This month, as we celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8 and Sydney Opera House’s All About Women festival on March 8 & 9, we’ve curated a list of remarkable and inspirational women whose bravery, determination, and brilliance made a lasting impact on society.

WOMEN IN LITERATURE

Miles Franklin Undercover
RRP $34.99

After the success and celebrity of her coming of age novel My Brilliant Career, published when Miles Franklin was only 21, she disappeared. This is the story of the decade that made her second career as a fearless advocate for working women.

In this real-life sequel to My Brilliant Career, author Kerrie Davies uncovers a little-known period in Miles’ life, from the servant’s quarters of Sydney and Melbourne’s wealthy houses to volatile Chicago, in the turbulent years after her early success.

 

Outrageous Fortunes
RRP $36.99

When Mary Fortune arrived in Melbourne with her infant son in 1855, she was determined to reinvent herself. The Victorian goldfields were just the place. But when Mary died in 1911, her identity was nearly lost.

In Outrageous Fortunes, Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex retrieve Fortune’s astonishing career and discover an equally absorbing story in her illegitimate son, George. While Mary was writing crime, George was committing it, with convictions for theft and bank robbery. In their intertwined stories, crime fiction meets true crime, and Melbourne’s literary bohemia consorts with the criminal underworld.

 

The Scandal of the Century
RRP $36.99

In The Scandal of the Century, Lisa Hilton interweaves the story of these two rebellious and ruthless women. Against the backdrop of seventeenth-century England, with its strict traditional conventions of love, duty and identity, she shows just how far these women would go to break free.

 

 

 

 

Joan Lindsay
RRP $36.99

Joan Lindsay, wife of painter, art entrepreneur and National Gallery of Victoria director Daryl Lindsay, sacrificed her own artistic talent in deference to her husband, as was the order of the day.

Was Joan really the dutiful wife, or was she patiently waiting her chance? Was Picnic at Hanging Rock a burst of creativity in response to a life held in check? Or did something happen behind the carefully curated scenes that gave rise to her extraordinary novel? Joan Lindsay- The Hidden Life of the Woman who Wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock explores these questions and more in an engaging and surprising portrait of a fascinating Australian woman.

 

This Woman’s Work
RRP $24.99

Published to challenge the historic narrative of music and music writing being written by men, for men, This Woman’s Work seeks to confront the male dominance and sexism that have been hard-coded in the canons of music, literature, and film and has forced women to fight pigeon-holing or being side-lined by carving out their own space. Women have to speak up, to shout louder to tell their story – like the auteurs and ground-breakers featured in this collection, including: Anne Enright on Laurie Anderson; Megan Jasper on her ground-breaking work with Sub Pop; Margo Jefferson on Bud Powell and Ella Fitzgerald; and Fatima Bhutto on music and dictatorship.

 

How Women Made Music
RRP $80.00

How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music brings this impressive reshaping to the page and includes material from more than fifty years of NPR’s coverage plus newly commissioned work. A must-have for music fans, songwriters, feminist historians, and those interested in how artists think and work. This incomparable hardcover volume is a vital record of history destined to become a classic and a great gift for any music fan or creative thinker.

 

Women and the Piano
RRP $51.95

Throughout most of the piano’s history, women pianists lacked access to formal training and were excluded from male-dominated performance spaces.

Celebrated pianist and author Susan Tomes traces fifty such women across the piano’s history. Including now-famous names such as Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, Tomes also highlights overlooked women: from Hélène de Montgeroult, whose playing saved her life during the French Revolution, to Leopoldine Wittgenstein, influential Viennese salonnière, and Hazel Scott, the first Black performer in the United States to have a nationally syndicated TV show.

 

Rebel Girl
RRP $46.99

In Rebel Girl, Hanna’s raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home, to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes blindingly clear, being in a ‘girl band’, especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or a safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightening rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination. In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the darkest, hardest times along with the most joyful – and how it all fuelled her revolutionary art, from the 1980s to today.

 

Women Holding Things
RRP $55.00

Women Holding Things explores the significance of the objects we carry—in our hands, hearts, and minds—and speaks to, and for, all of us. Maira Kalman’s unique work is a celebration of life, of the act and the art of living, offering an original way of examining and understanding all that is important in our world—and ultimately within ourselves.

 

 

New Women’s Work
RRP $65.00

This book explores these art forms, focusing on ten areas traditionally labelled as ‘feminine’. Featuring 38 artists from around the world, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy examines the traditions these artists work with and the boundaries they’re breaking. Through stories of family, migration, gender, and what it means to be a craftsperson, this book explores the future of the feminine in the arts.

 

 

The Story of Art Without Men
RRP $29.99

How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway?

Have your sense of art history overturned, and your eyes opened to many art forms often overlooked or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it’s never been told before.

 

 

Great Women Sculptors
RRP $100.00

Presenting a more expansive and inclusive history of sculpture, Great Women Sculptors surveys the work of more than 300 trailblazing artists from over 60 countries, spanning 500 years from the Renaissance to the present day.

Organized alphabetically, each artist is represented by an image and newly commissioned text to showcases 500 years of sculptural creativity in one accessible, visually stunning volume.

 

Letters to Gwen John
RRP $32.99

Celia Paul has felt a lifelong connection to the artist Gwen John. There are extraordinary parallels in their lives and work. Both have always made art on their own terms. Both were involved with older male artists. Both worked hard to keep themselves and the sacred flame of their creativity from being extinguished by others.

Letters to Gwen John is Paul’s imagined correspondence with this groundbreaking painter. These intimate, passionate, haunting letters offer a unique form of memoir and conversation, and an unforgettable insight into a life devoted to making art.

 

Art Monsters
RRP $27.99

Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, Art Monsters is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body. Weaving daring links between disparate artists and writers – from Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography to Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits to Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures – Lauren Elkin shows that their work offers a potent celebration of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political.

 

 

The Subversive Stitch
RRP $39.99

Rozsika Parker uses household accounts, women’s magazines, letters, novels and the works of art themselves to trace through history how the separation of the craft of embroidery from the fine arts came to be a major force in the marginalisation of women’s work. Beautifully illustrated, her book also discusses the contradictory nature of women’s experience of embroidery- how it has inculcated female subservience while providing an immensely pleasurable source of creativity, forging links between women.

 

 

The Visionaries
RRP $24.99

The Visionaries follows in its protagonists’ footsteps from Leningrad to New York, Spain at civil war to France under occupation, as each is uprooted by totalitarianism’s ascendence. It shows them facing the injustices, unfreedom and unfathomable violence of their time as women, refugees, activists, resistance fighters – but above all as thinkers. Wolfram Eilenberger expertly distils the radical, brilliant philosophies each lived as well as developed, showing the two to be part of the same story, all testament to thought’s redemptive power.

 

 

How to Think Like a Woman
RRP $24.99

As a young woman growing up in a small, religious community, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she discovered philosophy and fell in love with its rationality, its abstractions, its beauty.

She combines memoir with biography to tell the stories of these four women, weaving throughout an alternative history of philosophy as well as her own search for beauty and truth. Formally inventive and keenly intelligent, How to Think Like a Woman is a moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally.

 

Metaphysical Animals
RRP $24.99

Written with expertise and flair, Metaphysical Animals is a vivid portrait of the endeavours and achievements of these four remarkable women. As undergraduates at Oxford during the Second World War, they shared ideas (as well as shoes, sofas and lovers). From the disorder and despair of war, they went on to breathe new life into philosophy, creating a radically fresh way of thinking about freedom, reality and human goodness that is there for us today.

 

 

The Second Sex
RRP $27.99

Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman’. In this groundbreaking work of feminism she examines the limits of female freedom and explodes our deeply ingrained beliefs about femininity. Liberation, she argues, entails challenging traditional perceptions of the social relationship between the sexes and, crucially, in achieving economic independence.

Drawing on sociology, anthropology and biology, The Second Sex is as important and relevant today as when it was first published in 1949.

 

The Feminist Killjoy Handbook
RRP $24.99

The term killjoy has been used to dismiss feminism by claiming that it causes misery. Drawing on her own stories and those of others, especially Black and brown feminists and queer thinkers, Sara Ahmed combines depth of thought with honesty and intimacy. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook unpicks the lies our culture tells us and provides a form of solidarity and companionship that can be returned to over a lifetime.

 

 

 

Hags
RRP $26.99

In the last few years, as identity politics has taken hold, middle-aged women have found themselves talked and written about as morally inferior beings, the face of bigotry, entitlement and selfishness, to be ignored, pitied or abused.

Hags asks the question why these women are treated with such active disdain. Victoria Smith explores the very specific reasons why this type of misogyny is so powerful today. The demonisation of hags has never felt more now.

 

The Sadeian Woman
RRP $22.99

With invention and genius, Angela Carter takes on the outrageous figments of his extreme imagination, and transforms them into symbols of our time – the Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes.

Angela Carter delves into the viscera of our distorted sexuality and reveals a dazzling vision of love which admits neither of conqueror nor of conquered.

 

A Dirty, Filthy Book
RRP $36.99

Annie Besant and her confidant Charles Bradlaugh are on trial for the sordid crime of publishing and selling a birth control pamphlet. Remarkably – forty-five years before the first woman will be admitted to the English bar – Annie is defending herself. Before Britain’s highest judge she declares it is a woman’s right to choose when, and if, to have children.

Drawing on unpublished archives, private papers and courtroom transcripts – and featuring an incredible cast including Queen Victoria, George Bernard Shaw and London itself – A Dirty, Filthy Book tells the gripping story of a forgotten pioneer who refused to accept the role the Establishment assigned to her. Instead, she chose to resist.

 

A Small Corner of Hell
RRP $34.95

Politkovskaya’s second book on the Chechen War,  A Small Corner of Hell, offers an insider’s view of this ongoing conflict.  In this book, Politkovskaya focuses her attention on those caught in the crossfire.  She recounts the everyday horrors of living in the midst of war, examines how the Chechen war has damaged Russian society, and takes a hard look at the ways people on both sides profited from it.  Now available in paperback,  A Small Corner of Hell ensures that Politkovskaya’s words will not be erased.   

 

 

In Extremis
RRP $22.99

Marie Colvin was glamorous, hard-drinking, braver than the boys, with a troubled and rackety personal life. She reported from the most dangerous places in the world and her anecdotes about encounters with figures like Colonel Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat were incomparable. She was much admired, and as famous for her wild parties as for the extraordinary lengths to which she went to tell the story.

Fellow foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum draws on unpublished diaries and interviews with friends, family and colleagues to produce a story of one of the most daring and inspirational women of our times.

 

The Lives of Lee Miller
RRP $24.99

Beautiful, bewitching and an exceptionally good photographer, Lee Miller became a Vogue cover girl in 1920s New York before embracing Paris, photography and Surrealism, and then dramatically changed her life yet again, reinventing herself as a war correspondent, notably covering the liberation of Dachau.

Featuring a selection of Miller’s finest work, including portraits of her friends Picasso, Tanning and Ernst, Penrose’s tribute to his mother brings to life a uniquely talented woman and the turbulent times in which she lived.

 

Sister Viv
RRP $35.99

Australian Army nurse Vivian Bullwinkel was just twenty-six when Japanese soldiers marched her and her fellow nurses into the shallow waters of a remote beach to be executed.

Miraculously, Vivian would be the lone survivor – and she committed the rest of her long life to an exceptional peacetime career which she lived in tribute to her lost friends. The Lieutenant-Colonel would also be the first woman to be honoured with a statue at the Australian War Memorial for her extraordinary bravery and service – a country girl who became one of the highest ranking women in the Australian army, and who spent her life caring for others.

 

The Elements of Marie Curie
RRP $34.99

Approaching Marie Curie from a unique angle, Sobel navigates her remarkable discoveries and fame alongside the women who became her legacy – from Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch and France’s Marguerite Perry, who discovered the element francium, to her own daughter, Irene, a Nobel Prize winner in her own right. The Elements of Marie Curie deftly illuminates the trailblazing life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time.

 

 

The Exceptions
RRP $24.99

The remarkable untold story of how a group of sixteen determined women used the power of the collective and the tools of science to inspire ongoing radical change. This is a triumphant account of progress, whilst reminding us that further action is needed.

The Exceptions is an intimate narrative which centres on Nancy Hopkins – a surprisingly reluctant feminist who became a hero to two generations of women in science. In uncovering an erased history, we are finally introduced to the hidden scientists who paved the way for collective change.

 

Eve
RRP $27.99

In Eve, Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long.

Bohannon’s findings, including everything from the way C-sections in the industrialized world are rearranging women’s pelvic shape to the surprising similarities between pus and breast milk, will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens have become such a successful and dominant species, from tool use to city building to the development of language.

 

Invisible Women
RRP $24.99

From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, and the media. Invisible Women reveals how in a world built for and by men we are systematically ignoring half of the population, often with disastrous consequences. 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 profound impact this has on us all.

 

 

Howl
RRP $24.99

Howl is a masterfully told and exquisitely drawn story of a young girl’s way of expressing and resolving big feelings.

Maggie has had a very bad day.
First of all, the sun was the wrong shape, in a sky that was too blue. The spaghetti was too long, and her pyjamas were the wrong kind of pyjama.
Then Maggie begins to have wolfish thoughts …

 

Farmhouse
RRP $15.99

Step inside the dollhouse-like interior of Farmhouse and relish the daily life of the family that lives there, rendered in impeccable, thrilling detail. Based on a real family and an actual farmhouse where Sophie salvaged facts and artefacts for the making of this spectacular work, page after page bursts with luminous detail and joy. Join the award-winning, bestselling Sophie Blackall as she takes readers on an enchanting visit to a farmhouse across time, to witness the way that history spins stories.

 

Three Dresses
RRP $26.99

When Wanda Gibson was a little girl, her mum would tell her this as they packed to go on holidays. Wanda grew up on Hope Vale Mission in Far North Queensland, and her family were allowed only one short break away from work each year. They would walk for two days to get to their special spot at the beach. Here, they camped in the sandhills, cooked fresh fish on the fire and swam in the ocean.

Beautifully illustrated with Wanda’s paintings, this heart-warming true story celebrates family time, connection to place and finding joy in the simple things, like your favourite three dresses.

 

Afloat
RRP $24.99

Roam the water with me. We are here to learn.
Here to spin wisdom, to grow …

From award-winning Gunai author Kirli Saunders and seven-time CBCA-winner Freya Blackwood comes Afloat, a story told in a time of climate crisis. Against a backdrop of a changed environment, an Elder leads a child along the waterways, sharing her People’s knowledge and gathering community along the way.

Afloat is an uplifting and inspiring picture book that uses the practice of weaving as a powerful metaphor for the honouring and teaching of First Nations wisdom, and the coming together of all people to survive, thrive and create a more hopeful future.

 

I’m Going to Be a Princess
RRP $24.99

What will Maya be when she grows up? A rocket scientist like Annie Easley? An Olympic athlete like Alice Coachman? A brain surgeon like Alexa Canady?

In this heart-warming and funny story, Maya discovers the achievements of some incredible Black women . . . but it’s a brave Nigerian princess who really captures her imagination! This uplifting and empowering picture book is the perfect gift for any young reader.

 

And Everything Will Be Glad to See You
RRP $45.00

From well-loved poets, including Grace Nichols, Wendy Cope, Lucille Clifton and Christina Rossetti, to newer voices such as Triska Hamid, Yrsa-Daley Ward and Amineh Abou Kerech, this outstanding collection from talented anthologist Ella Risbridger has poems for every mood and every moment. Ella’s selection is wide-ranging but accessible and includes work by a non-binary poet (who, of course, has been consulted about their inclusion) and two trans women poets.

 

She Speaks
RRP $34.99

Written in first-person, we hear from the astute sorceress Medea and her pivotal role in the quest for the Golden Fleece; discover the contributions of Cretan princess Ariadne in the slaying of the Minotaur; witness the strength and resilience of Atalanta, Circe, Helen of Troy, and many other women who have been previously overshadowed by their male counterparts.

