BOOKSHELF

NONFICTION

An Unexpected Life: A Memoir, by Gloria Steinem

Before she became a feminist leader, Gloria Steinem was a curious child: going on road trips with her itinerant father, caring for her mother, and devouring every book she could find. In An Unexpected Life, Steinem reflects on the unlikely experiences and pivotal moments — from a childhood rat bite that opened her eyes to the dangers of poverty to the 1970 Women’s March honoring the right to vote — that shaped the visionary woman she would become. She shares her years living in India, learning from the nonviolent movement there, and her travels around the world advocating for women’s rights. Along the way, she honors the people who influenced her most, including trailblazers, writers and thinkers who expanded her understanding of power, community, justice and solidarity. Moving between past and present, Steinem examines the progress and setbacks of six decades of activism. As she reflects on the movements she helped build and the victories won for women’s and human rights, she also looks ahead, urging new generations to imagine bolder, more inclusive paths forward.

An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America, by Keri Leigh Merritt

After teaching school in China in the early 1920s, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) moved to a small rural town in northeast Georgia. Along with her lover, Paula Snelling, Smith began running a socially progressive summer camp for girls in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Together the couple created and published a magazine devoted to creating a new vision of the former Confederacy that passionately championed equality and integration. They were the first white Southerners to publish Black writers, and Smith wrote articles instructing white Southerners to stop supporting the dictates of Jim Crow. In 1944 she published a bestselling novel, Strange Fruit, which became a national sensation and was banned in Boston and Detroit. She went on to publish six more books, both fiction and nonfiction, exploring topics ranging from racism and human suffering to sexual repression and Freudian psychoanalysis. Because of Smith’s provocative work, the FBI spied on her for decades, she received countless death threats, and her home was burned three times by angry racists, resulting in the loss of multiple works-in-progress. Undaunted, she continued her ardent fight against segregation, maintaining friendships with some of the great leaders of her day, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, W.E.B Dubois, Paul Robeson and Pauli Murray.