We’re celebrating Women’s History Month with a list of recent UGA Press publications that include memoirs, biographies, and deep dives into subjects ranging from literature to medicine, all with a focus on the lives and histories of women. For more information, click the link in the caption.
“Cecile Pineda is a foundational voice in Latina/Latino literature. Every new book is cause for celebration. She is writing at full force. Read it.”
—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels, on Entry Without Inspection by Cecile Pineda
“Medical Bondage builds on several decades’ worth of excellent scholarship on the experiences of enslaved women, health, and medicine under American slavery, a literature that has explored white medicine’s commodification, exploitation, and racialization of the enslaved, as well as the autonomy, creativity, and resilience of black healers and sufferer. . . Indeed, the author’s brave, provocative, and tireless promotion of this troubling history is to be admired and respected.”
—The Journal of African American History review of Medical Bondage by Deirdre Cooper Owens
“I have long been a fan of journalist and activist Anjali Enjeti’s work, and I am delighted that her essay collection Southbound delivers on her most admirable legacy. Enjeti does not shy away from investigating her own, her community’s, this country’s, and in fact the world’s casual acceptance of racism and xenophobia in all its many insidious forms. Plus, as a southerner and South Asian woman, Enjeti looks at anti-Blackness from several lenses and offers a model for not just how to acknowledge one’s own complicity in the endless atrocities of racism but also how to act and go beyond just the plush label of ally. This book had me in tears many times but the gift of its deep intelligence and candor, the pain and the passion in these pages, gave me a lot of hope for all of us in a pretty hopeless time. This is a book I hope every American reads.”
—Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity, on Southbound by Anjali Enjeti
“Based on extensive research in primary sources, Vénus Noire is a groundbreaking study of how, despite their relatively few numbers in metropolitan France, black women were weighted with powerful symbolic valence. French writers, scientists, and artists all depicted black women as sexualized, mysterious, and uncontrollable “others,” thus burdening actual black women with living their lives in tension with these stereotypes. Mitchell brings to life the biographies of three particularly well-documented black women, while deconstructing artistic and literary icons of many more, to show how French discourse produced race and gender from the Revolution and Napoleonic era through the Second Empire. Haunting, breathtaking, and riveting, this book will linger in your mind long after you close its pages.”
—Sue Peabody, author of Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, on Vénus Noire by Robin Mitchell
“This is a marvelously observant memoir, not only of Shah’s parents’ generation and their arrival in the United States, but also of her own generation’s search for love, for a notion of home and belonging. While this memoir is frequently heartbreaking, it also dazzles with incandescent humor. One of the most nuanced, wise, and tender portraits of immigration I have ever read.”
—Kiran Desai, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Inheritance of Loss, on This Is One Way to Dance by Sejal Shah
Centered in New York City, Pushing Back by Ariella Rotramel highlights two small, women-led community organizations that have participated in a number of progressive coalitions on issues such as housing rights, workers’ rights, and environmental justice at the local, national, and global levels. Rotramel shows how activists respond to injustice and marginalization, documenting the ways people of color and the working class in the United States recognize identity as key to the roots of and solutions to injustices such as environmental racism and gentrification. 
“Justice Leah Ward Sears is important not only because it tells Justice Sears’s remarkable personal story and discusses her many contributions to law and history, but because it does all of that in the context of political, legal, and electoral events important to all of us. The book accomplishes the difficult task of telling the personal and inspirational story of a brilliant African American woman while also discussing some of the most difficult issues of our time. I recommend Seizing Serendipity to anyone interested in women’s history, African American history, and biographies of extraordinary people.”
—Angela J. Davis, author of Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor, on Justice Leah Ward Sears: Seizing Serendipity by Rebecca Shriver Davis
“A cogent, scrupulously researched, squinty-eyed look at how conservative Southern values have shaped sororities throughout the United States.”
—Nell Beram for Press Herald, on Women of Discriminating Taste by Margaret L. Freeman
“In Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words, author Susan Reyburn provides a candid look into Parks’ personal life through previously unreleased letters, documents and photographs. . . . This courageous woman packed so much into her life, and likewise, the details of her life are packed into this inspiring portrait.”
—Matt Gifford for BookPage, on Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words by Susan Reyburn
“Leslie Petty’s Romancing the Vote artfully traces the development of American women’s activist feminist fiction from the subtle subversion of the sentimental romance to the middlebrow modernism of New Woman fiction. This book adds an important literary dimension to our understanding of American women’s political and reform history.”
—Ellen Carol DuBois, coauthor of Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents, on Romancing the Vote by Leslie Petty
Anne Finch and Her Poetry by Barbara McGovern is the first major critical examination of the life and works of the foremost English woman poet of the eighteenth century. This biography places Anne Finch (1661-1720) in her social and literary milieu and includes discussion of such topics as love and marriage, female friendships, melancholy, and nature as they relate both to Finch’s life and to her poetry. 
“Lillvis’s text is a welcome addition to the creative, critical, and theoretical work surrounding the current moment in black literatures. Lillvis’s work shows a fresh approach that bends the discourse in creative new directions.”
—James Arnett, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, on Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis
“Brückmann shows the persistence of white supremacist culture and emphasizes how it is deeply embedded in gender and class expectations. Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood demonstrates that race, gender, and class analysis combined provides a richer, more complex view of the Civil Rights era and the book is an important addition to scholarship of the segregation era.”
—Carol Grose, U.S. Studies Online, on Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood by Rebecca Brückmann
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