The Women Missing from American History by Tom Cooper

Open almost any textbook and count the faces. You will find 737 named figures and only 178 women, and 98 of those appear once and vanish. Girls get a map with no roads to themselves, boys get a story that the work was theirs, and both learn a history that is half true.

This book is not a complaint and it is not a collection of trivia. It is 16 chapters of fully checked lives that span science, invention, civil rights, labor, medicine, war, suffrage, and literature, each 1 showing a pattern so repeated it has a name. When a woman did the work, a man was often credited, a movement chose a safer face, a law said her service did not count, or her book was simply not taught.

Inside, you will discover:
• Eunice Foote, who proved carbon dioxide traps heat in 1856, 3 years before Tyndall, and was forgotten for 100 years
• Alice Ball, 23 years old, who made leprosy treatable and lost her name to her boss
• The Black women computers like Katherine Johnson who calculated the space race from a segregated building
• Claudette Colvin, 15, arrested 9 months before Rosa Parks and left off the poster
• Builders of unions, hidden pilots of World War 2, and suffragists on horseback who could not vote You will meet Madam C.J. Walker, the Radium Girls, Henrietta Lacks, Maria Mitchell, and 30 more, told in plain language with gaps named instead of invented. Say the names out loud and the repair begins. The research is real, the credit is restored, and the next student who hears HeLa or La Pulga will know the full truth the first time.