Women's History Month - Recommended Readings

Written by Faculty:


Sungyun Lim
Associate Professor - Japan / Modern Korea


Honor Sachs
Associate Professor - Early America


Marcia Yonemoto
Professor / Department Chair - Early Modern Japan


Barbara Engel
Distinguished Professor Emerita - Russia / Women's History


Susan Kent
Professor Emerita - Modern Britain / British Empire


  • "This sweeping, readable global discussion ranges from prehistory to the present, showing how complex and changing this basic human concept turns out to be." - Associate Professor Emeritus Ralph Mann

  • "This brief, accessible overview dispels myths and puts a powerful and long-lived ruler into global context. An entire era still bears her name." - Associate Professor Emeritus Ralph Mann

Lee Chambers
Professor Emerita听- Modern World


Marjorie Mcintosh
Distinguished Professor Emerita - Early Modern Britain


Further Recommendations:听



  • "Bayard de Volo examines both the central roles women played in Cuban Revolution, especially in the urban underground, and the ways Castro manipulated gendered narratives in the war for hearts and minds. In so doing, she revises the official story of the Revolution, which praises young, bearded guerillas, and provides a deeper understanding of the Revolution's success against the dictator, Fulgencio Batista." - Dr. Julia Ogden

  • "A collection of works written by听Justice Ginsburg throughout her life, focusing on gender, law and the Supreme Court. A fascinating look into her mind and life." - Abi Peters

  • "Filled with fresh research, this prize-winning book shines light on the contrasting experiences of Civil War women--North and South, rich and poor, free and enslaved". - Associate Professor Emeritus Ralph Mann

  • "A study of two women who wrote about western history as amateur historians during the twentieth century. Much of it sent in and around Denver." - Professor Honor Sachs

  • "A compelling and engagingly written account of how claims to special听consideration are in tension with full and equal rights, spanning American history from colonial times to the twentieth century." - Dr. Vilja Hulden

  • "A revisionist history of footbinding. Resisting simple portrayal of the custom of footbinding as a patriarchal practice that victimized women, Ko invites the readers to the intimate and familial world of footbinding in the inner quarters to try to understand how the women themselves must have regarded the practice. Ko analyzes the multiple layers of cultural imagery that historically exoticized and eroticized the practice in both China and the Western world, and then brings the readers to the materiality of the bound feet themselves, through the beautifully adorned slippers that the women themselves lovingly decorated through embroidery. A thought-provoking read. The author鈥檚 affection and admiration for the women with bound feet is very moving." - Professor Sungyun Lim

  • "Law-Yone is actually a novelist, but in this book she traces her father's career as a dissident newspaper editor under various twentieth-century Burmese regimes, its impact on the family, and her own experiences as a refugee/immigrant in the United States." - Professor Miriam Kadia

  • "An engaging, image-filled introduction to women's history in India, by a prominent Indian feminist." - Professor Lucy Chester

  • "A master of the historian's craft shows how and why elite "grand families" in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China could not do without women of talent." - Professor Marcia Yonemoto

  • "A careful and nuanced history about the Korean 鈥渃omfort women鈥 mobilized by the Japanese military during the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War. Piercing analysis through multiple layers of discourses on wide-ranging political spectrum from Korea, Japan, and the U.S. the author not only challenges the typical and simplistic portrayal of the 鈥渃omfort women鈥 as victims, but also exposes the violence of such portrayal on the women themselves. In its stead, Soh highlights the structure of patriarchy in the Japanese empire and Korea, that led to the women鈥檚 victimization then and continuously after 1945." - Professor Sungyun Lim

  • "An engrossing and beautifully written book that is also a major feat of historical research, as the author reconstructs from fragmentary evidence the world of a not-well-behaved woman whose remarkable life took her from the snow country of far northeastern Japan to the metropolis of Edo (now Tokyo) in the early nineteenth century." - Professor Marcia Yonemoto

  • "Malintzin was Hernan Cortes's indigenous interpreter, and a central听figure in the success of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. By placing Malintzin in her historical context, Townsend not only humanizes the notorious symbol of "La Malinche," but she also dispels that myth that a "handful of adventurers" took down a vast and mighty empire." - Dr. Julia Ogden