Hidden Histories of Women

The Hidden Histories of Women series uncovers the lives, labor, and legacies of women who shaped history—often without recognition, credit, or protection. From healers and innovators to writers, rebels, caretakers, and thinkers, these books examine how women’s contributions were minimized, erased, or misattributed, and how those stories continue to echo today.

This series explores:

Women in medicine, science, and war

Cultural erasure and gendered silence

Power, patriarchy, and resistance

Forgotten innovators and leaders

The emotional labor of history

Identity, voice, and visibility

Written in a narrative nonfiction style that blends historical research with reflective storytelling, these books invite readers to reconsider what history values—and who gets to be remembered.

These are not just stories of loss. They are stories of resilience, brilliance, and reclamation.

The Blame: A Hidden History of Heresy, Genius, and the Violence of Erasure

From the first woman blamed for reaching toward a tree to the last one told her name didn't belong on her own discovery. In every sacred text, before the doctrine and the law, there was a woman they needed to erase.

They called Eve dangerous for wanting knowledge. They called Helen guilty for being beautiful. They called Pandora reckless for asking what was inside the box. They called the healers witches, the mystics heretics, the scientists anonymous. They built a theology of blame so ancient it stopped looking like a choice — and started looking like truth.

The Blame recovers what was buried. From the divine feminine they wrote out of scripture to the scientists whose names migrated from first author to footnote to absence. From the midwives whose medicine became a death sentence to the artists who hid self-portraits in the margins of manuscripts no one thought to check. From the Malleus Maleficarum that gave men permission to burn women to the algorithms still calculating their silence at digital speed.

The book opens and closes with fiction — three women in a fifteenth-century print shop who dared to write counter-scripture into the margins of a witch-hunting manual, and a modern conservator who discovers the ink they left behind never dried. Between them lie ten chapters of documented history, recovered scholarship, and reclaimed names. The Gates of Inanna structure the descent: mythical erasure, intellectual erasure, literary, spiritual, economic, digital, complete — before charting the path of return.

What begins as blame becomes a blueprint. What begins as erasure becomes a rose that refuses to stop blooming.

Women & Culture: The Americas and Beyond—Narratives of Power, Preservation, and Reclamation

From the first corn ground on stone to the last language they were forbidden to speak. In every civilization, before the monuments and the empires, there were women's hands.

They ground the grain that fed nations. They wove the cloth that carried meaning. They tasted the plants that healed and the ones that killed. They kept the ceremonies alive when keeping them was punishable by death. They were humanity's first architects — of culture, of knowledge, of survival — and history erased them anyway.

Women and Culture recovers what was taken. From the Haudenosaunee clan mothers whose political systems inspired democracy to the enslaved African women who braided rice seeds into their hair so something from home would survive the crossing. From the healers burned as witches to the midwives whose medicine was stolen and renamed. From the boarding schools that cut the braids to the granddaughters now learning the languages that were supposed to die.

Part I builds the case: across continents and centuries, women were the carriers of civilization. The Lost Chapters confront what colonization destroyed — the temples credited to men, the archives set on fire, the tongues broken and forbidden. Part II turns to the Americas, where Indigenous and African-descended women preserved what empire tried to erase, and where their descendants are now reclaiming it.

What begins as a history of erasure becomes a story of return. What begins as silence becomes a loom that never stopped.

Women for Change: Hidden Histories of Power and Resistance

From the first council fire where every voice carried equal weight to the last circle they tried to break. In every civilization, before the thrones and the empires, there were women who governed.

They selected the chiefs and removed the ones who failed. They held veto power over wars. They controlled the food that sustained nations. They tended the fire at the center of the circle—literally and symbolically—and when empire came to replace their councils with pyramids, they rebuilt the circle underground.

Women for Change recovers the power that was taken—and traces how women fought to take it back. From the Haudenosaunee Clan Mothers whose governance inspired a democracy that deliberately left them out to the West African Queen Mothers who advised kings and outlasted colonizers. From Harriet Tubman's nineteen trips into slave states to Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony that made a nation reckon with its brutality. From the abolitionists who organized in circles no empire could crush to the digital activists still weaving those same patterns today.

Structured as seven circles—broken, hidden, council, teaching, healing, speaking, and gathering—the book maps how women's power was systematically shattered through property law, religious doctrine, legal codes, educational exclusion, and spectacular violence, then traces how women rebuilt that power in kitchens and markets, in secret schools and resistance networks, and in movements for abolition, suffrage, civil rights, environmental justice, and peace.

What begins as a history of shattering becomes a geometry of return. What begins as a broken circle becomes a fire that never went out.