For Women’s History Month 2025, we are sharing 10 free chapters from books uncovering women’s contributions to history. These extracts look at how women transformed religious life across the globe, played a pivotal role in the intelligence service, were an essential part of music — and much more. We see how, while often overlooked, women from all backgrounds consistently challenged gendered expectations and played important roles.
You can also shop this selection of books at 30% discount by using the code WHIST when prompted at checkout at yalebooks.co.uk until 1st April 2025 (for customers in the UK only).
Women in Intelligence
The Hidden History of Two World Wars
Helen Fry
A groundbreaking history of women in British intelligence, revealing their pivotal role across the first half of the twentieth century.
Chapter 1, Invisible Spies, introduces the stories of Edith Cavell, Marthe Cnockaert and the networks of other women engaged in covert operations at the outbreak of the First World War.
Women and the Reformations
A Global History
Merry Wiesner-Hanks
A compelling, authoritative history of how women shaped the Reformations and transformed religious life across the globe.
Chapter 1, Monarchs, explores the influence of women monarchs in driving religious change, from Isabelle of Castile to Maria Theresa.
The Gentleman’s Daughter
Women’s Lives in Georgian England
Amanda Vickery
What was the life of an eighteenth-century British genteel woman like? In this lively and controversial book, Amanda Vickery invokes women’s own accounts of their intimate and their public lives to argue that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the scope of female experience did not diminish—in fact, quite the reverse.
This Chapter, Gentility, focuses on Elizabeth Shakleton’s diaries. It provides a fascinating insight into the daily social interactions of the ‘genteel’ or ‘provincial’ classes, illustrating the inter-relationship between land, trade and professions in this era.
Mission France
The True History of the Women of SOE
Kate Vigurs
Formed in 1940, Special Operations Executive was to coordinate Resistance work overseas. The organisation’s F section sent more than four hundred agents into France, thirty-nine of whom were women. But while some are widely known—Violette Szabo, Odette Sansom, Noor Inayat Khan—others have had their stories largely overlooked. This is the full story of the thirty-nine female SOE agents who went undercover in France.
In Chapter 1, Setting Europe Ablaze, Vigurs introduces the stories of some of the women who made up the SOE – and sets out how the organisation was born following the fall of France in June 1940.
Vagabond Princess
The Great Adventures of Gulbadan
Ruby Lal
A captivating biography of one of the world’s greatest adventurers, the itinerant Mughal Princess Gulbadan, based on her long-forgotten memoir.
In this chapter, Lal introduces readers to Gulbaban’s royal world, which was outdoors-oriented and filled with matriarchs and magical tales.
Women and the Piano
A History in 50 Lives
Susan Tomes
Celebrated pianist and author Susan Tomes traces fifty such women across the piano’s history. From Maria Szymanowska to Nina Simone, and including interviews with women performing today, this is a much-needed corrective to our understanding of the piano—and a timely testament to women’s musical lives.
In these chapters, Tomes sets out the transition away from the harpsichord and the rise of the piano, showing the inseparable role of women in this development.
Merze Tate
The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar
Barbara D. Savage
A powerful and inspiring biography of Merze Tate, a trailblazing Black woman scholar and intrepid world traveler, who refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.”
This chapter, ‘Sail to the Future’, details Tate’s process of applying and taking up a place at Oxford, becoming the first Black American to study there. She battled patronising attitudes yet completed a degree which she took with her in her further scholarship and adventures around the world.
The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective
Sara Lodge
A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account—and how they became a cultural sensation. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women’s lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction.
In Searchers and Watchers, Lodge introduces readers to some of the first Victorian female detectives, including Elizabeth Joyes and Sarah Dunaway, and charts women’s integral role in the rise of specialist investigations in the Victorian era.
Perfection
400 Years of Women’s Quest for Beauty
Margarette Lincoln
Ranging across the last four hundred years, Margarette Lincoln examines women’s health and beauty in fascinating detail. Considering everything from body sculpture, diet, and exercise to skin, teeth, and hair, Perfection is a vibrant account of women’s body-fashioning—and shows how intimately these practices are related to community and identity throughout history.
In the Introduction, Lincoln explores how women’s quest for beauty has gone hand-in-hand with oppression, discrimination and aspiration.
The Pocket
A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660–1900
Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux
This fascinating and enlightening study of the tie-on pocket combines materiality and gender to provide new insight into the social history of women’s everyday lives—from duchesses and country gentry to prostitutes and washerwomen—and to explore their consumption practices, sociability, mobility, privacy, and identity.
This chapter explores and illuminates the unassuming pocket as a tool that provided women with adaptability, mobility and sociability – and enabled participation in socio-economic life.
Shop this selection of books at 30% discount by using the code WHIST when prompted at checkout at yalebooks.co.uk.
Offer available for customers in the UK, subject to availability and runs until 1st April 2025. This is an exclusive offer that will only be honoured on our website and not through other retailers and can not be used in conjunction with other promotions.
