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Free Ebooks for Women's History Month

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (sitting) and Susan B. Anthony
One of my favorite pictures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (sitting) and Susan B. Anthony, late in their lives.
It’s Women’s History Month, and while I don’t usually pay much attention to that sort of thing, it’s a topic that’s certainly worthy. I didn’t know a lot about the women’s suffrage movement in America until I was hired to teach an Intro to Women’s Studies class at Towson State University one year, having seen a flyer up at JHU where I was in grad school at the time. I frantically crammed a whole lot of reading in that summer, prepping to teach a class that covered what seemed to be everything: linguistics, biology, anthropology, literature, and more than anything else, history, history, history.

And in it I met one of the great loves of my life: a movement whose history continues to fascinate and inspire me, the American suffrage movement and the fascinating characters that moved it forward: Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Victoria Woodhull…and more, a cast of hundreds in a period that was turbulent and changeable and crammed full of social movements, including abolition, free love, spiritualism, temperance, women’s suffrage and a myriad others.

If you’re interested in it, a great place to start is Stanton’s own memoir, EIGHTY YEARS AND MORE: REMINISCENCES 1815-1897, which is free on the Kindle as well as on Project Gutenberg (as is everything I mention for free on the Kindle). Or the books she, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage authored, also available free on the Kindle, Volumes I, II, and III of HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE as well as the three later volumes penned by Ida Husted Harper, Volumes IV, V, and VI. Harper also wrote THE LIFE AND WORK OF SUSAN B. ANTHONY, Volumes I and II. (Note: I don’t see Volume II in a free version on the Kindle; if you don’t want to pay, I suggest going to look on Project Gutenberg and maybe kicking them a buck or two as a thank you.)

Or go to one of the documents that started it all, Mary Wollstonecraft’s VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN or her lesser known book MARIA, OR THE WRONGS OF WOMAN. Other Wollstonecraft available, should you cultivate a taste for her, includes LETTERS ON SWEDEN, NORWAY, AND DENMARK, her short stories, and her novel MARY.

Skip ahead one generation to what Wollstonecraft’s daughter writes (and the wonder of e-books is that all of this is out there for free, which frankly to me makes the Internet the marvel that it is) and you’ll find FRANKENSTEIN, THE LAST MAN, MATILDA, and PROSERPINE AND MIDAS.

I’ll try to post some more of these throughout the month – there’s a TON of free reading out there in this area and the only problem is its discoverability. I welcome recommendations!

4 Responses

  1. Hi–this is a very informative post. Right now, I’m reading sci-fi, but I’m going to send this link to a writer friend who penned a children’s historical fiction that deals with this precise time frame.

    Reply

  2. Thanks for this, Cat. I agree with you about the “discovery” and the wonder part of learning about the suffrage woman. It inspires awe.

    I’d recommend, too, delving into the work of the early 19th century American women writers: Kate, Chopin (who breaks my heart), Edith Wharton, especially “House of Mirth.” There are others and they were writing from their pulse-beat.

    Cheers.

    Reply

  3. Hi Cat,

    My book “Carrie Chapman Catt: A Life of Leadership” is also available free as an e-book though not for the Kindle). It can be found and downloaded by looking up the title on Google Books. The original intended audience was middle school students, but I believe quite a few adults have read it.

    Thanks for this excellent post.

    ~~Nate Levin

    Reply

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Tracking 2011

I posted earlier that I’d had nineteen stories published in 2011, and John asked for some particulars. Here they are, in a post that tries to sum up what I -did- in 2011. 🙂

I finished two large fiction projects. The first was a collaboration where the other participant dropped out, and I ended up finishing the book. I would estimate that I wrote between 50-60 thousand words on this, and it went through two sets of revisions. It’s currently being shopped around.

The second was a reworking of an earlier novel into a trilogy. I mapped this out and divvied up the existing content, and finished the first volume, which involved about 70 thousand words of new content. A goal for 2012 is to finish the second volume. It’s currently being looked at by a publisher, and I think it’s the best thing I ever wrote, so I hope to sell it this year.

I did some editing work as well, which I’ll talk about at another time.

Statistics:
Number of submissions: 32 in 2011, which is actually much lower than (imo) it should be, and which I hope to double in 2012
Number of acceptances: 18
Most rejections garnered by an accepted piece: 10 for Flicka, which is a very odd story and ended up appearing in SUBVERSION. Also notable is Whose Face This Is, I Do Not Know, which appeared in Clarkesworld after eight other rejections (clearly I should have sent it to them much earlier, but I was thinking of it as a horror piece)

New stories written (not counting flash, which I did a bad job of tracking):

  • A Querulous Flute of Bone ““ written to spec
  • Do The Right Thing ““ written at an editor’s request, who then turned it down, just rewrote and sent out for the first time
  • Five Ways To Fall In Love on Planet Porcelain ““ currently in circulation
  • Logic and Magic in the Time of the Boat Lifts (collaboration with Ben Burgis) ““ currently in circulation
  • Pumpkin Knight ““ Codex contest story, reworking before it goes anywhere
  • Talking in the Night ““ needs polishing before it goes out

Last year was actually a little unproductive in terms of stories. This year I’ve already finished: 1) a 1000 word piece for a children’s market, 2) “Space Elevator Music” (flash), 3) “Love’s Footsteps,” a S&S piece that I’m reading at Confusion this week and then sending to BCS. I’ve got a slew of half-finished stuff that I’m taking to the con as well, because sometimes I get very productive during my solo time at cons.

In 2011, I pulled one story from a market who had had it way too long and got a nice note from the editor about how the wait would make the pro sale that much sweeter when I got it and letting me know that the more professional the market, the longer I should expect to wait. I moved said market to the top of my “do not submit to these people” list.

Stories that appeared in 2011:

*This is the story I am pushing for award notice, but other notables are “Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know” and “Love, Resurrected.”

Some notes on my submission process:

I have four criteria for market that help determine whether or not I submit to them, which are pay rate, reply time, whether they take e-subs, and how much notice they get. Something that’s high in one category may compensate for something in another category ““ Tor.com’s pay rate versus the slow reply time, for example, or the amount of notice F&SF gets versus the pain in the rear nature of printing out a paper submission (it has become the only magazine I’m willing to do this for, though).

Sometimes I send things to a specific market because I wrote it with them in mind. This is what happened with “Clockwork Fairies,” which appeared in Tor.com because the first market turned it down. Occurrences like this are not uncommon. I mention this only to increase my own mystique and make editors more eager to grab my stories when they appear, but I am afraid my prolific nature works against me in this regard.

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