DMPL Book Picks: Nine Books About Women in History Who Did It All

'All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Women at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler,' by Rebecca Donner

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment--a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. After being ambushed by the Gestapo in 1943, she was executed.

Harnack's great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. This book was the winner of the 2022 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

'The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky,' by Andrew Kaufman

In 1866, a twenty-year-old stenographer named Anna Snitkina applied for a position with a writer she idolized: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Anna became his trusted first reader and confidante, then his wife, and finally his business manager, launching one of literature's most turbulent and fascinating marriages.

The Gambler Wife offers a fresh and captivating portrait of Anna Dostoyevskaya, who reversed the novelist's freefall and cleared the way for two of the most notable careers in Russian letters: her husband's and her own. The result is a story that challenges ideas of empowerment, sacrifice, and female agency in nineteenth-century Russia, and a welcome new appraisal of an indomitable woman whose legacy has been nearly lost to literary history.

'Lab Girl,' by Hope Jahren

Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she's studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life, but it is also so much more.

Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together. It is told through Jahren's remarkable stories: her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom's labs; how she found a sanctuary in science and learned to perform lab work done "with both the heart and the hands"; and the disappointments, triumphs, and exhilarating discoveries of scientific work.

'Margaret Fuller: A New American Life,' by Megan Marshall

From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England's intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women's sense of how they could think and live. Megan Marshall tells the story of how Fuller became the New-York Tribune's front-page columnist, unleashing a crusading concern for the urban poor and prostitutes. She eventually became America’s first female war correspondent.

She eventually found a partner and birthed a son. Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck shortly after Fuller's fortieth birthday, the sense and passion of her life's work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall's inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.

Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

'Life In Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina,' by Misty Copeland

Determination meets dance in this New York Times bestselling memoir by the history-making ballerina Misty Copeland, recounting the story of her journey to become the first African-American principal ballerina at the prestigious American Ballet Theatre.

With an insider's passion, Misty opens a window into the life of an artist who lives life center stage, from behind the scenes at her first classes to her triumphant roles in some of the world's most iconic ballets. A sensational memoir as sensitive and clear-eyed as her dancing, Life in Motion is a story of passion, identity and grace for anyone who has dared to dream of a different life.

'Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World,' by Amy Stanley

The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a traditional life. But after three divorces, and a temperament much too strong-willed for her family’s approval, she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo, a bustling metropolis at its peak.

With Tsuneno as our guide, we experience the excitement of Edo just prior to the arrival of American Commodore Perry’s fleet, which transformed Japan. Tsuneno’s life provides a window into 19th-century Japanese culture and a rare view of an extraordinary woman who sacrificed her family and her reputation to make a new life for herself.

'Confident Women: Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion,' by Tori Telfer

As Tori Telfer reveals in Confident Women, the art of the con has a long and venerable tradition, and its female practitioners are some of the best—or worst. This book is a thoroughly entertaining and darkly humorous roundup of history’s notorious but often forgotten female con artists and their bold, outrageous scams.

From a French woman getting her hands on a diamond-studded necklace by pretending to be frends with Queen Marie Antoinette to a 40-something woman who still almost forty show dogs, there are many stories abound. Confident Women asks the provocative question: Where does chutzpah intersect with a uniquely female pathology, and how were these notorious women able to dupe and swindle their victims?

'The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation,' by Anna Malaika Tubbs

Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little were all born at the beginning of the 20th century and forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women. They passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity: from Louise teaching her children about their activist roots, to Berdis encouraging James to express himself through writing, to Alberta basing all of her lessons in faith and social justice.

These women used their strength and motherhood to push their children toward greatness, all with a conviction that every human being deserves dignity and respect despite the rampant discrimination they faced.

'If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won't),' by Betty White

The New York Times bestseller from the beloved actress and Hollywood icon who made us laugh on shows from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Golden Girls to Saturday Night Live!

In this candid take on everything from the unglamorous reality behind red-carpet affairs to her beauty regimen (“I have no idea what color my hair is, and I never intend to find out”), Betty White shares her observations about life, celebrity, and love (for humans and animals). Filled with photos, If You Ask Me is funny, sweet, and straight to the point—just like Betty.