Moraga and Anzaldúa’s anthology of writings from women of color includes pieces ranging from personal essays to art to poetry to more formal introductions to each of the sections. All of it is moving to read as women struggle with race, sex, class, religion, and pieces of her experience that have diminished her – but the authors piece themselves back together in the community of these pages. We recommend Moraga’s “La Güera,” Mitsuye Yamada’s “Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman,” and “Across the Kitchen Table,” a dialogue between Barbara and Beverly Smith. 

Words of Fire is a vital history of Black women in the US from the early nineteenth century to the early 1990s. It includes influential pieces like Combahee River Collective’s statement, Frances Beale’s “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” and Lorraine Hansberry’s essay on Simone de Beauvoir. The book shows the richness and diversity of Black women’s thought without limiting it to one concern, one concept, or one history. 

Davis’s analysis of Black women’s evolving history in the US is as relevant and valuable as ever. She analyzes the different standards of femininity for Black and white women, their relationship to class, and proposes a future where women of all races are less burdened by social reproduction.

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam. The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. 

In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés shows how woman’s vitality can be restored through what she calls “psychic archaeological digs” into the ruins of the female unconscious. Dr. Estés uses her families’ ethnic tales, washed and rinsed in the blood of wars and survival, multicultural myths, her own lyric writing of those fairy tales, folk tales, and stories chosen from her life witness, and also research ongoing for twenty years … to help women reconnect with the healthy, instinctual, visionary attributes of the Wild Woman archetype. With these stories, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine.