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Showing 1–17 of 17 books

  • List: Amelia Bloomer List - Young Adult Nonfiction
  • Award year: 2017
  • Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine

    Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine

    By Ibtisam Barakat

    Picking up where Tasting the Sky left off, Balcony on the Moon follows Ibtisam Barakat through her childhood and adolescence in Palestine from 1972-1981 and chronicles her desire to be a writer. Ibtisam finds inspiration through writing letters to pen pals and from an adult who encourages her to keep at it, but the most surprising turn of all for Ibtisam happens when her mother decides that she would like to seek out an education, too. This memoir is a touching, at times funny, and enlightening look at the not often depicted daily life in a politically tumultuous area.
  • Becoming Unbecoming

    Becoming Unbecoming

    By Una

    It's 1977 and Una is 12. Other kids are into punk or ska, but Una is learning to play "Mull of Kintyre" by Wings on the guitar, and she thinks it's a really good song. There's another song, chanted on the terraces by Leeds United fans. It might not have made it on to Top of the Pops, but the boys all sing it on the walk home from school: "One Yorkshire Ripper . . . There's only one Yorkshire Ripper . . . One Yorkshire Ri-pper . . ." A serial murderer is at large in West Yorkshire and the police—despite spending more than two million man-hours hunting the killer and interviewing the man himself no less than nine times—are struggling to solve the case. As this national news story unfolds around her, Una finds herself on the receiving end of a series of violent acts for which she feels she is to blame. Unbecoming explores gender violence, blame, shame, and social responsibility. Through image and text Una asks what it means to grow up in a culture where male violence goes unpunished and unquestioned. With the benefit of hindsight Una explores her experience, wonders if anything has really changed and challenges a global culture that demands that the victims of violence pay its cost.
  • CBLDF Presents: She Changed Comics: The Untold Story of the Women Who Changed Free Expression in Comics

    CBLDF Presents: She Changed Comics: The Untold Story of the Women Who Changed Free Expression in Comics

    By Betsy Gomez (Editor)

    SHE CHANGED COMICS celebrates the women who changed free expression in comics, with profiles of more than sixty groundbreaking female professionals and interviews with the women who are changing today's medium, including RAINA TELGEMEIER, NOELLE STEVENSON, G. WILLOW WILSON, and more! SHE CHANGED COMICS also examines the plights of women imprisoned and threatened for making comics and explores the work of women whose work is being banned here in the United States. A must for readers of all ages, students, and educators.
  • Clarina Nichols: Frontier Crusader for Women's Rights

    Clarina Nichols: Frontier Crusader for Women's Rights

    By Diane Eickhoff

    Everyone knows about the ''Votes for Women'' campaign that led to the 19th Amendment in 1920. Few know just how long the struggle really was. Decades earlier, brave women began breaking the taboo of remaining silent at gatherings that included men. They began signing their names to petitions, flexing political muscle long before they had the vote. They wrote millions of words and published some of the most influential books and journals of their day. No one represents this early struggle -- the small triumphs and discouraging setbacks -- better than Clarina Howard Nichols (1810-1885), the Vermont newspaper publisher whose speeches made a powerful case for equality. Nichols, herself the victim of a failed marriage, was a magnet to abused and mistreated women and was their advocate at a time when her sex was just beginning to speak up. And when she felt progress wasn't coming soon enough, she moved west, to Bleeding Kansas, where she would make history and show the world that feminism could thrive on the frontier.
  • Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey

    Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey

    By Özge Samancı

    Growing up on the Aegean Coast, Ozge loved the sea and imagined a life of adventure while her parents and society demanded predictability. Her dad expected Ozge, like her sister, to become an engineer. She tried to hear her own voice over his and the religious and militaristic tensions of Turkey and the conflicts between secularism and fundamentalism. Could she be a scuba diver like Jacques Cousteau? A stage actress? Would it be possible to please everyone including herself? In her unpredictable and funny graphic memoir, Ozge recounts her story using inventive collages, weaving together images of the sea, politics, science, and friendship.
  • Fastpitch: The Untold History of Softball and the Women Who Made the Game

