International Womens Day 2019 in Lewisham Libraries

Lewisham Libraries will be celebrating International Women's Day on Friday the 8th March 2019. The theme for this year will be #BalanceforBetter. We will celebrate women's achievements while calling for a more gender-balanced world.

Have a look at our selection here, or at our display in our branches. We always have great books you can try.
The link to the digital copy can be found below the description and most of these can be found in our book catalogue or in branches
 

 


 
Eleven Hours
by Pamela Erens, 2016.


A heavily pregnant young woman is leaving the shopping mall to head home on a horribly hot day in Texas when she is suddenly bundled into a car and kidnapped by a desperate young man, in this page-turning thriller from the author of Tully.

 


Dietland
by Sarai Walker, 2015.


Dietland will be adapted into AMC's 10-episode straight-to-series starring multiple-Emmy winner Julianna Margulies and Joy Nash. Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you're fat, to be noticed is to be judged. Or mocked. Or worse. But when a mysterious woman starts following her, Plum finds herself involved with an underground community of women who live life on their own terms. At the same time, a dangerous guerrilla group called "Jennifer" begins to terrorize a world that mistreats women. As Plum grapples with her personal struggles, she becomes entangled in a sinister plot, the consequences of which are explosive.
Copies
Overdrive eBook: Dietland
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Rise
Gina Miller,2018.


Gina Miller came to prominence when she brought one of the most significant constitutional cases ever to be heard in the British Supreme Court. Gina successfully challenged the UK government's authority to trigger Article 50 - the formal notification to leave the European Union - without parliamentary approval. For standing up for what she believed was right, Miller became the target of not just racist and sexist verbal abuse, but physical threats to her and her family. One question she kept being asked was how could she keep going at the cost of so much pain and aggravation? To her the answer was obvious: she'd been doing it all her life. In Rise, Gina Miller draws on a lifetime of fighting injustice and looks at the moments that made her; the trauma, failures and successes that gave her the confidence in her voice, the ability to know how to use it and the strength not to let others diminish it, even when it came at incredible cost. To those who say one person cannot make a difference, this memoir demonstrates irrefutably how you can.
Copies
OverDrive eAudio: Rise
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When I Hit You
Meena Kandasamy, 2018.

Meena Kandasamy's vivid, sharp and precise writing makes a triumph of When I Hit You"- Guardian. Seduced by politics, poetry and an enduring dream of building a better world together, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor. Moving with him to a rain-washed coastal town, she swiftly learns that what for her is a bond of love is for him a contract of ownership. As he sets about reducing her to his idealised version of an obedient wife, bullying her and devouring her ambition of being a writer in the process, she attempts to push back - a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape.
Copies
OverDrive eAudio: When I Hit You
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Red Clocks
by Leni Zumas, 2018.


FIVE WOMEN. ONE QUESTION: What is a woman for?

In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers.

 Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro's best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling homeopath, or "mender," who brings all their fates together when she's arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.

RED CLOCKS is at once a riveting drama whose mysteries unfold with magnetic energy, and a shattering novel of ideas. With the verve of Naomi Alderman's THE POWER and the prescient brilliance of THE HANDMAID'S TALE, Leni Zumas' incredible new novel is fierce, fearless and frighteningly plausible.
Copies
Overdrive eBook: Red Clocks
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Rise Up Women!
The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes by Diane Atkinson, 2017.
Between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War, while the patriarchs of the Liberal and Tory parties vied for supremacy in parliament, the campaign for women's suffrage was fought with flair and imagination in the public arena.


From their marches on Parliament and 10 Downing Street, to the selling of their paper, Votes for Women, through to the more militant activities of the Women's Social and Political Union, whose slogan 'Deeds Not Words!' resided over bombed pillar-boxes, acts of arson and the slashing of great works of art, the women who participated in the movement endured police brutality, assault, imprisonment and force-feeding, all in the relentless pursuit of one goal: the right to vote.


A hundred years on, Diane Atkinson celebrates the lives of the women who answered the call to 'Rise Up'; a richly diverse group of actresses and mill-workers, teachers and doctors, bootmakers and sweated workers. Meticulously researched, vividly rendered and definitive, Rise Up, Women! brings these women to life in a stirring celebration of their grace, resilience and determination that changed the world forever.
Copies
Overdrive eBook: Rise Up
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Do It Like a Woman
By Caroline Criado-Perez, 2016.

