Written in 1405, this book is the first full-length history of women.

Women’s History Month may be coming to a close, but we think celebrating our double-X heritage should be a year-round affair. To deepen our understanding of the topic, we spoke with Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ph.D., author of Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (Vintage Books, 2008), for some suggestions on recommended reading. “These are classics, and that word shouldn’t frighten people away from reading them,” Ulrich says of her selections. “They are very readable and accessible, which is why they’ve survived.” Her picks:

The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan (Penguin Classics, 2000)
Penned in 1405, the original handwritten manuscript of this book is considered the first full-length history of women. “The City of Ladies is a passionate defense of women’s capacity for education,” Ulrich writes. “The opening scene in which Christine describes her dismay over misogynist ideas seems casual, almost chatty. Yet it is also artful.”

Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Humanity Books, 2002)
Published in 1898, when Stanton was 83 years old, this memoir chronicles the suffragist’s struggle for equal rights in 19th-century America. “Part reminiscence, part sermon and part travelogue, it was written to mollify her critics — there was little hope of that.”

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991)
Based on lectures given by Woolf at Cambridge University in 1928, this essay offers a sharp examination of sexism and society, including the fictional fate of Shakespeare’s sister. Writes Ulrich: “Woolf’s invocation of Judith Shakespeare is both a lament and an invitation, an acknowledgment of absence and a call for a new kind of history, one that begins with an imaginative recognition of all that has been lost.”

According to Ulrich, “people make history when they do the unexpected.” Have you ever done anything to shake up the status quo?

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