Five Ways
Subscribe to my newsletter and get a free story!
Share this:

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.

  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.

  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

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Get Fiction in Your Mailbox Each Month

Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.

Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.

 

"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

You may also like...

Response Times and Professional Magazines

Yesterday I withdrew a story from a market because we were starting to near the one year mark, and the couple of queries I’d made all got the usual “It’s in the queue, we’re swamped, just a little longer” reply. I don’t mind waiting a little longer, but I do mind when it gets used to keep you going for months.

So that’s cool, and no hard feelings over them having sat on it a while. I end up withdrawing a story for similar reasons once every couple of years. But here’s the reply I got regarding the withdrawal:

Thanks for the note. Your story is officially withdrawn from our reading queue. One thing you might want to consider in the future is that pro markets take a lot of time. So I’d tailor a story for a certain market and then move on while you wait. That’s what Bradbury and Matheson and all those guys do. Some pro markets such as Cemetery Dance take up to two years. So that’s why I say. But the credit one receives when they break pro is worth everything. I hope this helps you future endeavors. You can send along something else in the future when we reopen for subs in [identifying information redacted]. Just make sure it’s a different story as I don’t accept stories that have previously been withdrawn.

Some pro markets do take up to two years, but it’s darn few of them. Most of the professional magazines are professional; they get stuff back to you fast. Even without e-submissions, Gordon Van Gelder manages to wade through swamps of rejections and still return them in a timely manner. Sure, Tor.com is slow, but given that they pay five times as much as most, I’m willing to give them five times as much time in which to reply. Asimov’s, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Strange Horizons all pay professional rates and yet manage what is apparently a highly unprofessional rapid reply rate.

We got 550-600 subs a month towards the end of my tenure with Fantasy, and I would have felt terrible making people wait over a month, let alone more. And I’m going to say, this particular rejection is a great argument for form rejections, because the patronizing tone here really put me off, plus this is TERRIBLE advice for a new writer. Write what you want to write, not what you think a magazine wants to see.

I dunno. Maybe the editor is working off a different definition of professional than I use.

...

Documents of Tabat: An Instructive and Useful Listing of the Chal Shops of Tabat
What are the documents of Tabat? In an early version of the book, I had a number of interstitial pieces, each a document produced by the city: playbills, advertisements, guide book entries. They had to be cut but I kept them for this purpose. I'll release them at the end of April in e-book form; careful readers will find clues to some aspects of Beasts of Tabat in them. -Cat
What are the documents of Tabat? In an early version of the book, I had a number of interstitial pieces, each a document produced by the city: playbills, advertisements, guide book entries. They had to be cut but I kept them for this purpose. I’ll release them at the end of April in e-book form; careful readers will find clues to some aspects of Beasts of Tabat in them. -Cat

An Instructive and Informative Listing of the Chal Shops of Tabat, being Pamphlet #4 of the second series of “A Visitor’s Guide to Tabat”, Spinner Press, author unknown.

While in Tabat, the visitor will want to try the drink it’s famous for: chal, salty fish and seaweed mixed with strong black tea in what is admittedly an acquired taste. The abundance of such establishments supplies the city dwellers with places to exchange thoughts and news. Many chal houses pride themselves on the antiquity of their brews, which may be years, decades, or in at least one case, centuries old.

Located at the edge of Salt and the Serpentine, the Dancing Cup hosts students from the nearby College of Mages. Go here to catch a glimpse of them showing off new spells and minor magics, particularly in the open air of the back courtyard. Their house chal is over a hundred years old, but they offer many variants, including cider and other fruit drinks. Open all hours.

Two chal shops near Tabat’s Arena are renowned: the Blade’s Savor and Berto’s. The fierce rivalry between the two often leads to free chal for customers willing to switch allegiance. Both shops frequently sponsor gladiators, many of which can be found drinking in one or the other. Bella Kanto and the majority of the Brides of Steel school can be found in Berto’s. These are the only shops you’ll find open during Tabat’s Games. Open all hours.

The Salty Purse, situated a block from the docks on Trade Way, claims a chal of over 200 years provenance, and serves only that, along with ship’s hardbread, doing a hearty business in the former, if not the latter. Open all hours.

In Tabat’s small theater district, actors and wealthy theatergoers favor the Fuchsia and Heron. The most expensive shop in the city, it subsidizes actors’ tabs and even pays a few to patronize it, ensuring a steady flow of Tabat’s most glittering figures. Open from the last afternoon bell till the last night bell only.

***
Love the world of Tabat and want to spend longer in it? Check out Hearts of Tabat, the latest Tabat novel! Or get sneak peeks, behind the scenes looks, snippets of work in progres, and more via Cat’s Patreon.

#sfwapro

...

Skip to content