New sapphic book review: The Freezer (Cal Nyx #3) by Kim Hunt
https://judeinthestars.com/2025/03/26/the-freezer-by-kim-hunt/
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Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie" by Ellen Cassedy (2022).
The author Ellen Cassedy and her co-worker Karen Nussbaum were office workers at Harvard University in the early 1970's. Conversations with other women in similar employment brought out the same recurring complaints of low pay, lack of opportunity for advancement, sexual harassment in the workplace, and overall lack of respect.
They began publishing a newsletter called "9to5", giving a voice to women clerical workers. Before long, they had gathered a group of ten women to create the organization 9to5, which eventually became District 925, a nationwide labor union for office workers.
The organization fought to win respect for the legions of clerical staff, overwhelmingly women, who were patronized as "office wives", loaded with petty chores unrelated to their official jobs, passed over for promotions to managerial positions, underpaid, and subjected to sexual harrassment.
In corporate and university offices, insurance companies, banks, and thousands of other settings, the once undervalued secretary, dismissed as a menial file clerk or typist, gained recognition as a true administrative professional whose many skills keep organizations running smoothly.
(Interesting note: The movie "9 to 5" was loosely inspired by the 9to5 movement.)
Link to book:
https://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/working-9-to-5-products-9781641608220.php
Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics" by Anastasia C. Curwood (2023).
When I stumbled across this book on the "new" shelf at the library, it took my memory back to the excitement of seeing a woman as a serious presidential candidate in 1972, when I was 12 years old. Our generation of girls in the 1970's were being told that we could grow up to be anything, including president, and here was an example right in front of us.
Well, history let us down. Chisholm was battling double prejudice, as a woman who was also black, and she never made it out of the primaries. More than a half-century later, despite two women nominees, we have yet to see a woman president.
Reading this book, I discovered so much more about Chisholm's life beyond her presidential run. Here was her childhood in Barbados, her early work in New York City in childhood education and child-welfare issues, and then her entry into politics in the New York State Assembly.
Serving in the U.S. Congress from 1969-1983, she was instrumental in creating the WIC nutritional assistance program, and seeing that domestic workers received minimum wage protections. She supported land rights for Native Americans, opposed the Vietnam War, and campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment.
She told us: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair!”
Link to book:
https://uncpress.org/book/9781469671178/shirley-chisholm/
Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "Marie Curie" by Susan Quinn (1996).
Marie Sklodowska-Curie is a familiar name to just about all of us. We know from our school days that she discovered radioactivity, and was a two-time Nobel Prize winner. But for many of us, she remains a brief sketch from school history books.
This complete biography is satisfyingly full of detail about both her scientific work and her personal life. Starting with her youth in Russian-occupied Poland, going on to her student years in Paris, then to her partnership with her husband Pierre Curie, and their work with radioactive elements, which led to their first Nobel Prize.
After Pierre was killed in a street accident, she continued her scientific career, at a time when women in science were commonly sidelined and minimized. She was the first woman to receive a Doctorate from the Sorbonne, the first woman to serve as a Professor there, and in 1911, was awarded her second Nobel Prize, the first awarded solely to a woman.
During WWI, she designed portable X-ray machines for field hospitals, helping doctors locate and remove shrapnel and save lives. Much of the rest of her life was devoted to the study of radioactivity in medical research, including the use of X-rays for diagnosis of ailments, and the use of radioisotopes for treatment of cancerous tumors.
Truly one of the great women of science.
Link to book:
https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/susan-quinn/marie-curie/9780201887945/
Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson" by William Souder (2012).
Excerpts from the publisher's description:
"Rachel Carson loved the ocean and wrote three books about its mysteries. But it was with her fourth book, Silent Spring, that this unassuming biologist transformed our relationship with the natural world. Silent Spring was a chilling indictment of DDT and other pesticides... It was Carson who sifted through all the evidence, documenting with alarming clarity the collateral damage to fish, birds, and other wildlife; revealing the effects of these new chemicals to be lasting, widespread, and lethal....Carson opened a fault line between the gentle ideal of conservation and the more urgent new concept of environmentalism...."
"...On a Farther Shore reveals a shy yet passionate woman more at home in the natural world than in the literary one that embraced her. William Souder also writes sensitively of Carson’s romantic friendship with Dorothy Freeman, and of Carson’s death from cancer in 1964. This extraordinary new biography captures the essence of one of the great reformers of the twentieth century."
I love Carson's trilogy of sea and shore nature books, wonderful repeat re-reads. But it was her darkly hard-hitting "Silent Spring" which changed the world and made her one of my heroes.
Link to book:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/170448/on-a-farther-shore-by-william-souder/
Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812" by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (1989).
Martha Ballard was an ordinary woman who lived on the Maine frontier in the first decades after the American Revolution. She delivered 816 babies, often travelling through snow and across rivers to reach her patients. She also helped her husband support their family with her textile work and various other enterprises, including supporting herself for a year when her husband was imprisoned for debt. She might have remained unknown to history, but for the fact that she kept a diary which survived.
The diary's short factual entries detail Ballard's work as a midwife, her spinning and weaving, gardening, and various business enterprises. Out of these terse entries, historian Ulrich assembles a fascinating social history of a woman's life in the late 18th and early 19th century.
Each chapter of the book begins with an excerpt from Ballard's diary, and then fleshes out that excerpt with the social and economic background that places it in context. The topics covered range from midwifery and medicine, to religion, to marriage, to the legal system. The role of women is central to the story, tying together these various threads.
This book won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1990.
Link to book:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/181591/a-midwifes-tale-by-laurel-thatcher-ulrich/
Read MODEL HOME by Rivers Solomon if you love quintessential queer black literature, haunted houses, fractured families, sprawling suburbs, loving cups of tea, gut-punching prose, late night sanctuary diners, Jenny Holzer's Abuse of Power, Mothers, dissociating, running away & the unexplainable.
@bookstodon #book #books #bookreview #bookreviews #bookrecs #bookrec #bookrecommendations #bookrecommendation #readersofmastodon #readersonmastodon #2025reads #ireadbooks #lgbtqbooks #queerbooks
New sapphic book review: For Love and Blood and Fury: a sapphic paranormal romance (Lilith's Legacy Book 1)
https://judeinthestars.com/2025/03/18/for-love-and-blood-and-fury-liliths-legacy-book-1/
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Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years" by Elizabeth Barber (1994).
I mentioned this book here awhile ago, in connection with one of the daily haiku prompts, but today it's time to give it a direct recommendation.
It's about the earliest history of spinning and weaving in the Bronze Age, and the role women played in developing these arts, and the role these arts played in the lives of women.
Spinning was the basis of all textile production, and the most time-consuming. Without thread, there could be no weaving. Women had their spindles and distaffs always ready to hand, spinning in any odd moments as they went through their days, as they walked down the road, as they sat beside cooking pots, as they tended children, as they visited and socialized.
No wonder spinning played such a part in cultural memory, from the three Fates spinning the thread of a human life, to Ariadne's ball of thread in the labyrinth, to fairy tales like Rumplestiltskin.
Spinning and weaving were peculiarly female labors, because until industrialization, they could be performed at home while children ran about. Clothing was highly valued because it took so much labor to produce, yet because it wore out and vanished from the archaeological record, historians paid little attention to it, until modern interest in women's history highlighted its importance.
Link to book:
For today's book recommendation for Women's History Month, I'm suggesting two different books about Women and Bicycles.
One is a nonfiction book for YA readers, "Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way)" by Sue Macy (2017).
In a short snappy hundred pages, this book tells how access to bicycles, starting in the 1890's and continuing into the 20th century, changed the lives of women. Bicycles set women free to travel independently, go exploring, engage in exercise, more easily reach jobs and run errands, and embrace more practical and comfortable clothing. While written for a YA audience, it is an informative concise overview of the subject for readers of any age.
Link to "Wheels of Change":
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/205395/wheels-of-change-by-sue-macy/
Today's second book is "Bicycling for Ladies" by Maria Ward (1896).
This book was written at the height of the 1890's bicycling craze. The author was herself a woman cyclist. In this book, she endorses loose practical clothing, shorter skirts, breathable waists, and even knickerbockers. She encourages women to undertake their own bicycle maintenance, and explains the use of various tools. She encourages women to venture out and explore the world, extolling the sense of independence and confidence to be found in such adventures.
Link to free LibriVox audiobook:
https://librivox.org/bicycling-for-ladies-by-maria-e-ward/
Link to free public domain text at Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62227
New sapphic book review: The Black Bird of Chernobyl by Ann McMan, narrated by Christine Williams
Video review: https://www.instagram.com/p/DHEU2zCIa82/
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Twisted sisters Gonorrena & Hepatitissa are 2 nefarious hoo-hoos who love committing atrocities. They aided Haight Squeezog in his takeover of Bonertania. Learn more at sifillis.com!
Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet" by Nell McShane Wulfhart (2023).
When stewardesses were first introduced to passenger air travel, they were hired as nurses, to care for airsick or nervous passengers. Before long, their role had changed to encompass general passenger pampering. In the process, stereotypical gender roles played a larger and larger part.
Stewardesses were required to report for weight checks, clothing inspections (including girdles), and attend training on makeup, hair, and general "charm". They were forbidden to marry or to become pregnant. And they were summarily fired when they reached the age of 32.
In addition to all this, they were subject to sexual harrassment and innuendo, encouraged by highly sexualized advertising campaigns by the airlines which employed them. Their pay was low, and the union to which they paid their dues ignored their issues to focus on male transportation workers issues.
This book is the story of how the women organized to fight for their rights under Title VII, formed their own union to better represent them, and won better pay and benefits, freedom from oppressive rules, protection from harrassment, and a career path that offered opportunity for advancement and respect.
Link to book:
Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America" by Katherine Turk (2023).
Excerpts from publisher's description:
"In the summer of 1966, crammed into a D.C. hotel suite, twenty-eight women devised a revolutionary plan. Betty Friedan, the well-known author of "The Feminine Mystique", and Pauli Murray, a lawyer at the front lines of the civil rights movement, had called this renegade meeting from attendees at the annual conference of state women’s commissions. Fed up with waiting for government action and trying to work with a broken system, they laid out a vision for an organization to unite all women and fight for their rights. ... In less than twenty-four hours, the National Organization for Women was born...."
"In The Women of NOW, the historian Katherine Turk chronicles the growth and enduring influence of this foundational group through three lesser-known members who became leaders: Aileen Hernandez, a federal official of Jamaican American heritage; Mary Jean Collins, a working-class union organizer and Chicago Catholic; and Patricia Hill Burnett, a Michigan Republican, artist, and former beauty queen. From its bold inception through the tumultuous training ground of the 1970s, NOW’s feminism ... permanently shifted American culture and politics."
Link to book:
It’s New Zealand Book Month and I’m reviewing Outsider by Kiwi author Jade du Preez.
https://judeinthestars.com/2025/03/06/outsider-by-jade-du-preez/
Video review: https://www.instagram.com/p/DG3PO7qgLqY/
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Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist" by Judith Heumann (2020).
Born in 1947, Heumann contracted polio as a toddler, and used a wheelchair for most of her life. As a child, she was refused admittance to public school, because her wheelchair was deemed a "fire hazard". Her mother challenged this injustice, and fought for her daughter's right to equal educational opportunity. As a result, Heumann entered public high school in 1961.
While attending college, she began organizing rallies with other students, insisting on such accommodations as wheelchair ramps and the right to live in dorms.
In 1970, Heumann sued the New York City Board of Education for refusing her a teaching license because of her disability. The Board of Education settled the suit, and she became the first wheelchair user to teach in New York City.
Heumann went on to become a leader in the Disability Rights movement. She founded Disabled in Action, an organization focused on securing the protection of people with disabilities under civil rights laws. She led political protests and helped push for legislation for disability rights.
This book looks at the life and legacy of a woman who made a difference in the lives of so many people. It's especially important to recall her work now, when disabilily rights are again under threat.
Link to book:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/621090/being-heumann-by-judith-heumann-with-kristen-joiner/paperback/
Today's book recommendation for Women's History Month is "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf (1929).
The themes of this witty and engrossing little book are the roadblocks hampering women writers and artists, specifically lack of financial independence, and lack of personal time and space. "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
She presents her arguments through a series of fictional scenes. In the first, she imagines the contrast between the educational richness offered to men at Oxbridge, and the bare-bones women's college down the road.
She then wonders why women don't have the money to endow and support their own literary institutions as men do. She surveys centuries of limited opportunities for women. How can such stunted lives produce a genius like Shakespeare?
She then goes on to imagine that Shakespeare had a sister as gifted as himself. But this sister would have had none of her brother's opportunities to freely develop that gift. She would not have been able to run away to London and live the life he had lived. Her story would have been brief and tragic.
Concluding with examination of women writers of the 19th and early 20th century, she speculates on how much more women might yet achieve, with financial support and a room of their own.
Public domain text from Internet Archive here:
https://archive.org/details/woolf_aroom/page/n1/mode/2up
Public domain audiobook from LibriVox here:
Do people know good epistolary fiction books? I like the idea of a story written out like a real diary. I don't care if it's in either english or finnish.
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A while ago, on another social media site, someone posted a question along the lines:
What books might provide inspiration for playing a wizard in D&D?
My (long-ish) answer was:
Part of the problem with finding stories which really fit the mold of D&D wizards is that even the source material that inspired D&D doesn’t perfectly fit how D&D magic works. And even the D&D fantasy novels themselves often gloss over how magic works in various editions.
1/X
Today's book recommendation for Black Hisory Month is "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?" by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In this, his last book, published in 1967, King reflects on the journey of the civil rights movement, its goals and its successes, and also the areas where progress was still unfulfilled, and the challenges that still lay ahead.
The most pressing fresh challenge as he saw it was economic equality. The political equality of voting rights alone couldn't bring people to their full potential if they still struggle with systemic pressures holding them back. He discusses jobs, wages and housing issues. He also writes in support of Universal Basic Income: "I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income."
He also calls for black people to declare their own personal freedom with full confidence, independent of white structural permissions:
“The Black man must reach down to the inner depths of his soul and sign his own Emancipation Proclamation. Psychological freedom is the most powerful weapon against the long night of slavery and no Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation or Johnsonian civil rights bill can bring this kind of enduring freedom.”
Link to book here:
