read.
I loved biographies, and powered through the Landmark Books, those iconic blue-covered books that held the tales of amazing lives. Those lives were almost exclusively lived by men; the only Landmark biographies of women I recall were of Abigail Adams, Clara Barton, Helen Keller, and Eleanor Roosevelt. But that was OK, I could read them multiple times. Each time, I cried when they died—a predictable hazard when reading bios. While I found the lives of the men equally captivating, they didn't transport me in quite the same way.
Since I've always found true stories to be even more powerful than imagined ones, it makes sense that I became a journalist: Getting paid to write about real people enmeshed in complicated situations was a perfect extension of my reading foundations. When background research in dusty repositories was required, all the better. I was in the business of discovering stories, recording idiosyncratic voices, explaining how the world worked.
Like any journalist, I was always on the lookout for a "scoop"—the facts no one else had yet uncovered, the story no one had yet told. So when I turned to writing narrative history—pivoting from writing the first drafts of history to writing the second iteration—I found myself again drawn to exploring more neglected sectors of the historical map. That led me to women's history…and the thrill of discovery.
Women's lives, and their work in the world, are often hidden, harder to find in the archives; placing them into the context of their times requires extra effort, but the rewards are great. The ah-ha moments are deeply satisfying, certainly for the writer, and hopefully for the reader. And if "well-behaved women seldom make history"—as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously described our subjects—we have marvelously colorful characters to write about.
There's no best time of the year for reading great stories about fascinating women, but Women's History Month gives us the impetus to bring these books some well-deserved attention, and carry them onto your TBR lists.
Here are a few of my favorites, some new, some older, all terrific.
What women's history would you recommend to your fellow readers? Let us know in the comments!
Elaine F. Weiss' The Woman's Hour: The Last Furious Fight to Win the Vote will be published on March 6th. Don't forget to add it to your Want to Read shelf..
Check out more recent blogs:
20 Top Short Story Collections
To Quit Or Not Quit a Book? Our Readers Weigh In...
28 of the Season's Highest-Rated Debuts
posted by Cybil on February, 27
from Goodreads Blog http://ift.tt/2FgLG2G
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment