The author, historian, and activist talks to Shondaland about her new book, “The Women’s History of the Modern World.”
“As a child, I cannot remember when I realized that to most people, girls were less important than boys,” says Rosalind Miles in her newest book, The Women’s History of the Modern World — How Radicals, Rebels, and Everywomen Revolutionized the Last 200 Years.
Noting a statement by Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich —“well-behaved women seldom make history” — Miles shines a spotlight on these rebels who’ve fought to gain equality in a man’s world.
I am in love with all the brave female movers and shakers who dragged us into the modern age, often in the teeth of violence and hatred.
Evidenced by Kamala Harris, elected as the first female Vice President of the United States, women have rocked the race toward equality. Other well-known women paved the path — Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress; Oprah Winfrey, the first woman to produce her own talk show; Jennifer Welter, the first woman coach in the NFL; and sixteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai, the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.
In the The Women’s History of the Modern World, Miles also highlights lesser-known trailblazers absent from history books, such as Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who led the American Anti-Slavery Society; Margaret Sanger, the mother of birth control; and heroine of the Belgian resistance during WWII, Andrée de Jongh.
But we still have a long way to go.
Read the rest of my interview at Shondaland.
