Women's History Non-Fiction

The Lady and the Octopus

How Jeanne Villepreux-Power Invented Aquariums and Revolutionized Marine Biology

By: Danna Staaf
Narrated by: Suzie Althens
Length: 4 hours 32 minutes

"Jeanne Villepreux-Power was never expected to be a scientist. Born in 1794 in a French village more than 100 miles from the ocean, she pursued an improbable path that brought her to the island of Sicily. There, she took up natural history and solved the two-thousand-year-old mystery of how the argonaut octopus gets its shell. In an era when... Read more

The Women's House of Detention

A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison

By: Hugh Ryan
Narrated by: Janet Metzger
Length: 13 hours 23 minutes

This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.

The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich... Read more

The Daughters of Kobani

A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice

By: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Narrated by: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Length: 6 hours 49 minutes

The extraordinary story of the women who took on the Islamic State and won

"The Daughters of Kobani is an unforgettable and nearly mythic tale of women's power and courage. The young women profiled in this book fought a fearsome war against brutal men in impossible circumstances--and proved in the process what girls and women can accomplish when... Read more

Empress of the Nile

The Daredevil Archaeologist Who Saved Egypt's Ancient Temples from Destruction

By: Lynne Olson
Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
Length: 13 hours 42 minutes

The remarkable story of the intrepid French archaeologist who led the international effort to save ancient Egyptian temples from the floodwaters of the Aswan Dam, by the New York Times bestselling author of Madame Fourcade’s Secret War

“A female version of the Indiana Jones story . . . [Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt] was a daredevil whose... Read more

The Women’s Suffrage Movement

By: Sally Roesch Wagner
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 22 hours 17 minutes

An intersectional anthology of works by the known and unknown women that shaped and established the suffrage movement, in time for the 2020 centennial of women's right to vote, with a foreword by Gloria Steinem

Comprised of historical texts spanning two centuries, The Women's Suffrage Movement is a comprehensive and singular volume that covers... Read more

Susan B. Anthony

The Making of America series: Book #4

By: Teri Kanefield
Narrated by: Joyce Bean
Length: 3 hours 53 minutes

Author Teri Kanefield examines the life of America’s famous suffragette, Susan B. Anthony. Anthony was born into a world in which men ruled women: A man could beat his wife, take her earnings, have her committed into an asylum based on his word, and take her children away from her. While the young nation was ablaze with the radical notion that... Read more

Hidden Figures

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

By: Margot Lee Shetterly
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 10 hours 47 minutes

The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner. Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the... Read more

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By: Rebecca Skloot
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell & Bahni Turpin
Length: 12 hours 30 minutes

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The story of modern medicine and bioethics—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”—Entertainment Weekly

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE • ONE OF THE “MOST INFLUENTIAL” (CNN), “DEFINING” (LITHUB), AND “BEST” (THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF... Read more

The Radium Girls

The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

By: Kate Moore
Narrated by: Angela Brazil
Length: 15 hours 52 minutes

1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous—the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls.

As the... Read more

My Own Words

By: Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Narrated by: Linda Lavin
Length: 13 hours 16 minutes

The first book from Ruth Bader Ginsburg since becoming a Supreme Court Justice in 1993—a witty, engaging, serious, and playful collection of writings and speeches from the woman who has had a powerful and enduring influence on law, women’s rights, and popular culture.

My Own Words offers Justice Ginsburg on wide-ranging topics, including gender... Read more

Bad Feminist

Essays

By: Roxane Gay
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 11 hours 46 minutes

“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.”  — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?A New York Times BestsellerBest Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe •... Read more

We Should All Be Feminists

By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Narrated by: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Length: 45 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The highly acclaimed, provocative essay on feminism and sexual politics—from the award-winning author of Americanah

"A call to action, for all people in the world, to undo the gender hierarchy." —Medium

In this personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from the much-admired TEDx talk of the same name—Chimamanda Ngozi... Read more

Women in Science

50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World

By: Rachel Ignotofsky
Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen
Length: 3 hours 32 minutes

The New York Times bestseller Women in Science highlights the contributions of fifty notable women to the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) from the ancient to the modern world. This fascinating collection contains information about relevant topics such as lab equipment and rates of women currently working in... Read more

My Beloved World

By: Sonia Sotomayor
Narrated by: Rita Moreno
Length: 12 hours 26 minutes

The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own extraordinary... Read more

A Woman of No Importance

The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

By: Sonia Purnell
Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
Length: 13 hours 53 minutes

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Chosen as a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by NPR, the New York Public Library, Amazon, the Seattle Times, the Washington Independent Review of Books, PopSugar, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, BookBrowse, the Spectator, and the Times of London

Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography

“Excellent…This book is as riveting as... Read more

Lab Girl

By: Hope Jahren
Narrated by: Hope Jahren
Length: 11 hours 37 minutes

“This book has it all: nature, love, science, drama, heartbreak, joy, and plenty of dirt. Not since Cheryl Strayed's Wild have I read such a rich and compelling nonfiction narrative. Lab Girl is the story of Jahren's life in science, and her writing on the wonders of nature will renew your sense of awe. But more than that, it is an exploration... Read more

The Glass Universe

How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars

By: Dava Sobel
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
Length: 12 hours 42 minutes

“Spectrography is a way of studying stars by taking pictures that separate astral light into different wavelengths. The practice was pioneered by Dr. Henry Draper of the Harvard Observatory in the late 1800s, but the long and detailed work of interpreting the images and classifying the stars was done by a group of women. In this long overdue... Read more

Modern HERstory

Stories of Women and Nonbinary People Rewriting History

By: Blair Imani
Narrated by: January LaVoy, Blair Imani, Bree Wernicke & Tegan Rain Quin
Length: 4 hours 48 minutes

An inspiring and radical celebration of 70 women, girls, and gender nonbinary people who have changed--and are still changing--the world, from the Civil Rights Movement and Stonewall riots through Black Lives Matter and beyond.

With a radical and inclusive approach to history, Modern HERstory profiles and celebrates seventy women and nonbinary... Read more

Wild Swans

Three Daughters of China

By: Jung Chang
Narrated by: Joy Osmanski
Length: 22 hours 51 minutes

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author.

An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window... Read more

All That She Carried

The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

By: Tiya Miles
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 9 hours 29 minutes

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and insightful” (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out of the archives.
 
WINNER: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Harriet Tubman Prize,... Read more