Every day, all around the world, women are reinventing what it means to be female in cultures where power, privilege or basic freedoms are all too often equated with being male. Here, Caroline Criado-Perez, one of the most vocal and tenacious campaigners of her generation, introduces us to some of these pioneering women. We meet the first woman to cross the Antarctic alone; we meet a female fighter pilot in Afghanistan; we meet a climate change activist who scaled new heights; we meet a Chilean revolutionary turned politician; we meet the Russian punks who rocked out against Putin; and we meet the Iranian journalist who dared to uncover her hair.
 

 

Things I Wish I'd Known
Victoria Young, 2016.

Look at the front cover of any parenting book and what do you see? Glowing mothers-to-be, or pristine, beautifully-behaved children.

But the reality is, your pregnancy might be a sweaty, moody rollercoaster, and your children will almost certainly spend the first few years of their lives covered in food, tears and worse. And the experience is no less magical for it.

In this no-holds-barred collection of essays, prominent women authors, journalists and TV personalities explore the truth about becoming mothers. Covering topics from labour to the breastapo, twins to IVF, weaning to post-birth sex, and with writers including Cathy Kelly, Adele Parks, Kathy Lette and Lucy Porter (and many more), Things I Wish I'd Known is a reassuring, moving and often hilarious collection that will speak to mothers - and mothers-to-be - everywhere.
Copies
OverDrive eAudio :Things I Wish
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Shoot Like a Girl
Mary Jennings Hegar, 2017.


A must-read about an American patriot whose courage and determination will have a lasting impact on the future of our Armed Forces and the nation."-Senator John McCain

On July 29, 2009, Air National Guard major Mary Jennings "MJ" Hegar was shot down while on a Medevac mission on her third tour in Afghanistan. Despite being wounded, she fought the enemy and saved the lives of her crew and their patients. But soon she would face a new battle: to give women who serve on the front lines the credit they deserve...

After being commissioned into the U.S. Air Force, MJ Hegar was selected for pilot training by the Air National Guard, finished at the top of her class, then served three tours in Afghanistan, flying combat search-and-rescue missions, culminating in a harrowing rescue attempt that would earn MJ the Purple Heart as well as the Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor Device.

But it was on American soil that Hegar would embark on her greatest challenge-to eliminate the military's Ground Combat Exclusion Policy, which kept female armed service members from officially serving in combat roles despite their long-standing record of doing so with honor.

In Shoot Like a Girl, MJ takes the reader on a dramatic journey through her military career: an inspiring, humorous, and thrilling true story of a brave, high-spirited, and unforgettable woman who has spent much of her life ready to sacrifice everything for her country, her fellow man, and her sense of justice.
Copies
OverDrive eAudio: Shoot Like
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Her Brilliant Career
Rachel Cooke, 2014.

In 1956, a widow, Violet Clark, was accused of the murder of her baby twins. At her trial, Wright's defence saved her from the gallows. The Fifties were a conservative, inward looking decade during which women retreated once more to the safety of the kitchen. But Violet was defended by Rose Heilbron QC, the first woman to be appointed silk in Britain, the first woman to defend in a murder trial - and a tabloid celebrity. Rachel Cooke tells the story of Heilbron and some of her extraordinary contemporaries - Muriel Box, film director; Betty Box, film producer; Margery Fish, plantswoman; Patience Gray, cook; Alison Smithson, architect; Sheila van Damm, rally car driver and theatre owner; Nancy Spain, journalist and radio personality; Joan Werner Laurie, editor; Jacquetta Hawkes, archaeologist.
 

 

Milkman
By Anna Burns, 2018.

In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous.
Middle sister is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman.


But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous.
Copies
OverDrive eAudio: The Milkman
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Roar : Uplifting. Intriguing.
by Cecelia Ahern, 2018.

From international bestseller Cecelia Ahern come thirty stories that speak to us all: the women who befriend us, the women who encourage us, the women who make us brave. From The Woman Who Slowly Disappeared to The Woman Who Returned and Exchanged her Husband, discover these original, surprising tales and find a story for every woman.

Witty, tender, surprising, these stories capture the moment when we all want to roar.
'A wonderful, inspiring collection.the kind of book everyone should have on their shelf' Libby Page, bestselling author of The Lido

'Inventive and ingenious, with a doffing of the cap to Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood' Stylist

Copies
Overdrive eBook:Roar
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Her Body and Other Parties
by Carmen Maria Machado, 2017.


