Non-Fiction

Content type
Collection

Clara Asscher Pinkhof

Clara Asscher Pinkhof dedicated her life and work to helping and advocating for Jewish children, initially as a teacher and later as an author. She is most known for her accounts of the experiences of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation.

Marion Phillips

As Chief Women’s Officer of the Labour Party, Marion Phillips was one of the most important figures in the campaign to free women from domestic drudgery at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her work brought a quarter of a million women into the Labour Party.

Helen Harris Perlman

With almost seventy years as a social work practitioner, supervisor, teacher, consultant, and author to her credit, Helen Harris Perlman was a legend in her field. She pioneered the “Chicago School” of social work, arguing that many people in crisis needed short-term therapy and solutions rather than long-term Freudian analysis.

Jessica Blanche Peixotto

Jessica Blanche Peixotto defied convention and her family to become a respected authority in the field of economics. Through her education, professorship, and departmental leadership at the University of California at Berkeley, she broke down barriers for women in education.

Ruth Peggy Sophie Parnass

Born in Germany, Ruth Peggy Sophie Parnass was sent to Sweden to escape the Nazis. Parnass became a journalist, actress, court reporter, feminist activist, and writer. Parnass combines her private and public lives in her writing, whether on her childhood under Nazi rule in Hamburg and as an exile in Sweden, on women's issues, or on political matters.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker is a feminist revolutionary, a poet, critic, and creator of contemporary midrash. She is one of an increasing number of women writers who have the courage to approach bibliocal history and legend from an unorthodox, feminist point of view.

Fayga Ostrower

Fayga Ostrower, born in Poland, began her artistic career after her family immigrated to Brazil, where she quickly developed a love and a talent for engraving. Her award-winning works have been displayed across the world, and she wrote many books reflecting on the power of art as a universal human language.

Dalia Ofer

Dalia Ofer is an Israeli historian whose work mainly focuses on women’s experiences in the Holocaust and collective memory of the Holocaust in Israeli society. Ofer has published a multitude of books and articles on these topics during her career, and she has held positions at many prestigious universities around the world including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

Bernice L. Neugarten

Beginning the 1950s, Bernice Neugarten began groundbreaking research on aging that exploded many myths about the elderly and emphasized the importance of tailoring services to the needs of individual elderly people. She became the University of Chicago’s first tenured professor of human development in 1960 and wrote eight books and more than 150 articles on her research.

Mary Moss

Despite living with her parents for much of her life, Mary Moss lived a vivid existence through the characters she investigated as a journalist and the ones she invented in her fiction. Her journalism covered Yiddish theater, child care facilities, women in asylums, the immigrant experience, and women cranberry workers,. She also wrote two novellas and two novels.

Bessie Louise Moses

Gynecologist, professor, and contraceptive pioneer Bessie Louise Moses spent a long professional life as a public health advocate and women’s health specialist. She founded the first birth control clinic in Baltimore, organized clinics throughout Maryland, and lectured and wrote a book promoting contraception to the public.

Deborah Dash Moore

Deborah Dash Moore is a leading scholar of American Jewish history. Her influential work has focused on both urban and visual Jewish history in locales from New York to Miami to Los Angeles. A prolific interpreter of Jewish and American culture, Moore has played a key role in making American Jewish history a recognized subfield in the academy.

Ellen Moers

Ellen Moers’ Literary Women (1976), the third and last book of her career, is a benchmark of feminist criticism. While early critics attacked Literary Women for its exclusive focus on women writers, her analysis of Mary Shelley and other women writers reshaped our understanding of their work.

Sarah Gertrude Millin

With a career of over thirty years, Sarah Gertrude Millin was one of South Africa’s most prolific literary figures of the twentieth century. The racism and conservative political attitudes that pervade her work, however, have lowered her status in South African literary history.

Marion Simon Misch

Marion Misch participated in a great number of volunteer activities through her lifetime, all the while running a successful business following the death of her husband. Her primary interests centered on education and Judaism, and her volunteerism reflected her concern for these issues.

Hélène Metzger

Hélène Metzger was a French historian of chemistry and a philosopher of science, whose work remains influential today. Her independence and drive brought her great recognition, despite the lack of credibility given to her as a woman.

Eve Merriam

Eve Merriam was an accomplished poet and playwright, best known for her books of children’s poetry that are beloved by audiences of all ages. Her life and career centered around New York, where she used her keen critical eye and unique tactile style to create poems and plays about urban life, social justice, feminism, and more. 

Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar

Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar struggled between her allegiance to French culture and her identity as a Jewish person. In her published journal, she perceptively documented the abandonment of French Jews during the Holocaust and the struggles of assimilated French Jews.

Deborah Marcus Melamed

Deborah Marcus Melamed encouraged Jewish women to form their own relationship with Jewish practice through her 1927 book The Three Pillars, an interpretive guide to rituals and customs. Melamed also served as vice president of the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism from 1920 to 1930 or 1932.

Martha Tamara Schuch Mednick

Both through her psychological research and through her collaboration with a diverse group of women scholars, Martha Tamara Schuch Mednick helped long–silenced minorities express their experiences. Her accomplishments included a paper that debunked the myth of Israeli settlers’ gender equality and the organization of the first international interdisciplinary conference on women, bringing together American, Israeli, and Arab women scholars.

Miriam Markel-Mosessohn

Miriam Markel-Mosessohn was a Hebrew writer. She was most admired by Judah Leib Gordon, the foremost poet of the Haskalah, with whom she maintained a regular correspondence. Through her translations, her brief journalistic career, and her influence on Gordon, Markel-Mosessohn played a key role in the Hebrew literary revival.

Johanna Löwenherz

Johanna Löwenherz traveled widely on behalf of Germany’s socialist women’s movement, raising consciousness and lecturing on the social, economic, and legal equality of women. She became one of the most active representatives of the SDP in the Neuwied region, elected as a delegate to three regional party conferences.

Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was a socialist revolutionary known for her critical perspective. Born in Poland, Luxemburg had become an important figure in the world socialist movement by 1913. She argued against Lenin’s hierarchal conception of party organization, and against revisionism. Luxemburg was internationalist in orientation and unflinchingly dedicated to a radical democratic vision.

Lillian R. Lieber

Frustrated with the way math is taught in schools, Lillian R. Lieber created unconventional, popular books to excite young readers and incite their curiosity.

Estelle Liebling

Estelle Liebling was a talented opera singer who performed at the Dresden Royal Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera and toured through the United States and Europe. She trained popular and Metropolitan Opera singers at her studio in New York for fifty years and wrote books on vocal training and compositions for piano and voice.

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