Women's History Month at the Library

Details of our planned activities for Women's History Month.

Reading lists

We've collated these resource collections of fiction, non-fiction, films, and documentaries about women's history. Our lists have a mixture of digital and physical resources. Read and watch online or use our click and collect service to borrow physical items. Delve in to discover your new favourite book or film, and find out more about women's history.

Women's history resources

Book giveaways

Our book giveaway will run during March on our social media channels. Follow us on Instagram or Twitter @uwelibrary to find out when we're giving books away. Current students and staff are eligible to enter the giveaway.

2021 book giveaway titles

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

In 1976, Dana dreams of being a writer. In 1815, she is assumed a slave. When Dana first meets Rufus on a Maryland plantation, he’s drowning. She saves his life – and it will happen again and again.

Neither of them understands his power to summon her whenever his life is threatened, nor the significance of the ties that bind them. And each time Dana saves him, the more aware she is that her own life might be over before it’s even begun.

This is the extraordinary story of two people bound by blood, separated by so much more than time.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez

Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you're a woman.

Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. it exposes the gender data gap - a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women's lives.

Award-winning campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the impact this has on their health and well-being. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media, Invisible Women reveals the biased data that excludes women. In making the case for change, this powerful and provocative book will make you see the world anew. A must read.

Women & Power by Mary Beard

From the internationally acclaimed classicist and New York Times best-selling author comes this timely manifesto on women and power.

At long last, Mary Beard addresses in one brave book the misogynists and trolls who mercilessly attack and demean women the world over, including, very often, Mary herself. In Women & Power, she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial. As far back as Homer’s Odyssey, Beard shows, women have been prohibited from leadership roles in civic life, public speech being defined as inherently male. From Medusa to Philomela (whose tongue was cut out), from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren (who was told to sit down), Beard draws illuminating parallels between our cultural assumptions about women’s relationship to power—and how powerful women provide a necessary example for all women who must resist being vacuumed into a male template. With personal reflections on her own online experiences with sexism, Beard asks: If women aren’t perceived to be within the structure of power, isn’t it power itself we need to redefine? And how many more centuries should we be expected to wait?

Women Who Built Bristol by Jane Duffus

Containing 250 inspiring women, three sheroic dogs and one heartbroken barmaid from Easton. The Women Who Built Bristol is a bursting compendium of brilliant women who helped to shape Bristol into the vibrant city it is today. From pin makers to police chiefs, from workhouse inmates to lord mayors, this book shows that Bristol was built by women.