    Fastpitch: The Untold History of Softball and the Women Who Made the Game

    By Erica Westly

    Softball is played by tens of millions in various age groups all around the world, but the origins of this beloved sport (and the charismatic athletes who helped it achieve prominence in the mid-twentieth century) have been shrouded in mystery…until now. Fastpitch brings to vivid life the eclectic mix of characters that make up softball's vibrant 129-year history. From its humble beginnings in 1887, when it was invented in a Chicago boat club and played with a broomstick, to the rise in the 1940s and 1950s of professional-caliber, company-sponsored teams that toured the country in style, softball's history is as varied as it is fascinating. Though it's thought of today as a female sport, fastpitch softball's early history is full of male stars, such as the vaudeville-esque Eddie Feigner, whose signature move was striking out batters while blindfolded. But because softball was one of the only team sports that also allowed women to play competitively, it took on added importance for female athletes. Women like Bertha Ragan Tickey, who set strikeout records and taught Lana Turner to pitch, and her teammate Joan Joyce, who struck out baseball star Ted Williams, made a name—and a life—for themselves in an era when female athletes had almost no prospects. Softball allowed them to flourish, and they in turn inspired a whole new generation of athletes.
  • Game Changers: The Unsung Heroines of Sports History

    Game Changers: The Unsung Heroines of Sports History

    By Molly Schiot

    Based on the Instagram account @TheUnsungHeroines, a celebration of the pioneering, forgotten female athletes of the twentieth century that features rarely seen photos and new interviews with past and present game changers including Abby Wambach and Cari Champion. Two years ago, filmmaker Molly Schiot began the Instagram account @TheUnsungHeroines, posting a photo each day of a female athlete who had changed the face of sports around the globe in the pre-Title IX age. These women paved the way for Serena Williams, Carli Lloyd, and Lindsey Vonn, yet few today know who they are. Slowly but surely, the account gained a following, and the result is Game Changers, a beautifully illustrated collection of these trailblazers' rarely-before-seen photos and stories. Featuring icons Althea Gibson and Wyomia Tyus, complete unknowns Trudy Beck and Conchita Cintron, policymaker Margaret Dunkle, sportswriter Lisa Olson, and many more, Game Changers gives these “founding mothers” the attention and recognition they deserve, and features critical conversations between past and present gamechangers—including former US Women's National Soccer Team captain Abby Wambach and SportsCenter anchor Cari Champion—about what it means to be a woman on and off the field. Inspiring, empowering, and unforgettable, Game Changers is the perfect gift for anyone who has a love of the game.
  • Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

    Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

    By Margot Lee Shetterly

    Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA's African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America's space program. Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers', calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts, these ‘coloured computers' used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets and astronauts, into space. Moving from World War II through NASA's golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War and the women's rights movement, ‘Hidden Figures' interweaves a rich history of mankind's greatest adventure with the intimate stories of five courageous women whose work forever changed the world.
  • Radioactive!: How Irène Curie and Lise Meitner Revolutionized Science and Changed the World

    Radioactive!: How Irène Curie and Lise Meitner Revolutionized Science and Changed the World

    By Winifred Conkling

    In 1934, Irène Curie, working with her husband and fellow scientist, Frederic Joliot, made a discovery that would change the world: artificial radioactivity. This breakthrough allowed scientists to modify elements and create new ones by altering the structure of atoms. Curie shared a Nobel Prize with her husband for their work. But when she was nominated to the French Academy of Sciences, the academy denied her admission and voted to disqualify all women from membership. Four years later, Curie's breakthrough led physicist Lise Meitner to a brilliant leap of understanding that unlocked the secret of nuclear fission. Meitner's unique insight was critical to the revolution in science that led to nuclear energy and the race to build the atom bomb, yet her achievement was left unrecognized by the Nobel committee in favor of that of her male colleague.
  • Reproductive Rights: Who Decides?

