In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating trailblazing paths taken by women whose courage and vision transformed societies. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating trailblazing paths taken by women whose courage and vision transformed societies. This reading list features five biographies that highlight women who resisted systemic barriers, confronted entrenched hierarchies, and fought for the dignity and safety of others. From activists and reformers to scientists and cultural leaders, these stories reveal how women—often overlooked or silenced—have pushed boundaries, protected the vulnerable, and inspired movements for justice. Together, they remind us that progress toward gender equality has always been driven by those who refused to accept the limits imposed on them.
1. A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housingby Betty Boyd Caroli
In this biography, Mary K. Simkhovitch emerges as a pioneering force in the settlement house movement and a central architect of American public housing reform. Betty Boyd Caroli traces Simkhovitch’s founding of Greenwich House in 1902 and her influential role in shaping early 20th‑century urban policy, including her leadership in New Deal housing initiatives, the creation of the National Housing Conference, and co‑authoring the landmark 1937 National Housing Act. Balancing an unconventional marriage, family life, and a relentless public mission, Simkhovitch became widely admired—once even depicted as a “Wonder Woman of History”—for her ability to confront urban poverty while advocating fiercely for immigrant communities and affordable housing. This biography, rich with historical insight, positions her as an enduringly relevant figure whose work helped define the federal government’s responsibility to support low‑income families.
2. American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism by Steven K. Green
American Infidelity traces the dramatic late‑19th‑century clash between a dominant evangelical culture and a rising coalition of freethinkers, feminists, and sexual reformers who sought greater personal liberty and challenged religious authority. Historian Steven K. Green follows this struggle through the activists who fought for birth control, divorce reform, and women’s autonomy, as well as the moral crusaders—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who worked to suppress them. Revealing how these “infidels” pushed for a more open, rational, and egalitarian society, Green shows how their movements were ultimately stifled but left a powerful legacy that continues to shape today’s debates over reproductive rights, censorship, and the role of religion in public life.
3. COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black
Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History
This book recounts the often‑overlooked story of Harriet Tubman’s 1863 Combahee River Raid, a daring Civil War operation in which she led Union spies, scouts, and two Black regiments up South Carolina’s river to destroy major rice plantations and liberate 730 enslaved people. Drawing on newly examined documents—including Tubman’s pension file and plantation records—historian Edda L. Fields‑Black, a descendant of one of the raiders, brings to life the enslaved families and communities who escaped to freedom that night and later helped shape the Gullah Geechee culture. Through this vivid reconstruction, the book reveals one of Tubman’s most extraordinary military achievements and the enduring legacy of those who fought for liberation.
4. The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America by Kathleen B. Casey
The Things She Carried reveals how purses, bags, and sacks have long been critical tools for women asserting privacy, autonomy, and political power in America. Kathleen Casey shows how these objects—from 19th‑century reticules to the handbags carried by immigrant workers, civil rights activists, and Rosa Parks herself—became symbolic extensions of women’s rights struggles, allowing them to navigate male‑dominated spaces, protect personal dignity, and challenge discriminatory systems. Drawing on sources ranging from vintage purses to photographs, advertisements, and legal archives, Casey uncovers how women of all backgrounds used the bags they carried to assert agency, cross restrictive social boundaries, and shape pivotal moments in the fight for gender and racial equality.
5. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA, and the Battle against Thalidomide by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh
This biography tells the remarkable story of Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA medical officer who, in the early 1960s, prevented the dangerous drug thalidomide from being approved in the United States, sparing countless Americans from catastrophic birth defects. A pioneering scientist who earned advanced degrees in an era with few female researchers, Kelsey resisted intense pressure from Merrell Pharmaceutical and spent nineteen months demanding solid evidence of the drug’s safety. Her unwavering stance not only kept thalidomide off the U.S. market but also spurred sweeping reforms in drug regulation through the 1962 Drug Amendment, which established modern clinical trials, informed consent, and stronger FDA oversight. Drawing on archival records and family papers, the book reveals her lifelong commitment to ethical science, her battles against industry hostility and institutional barriers, and her enduring legacy as a vigilant protector of public health.
Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch—featured as a “Wonder Woman of History” in a series produced by DC Comics—was a key figure in America’s settlement house movement. Throughout the early twentieth century, she spearheaded efforts to improve living conditions for immigrants and the disadvantaged in American cities. Her lifelong advocacy for public housing and urban reform remains urgently relevant almost seventy-five years after her death.
Discover Mary K. Simkhovitch’s extraordinary legacy with our interactive timeline below.
African American history does not begin with the founding of the United States—its roots stretch centuries deep. Black experiences, intellectual traditions, resistance, and cultural innovation have shaped the story of America. This timeline brings together Oxford works that illuminate pivotal moments across over two hundred transformative years—from a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harriet Tubman to long-overlooked accounts from the later Civil Rights era. Explore the essential role of historically Black colleges and universities, and encounter richly drawn portraits of trailblazers like Louis Armstrong and Althea Gibson. Taken together, these books reveal a legacy of resilience, creativity, and influence that has defined American life from the colonial era through the 20th century.
Explore the depth and breadth of African American history with this curated selection of Oxford University Press titles—stories that predate 1776 and continue to shape the nation we know today.
The purpose of any abstract is to summarise your article’s content in a way that will help potential readers decide if they want to read your work. An abstract usually runs between 150 and 300 words and will likely be your readers’ first interaction with your research article, so you must write it with that in mind. It should be intelligible on its own, without someone needing to have read your whole article or have in-depth knowledge of the subject at hand to follow the abstract’s meaning.
Interdisciplinary abstracts are more complex than abstracts aimed at a single discipline, since they must appeal to a wider range of readers with radically varying knowledge bases. What follows is a list of eight key strategies for writing clear, compelling abstracts for interdisciplinary research. It’s not intended to be prescriptive or exhaustive, but I hope it will help if you’re feeling overwhelmed with the amount of ground you’re expected to cover in such a small number of words.
Start with the hook A stand-up comic once told me that the golden rule of comedy is to always start with your best joke. This advice can be applied to writing abstracts: start with the hook. The ‘hook’ is the most exciting and impactful feature of your work. It answers the perennial questions of ‘So what?’ and ‘Why should anyone care?’ If you can convincingly answer these questions in the first sentence of your abstract, readers are much more likely to want to read the full article.
Often, the hook is placed at the end of the abstract as an enticement to read more, but increasingly I think it can be more effective when placed in the very first sentence of an interdisciplinary abstract. When writing up interdisciplinary research, you are appealing to a wider readership that goes beyond the confines of one discipline, so you must capture their attention right from the off with a statement of impact that makes it abundantly clear why researchers in multiple disciplines need to read your work. Then, you can move onto specifics like background and methods.
State your purpose Every abstract should state the central research question or aim of the article, in the clearest possible terms, and justify why it must be answered. It is possible for an article to answer more than one research question, but juggling multiple research questions often leads to an unfocused argument and an overly long article. An article of six-to-ten thousand words gives you enough time to answer one central research question very convincingly, and it is better to do this than to answer multiple research questions less convincingly. Before moving on, you must clarify why it is important to answer that research question. Why is this research necessary and how does the article address that need?
Summarise disciplinary contexts Your interdisciplinary article likely builds upon recent developments in more than one discipline, so you should not assume that readers will be conversant in all the disciplines with which your work engages. Use a couple of sentences to explain key developments in each relevant discipline that directly impact your research. Focus only on what’s essential for understanding your argument. Keep this concise, though, as abstracts should not be overloaded with contextual information.
Explain your methods Interdisciplinary methods are complex but enriching. They usually pull together and combine research techniques from multiple disciplines. Due to this complexity, interdisciplinary abstracts are sometimes overloaded with technical terminology that seem impenetrable to many readers. Take care to explain your methods or theoretical framework and why they help you answer your research question, keeping jargon to a minimum and defining key technical terms with which readers may not be familiar.
Defend your interdisciplinarity Interdisciplinary research is often called upon to justify its existence as interdisciplinary research. There are large numbers of scholars who are sceptical about the very idea of interdisciplinarity. If you are to retain these scholars as readers, you must explain in your abstract why an interdisciplinary approach to your research question is not only possible but essential. Some problems demand interdisciplinary approaches, others do not. You need to convince readers that your work fits into the former category and explain why you have assembled your unique interdisciplinary methodology or theoretical framework to respond to this research question.