With her meticulous research and insightful storytelling, readers will be mesmerised as passionate classicist Honor Cargill-Martin breathes new life into well-loved stories by retelling eight classic Greek myths, this time from an all-female perspective.

 

Goddesses and Heroines
RRP $19.98

Told afresh for a contemporary readership, Goddesses & Heroines brings alive stories from a variety of cultures with palpable energy. We meet the youthful Aphrodite; Hecate, the maths whizz; the heroic Mulan; Oshun, the Nigerian goddess whose foresight sparked a rebellion that freed slaves; and the not-so-fair-y godmother Baba Yaga, whose bone-crunching approach to life will be an inspiration to any power-hungry young thing.

A section on the symbols commonly associated with each goddess provides context for each story and familiarizes readers with the symbols to spot her by. The endmatter includes information on how goddesses and heroines achieved their mythic status, how myths are passed on and evolve, and a map of goddesses from around the globe and how they are inter-connected.

 

Women’s Football Legends 2025
RRP $24.99

Showcasing the top 100 stars currently in the women’s game, Women’s Football Legends 2025 offers the latest facts and stats of players in every position who play in the elite leagues, including the WSL, USA’s NWSL, Australia’s A-League, Spain’s Liga F, Germany’s Frauen Bundesliga and France’s D1 Feminine . With a star profile on each page, the book is packed with incisive data and includes stunning heat maps that show the pitch movements of every player featured. Get your copy now and start comparing the goals, assists, saves, freekicks (and a host of other data) of the current icons in women’s football.

 

I Flew Around the World
RRP $27.99

 At just 19 years old, Zara embarked on a daring adventure to become the youngest woman to fly solo across the globe.

This captivating book chronicles her journey through 52 countries and 5 continents, from the icy landscapes of Greenland to the deserts of Saudi Arabia. With stunning illustrations and engaging storytelling, Zara shares her encounters with diverse cultures, wildlife, and the natural wonders of our planet.

 

Amazing Women Memory Game
RRP $24.99

Match up the Little People to their BIG DREAMS! Discover amazing women in this simple memory game, from the creator of the bestselling Little People BIG DREAMS books.

Pair up Jane Austen, Marie Curie, Mary Anning and many more iconic women with their outstanding achievements. Featuring 20 inspirational women and their incredible life stories.

 

上海生與死
$48.45

郑念1915年生于中华民国北平（北京），曾是外交官夫人和外資企業高級職員。後歷經文革浩劫，她的自傳是最早在海外出版講述文革中個人遭遇的作品。

 

 

 

 

 

鴻：三代中國女人的故事（23週年紀念版）
$41.50

華人作家張戎（Jung Chang）曾獲得大英帝國勳章（CBE），她是首位獲得此項榮譽的大陸華人。張戎的自傳《鴻：三代中國女人的故事》講述張戎、媽媽和奶奶的故事。这部自传体作品从张戎十五岁时就被父亲献给军阀作妾的姥姥写起,写到她从小就投身于共产主义理想的母亲,再到自己在红色家庭长大成人的林林总总。这是一部三代女人的家族史,也是橫跨一个世紀的中国历史写照。

 

 

 

她物誌
$63.45

書中的每個物件都代表不同時代、不同角落女性經歷的挑戰，及她們面對時展現的機智與韌性。這些不僅是女性的個人故事，也是女性對人類文明的貢獻不斷被抹去後，仍努力重建且不失去信心的故事。

 

 

 

 

ふしぎの国のバ－ド　１巻　バイリンガル版
$31.40

時は明治初頭。東京から蝦夷まで、地図なき道を旅したイギリス人がいた。その名はイザベラ・バード、冒険家。彼女の目的はただひとつ、滅びゆく日本古来の生活を記録に残すこと。通訳の伊藤鶴吉をひとり連れ、日本人すらも踏み入ったことのない奥地への旅が、今はじまる！

This comic was written based on “UNBEATEN TRACKS in JAPAN” written by Isabella Lucy Bird. As the book is dedicated mainly for the Japanese learners of English, therefore it can be enjoyed by all who are interested in Japanese traditional culture, as well as learning Japanese language.