Learning about women in history from the latest books helps you understand your history.

With days to go in Women’s History Month, the theme “Moving Forward Together,” celebrating "Women Educating and Inspiring Generations" fits perfectly with Take The Lead’s suggested list of books by women authors writing about history.

Even with the trend of banned books and the threat to reduce funding to public libraries, the habit of reading (and listening) to books is popular in this country, with more women consuming books in all forms—ink on paper, e-books, and audiobooks—than men. There is also a trend of more women publishing books than men—a gender gap worth applauding.

“There is also a #trend of more #women publishing #books than men—a #gendergap worth #applauding.”

In the U.S. book sales reach a stable $28 billion in revenue each year, according to Exploding Topics, with e-books outperforming audio books at $956 million in sales.

“Roughly one in four men read a novel or short story in 2022, compared with fewer than half of all women,” a 2025 study shows.

And since 2020, “women were writing the majority of all new books, fiction, and nonfiction each year in the United States. And women weren't just becoming more prolific than men by this point: they were also becoming more successful,” NPR reports. “The average female-authored book now sees greater sales, readership, and other metrics of engagement than the average book penned by a male author.”

This eclectic Take The Lead list of memoirs, essays, poetry, history, business, creative nonfiction, and biographical novels includes excellent glimpses into many different arenas, each offering insight into a segment of the world and women’s history with clarity and revelation.

“Know your history and you can create the future of your choice,” says Gloria Feldt, co-founder and president of Take The Lead. This is the first of the 9 Leadership Power Tools she created and is the basis of the Power Tools online course.

“Know your history and you can create the future of your choice. —Gloria Feldt, Co-Founder and President of @TakeLeadWomen”

The first choice (out of alphabetical order) is a lifelong book lover’s ode to the urgent necessity of reading to make sense of our lives. And there is no better time than in today’s disruptive cultural chaos to do just that.

In her new book, River Of Books, A Lifelong Journey to Understanding The World, author Donna Seaman, editor-in-chief of Booklist, says she “read insatiably because I was angry, alienated, yearning, depressed, and determined to know more. I read to anchor myself to something larger and more meaningful, to a universe I could trust.”

In an interview with Seaman for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, author Michael Antman writes, “Reading is not merely a diversion from reality; indeed, it redoubles our attention to reality, enriching it with new insights into the human condition and the natural world.”

“Reading is not merely a diversion from reality; indeed, it redoubles our attention to reality, enriching it with new insights into the human condition and the natural world. –Michael Antman”

Seaman writes that reading “is a form of inebriation, but not of abandon. It’s an active state of heightened receptivity.”

1. Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

This award-winning book covers an enormous span of human evolution and how women were left out of most scientific research and why. Filling in those gaps with intensive research, Bohannon recently told St. Louis Public Radio, “Books like these, conversations like these, they're here to give you tools to use to describe that experience you're already an authority on, They're here, more than anything else, to just enrich your understanding of this messy life you're living in this body that, frankly, is your only one you're going to get.”

2. Veronica Chapa, Malinalli. History has not been kind to this formidable Nahua young woman who in the 16th century was Hernan Cortes’ interpreter—and slave—who brokered the meeting with Moctezuma that led to the conquest of Mexico by Spain. Villainized for five centuries, Malinalli is brought to life by Chapa in a richly imagined and diligently researched narrative that awards Malinalli the power she owned and still deserves. At a time when Mexico has its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, it is critical to understand the indigenous roots of the power of women across history not only in Mexico but around the world.

3. Elizabeth Comen, All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today. The author, is an award-winning Medical Oncologist specializing in breast cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. In this book she points to the gaslighting, shaming, dismissing and silencing women have suffered in healthcare throughout history. She expertly and adroitly flips the narrative on this to “share unique and untold stories, drawing upon medical texts and journals, interviews with expert physicians, as well as her own experience treating thousands of women.”

4. Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar Martínez, The Broken Rung: When the Career Ladder Breaks for Women—and How They Can Succeed in Spite of It. Every professional woman knows it is not an easy climb to the top. Infrastructure, bias, policies, behaviors, attitudes all contribute to the stumbling blocks many encounter on the rise to the top. These senior partners at McKinsey nimbly combine experience, 10 years of research, interviews, anecdotes, and data to explain and attempt to amend the missing pieces on the ladder. Their discovery? “Women need to build their ‘experience capital’ to level the playing field and maximize their earning potential.”

“Women need to build their ‘experience capital’ to level the playing field and maximize their earning potential. –Kweilin Ellingrud, @LareinaYee, & María del Mar Martínez”

5. Alison Fensterstock and National Public Radio, How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music. Using the interviews since 2017 of the NPR series, “Turning The Tables,” this anthology covers conversations with music icons from Joan Baez to Beyonce, and Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift on 50 years of women in the music industry. Candidly speaking about the moments throughout the decades of women making music, the stories they tell inform what we know about an industry and how women fit in—and didn’t—to make their own legacy.

6. Maira Kalman, Still Life with Remorse. The internationally revered artist and author combines her own personal stories with 50 of her paintings for an imaginative memoir on grief and memory. “Through these narratives, Kalman uses her signature wit and tenderness to reveal how family history plays an influential role in all of our work, lives, and perspectives. A feat of visual storytelling and vulnerability, Still Life with Remorse explores the profound hidden in the quotidian, and illuminates the powerful universal truths in our most personal family stories.’

Listen to Gloria Feldt’s Intenioning podcast on Women’s History Month

7. Koleka Putuma, Collective Amnesia. In her first book of poetry, South African poet Koleka Putuma explores cultural history, society, family, Black identity, and the nature of women. “Putuma explodes the idea of authority in various spaces – academia, religion, politics, relationships – to ask what has been learnt and what must be unlearnt

8. Joy-Ann Reid, Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America. The renowned TV host tells the love story of the field secretary of the NAACP and his wife, who met in college and worked together for the Civil Rights Movement, until he was murdered in 1963 by the Ku Klux Klan. Standiing side by side at protests and boycotts until his death, she carried on his legacy, writing a book about his fight and becoming an NAACP leader as well. “In this groundbreaking and thrilling account of two heroes of the civil rights movement, Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie’s relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today.”

9. Miranda Spivack, Backroom Deals in Our Backyards, How Government Secrecy Harms Our Communities and the Local Heroes Fighting Back. Miranda Spivack is an award-winning journalist and editor who reports on “government accountability and secrecy and urban development.” Her new book is an extremely timely take on how government, companies and special interests threaten “our health, safety, and democracy.” She highlights a grassroots movement of community activists who pushback, fight back and aim for change. According to the publisher, “A work of riveting narrative nonfiction based on years of original reporting, Backroom Deals in Our Backyards tells the story of five ‘accidental activists’—people from across the United States who started questioning why their local and state governments didn’t protect them from issues facing their communities and why there was a frightening lack of transparency surrounding the way these issues were resolved.”

10. Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, Mother Creature Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling. At a time in history of great uncertainty about climate, culture, economics, and all things political, essayist Steinauer-Scudder writes about how the natural world survives and mothers the young and how that informs how we behave throughout life. Studying owls, whales, forests, marshes and gardens, and writing about their lessons, her new book incorporates universal narratives. “The creatures inhabiting these stories teach us about centering, belonging, entanglement, edgework, homemaking, and how to imagine the future.”

11. Patricia Walsh Chadwick, Breaking Glass: Tales From The Witch of Wall Street. Earning the moniker as the Witch of Wall Street does not intimate Patricia Walsh Chadwick as she proudly charts her hard-driven path from former cult member kicked out by her family to a top global partner at Invesco. Starting as a receptionist, she worked all the way to the top and through the ceiling. In 30 years in the investment business, she last held the position of chair of the Investment Policy Committee at Invesco before leaving to serve on several corporate boards. Now president of Ravengate Partners LLC,, and serving on several nonprofit boards, she is candid and earnest in her narrative, as this memoir follows her earlier book, Little Sister, about growing up in a religious cult.

Read, Listen, Learn: 13 Great Books by Women Authors for Women’s History Month

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