Forecast your results Some abstracts won’t do this because the authors prefer to keep the revelation of their findings back for the conclusion of their article. I prefer abstracts to at least forecast the results of the research, simply because this might convince more prospective readers to engage with and cite your article if they know from reading the abstract that its results have direct implications for their own research.
Use an economy of words All your sentences should have a purpose. Meandering trains of thought that take a while to get to the point do not have a place in an abstract, so remove anything that is even slightly tangential. Bear in mind that an abstract is also a discovery aid, since the text of an abstract is often part of the metadata that is pulled across to bibliographic indexes such as SCOPUS and Google Scholar. Consequently, an abstract should include the kind of words you imagine potential readers might type into a library catalogue or online search tool. You will often be asked to provide a list of keywords alongside your abstract, and it is a good idea to work them into the text of the abstract itself to boost your article’s discoverability further.
Write assertively Abstracts are not the place to be modest about your achievements. Use assertive verbs and write in the present tense: say ‘this article does X’ rather than ‘this article aims to do X’ or ‘this article will do X’. Avoid hedging your bets, with words like ‘arguably’ and ‘potentially’ or an overly liberal use of the conditional. And above all: back yourself! It is expected for a research article to contain detailed discussion of other researchers’ work. That is not the case for an abstract, which should foreground your own original interpretation.
When I studied comparative politics as an undergraduate in the 1990s, I was introduced to the field through static comparisons between national political systems. Each chapter in the textbook we read described a different country, and we learned about constitutions, legislatures, and parties as if they were fixed features of political life.
That approach has long since been overtaken by events. Today’s students live in a world where party systems are changing from election to election, new technologies are transforming political participation and communication, and authoritarian rulers are coming up with new ways of grabbing and holding on to power.
How should we teach comparative politics in this rapidly changing environment? That’s something I thought about when I sat down to write my new textbook, An Introduction to Comparative Politics. My answer has four parts.
1. Get to the key concepts and ideas right away
Scholars of comparative politics ask two big questions: why are political systems so different from one another, and how do those differences matter for people’s lives? If we help students understand why those two questions are so important and guide them as they learn about the main differences between political systems, we can put them on a life-long journey of discovery. Today’s students have easy access to reasonably accurate data on political systems via their computers and their phones, so it’s not factual information they need from us—they need concepts and ideas they can use to make sense of the information that is available to them.
2. Take a global view
The modern discipline of comparative politics developed in America and Europe in the nineteenth century, and it has long treated the institutions of North American and Western European democracies as the standard against which all other systems are measured. That attitude never made much sense, and it makes less sense today than ever, since many of today’s political challenges and conflicts have a global scope. Today’s students are eager to understand how the key concepts and ideas of comparative politics travel across continents—or, as is sometimes the case, they don’t.
3. Talk about historical change
The turn away from static comparisons between national political systems also requires that we pay attention to processes of historical change, continuities, and resurgences.
It is remarkable how much history has been repeating itself lately. Over the last two decades, leading comparativists have presented in-depth analyses of “electoral authoritarianism”—conducting multi-party elections in de facto authoritarian regimes. As Theodore Zeldin showed in the 1950s, Napoleon III’s regime in France in the 1850s and 1860s had all the hallmarks of electoral authoritarianism. Other comparativists have examined the rise of populism. Donald Trump’s rise to power in the United States has a lot in common with Georges Boulanger’s meteoric political career in France in the 1880s.
4. Emphasize data and methods
For better or worse, we live in a data-driven world, and whatever our students choose to do when they’re done studying, they’re going to need basic data literacy skills. This makes it all the more important for us as teachers to emphasize that comparative politics isn’t just a set of facts to memorize—it is a way of thinking about the world. Students need to become familiar with the main methodological approaches in comparative politics right away, including both broad cross-national comparisons and focused case studies. I therefore deemed it essential, when writing An Introduction to Comparative Politics, to present students with up-to-date data and up-to-date empirical examples in all chapters.
By learning the key concepts and ideas, taking a global view, tracing processes of historical continuity and change, and using diverse comparative methods, students can gain the independence of mind they need to make sense of politics throughout their lifetimes.