In her provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. Startling narratives map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited on their bodies, both in myth and in practice.
 A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the mysterious green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague spreads across the earth.


 A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery about a store's dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted house guest. Bodies become inconsequential, humans become monstrous, anger becomes erotic. A dark, shimmering slice into womanhood, Her Body and Other Parties is wicked and exquisite.

Copies
Overdrive eBook: Her Body
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Bluestockings
The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education
by Jane Robinson, 2009.

Jane Robinson's Bluestockings is the incredible story of the fight for female education in Britain.

In 1869, when five women enrolled at university for the first time in British history, the average female brain was thought to be 150 grams lighter than a man's. Doctors warned that if women studied too hard their wombs would wither and die. When the Cambridge Senate held a vote on whether women students should be allowed official membership of the university, there was a full-scale riot.

Despite the prejudice and the terrible sacrifices they faced, women from all backgrounds persevered and paved the way for the generations who have followed them since.

By the 1920s, being an 'undergraduette' was considered quite the fashionable thing; by the 1930s, women were emerging from universities as anything from aviation engineers to professional academics.

Bluestockings tells an inspiring story - of defiance and determination, of colourful eccentricity and at times heartbreaking loneliness, as well as of passionate friendships, midnight cocoa-parties and glorious self-discovery.

'Social history of the best kind' Sunday Times


'Modern girls need reminding of the long battle, and Jane Robinson's fine book does just that, charting the lives and struggles of campaigners ... But there is more joy than sorrow' Mail on Sunday

Jane Robinson was born in Edinburgh and brought up in Yorkshire. Her books about women travellers and pioneers have established her as an engaging social historian with an appreciative eye for eccentricity. Jane lives near Oxford with her husband and two sons.
 

 

The Girls Who Went to War
Duncan Barrett
Nuala Calvi, 2016.

The personal accounts of three young women who joined up in 1940. In the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone against Germany. The British Army stood at just over one and a half million men, while the Germans had three times that many, and a population almost twice the size of ours from which to draw new waves of soldiers.

Clearly, in the fight against Hitler, manpower alone wasn't going to be enough. Eighteen-year-old Jessie Ward defied her mother to join the ATS, Margery Pott signed up for the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and nanny Kathleen Skin the WRNS.

The Mere Wife
by Headley Maria Dahvana, 2018.


New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley's fierce, feminist retelling of the classic tale of Beowulf.To those who live there, Herot Hall is a paradise.


With picket fences, gabled buildings, and wildflowers that seed themselves in ordered rows, the suburb is a self-sustaining community, enclosed and secure. But to those who live secretly along its periphery, Herot Hall is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights.Dylan and Gren live on opposite sides of the perimeter, neither boy aware of the barriers erected to keep them apart.


For Dylan and his mother, Willa, life moves at a charmingly slow pace. They flit between mothers' groups, playdates, cocktail hours, and dinner parties. Gren lives with his mother, Dana, just outside the limits of Herot Hall. A former soldier, Dana didn't want Gren, didn't plan Gren, and doesn't know how she got Gren. But now that she has him, she's determined to protect him from a world that sees him only as a monster. When Gren crosses the border into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, he sets up a collision between Dana's and Willa's worlds that echoes the Beowulf story - and gives sharp, startling currency to the ancient epic poem.
  
 

Databases

We have over 16 databases covering a wide range of topics. Don't waste time trawling through lots of questionable sites with lots of pop ups and strange advertisements.Get access to free, high quality academic papers, historical newspapers, dictionaries and biographies. All you need is your library card to get started on your research!
 

A Dictionary of Gender Studies Gabriele Griffin, 2017.

Over 430 entries

This new dictionary provides clear and accessible definitions of a range of terms from within the fast-developing field of Gender Studies. It covers terms which have emerged out of Gender Studies, such as cyber feminism, the double burden, and the male gaze, and gender-focused definitions of more general terms, such as housework, intersectionality, and trolling. It also covers major feminist figures, including Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as groups and movements from Votes for Women to Reclaim the Night. It is an invaluable reference resource for students taking Gender Studies courses at undergraduate or postgraduate level, and for those applying a gender perspective within other subject area.
Access
eISBN: 9780191834837
Gender Studies
 

 

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography


Over 60,000 biographies, 72 million words, 11,000 portraits of significant, influential or notorious figures who shaped British history.
 

 

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