One of my geocaching friends has a series of hides titled “Women in History.” She was inspired by a class she took in college and has invited others to contribute to the series. I had that in mind when I agreed to review Women Make History: Fifty-Three Stories of Courage, Strength & Resilience by Sharon Spaulding. I now have a number of women I can add to the series.
Many of the women who appear in this book were also part of a New York Times series titled Overlooked: A Celebration of Remarkable, Underappreciated People Who Broke the Rules and Changed the World. I have to say I didn’t know most of the names in the book. A few were familiar, such as Bessie Coleman, Gladys West, Jocelyn Elders, and Marjorie Merriweather Post. Most were unfamiliar to me, and I learned quite a bit about strong women who were overlooked by history. In several cases, men took the credit for some of the accomplishments by women. It’s also pointed out that when women did make a discovery, the press would doubt their story simply because they didn’t believe a woman was capable of thinking like that.
The collection of stories here is excellent. The vast majority of women participated in some way in the women’s suffrage movement over more than one hundred years in the nation’s history. Even women who were accomplished at other things often had ties to the suffrage movement.
Rosalind Franklin was a woman scientist who first discovered the double-helix shape of DNA, and that fact was largely forgotten, with Watson and Crick getting the credit and the Nobel Prize. Watson did discuss her in his memoir about pursuing the structure of DNA, and he was blatantly sexist and dismissive about her contributions. This is indicative of what many intelligent women faced, even when they were accomplished leaders in their various fields.
The selection of women overlooked for the most part by history is a good one, with strong women who were influential across the spectrum of fields. Spaulding groups the women together as visionaries, thinkers, barrier-breakers, social reformers, and more. It’s structured well, with each woman getting several pages of an overview of her life and accomplishments. There are also two questions at the end of each entry, which helped me to pause and think a bit deeper about what each of them accomplished and how different it is for women now. As the saying goes, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” These can also be used as a jumping-off point for classroom discussions.
I learned so much in Women Make History: Fifty-Three Stories of Courage, Strength & Resilience and have gone deeper into several of the people I read about. It’s fascinating to see women break through barriers at a time when society did not want them to do anything other than stay home and have babies. This is a great book that can be inspirational for young girls as well as educating them about the limitations faced by women in history.
Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Outside the Box, and author Sharon Spaulding for the advance reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.
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Categories: Book Reviews
Sounds like an interesting history book. One woman who made incredible contributions to both mathematics and physics is Emily Noether. You rarely hear about her. I am curious whether she was in the book. One of the things she created was Noether’s Theoroem that all conservation laws correspond to a symmetry and vice versa. One example of a symmetry is that the laws of physics don’t change by time. The symmetry that follows is that energy is conserved. There are lots of them and it is often said that modern physics rests on three pillars, relativity, quantum physics, and Noether’s Theorem. Anyway, she is very important but rarely acknowledged.