Over 50 books up for grabs in Women’s History Month special giveaway
As part of our Women’s History Month coverage in All About History 127, we’ve worked with a number of publishers to give away over £900-worth of history books covering a variety of aspects of women’s history.
From histories of some of the great female rulers in history to examinations of the suffragette movement or celebrating the work of great female artists (and a little historical fiction thrown in too), this collection of about 50 titles is a crash course in women’s history that will bolster any collection (sorry we can’t provide the new bookcase you’ll need to keep them all).
All you have to do to have a chance of winning this amazing prize is answer the question below and fill in your details. The competition closes on 22 March 2023. Full details of the books up for grabs below.
Special thanks to Thames & Hudson, Penguin Books, Verso Books, Osprey Publishing, Hodder & Stoughton, Head Of Zeus, The History Press, Unicorn Publishing, Orion Books, NYU Press, British Library Publishing and Yale University Press for their contributions to this prize bundle.
Here are the books involved in the giveaway.
Courtesy of Thames & Hudson
Women Photographers
By Clara Bouveresse: A slipcased set of all three books in the Photofile ‘Women Photographers’ series.
The Lives of Lee Miller
By Antony Penrose: Beautiful, bewitching and an exceptionally good photographer, Lee Miller was one of life’s adventurers.
Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life
By Eleanor Clayton: The first fully illustrated biography to look at the entirety of Barbara Hepworth’s multi-faceted artistic practice
Julia Margaret Cameron: Arresting Beauty
By Lisa Springer and Marta Weiss: Arresting Beauty presents more than 100 images drawn from the most extensive collection of Cameron’s work anywhere in the world, now including treasures from the Royal Photographic Society.
Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?
By Linda Nochlin: The 50th anniversary edition of the first major work of feminist art history, published together with the author’s reflections three decades on
Courtesy of Penguin Books
The Flames
By Sophie Haydock: A gripping historical novel set in 1900s Vienna, featuring four fiery women.
The Five
By Hallie Rubenhold: Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They were all murdered in 1888. Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him has become far more famous than any of these five women… Jack the Ripper
Courtesy of Verso Books
The Rising of the Women
By Meredith Tax: Caught between the hostility of male trade unionists, the chauvinism of male socialist organisers, and the assumptions of middle-class feminists, women workers forged their own demands for economic and political justice in the industrialising landscape of North America.
Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution
By Yasmin El-Rifae: A haunting, intimate account of the women and men who built a feminist revolution in the middle of the Arab Spring.
Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women
By Kristen Ghodsee: Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism in Eastern Europe. Through the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of radicals.
Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism
By Barbara Winslow: An extraordinary political biography of English suffragist, feminist, and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst
Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties
By Sheila Rowbotham: A sparkling portrait of a time when women were breaking all the rules about sex, politics and their place in the world
Courtesy of Osprey Publishing
Sisters in Arms
By Julie Wheelwright: Sisters in Arms charts the evolution of women in combat, from the Scythian warriors who inspired the Amazonian myth, to the re-emergence of women as official members of the armed forces in the twentieth century.
Napoleon’s Women Camp Followers
By Terry Crowdy: Researched from primary sources, this is the first book to explain and illustrate the organisation, activities and personal stories of the female ‘support staff’ who played a major role in the day-to-day life of Napoleon’s armies.
Courtesy of Hodder & Stoughton
The Hiding Place
By Corrie ten Boom: Despite the danger and threat of discovery, the ten Boom family courageously offered shelter to persecuted Jews during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Then a trap brought about the family’s arrest. Could God’s love shine through, even in Ravensbruck?
Black England
By Gretchen Gerzina: The idea that Britain became a mixed-race country after 1945 is a common mistake. Georgian England had a large and distinctive Black community. Black England tells their dramatic, often moving stories.
Hear No Evil
By Sarah Smith: In the burgeoning industrial city of Glasgow in 1817 Jean Campbell – a young, Deaf woman – is witnessed throwing a child into the River Clyde from the Old Bridge.
