We’re Still Celebrating Women’s History Month Without You, Google Calendar!
March 11, 2025
It wasn’t just Black History Month that Google Calendar removed from its holiday list. They did away with Women’s History Month, too. Just check your phones. In true fashion of an avowed fascist’s pick me, Big Tech was thorough with the forty-seventh administration’s anti-DEI scourge. But we said it once and we’ll say it again: We don’t need you to recognize Women’s History Month. Keep on with pandering to the patriarchy as we keep this party rolling.
This year’s theme highlights how women have educated and inspired generations, and we have just the handful of titles from our catalog for the occasion! This inexhaustive list also serves as a shout-out to women writers. Because writing is yet another way to educate and inspire generations.
The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice Is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence
“Embracing self-defense doesn’t mean giving up on legal and political change. What it means is knowing when not to depend on institutions or the law for our immediate safety. The systems we’ve fought for decades to change are reliable and unreliable. They are so much better than they were for previous generations and they’re no different than they’ve always been. Changing laws and attitudes is essential to preventing gender-based violence but also inadequate. Because gender-based violence is intimate and personal, strategies for stopping this violence need to be intimate and personal too.”
—Meg Stone
The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany
“After Hitler’s rise to power, [Sigrid] Schultz found creative ways around the Nazis’ tightening control over the press. Described by fellow foreign correspondent Quentin Reynolds as “Hitler’s greatest enemy,” she reported on the passage of antisemitic laws, the opening of concentration camps, the closing of churches, and the reign of terror against Jews, Communists, and anyone who opposed Hitler’s government. She accurately predicted Hitler’s military intentions and shared details of Germany’s rearmament. She demonstrated how the Nazis manipulated and misreported the news to their own people and attempted to control the foreign press through a combination of bribery and threats.”
—Pamela D. Toler
Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop
“Audre Lorde wrote that one of white feminists’ gravest mistakes was their assumption that women of color could only teach them about the lives of women of color. We absolutely need to see that the bodies of women of color are special sites in the production of racial, economic, and ableist hierarchies. But a hallmark of Black feminist activism has also been that looking at the lives of those facing multiple oppressions can help us learn what will liberate all women. The lives of women of color make particularly clear what is at stake for all women.”
—Serene Khader
The Hivemind Swarmed: Conversations on Gamergate, the Aftermath, and a Quest for a Safer Internet
“You know, what strikes me is that none of my students know what Gamergate is because it’s been three years. Well, now it’s become a historical event. . . . You talk about it as an event that was important because it signaled the fall of the game industry at that period of time. One of the problematic things about Gamergate is that you couldn’t say who won or lost. It just showed everybody’s ass.”
—Lisa Nakamura, gender and technology researcher, interviewed by David Wolinsky
Kindred
Foreword by Janelle Monáe
“Kevin and I became more a part of the household, familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize. Not that I wanted us to have trouble, but it seemed as though we should have had a harder time adjusting to this particular segment of history—adjusting to our places in the household of a slaveholder. For me, the work could be hard, but was usually more boring than physically wearing. And Kevin complained of boredom, and of having to be sociable with a steady stream of ignorant pretentious guests who visited the Weylin house. But for drop-ins from another century, I thought we had had a remarkably easy time. And I was perverse enough to be bothered by the ease.”
—Octavia E. Butler
Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
“Whether domestic or internationally focused, Lorraine emphasized Black independence from white (European or American) political control. She continuously rejected the Western nations’ panic around the potential influence of Islam or communism as both condescension and an effort at control. In this way, she was something of a Black nationalist, not as a matter of separatism but as an ethic of self-determination.”
—Imani Perry
“Perhaps women are beginning to wake from the trance of male entitlement, which our culture encodes as romantic love and experts accept as integral to healthy marriages. Waking up can be slow and disorienting. I spent much of my fifteen-year marriage bound to my husband by our shared conviction that his entitlement to female caretaking mattered more than my own happiness, desires, or pain. When I finally wrenched myself free I did so simply to survive, having held myself in misery so long that I was fantasizing and occasionally plotting my own death.”
