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Student Life | Texas A&M University
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Student Life | Texas A&M University

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  • ABOUT
    • Employment
    • Organizational Chart
  • MEET THE DEAN
  • OFFICES
    • Office of the Dean
    • Graduate & Professional Student Government
    • Health Promotion
    • LGBTQ+ Pride Center
    • New Student & Family Programs
    • Off-Campus Student Services
    • Student Assistance Services
    • Student Conduct Office
    • Student Legal Services
    • Student Media
    • Women’s Resource Center
  • CONTACT US
  • GIVE NOW

WOMEN'S RESOURCE CENTER

About the Center | Presentations | Signature Programs | Resources | Get Involved | Donate | Our Staff | Contact Us

IN HER OWN WORDS: A WRC BOOK CLUB

We are excited to gather in community to discuss some awesome women authors. We will be expanding our summer book club into a regularly occurring book club called In Her Own Words. In Her Own Words will take place during both winter and summer breaks.

In Her Own Words will take place in June-July and again in December-January. Anyone affiliated with the university is welcome to participate. Our meeting times will vary with each book. Please fill out the form below to get the Zoom invite for each meeting. Unfortunately, the Women's Resource Center is not able to provide books. We encourage you to check your local library for copies of the books. If you purchase the books from Amazon, remember to use Amazon Smile and select the organization of your choice to get some of your proceeds.

Book Club Sign Up Form

  • Name * Required
  • I am: * Required
  • I would like to register for In Her Own Words book club. * Required
    Please visit the WRC Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to vote for the book selection.

PAST BOOKS

JUNE 23, 2020

This is how you find yourself.

There is a voice of longing inside each woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends. We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent—even from ourselves.

For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. But she soon realized they had come to her from within. This was her own voice—the one she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions, cultural conditioning, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to quit abandoning herself and to instead abandon the world’s expectations of her. She quit being good so she could be free. She quit pleasing and started living.

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.

Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.

JULY 14, 2020

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.

AUGUST 4, 2020

Recruited from settings as diverse as elite women’s colleges and small Southern towns, more than ten-thousand young American women served as codebreakers for the U.S. Army and Navy during World War II. While their brothers, boyfriends, and husbands took up arms, these women went to the nation’s capital with sharpened pencils–and even sharper minds–taking on highly demanding top secret work, involving complex math and linguistics. Running early IBM computers and poring over reams of encrypted enemy messages, they worked tirelessly in a pair of overheated makeshift code-breaking centers in Washington, DC, and Arlington, Virginia, from 1942 to 1945. Their achievements were immense: they cracked a crucial Japanese code, which gave the U.S. an acute advantage in the Battle of Midway and changed the course of the war in the Pacific Theater; they helped create the false communications that caught the Germans flat-footed in the lead-up to the Normandy invasion; and their careful tracking of Japanese ships and German U-boats saved countless American and British sailors’ lives.

Through extensive archival research and numerous interviews conducted with the surviving code girls (now in their nineties), Mundy has constructed a dazzling narrative that expertly conjures up the war years–the battles abroad and the uncertainty and excitement on the home front. Mundy hones in on the lives and labors of several exemplary code-breakers, including Ann Caracristi and Agnes Driscoll, while providing a broader portrait that celebrates the entire cohort of talented women, whose top secret has went without public recognition for nearly seventy years. She expertly weaves the story among the larger events of the war and the daily activities of the codebreakers, anchoring the story to the figure of Dot Braden, a schoolteacher recruited by the Army, who–before her arrival at Arlington Hall–had scarcely left Virginia (Dot is still living today at age 96 and open to doing limited publicity alongside Mundy). For many of these young women, breaking codes was one of the most thrilling times of their lives: they were engaged in stimulating, truly essential work–enjoying challenges and opportunities that had never been open to them before—while, in many cases, getting their first taste of big city life, falling in and out of love, amid the excitement and heartbreak of wartime.

Ordered by military officials never to reveal the scope of their war work, these women and their incredible stories and accomplishments were all but written out of history until Mundy discovered a cache of recently declassified documents at the archives of the NSA. Based on these documents, other rich archival sources, and interviews with the women themselves, CODE GIRLS offers a page-turning narrative of broad popular appeal while establishing a vital new historical record; and it brings to life this riveting story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.

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