I, Julian
By Claire Gilbert: From the author of Miles to Go before I Sleep comes I, Julian, the account of a medieval woman who dares to tell her own story, battling grief, plague, the church and societal expectations to do so.
Chasing the Dragon
By Jackie Pullinger: When Pullinger set sail from England in 1966 she had no idea that God was calling her to the Walled City. Yet, as she spoke of Jesus Christ, brutal Triad gangsters were converted, prostitutes quit, and Jackie discovered a new treatment for drug addiction: baptism in the Holy Spirit.
Courtesy of Head Of Zeus
Woman’s Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi
By Sarah Clegg: The history of a demonic tradition that was stolen from women – and then won back again.
Cleopatra’s Daughter: Egyptian Princess, Roman Prisoner, African Queen
By Jane Draycott: The first modern biography of one of the most fascinating, and unjustly neglected, female rulers of the ancient world: Cleopatra Selene. Princess, prisoner, African queen – and surviving daughter of Cleopatra VII.
Courtesy of The History Press
Gloriana
By Linda Collins and Siobhan Clarke: Tells the story of Elizabethan art as a powerful device for royal magnificence and propaganda, illuminating several key artworks of Elizabeth’s reign to create a portrait of the Tudor monarch as she has never been seen before.
Cast a Diva
By Lyndsy Spence: Maria Callas (1923–77) was the greatest opera diva of all time. Despite a career that remains unmatched by any prima donna, much of her life was overshadowed by her fiery relationship with Aristotle Onassis. However, little is known about the woman behind the diva.
Violette
By Tania Szabó: SOE agent Violette Szabó was one of the most incredible women who operated behind enemy lines during the Second World War. Written by her daughter, Young, Brave and Beautiful reveals the woman and mother behind this extraordinary hero.
Out of the Darkness
By Kate Kerrow, Rebecca Mordan: In 1981, a group of women marched from Cardiff to the Greenham Common RAF base in Newbury to protest the siting of US nuclear missiles on British soil.
The Times Great Women’s Lives
This selection of Times obituaries from 1872 to 2014 revisits the lives of 125 women who have all, in their own way, played an important part in women’s educational, professional, social, cultural and emotional journey over the best part of two centuries.
War Stories
By David Bolton: After listening to his mother-in-law talking about her experiences in the Second World War, David Bolton set out to record the wartime memories of British women before it was too late.
Pauline Gower, Pioneering Leader of the Spitfire Women
By Alison Hill: A story of bravery, fortitude and political persuasion. Pauline was a clear leader of her time and a true pioneer of flight.
Remarkable Women of the Second World War
By Victoria Panton Bacon: When the Second World War broke out, the task of keeping society afloat fell on the shoulders of the women left behind. Remarkable Women of the Second World War is a collection of twelve of these stories, all carefully gathered and retold by Victoria Panton Bacon.
Magnificent Women and Flying Machines
By Sally Smith: The stories of the pioneers who achieved real firsts in various forms of aviation: in ballooning, parachuting, gliding, airships and fixed-wing flight – right up to a trip to the International Space Station!
Courtesy of Unicorn Publishing
Stunner: The Fall and Rise of Fanny Cornforth
By Kirsty Stonell Walker: It’s finally time that the truth is separated from the swirl of lies and that the life of one of the most infamous women of Bohemian London is told, from canvas to asylum.
Queen of The Savoy: The Extraordinary Life of Helen D’Oyly Carte 1852-1913
By Elisabeth Kehoe: She was known in her time as the true founder of the Gilbert and Sullivan franchise and this biography will bring to light, some 110 years after her death, the extraordinary role that she played in one of Britain’s greatest success stories.
Constance Villiers Stuart in Pursuit of Paradise
By Mary Ann Prior: Constance earned her reputation studying Mughal and Moorish gardens as well as those in Great Britain, France, Italy and northern Europe. Between 1910 and 1955 she wrote about them, painted and photographed them and lectured on them.
