After Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school, more women demanded a chance to study medicine. Their success spurred a chilling backlash from male physicians who distorted Darwin’s evolution theory and proclaimed that women should never be allowed to attend college or enter a profession because their menstrual cycles made them perpetually sick. Into the midst of this turmoil marched Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of a New York publisher and the first woman to be accepted into the world-renowned Sorbonne medical school in Paris. Aided by other prominent women physicians and suffragists, Jacobi conducted the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women’s reproductive biology. The results of her studies shook the foundations of medical science and higher education.

Award-winning historian Paulina Bren tells the story of the first generations of women who fought their way into the bad-boy culture and lavish opulence of the finance world. If the wolves of Wall Street made a show of their ferocity, the she-wolves did so with tough-as-nails persistence. Starting at a time when “No Ladies” signs hung across the doors of Wall Street’s clubs and unapologetic sexism and racism were the norm at top firms, Bren chronicles the remarkable women who demanded a seat at the table. She-Wolves is an engaging and enraging look at the collision of women, finance, and New York from the go-go years to ground zero.

The untold story of Alice Hamilton, a trailblazing doctor and public health activist who took on the booming auto industry—and the deadly invention of leaded gasoline, which would poison millions of people across America. Hamilton had New England connections, too – she attended Miss Porter’s Finishing School in Farmington, became the first woman faculty member of Harvard, and she retired to live out her days in Hadlyme, CT.

Toler draws on extensive archival research to unearth the largely forgotten story of Sigrid Schultz’s years spent courageously reporting the news from Berlin, from the revolts of 1919 through the Nazi rise to power and Allied air raids over Berlin in 1941. At a time when women reporters rarely wrote front-page stories and her male colleagues saw a powerful unmarried woman as a “freak,” Schultz pulled back the curtain on how the Nazis misreported the news to their own people, and how they attempted to control the foreign press through bribery and threats.

Published in English for the first time, this is the memoir of the fabulous, rule-breaking, one-of-a-kind Josephine Baker. After stealing the spotlight as a teenaged Broadway performer during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Josephine then took Paris by storm, dazzling audiences across the Roaring Twenties. When World War II broke out, Josephine became a decorated spy for the French Résistance. Her celebrity worked as her cover, as she hid spies in her entourage and secret messages in her costumes as she traveled. She later joined the Civil Rights movement in the US, boycotting segregated concert venues, and speaking at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr.

Dava Sobel approaches Marie Curie from a unique angle, narrating her remarkable life of discovery and fame alongside the women who became her legacy–from France’s Marguerite Perey and Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch to Mme. Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For decades the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings that probed new theories about the interior of the atom, Marie Curie traveled far and wide to share the secrets of radioactivity before her death at 66 from aplastic anemia.

Helen Gibson was a woman willing to do anything to give audiences a thrill. Advertised as “The Most Daring Actress in Pictures,” Helen emerged in the early days of the twentieth-century silent film scene as a rodeo rider, background actor, stunt double, and eventually one of the era’s biggest action stars. Her exploits on motorcycles, train cars, and horseback were as dangerous as they were glamorous, featured in hundreds of films and serials–yet her legacy was quickly overshadowed by the increasingly hypermasculine and male-dominated evolution of cinema in the decades that would follow her. Through the page-turning story of Helen’s pioneering legacy, Mallory O’Meara gives readers a glimpse of the Golden Age of Hollywood that could have been: an industry where women call the shots.

The twentieth century American department store: a palace of consumption where every wish could be met under one roof. It was a place where women, shopper and shopgirl alike, could stake out a newfound independence. In the 1930s, Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller came to her husband’s department store as a housewife tasked with attracting more shoppers like herself, and wound up running the company. Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor championed American designers during World War II–before which US fashions were almost exclusively Parisian copies–becoming the first businesswoman to earn a $1 million salary. And in the 1960s Geraldine Stutz of Henri Bendel re-invented the look of the modern department store. This stylish account captures the department store in all its glitz, decadence, and fun, and showcases the women who made that beautifully curated world go round.

In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of scientific thought. But after the Nazis took power, physicists like Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer, and Hildegard Stücklen had no choice but to flee due to their Jewish ancestry or anti-Nazi sentiments. Their harrowing journey out of Germany became a life-and-death situation that required herculean efforts of friends and other prominent scientists.