While you may be quite familiar with the suffragist movement of the early 20th century, you may be less familiar with the correlated birth of the women’s self-defense movement. Rouse explores why (white) women took to boxing, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, and other forms of defense in the early 1900s. Of course, the move was largely to protect themselves from the men in their lives, but Rouse doesn’t shy away from exposing uglier truths — like how white women wielded this tool of empowerment to reinforce their privileged spot above women of color. —Nicole Hill

The Combahee River Collective was a group of radical Black lesbian feminists in 1960s and ’70s Boston who believed in intersectionality (before we had a word for it) and the idea that “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free.” This book reprints the Combahee River Collective Statement, still impactful and relevant almost 50 years later, and editor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor interviews Combahee members. —Alice Burton