Celebrate Women's History: Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History
Muriel Fox
Listen to Muriel Fox discuss her involvement in the Equal Rights Movement (Source: Rollins College Oral History Archives)
Beloved long-time Tappan resident is one of the founding members of the National Organization of Woman, which was critical to the second wave feminist movement, and served as the largest feminist organization in the United States.
Betty Friedan
Another local resident involved in the second wave feminist movement, Friedan also co-founded the National Organization for Women.
Friedan's book "The Feminine Mystique" blew the curtain up to expose the inner thoughts of the "quiet desperation" of the 1950s housewife.
Celebrate Feminism
"Women and men have to fight together to change society - and both will benefit... Partnership, not dependence, is the real romance in marriage." ~Muriel Fox
On Our Shelves
A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Call Number: 305.42 COONTZISBN: 9780465002009Based on extensive research, this book reveals the "pain and hopes of a silenced generation of American women" - women that called themselves "transformed" after reading Friedan's 1963 landmark title "The Feminine Mystique."
Silent Spring by Call Number: YA 363.738 CARSONISBN: 0618249060First published in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water.
A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove : A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances by Call Number: 641.509 SCHENONEISBN: 0393016714The profound relationship between women and food is a story admirably told by Laura Schenone in a book filled with historic insights, moving anecdotes, and lively illustrations.
Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History by Call Number: 305.42 ULRICHISBN: 9781400041596Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History celebrates a renaissance in history inspired by amateurs, activists, and professional historians. The book ranges over centuries and cultures and is a tribute to history and to those who make it.
American Women Activists Writings: An Anthology, 1637-2002 by Call Number: 305.409 AMERICANISBN: 0815411855This anthology--remarkable, highly readable, and heroic in scope--redefines 'activism' beyond the strict realm of politics to embrace the many reform movements that women have galvanized and revolutionized : religious tolerance, civil rights, wildlife conservation, environmental protection, the labor movement, reproductive rights, and nuclear disarmament.
Leading Ladies : American Trailblazers by Call Number: 920 HUTCHISONISBN: 9780061138249In a series of biographical portraits, United States senator Kay Bailey Hutchison examines the lives of sixty-three pioneers in military service, journalism, public health, social reform, science, and politics.
From Eve to Dawn : A History of Women by Call Number: 305.42 FRENCHISBN: 9781558615656Marilyn French spent over fifteen years with a team of researchers and prominent historians examining women's lives and activities in civilizations and societies spanning the ages.
The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan 50 Years by Call Number: 305.42 FRIEDANISBN: 9780393063790Publication Date: 2013-02-11Landmark, groundbreaking, classic-these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of "the problem that has no name": the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women's confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. This 50th-anniversary edition features an afterword by best-selling author Anna Quindlen as well as a new introduction by Gail Collins.
Half the Sky by Call Number: 362.83 KRISTORISBN: 9780307387097Publication Date: 2010-06-01#1 National Bestseller From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era's most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world. With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope. They show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel and, with assistance from an aid group, built a thriving retail business that supports her family. The Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time became a surgeon. A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school, earned her doctorate and became an expert on AIDS. Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women's potential. They make clear how so many people have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part. Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Unleashing that process globally is not only the right thing to do; it's also the best strategy for fighting poverty. Deeply felt, pragmatic, and inspirational, Half the Sky is essential reading for every global citizen.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Click here to download the ebook Reading Lolita in Tehran. Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; some had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they removed their veils and began to speak more freely–their stories intertwining with the novels they were reading by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.
Biographical
Featured Download
Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation is in our online library of audiobooks in WMA format and is available to download with your library card.
"[Cokie] Roberts bring[s] to life the everyday trials of individuals like Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Eliza Pinckney, Mary Bartlett and Martha Washington - proving that without our exemplary women, the new country might have never survived:"