What to read this Women's History Month

March is Women’s History Month, and books about, by, and for women are perfect to add to your reading list.

Traci Thomas, creator of “The Stacks” podcast, shares her picks for books that tell lesser-known women-centered stories.

“I approached it by women historians writing about any topic in history but from the viewpoint of a woman historian for the nonfiction side,” Thomas says, “and then for the fiction side. I tried to find either women in history, historical events, or women talking about being women.”

Nonfiction

"It is all about white women as slave owners in the American South, a topic that I think oftentimes is glossed over or sort of presented as a thing that happened only when a woman was inheriting slaves or only if she was a widow. But this book has extensive research on the ways that white women were slave owners, how that was part of their economic and upward mobility, and how deeply entrenched it was in the system of American chattel slavery.
" This book just really disproves a lot of the myths that we have around women as far as the slave trade and slave mastery goes."

" It's about 13 different women whose lives were upended or changed by coming in contact with the Kennedy men. Some of them include some of the Kennedy women — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — and then women who we know sort of connected to the family, like a Marilyn Monroe or a Mary Jo Kopechne. And it covers from Joe Kennedy —the father, the patriarch —all the way down through [Robert F. Kennedy] Jr. And even the generation after that.
"It's a really interesting look at what happened to many of the women whose names we maybe know as footnotes to history. What was their story? What really happened to them?"

"It is the story of two Supreme Court cases that dealt with sovereignty in Native land in Oklahoma. Rebecca Nagle goes back into history, back to the trail of tears, as well as forward through to these cases that were decided in 2021 and 2022 and talks about this history that I really knew nothing about and I found so fascinating. It's written in such an engaging way."

Fiction

"In the book, Kiku Hughes tells the story of her grandparents and their internment, and it's a graphic novel, and it's really beautiful. And again, this is a piece of American history told by a female writer about a moment that we don't talk about that much because it's a little bit embarrassing, I think, to say the least, for America as a country. And also what Kiku does is she gets into sort of the day-to-day emotional realities.
"It is approachable for audiences of a lot of ages. I think you could kind of place this in the YA category and move it forward. Obviously, I read it as an adult and was deeply moved by it. I just found the book to be really fascinating."

"The reason a lot of people might not have heard of her is Diane Oliver died in 1966 at the age of 22 and she was largely forgotten to literary history, literary canon. Last year, thanks to some work from literary titans like Tayari Jones, her work was brought back. And they published this collection of stories that talk about race and racism in the 1950s and ‘60s.
"The stories are so chilling and juicy and good and I just was so excited to find this sort of piece of, if you will, forgotten history in the literary canon and so it's sort of an exciting book just because it's bringing back someone that was such a talent that was gone far too soon."

"The book is great. It is a quartet, a collection of four novellas, and each one is a different style of writing. So there's a speculative fiction, contagion story. There is a college campus drama. There is a horror story, and then there's also this lumberjack sort of tall tale story.
"Each of the stories deal with gender in some really interesting ways, and the ways that we sort of can confuse the performance of gender with the actual feelings of being alive and how those moments really come to life.
"I think Torrey Peters is doing really interesting work when it comes to blurring the lines between trans and cisgender people in the world."

Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Grace Griffin adapted it for the web.