After the Annex: Anne Frank, Auschwitz and Beyond
By Bas von Benda-Beckmann: After the Annex continues the journey that Otto Frank began. It is the ultimate attempt, based on thorough research in archives and available eye witness accounts, to reconstruct as precisely as possible what happened to the eight people in hiding after their arrest.
The Belles of Waterloo
By Alice Church: A romance inspired by real events… Maria, Georgy and Harriet navigate their first throes of passion, scandal, and love in the heady pre-war atmosphere of Brussels in 1815.
Courtesy of Orion Books
The Case Of The Married Woman
By Antonia Fraser: Poet, pamphleteer and artist’s muse, Caroline Norton dazzled 19-century society with her vivacity and intelligence. Award-winning historian Antonia Fraser brilliantly portrays a woman who refused to be curbed by the personal and political constraints of her time.
Venus And Aphrodite
By Bettany Hughes: Through ancient art, evocative myth, intriguing archaeological discoveries and philosophical explorations, Bettany Hughes takes us on a voyage of discovery to reveal the truth behind Venus, and why this immortal goddess is so much more than nudity, romance and sex.
Queens Of Jerusalem
By Katherine Pangonis: Pangonis explores the role women played in the governing of the Middle East during periods of intense instability, and how they persevered to rule and seize greater power for themselves when the opportunity presented itself.
Milk
By Joanna Wolfarth: Using the arc of her own experience, Joanna takes us on an intimate journey of discovery beyond mother and baby, asking how the world views caregivers, their bodies, their labour and their communal bonds.
The Other Side
By Jennifer Higgie: Weaving in and out of these myriad lives, Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art.
A Marriage Of Fortune
By Anne O’Brien: In the midst of civil war, each of these women must decide: Head or heart? Love or duty? Reputation- or scandal?
Unwell Women
By Elinor Cleghorn: In this ground-breaking history Elinor Cleghorn unpacks the roots of the perpetual misunderstanding, mystification and misdiagnosis of women’s bodies, illness and pain.
Courtesy of NYU Press
Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement
by Wendy L. Rouse: Restores queer suffragists to their rightful place in the history of the struggle for women’s right to vote
Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress
By Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink: The first biography of trailblazing legislator Patsy Takemoto Mink, best known as the legislative champion of Title IX
Susan B. Anthony: A Biography
By Kathleen Barry: Brings to life one of the most significant figures in the crusade for women’s rights in America
Courtesy of British Library Publishing
The Women’s Suffrage Cookery Book
Compiled by Mrs Aubrey Dowson: A faithful reproduction of a book originally published in 1912 by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS)
Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights
Edited by Polly Russell and Margaretta Jolly: Taking a forward-facing, activism-oriented look at how the history of women’s rights informs the continued fight for equality
Courtesy of Yale University Press
Mission France: The True History of the Women of SOE
By Kate Vigurs: The full story of the thirty-nine female SOE agents who went undercover in France
The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660–1900
By Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux: This fascinating and enlightening study of the tie-on pocket combines materiality and gender to provide new insight into the social history of women’s everyday lives
The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England
By Amanda Vickery: In this lively and controversial book, Amanda Vickery invokes women’s own accounts of their intimate and their public lives to argue that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the scope of female experience did not diminish-in fact, quite the reverse
Jane Austen: A Brief Life
By Fiona Stafford: An elegant and accessible introduction to the life and works of one of England’s greatest and most popular novelists
The Woman Reader
By Belinda Jack: This lively story has never been told before: the complete history of women’s reading and the ceaseless controversies it has inspired
Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy
By Emma Griffin: The forgotten story of how ordinary families managed financially in the Victorian era—and struggled to survive despite increasing national prosperity
Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin’s Russia
By Elizabeth Wilson: The first full biography of the fearless and brilliant Maria Yudina, a legendary pianist who was central to Russian intellectual life