Cover Image: On This Day She

On This Day She

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Member Reviews

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for giving me free access to the digital advanced copy of this book.

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This was very informative and enjoyable. I was engaged with the writing, loved learning about so many women in history, and really appreciated the diversity. The women are presented each “day” in history with a few pages per entry. I read the first month then decided I’d like to get the book myself when it was released, so I could read them daily more as was intended. Super interesting!

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On This Day She is based on a Twitter account of the same name. It is like a word of the day calendar in book form. They focus on a different woman from through out history each day of the year. The book includes women from many cultures, religions, and backgrounds. They are a little more skewed towards British women and women with academic backgrounds. There were some women who were famous for one thing but are in the book for a different reason like Hedy Lamarr, famous actress who was also an inventor. There are also many who had great achievements that were claimed by men. One of these is Fanny Mendelssohn, who had some of her compositions published under her brother Felix Mendelssohn's name.

I am not on Twitter so I do not know the women who populate their page but I wanted more balance of European and non-European women. There were also several women I had never heard of (which is the point) but the achievement was being the first women in a country to write for a living or get a certain type of upper level educational degree. Because these achievements, while impressive, were not very memorable.

This book is a great place to start to learn about some amazing women through out history. I would like to see more iterations of this book with more women because these are stories for both adult women and young girls to learn.

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A fascinating history of the many women overlooked by history.

On This Day She is a curated collection of tweets sharing profiles of women for each day of the year. These women cover the full spectrum of humanity (both in terms of fields and in terms of "goodness"), showing that history is skewed to disproportionately focus on men. Stories are shared about women explicitly overlooked/ignored because of their sex (and possibly other intersectional reasons) as well as women more "casually" ignored.

Overall, this book was a great snapshot of many different women from many different time periods in history. I really enjoyed seeing some women that I knew a bit about (Rosalind Franklin, Marie Curie, ...) and women that I didn't really know much about (Johanna Westerdijk would have been an amazing PhD advisor). I think my biggest gripe with this book is that the tweets for each entry are added as they were published originally without edits made for changes since that time.

I definitely think this is a really good book to read! I would love to read it again in the page-a-day format and really get a chance to think about each women and that part of history in more depth.

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I have already pre-ordered this book for my niece. Very good format with information about a female daily. These women are from different areas. I learned a lot and will tell people I know about this book and encourage them to purchase it. Thanks to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this outstanding book in return for my honest review. Receiving the book in this manner had no bearing on this review.

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This is kind of like a one-a-day calendar but In book form. For someone looking for a longer form read, this is not the book. However, this would be a great before bed book where you could read a few vignettes per night.

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This nonfiction book is an alternative history where the wording and publicity of these great women’s acts is corrected. Going over 12 months, the authors write out a short historical note about a number of women. There is an international perspective, and it is easy to read in small batches if needed thanks to short chapters/sections.

I had never heard of a majority of these women; the information was presented the same whether the woman did something wonderful or terrible.

Overall I really liked the idea of the book. Appreciated this idea of language - “Catharine of Aragon failed to provide Henry a son” vs “Catharine and Henry had no surviving sons.”

The kindle NetGalley edition just had things by month not specific days so it was hard to know what “this day” actually meant - just the month? Or was it supposed to be on a single day?

My critiques are that I am interested to see these topics organized in a different way, perhaps by their geographic location or chronology. I do wish the photos came at the beginning instead of the end of the person (as a visual learner).

My main issue comes though she it comes to the it is proof - where are the citations? Plenty of things were quoted but noting regarding where this originated. If the historical information is added back in, I think that would be helpful.

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