    Reproductive Rights: Who Decides?

    By Vicki Oransky Wittenstein

    Throughout history, men and women have always found ways to control reproduction. In some ancient societies, people turned to herbs or traditional rituals. Others turned to methods that are still used in the twenty-first century, such as abstinence, condoms, and abortions. Legislating access to birth control, sex education, and abortion is also not new. In 1873 the US Congress made it illegal to mail 'obscene, lewd, or lascivious materials'--including any object designed for contraception or to induce abortion. In some states in the 1900s, it was illegal for Americans to possess, sell, advertise, or even speak about methods of controlling pregnancy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and others began to defy these laws and advocate for the legalization of birth control and for better women's reproductive healthcare. By 1960 doctors had developed the Pill, but it wasn't until 1972 that all US citizens had legal access to birth control. And in the landmark decision Roe v Wade (1973), the US Supreme Court ruled that women had a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. Disputes over contraception, sex education, and abortion continue to roil the nation, leading to controversial legal and political rulings and occasionally violence. As society changes--and as new reproductive technologies expand the possibilities for controlling and initiating pregnancy--Americans will continue to debate reproductive rights for all.
  • Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

    Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

    By Lindy West

    Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible--like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you--writer and humorist Lindy West quickly discovered that she was anything but. From a painfully shy childhood in which she tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her big body and even bigger opinions; to her public war with stand-up comedians over rape jokes; to her struggle to convince herself, and then the world, that fat people have value; to her accidental activism and never-ending battle royale with Internet trolls, Lindy narrates her life with a blend of humor and pathos that manages to make a trip to the abortion clinic funny and wring tears out of a story about diarrhea. With inimitable good humor, vulnerability, and boundless charm, Lindy boldly shares how to survive in a world where not all stories are created equal and not all bodies are treated with equal respect, and how to weather hatred, loneliness, harassment, and loss--and walk away laughing. Shrill provocatively dissects what it means to become self-aware the hard way, to go from wanting to be silent and invisible to earning a living defending the silenced in all caps.
  • Take It As a Compliment

    Take It As a Compliment

    By Maria Stoian

    "I was fifteen." "I never saw him again." "They chanted after me, 'Oscar the Grouch, Oscar the Grouch." Bringing together the voices of males and females of all ages, the stories in this collective graphic memoir reflect real life experiences of sexual abuse, violence and harassment. Each experience is brought to life by Maria Stoian's exceptional artwork. Her unique and varied styles powerfully reflect the tone and mood of the different stories and in just a few pages express the complex emotions felt by victims of sexual abuse. Covering acts such as sexual violence, public sexual harassment, domestic abuse and child abuse, this is a reminder for survivors that they are not alone and a call for all of us to take action. The stories clearly show that assault of any type is not an honour bestowed on anyone. It is not a compliment.
  • Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why

    Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why

    By Sady Doyle

    She's everywhere once you start looking for her: the trainwreck. She's Britney Spears shaving her head, Whitney Houston saying, “crack is whack,” and Amy Winehouse, dying in front of millions. But the trainwreck is also as old (and as meaningful) as feminism itself. From Mary Wollstonecraft—who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—to Charlotte Brontë, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, Sady Doyle's Trainwreck dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians alike, and when women are pushing harder than ever against the boundaries of what it means to “behave.” Where did these women come from? What are their crimes? And what does it mean for the rest of us? For an age when any form of self-expression can be the one that ends you, Sady Doyle's book is as fierce and intelligent as it is funny and compassionate—an essential, timely, feminist anatomy of the female trainwreck.
  • Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran

    Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran

    By Shirin Ebadi

    The first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi has inspired millions around the globe through her work as a human rights lawyer defending women and children against a brutal regime in Iran. Now Ebadi tells her story of courage and defiance in the face of a government out to destroy her, her family, and her mission: to bring justice to the people and the country she loves. For years the Islamic Republic tried to intimidate Ebadi, but after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rose to power in 2005, the censorship and persecution intensified. The government wiretapped Ebadi's phones, bugged her law firm, sent spies to follow her, harassed her colleagues, detained her daughter, and arrested her sister on trumped-up charges. It shut down her lectures, fired up mobs to attack her home, seized her offices, and nailed a death threat to her front door. Despite finding herself living under circumstances reminiscent of a spy novel, nothing could keep Ebadi from speaking out and standing up for human dignity. But it was not until she received a phone call from her distraught husband—and he made a shocking confession that would all but destroy her family—that she realized what the intelligence apparatus was capable of to silence its critics. The Iranian government would end up taking everything from Shirin Ebadi—her marriage, friends, and colleagues, her home, her legal career, even her Nobel Prize—but the one thing it could never steal was her spirit to fight for justice and a better future. This is the amazing, at times harrowing, simply astonishing story of a woman who would never give up, no matter the risks. Just as her words and deeds have inspired a nation, Until We Are Free will inspire you to find the courage to stand up for your beliefs.
  • The V-Word: True Stories About First-Time Sex

    The V-Word: True Stories About First-Time Sex

    By Amber J. Keyser

    Losing it. Popping your cherry. Handing in your V-card. First time sex is a big unknown. Will it be candlelight and rose petals or quick and uncomfortable? Is it about love or about lust? Deciding to have sex for the first time is a choice that's often fraught with anxiety and joy. But do you have anyone telling you what sex is really like? In The V-Word seventeen writers (including Christa Desir, Justina Ireland, Sara Ryan, Carrie Mesrobian, Erica Lorraine Scheidt, and Jamia Wilson) pull back the sheets and tell all, covering everything from straight sex to queer sex, diving-in versus waiting, and even the exhilaration and disappointment that blankets it all. Some of their experiences happened too soon, some at just the right time, but all paint a broad picture of what first-time sex is really like. Funny, hot, meaningful, cringe-worthy, gross, forgettable, magnificent, empowering, and transformative, the stories in The V-Word are never preachy, but provide a map for teens to chart their own course through the steamy waters of sex. With The V-Word girls can finally take control, learn what's on the horizon, and eliminate the fear and mystery surrounding this important milestone.
  • We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out

    We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out

    By Annie E. Clark, Andrea L. Pino

    Across the U.S. student activists are exposing a pervasive cover-up of sexual violence on college campuses. Every day more survivors come forward. But other survivors choose not to. We Believe You elevates the stories the headlines about this issue have been missing--more than 30 experiences of trauma, healing and everyday activism, representing a diversity of races, economic and family backgrounds, gender identities, immigration statuses, interests, capacities and loves. More than 1 in 5 women and 5 percent of men are sexually assaulted at college, a shocking status quo that might have stayed largely hidden and unaddressed but for the two authors of We Believe You. In 2013, Annie E. Clark and Andrea L. Pino, then 23 and 20, building on the work of earlier activists, outed themselves as assault survivors and filed a federal complaint against the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) for mishandling such crimes; within a month, the U.S. government began to investigate UNC. Within a year, dozens of colleges were under federal investigation. But Clark and Pino rightly see themselves as two among many. Students from every kind of college and university--large and small, public and private, highly selective and less so?are sounding alarms and staking claims to justice by filing complaints, by pressing charges, and by simply living beyond the effects of assault and the betrayals of their schools. A sampling of their voices speak out in this book.
  • Women: Body-Positive Art to Inspire and Empower

    Women: Body-Positive Art to Inspire and Empower

    By Carol Rossetti

    The message we receive from the world is clear: we're not good enough. We're not skinny enough, pretty enough, smart enough. Women is all about accepting ourselves. Carol Rossetti asks us instead to say, “We're not good enough—we're even better.” Despite the progress we've made as a society, there is still a cruel and subtle gender oppression that exists today—and many don't realize it's there. In response, Rossetti decided to draw women to focus on the issues we face. Her illustrations are of women who feel safe expressing themselves by showing the world their fashion, sexuality, relationships, religion, disabilities, and even traumatic experiences.