Women's History Month

With the beginning of March, GCH Library is once again celebrating Women's History Month.

Check out our displays at St Andrew's and St Michael's Library for a wide variety of Women's History themed choices including historical fiction, classics by female authors, feminist retellings, biographies and non fiction history books covering hundreds of years of Women's History.

To mark the occasion, the Library team have also chosen a few of these to share in a timeline style reading list. All books in purple are fiction books (historical fiction, retellings and classics) while all titles in blue are non fiction books (history monographs or biographies).

Over 1000 years of Women's Stories:

Medieval Women by Henrietta Leyser [STA - 942.0144] - England 450-1500 (Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, Empress Matilda & many more!)

The Plantagenet Prelude by Jean Plaidy - 12th century France (Eleanor of Aquitaine)

Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman- 13th century England 

All Fall Down by Sally Nicholls - 14th century England (The Black Death, Yorkshire)

And I Darken by Kiersten White - 15th century Ottoman Empire (Vlad III  Gender Swapped Retelling)

Joan of Arc 

Divine Heretic by Jaime Lee Moyer  - 15th century France (Jeanne d'Arc, The Hundred Years War)

The Lady in the Tower by Alison Weir [STA -942.05242]- 1530s England (Anne Boleyn)

Pirate Queen by Sam Hart and Tony Lee [GN] - 16th century Ireland (Grace O'Malley, Tudor control of Ireland)

Artemisia Gentilschi by Jonathan Jones [STA - 709.032 GEN] - 17th century Italy (Greatest female artist of the Baroque age)

The Familiars by Stacey Hall - 1612 England (Pendle Hill Witch Trials)

The Rover and Other Plays by Aphra Behn [822 BEH] - 17th century England (One of the first English women to earn a living through her writing. Behn was greatly praised by Virginia Woolf  and is considered a trailblazer who broke barriers for later generations of female authors)

Queen of Freedom by Catherine Johnson - 1720 Jamaica (Queen Nanny, First Maroon War)

Drama and Danger by J.T. Williams - 18th century England (Elizabeth Sancho and Dido Belle, London)

Dido Belle 

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi - 18th century Ghana-21st century America (Slave Trade, British Colonisation, American Civil War, Jazz Age)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - 19th century Europe (Arguably the very first Science Fiction novel)

The Five: the Untold Lives of the Women killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold [STM- 920.72]  - 1880s England (Victorian London, Experiences of working class women)

Mysterious Element: The Story of Marie Curie by Pam Robson [STA     530.092]- 19/20th century Poland and France

The Color Purple by Alice Walker - 20th century America (Follows the struggles of several Black women in rural Georgia. The great success of Walker's novel led to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in History in 1982 - making her the first African-American woman to do so)

Wild Swans by Jung Chang [ STA 920 CHA] - 20th century China (Experiences of three generations of women under Mao's rule of China and life during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960/70s)

Frida Kahlo by Andrea Kettenmann [STA 709.0431 KAH] - 1940s Mexico (One of the most significant 20th century painters and part of the Mexicayotl movement which aimed to define Mexican identity after the revolution of the 1910s)

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank [STA/STM 920 FRA] - 1940s Amsterdam (Follows teenager Anne's experiences living hidden in a warehouse for two years during WWII and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands)

The Wheel of Surya by Jamila Gavin - 1947 India (Partition of India and war in the Punjab)

Malala Yousafzai

The Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys - 1957 Spain (Experiences of working class woman in Madrid under the Franco dictatorship)

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly [STA 920 VAU] - 1960s America (Follows the four African-American mathematicians who made great contributions to the US space program - set during the Civil Rights era, Space Race, Cold War and gender equality movement)

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi [GN] -1970s Iran (Tehran, Overthrowal of the Shah's regime, Islamic Revolution and war with Iraq)

Becoming by Michelle Obama [STA/STM 920 OBA]  - 20/21st century America (Charts Michelle Obama's life so far including her childhood in Chicago, experiences as a successful lawyer, advocate for women and role as the first Black First Lady of the United States)

A Very Large Expanse of Sea - 2002 America (Experiences of an American Muslim teenage girl one year after 9/11)

I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb [STA 920 MAL] - 21st century Pakistan (Follows Malala's campaign for girl's rights to education beginning with the Taliban's seizure of Swat Valley in 2007) 

As usual all books mentioned are available to borrow from the school Library!