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.
In 1952, Justice Robert Jackson issued a concurring opinion in the case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, in which a majority of the Supreme Court held that President Harry Truman could not invoke executive power to seize several of the major U.S. steel manufacturing companies in order to prevent a nation-wide steel strike that the Truman administration claimed would disrupt the participation of the United States in the Korean war.
Jackson’s opinion in Youngstown sketched a framework for executive power under the Constitution, identifying three examples of executive decisions against the backdrop of congressional authority. He set forth a continuum of executive power, ranging from instances in which executive decisions were “conclusive and preclusive” of the authority of other branches, to ones in which Congress and the executive shared powers and the branches operated in a “twilight zone” of concurrent authority, to ones in which an executive decision was in contradiction to a congressional effort to restrain it. When Jackson’s opinion appeared it garnered some appreciative commentary in academic circles but did not otherwise attract much attention.
Jackson’s Youngstown concurrence was revived, however, in two memorable opinions in American constitutional law and politics. The first was United States v. Nixon, in which Chief Justice Burger quoted a statement by Jackson that the dispersion of powers among the branches of government by the Constitution was designed to ensure a “workable government.” Burger concluded that allowing President Nixon to assert executive privilege against a subpoena in a criminal proceeding merely on the basis of a “general interest in confidentiality” would gravely interfere with the function of the courts and render the government “unworkable.” The second was Trump v. United States, in which Jackson’s statement in Youngstown that in some instances the president’s power to make executive decisions was “conclusive and preclusive” was used by Chief Justice Roberts to show that granting presidents absolute immunity for their official acts was necessary to enable them to execute their duties fearlessly and fairly.
More than seventy years after Jackson issued it, his Youngstown concurrence remains the most authoritative statement of the scope of executive power under the Constitution. But what of the justice who issued that opinion? Robert Jackson was arguably one of the most influential persons in the mid twentieth-century legal profession and a unique figure in American legal history. Yet today he is not widely known and has in some respects been misunderstood. Despite his having one of the largest collections of private papers in the Library of Congress, there has been comparatively little scholarship or popular writing devoted to Jackson. It is time to reintroduce him.
Jackson was the last Supreme Court justice to have entered the legal profession by “reading for the law,” a process where people apprenticed themselves to law offices prior to taking a bar examination. He would eventually study law for one year at Albany Law School and receive a degree, but he never attended college. His family were dairy farmers in western Pennsylvania and New York, and he was the first in his family to pursue a legal career. By 1934 he had become one of the more successful lawyers and wealthy residents in Jamestown, New York.
That year Jackson was approached by members of the Franklin Roosevelt administration and recruited to join the Bureau of Internal Revenue, even though his practice had not included tax law. From that position he progressed rapidly through New Deal agencies, becoming Solicitor General of the United States in 1938 and Attorney General in 1940. By that year he was on the short list for Supreme Court appointments, and was nominated to the Court by Roosevelt in 1941.
Jackson seemingly had every quality necessary to be an influential Supreme Court justice, possessing exceptional analytical and forensic skills and being a gifted writer. But he ended up somewhat unfulfilled on the Court, chafing about its isolation from foreign affairs during World War II and having fractious relationships with some of his fellow justices, notably Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. In the spring of 1945, he was offered the position of chief counsel at the forthcoming Nuremberg trials and took leave from the Court, uncertain about whether he would return. Jackson was largely responsible for the format of the trials, and although he had numerous difficulties with representatives of the other allied powers prosecuting Nazi war criminals, especially those from the Soviet Union, he said in his memoirs that he regarded his time at Nuremberg as the high point of his experience.
Jackson’s two years at Nuremberg were also a time in which he began an amorous relationship with his secretary, Elsie Douglas, to whom he would eventually leave his extensive private papers in his will. Douglas continued as his secretary when Jackson returned to the Court after Nuremberg, and when Jackson suddenly died of a heart attack in October 1954, it was in Elsie Douglas’ apartment. After Jackson’s return to the Court in 1946 his relations with colleagues improved, and his last major participation in a Court case came with Brown v. Board of Education in the 1952 and 1953 terms, in which Jackson, through writing successive memos to himself, eventually joined the Court’s unanimous opinion invalidating racial segregation in the public schools. Jackson had a heart attack in March 1954 and only returned to the Court on the day the Brown case was handed down. He then sought to recover over the summer of 1954, only to succumb that October.
All in all, a memorable life and career and a fascinating, complicated personality, whose remarkable talents somehow did not quite suit him for the role of a Supreme Court justice.
In the 1940s, the Normandiewas the epitome of elegance and engineering—a French ocean liner renowned for its Art Deco splendor and unmatched luxury. When war loomed over Europe, the ship sought refuge in New York Harbor. In this excerpt from Gotham At War, Mike Wallace shows how its transformation from glamourous ocean liner to utilitarian troopship mirrored the world’s descent into conflict.
On February 9, 1942, the Normandie—the world’s most glamorous ocean liner—had been the site of feverish activity, as 1,750 workers from the Robins Dry Dock & Repair Company, and 675 other laborers from sixty assorted subcontractors, worked to convert the rakish, Art Deco, red-and-black vessel—whose elegant staterooms had hosted the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Cole Porter, and Ernest Hemingway—into a drabbed-down, bunk-laden troopship.
The Normandie had been tied up at Pier 88 (at the foot of West 48th Street) since arriving from Le Havre on August 28, 1939, four days before Germany invaded Poland. Rather than have its crown jewel brave torpedoes at sea, or bombs back in France, the French Line, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT), laid up its vessel indefinitely on September 6, leaving on board only a skeleton crew of 113 (out of 1,227) to keep it shipshape. There it stayed, through the fall of France, while other sea queens came and went (at one point, in March 1940, the gray-camouflaged sisters Elizabeth and Mary were berthed in adjacent piers).