—Kate Hamilton
“The indifference to Black women as human beings worthy of defense and respect is not a new phenomenon. Enslaved Black women were bought, sold, raped, exploited, and, in many cases, violently killed since their arrival on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. More than four hundred years later, Black women continue to remain unprotected. Simply put, there is not, nor has there ever been, a safe place in this nation for Black women. This is especially true within the purview of law enforcement: an institution whose very existence originates from slave patrol and apprehension.”
—Cheryl L. Neely
On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family, from Punjab to California
“Before my parents were married, my father, a hippie from Los Angeles with long blond curls and a mustache, decided to call my grandfather to ask for permission to marry his daughter. My mother told him she didn’t think this was such a good idea. Though the couple had been dating for a few years, my grandparents knew nothing of their eldest daughter’s relationship. They expected my mother to have an arranged marriage to a suitable Indian groom, not a white Californian who wore bell-bottoms and talked of such nonsense as ‘true love.’ My grandparents had already facilitated introductions between my mother and potential husbands—they’d gone so far as to send her to England to meet a prospective match. And though she had no intention to follow through with any of the arrangements, my mother had been amiable, willing to placate her parents by attending the introductions. I’m not sure how or when my mother did plan to break the news to her parents, had my father heeded her warning and given up on calling my grandfather to ask for his blessing.”
—Jaclyn Moyer
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks: 10th-Anniversary Edition
“As with many Southern migrants, Parks’s political activities did not end when she left the South. But the image of Parks on the bus in 1955 is fixed in the popular imagination partly because she left the South as the civil rights movement she helped spur was blossoming. As her comrades in Montgomery and across the South fomented a nonviolent revolution increasingly captured by the national media, Parks had a new political base. Though she remained personally close to many Southern movement people and attended some events, she wasn’t a daily participant—and so became frozen in time, heralded for starting it all but largely unrecognized as an ongoing political actor.”
—Jeanne Theoharis
Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty
“Over the next year, Duncan testified before the Senate Health and Labor Committee, the Budget Committee, and the Economic Opportunity Committee, as well as Long’s Finance Committee. Duncan’s message was consistent: ‘It’s time people in Washington realize that if you can get good jobs with good pay, we’d be happy to get off welfare. . . . People are tired of having welfare officials tell them how to run their lives, when they can get sick, how much food they can eat. We want to rule our own lives. We want a piece of the American pie. We want jobs that will provide our families with a decent life.’”
—Annelise Orleck
“Nina McCall spent nearly three months in captivity in the Bay City Detention Hospital. Inside, she was forced to endure inhumane (and ineffective) medical treatments. Her days were filled with scrubbing floors and washing dishes; her nights were spent sharing a bed with another woman in a small room. After Nina was released, a state agent followed and harassed her, forcing her to continue taking the agonizing mercury injections, on threat of reincarceration. Unable to tolerate the pain any longer, Nina eventually decided to sue the government. he needed this cruel mistreatment to stop.”
—Scott W. Stern
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
“When people see that they matter in organizing spaces, they are more likely to repeatedly show up. It takes time to engage individuals in the process of building relationships in the movement, but it is more than worth it. In building those relationships, we are better able as organizers and leaders to ascertain what brings people to the table and what may keep them there, especially if we see that they have something important, large or small, enabling our work. Good movement organizing recognizes this by holding one-on-one or relational meetings, house meetings, and study groups.”
—Charlene A. Carruthers
With Her Fist Raised: Dorothy Pitman Hughes and the Transformative Power of Black Community Activism
“While Dorothy primarily identified as a childcare activist at this time of her life, her activism was not narrow. She also worked to create community-controlled resources that provided job training, adult education, a youth action corps, housing assistance, and food resources on the West Side. Like other organizers, Dorothy understood that the need for childcare was not independent of issues of needs for housing, employment, and welfare support. The renamed West Side Community Alliance addressed these issues as deeply interrelated problems that could not be effectively resolved in isolation.”
—Laura L. Lovett
About the Author
Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.