26 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ SEPTEMBER 9, 2019
Women’s Suffrage Centennial
This fall, National Geographic is kicking off a yearlong celebration of
women to mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. A
special issue publishing in November will be the first in the
magazine’s 131-year history to be written and photographed entirely
by women. October sees the publication of Women: The National
Geographic Image Collection, with an introduction and interviews by
Susan Goldberg, editorial director of National Geographic Partners
and the first woman editor-in-chief of National Geographic magazine.
It’s one of several forthcoming titles that pull from rich archival
material to illustrate women’s experiences and accomplishments.
Nat Geo’s 512-page hardcover, which “weighs a ton,” Goldberg
says, was a year in the making, drawing from more than 60 million
print and digital records: “You want to be inclusive and reflect the changes over time of how women
were portrayed.” Archival depictions dating back 130 years include images of suffragists; the famed
green-eyed “Afghan girl,” Sharbat Gula, from the magazine’s June 1985 cover; and many others.
Goldberg also includes photos of and conducted interviews with a star-studded list of contemporary
notable women, posing the same 11 questions to primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall, gun
safety activist Emma González, and novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among others. Taken as a
whole, the book reads “like a powerful story that is just now reaching crescendo,” Goldberg says.
At Penguin Press, Vanity Fair’s Women on Women (Nov.), edited by Radhika Jones with David Friend,
collects 28 feature articles about women, written by women. Jones, like Goldberg, achieved a
milestone when she became Vanity Fair’s first female editor-in-chief in November 2017. Spanning 36
years, Women on Women includes profiles of Princess Diana, Whoopi Goldberg, and Lena Waithe, as
well as Monica Lewinsky’s post-#MeToo take on the Clinton scandal. “This book is full of women who
are not like anybody else,” Jones writes in her introduction. “Women who, in their singular ways,
stood up for their lives, as they envisioned them, and in so doing, shaped the lives of multitudes.”
Phaidon is offering its own timely showcases, with Great Women Artists (Sept.) and Breaking Ground (Oct.), a study of architecture
designed by women. Both had been on the agenda for years, says Virginia McLeod, commissioning editor for architecture, and both
stemmed in part from examinations of Phaidon’s backlist. For instance, The Story of Art, first published in 1950, barely mentioned
any women; 1994’s The Art Book represented some improvement, but not much.
“I was thinking, well, has there been enough research in the past 40 years, since the women’s art movement of the 1970s?” says
Rebecca Morrill, commissioning editor for art. “Could I fill a similar book?” While there were a few skeptics in-house, she says, her
team soon had a longlist of more than 2,000 names that they culled to 423: “There is absolutely no shortage.” —S.J.R.Celebrating Women in Power
Rather, the book “shows how women were shaped by their
times. It helps explain what we saw in 2016 and why partisan-
ship is a much stronger predictor than gender.”
Other forthcoming books function as calls to
action. Timed for the next Women’s History
month, in March 2020, is Grand Central’s She
Proclaims by Jennifer Palmieri (author of Dear
Madam President, with 50,000 print copies sold
since 2018, per BookScan); it’s a “Declaration of
Independence from a man’s world,” in the words
of the subtitle, offering a roadmap for chal-
lenging the patriarchy.
At the end of August, Dutton published See Jane
Wi n by journalist Caitlin Moscatello, a look at the
historic number of women who ran for office in
2018, from the start of their campaigns through
the start of the current term. They include Lauren
Underwood, the U.S. representative for Illinois’s14th district, the first woman and the first person of color to
represent her district. She adopted for her campaign “Unbought
and Unbossed,” the slogan of the first African-American woman
elected to Congress, New York’s Shirley Chisholm.
Looking ahead to the next election cycle,
Skyhorse will publish the 2020 edition of Your
Voice, Your Vote in January. Author Martha Burk,
a Ms. magazine editor and former chair of the
National Council of Women’s Organizations,
self-published two previous versions, in 2008
and 2012. “This is something that one of our
editors found, and we were excited,” says Julie
Ganz, editor at Skyhorse. “We felt it was impor-
tant to sign up.” Chapters focus on a broad spec-
trum of issues—pay equity and Social Security,
military spending and affirmative action—
offering tools aimed at guiding women voters to,
as the subtitle puts it, be “the change we need.”