On May 15, 1941, the US government took the Normandie into protective custody, leaving French ownership intact but housing a contingent of armed Coast Guardsmen on board to forestall possible sabotage by crew members loyal to the Vichy government. (The Pétain regime was getting increasingly cozy with Germany: Vice Premier Admiral François Darlan had just visited Hitler on May 11.) American thoughts turned to possible uses of the giant ship, in the event of an actual confiscation, and proposals were floated to use it as a dockside super- barracks, or to move it to Brooklyn, where it could serve as a backup power supply for the entire city, capable as it was of generating 150,000 kilowatts. When the Normandie was seized, on December 12, the day after war with Germany broke out, the troopship option won out. The vessel was transferred to the Navy, renamed the USS Lafayette, and turned over to contractors who began carting off the legendary artwork and sumptuous furniture to the Chelsea Warehouse and converting the staterooms, which had housed 1,972 First, Tourist, and Third-Class passengers, into bunkrooms that would carry 14,800 soldiers to war.
With nearly 2,500 workmen (plus Coast Guardsmen and crew) constantly coming and going, the noise, confusion and disorder on the ship attracted the attention of Ralph Ingersoll, editor of PM. Security seemed dangerously casual to him, so Ingersoll assigned reporter Edmund Scott to find out how easily a potential saboteur might penetrate the Normandie’s defenses. It proved to be a snap. Scott joined Local 284 of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and got a job lugging furniture aboard. Once on deck, it proved easy to wander about as he pleased, and he was struck by how simple it would be to set a fire. On January 3, 1942, he filed his story, which Ingersoll decided not to run—it being, in effect, a blueprint for sabotage—and instead got in touch with the authorities, who seemed uninterested.
When a fire broke out at 2:34 on the afternoon of February 9, crewmen discovered to their horror that the fire hoses could not connect to the standpipes, as the latter had been converted to American fittings, while the former still spoke French. Efforts to sound the fire alarm also failed—it had been disconnected a few days earlier, along with the ship’s link to the city’s fire department, by a subcontractor who had forgotten to tell anyone. In the meantime—it was a blustery winter day—the wind whipped through the corridors, spreading the blaze until it was beyond control, with great sheets of flame leaping skyward. Most of the nearly 3,000 on board dashed down the gangplanks and joined the thirty thousand New Yorkers who choked Twelfth Avenue. Fire trucks now combined forces with fire boats to inundate the upper decks: over the next four hours, they poured on 3,000 tons of water. The ship began to list. The French officers who had rushed to the pier realized the danger; their calls to refill the ballast tanks to ground the ship on the slip bottom were rejected, as were their urgings to close the portholes.
The inundation continued, as La Guardia, who had rushed to the pier, said it was out of the question to let a fire rage unchecked in midtown Manhattan. Even after the inferno seemed contained, around 8:00 p.m., the fireboats—ordered by Commissioner Walsh to stop pumping—didn’t get his radioed message; and having gotten dark, his semaphore signals went similarly unheeded. By the time a cutoff was accomplished, the Normandie had taken on 16,000 tons of water, most trapped on the port side, a burden no ship could have borne. At 12:30 a.m., Admiral Andrews gave the order to evacuate. At 2:32 a.m., it rolled over in the gray Hudson ice and came to rest, its funnels just barely above the waterline, slumped ignominiously in the mud.
The U.S. Coast Guard flies over the wreckage of the USS Lafayette (previously known as the SS Normandie) at Pier 88, 12 August 1943. US Navy Photograph.
Rumors of sabotage flew, starting at the top. FDR asked Navy Secretary Knox the next morning if any enemy aliens had been permitted to work at the site. The truth flew almost as quickly yet had difficulty catching up. The first press reports carried District Attorney Frank Hogan’s statement—“There is no evidence of sabotage”—and Admiral Andrews’s concurrence, along with the facts they had ferreted out. The fire, they said, had been an accident, caused by carelessness. One worker had been using an acetylene torch to cut down a metal stanchion in the Grand Salon, the resulting sparks contained by an asbestos board held up by another laborer. When the second man put down his board for a minute to help a colleague, a spark leapt toward a pile of 1,140 life jackets, each filled with flammable kapok, each wrapped in even more flammable burlap. Up they went, in turn igniting a nearby mass of bunk-bound mattresses. On February 12, the FBI staged a re- creation at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; followed up with a full-dress investigation in which they interviewed 760 people, and came to the same conclusion. So did two congressional committees. No sabotage.
Nonetheless, doubts continued. Many refused to buy the verdict, especially after PM published Scott’s original story. The notion that Nazi saboteurs had done the deed was further nurtured by Alfred Hitchcock, then shooting and editing Saboteur (1942). The director inserted a sequence that showed his weaselly Nazi villain (played by Norman Lloyd) being taxied down the West Side past the capsized Normandie (shown in actual newsreel footage). As he surveyed the wreckage, Lloyd gave a perfectly calibrated, wickedly knowing half smile, as if to say: “Ah, our handiwork.” The Navy tried hard to muscle Hitchcock into excising the bit; it failed, and the ranks of doubters grew.
There was one person who did more than doubt—he was utterly certain the Normandie was the victim of foul play, because he himself had ordered the hit. No Nazi, he was the nation’s most celebrated jailbird, languishing up in Dannemora Prison (known as “New York’s Siberia”), doing a thirty-to-fifty-year stretch.
Featured image: SS Normandie at sea, colorized by Vick the Viking. Derivative work of Altair78. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
