A Treasure Trove: Sharon Spaulding on Women Who Make History

WRITTEN BY TRISH MACENULTY

An attic discovery sent Sharon Spaulding on a years-long quest to hunt down the “trailblazing” women history forgot, overlooked, or ignored. In Women Make History: Fifty-Three Stories of Courage, Strength & Resilience (Feb. 2026), Spaulding relates the stories of accomplished women from colonial America through the 20th century. The origin of her quest lies in the late 1970s, when she married Carl Spaulding, great-grandson of women’s rights activist Mary Ware Dennett. Dennett’s accomplishments in the battle for birth control have come to light in recent years, but when Spaulding first heard her husband’s family members talk about this remarkable woman, she had no idea who Dennett was.

“When Mary died, all of her papers, her journals, her private diaries were stored in an attic in the family house,” Spaulding said. “Every time I visited, I would pull out a handful of letters from an old steamer trunk in the bat-infested attic and read her story.”

Over the course of those visits, Spaulding learned Dennett’s history. “As I learned about all her accomplishments, I was dumbfounded that nobody knew about her.”

Spaulding, who has written for Ms. Magazine, Smithsonian.com, and New Hampshire Magazine, eventually decided to write about Dennett. As she researched, she kept finding other women who should have been in our history books and weren’t. While she struggled to corral the vast amounts of information about Dennett’s life and times, Spaulding kept files on the other women she stumbled across.

Finally, she could no longer keep these women’s stories to herself. She published the first “Women Make History: Stories We Should Have Learned in School” newsletter in November 2020. “We started out pretty small. But the newsletter has an open rate of 74 percent. I would hear from readers from all around the country, commenting on the material and suggesting other women to include in the newsletter.”

Spaulding soon amassed a “treasure trove of history-making, life-changing, groundbreaking, courageous women—role models—whose stories deserved to be shared and passed down.” After a while she realized she had a book—a lively, irreverent, and generous compendium. In early 2025 she began turning the stories into a book. Choosing which ones to include proved to be a challenge. In fact, Spaulding said it was such a difficult task, she’s already planning a second volume: “As I continue to write the newsletter, I have all these new stories I want to include,” she said.

Spaulding has selected women who represent a variety of ethnicities, backgrounds, and fields as well as time periods. “The women I chose were predominantly American, starting in the colonial era, and each is concerned with a different issue,” she said. Two of the women are still alive.

Some of the women are well known, she explained, but most people don’t know the back story. For example, First Lady Edith Wilson served as de facto president when her husband was disabled. Less well known is that she was also a direct descendant of Pocahontas. Other women such as Mary Ellen Pleasant, an indentured servant who became a millionaire and helped to fund the Abolitionist cause, are more obscure.

“Sometimes the women are controversial and sometimes the information is questionable, but if you dig a little bit, you’ll usually find a gutsy, amazing woman,” Spaulding said. Studying these women gave Spaulding a better perspective on the challenges that women activists faced. “Not only did they have to win over other women, they also had to convince men in the halls of power to support them. They needed to shift cultural attitudes in order to bring about concrete actions and results,” she said.

When it came time to publish the book, she turned to an old friend and former colleague, Doug daSilva (dougdasilva.com), who had the artistic and technical know-how to get the book out to the public. “Doug designed the cover and did the layout for me.  He did such a great job with the cover that a lot of the people who downloaded it on NetGalley said they did so just because of the cover.”

She had another partner in the creation of the book: her husband, Carl Spaulding, who drew illustrations of each featured woman.   “When I first met Carl, he was supporting himself through school as a graphic artist. He went into digital advertising and hadn’t done any art in 40 years when this book gave him the opportunity to pick up a pen,” she said. “It’s been wonderful for him and me.”

Spaulding eschewed an academic style. She envisions the book as a resource for both older and younger women, including high school-aged readers, to learn about their foremothers. “Generally speaking, each entry is about a five-minute read,” she said. “For me, accessibility is key.” Historical fiction writers will also find the book a great resource. Spaulding noted that she met a number of women at the recent HNS conference who were interested in writing bio-fiction. “Any one of the women in the book would make for a great work of fiction.”

Now that Women Make History has launched, Spaulding intends to resume work on her own book about Mary Ware Dennett—the woman who started it all.

About the contributor: Trish MacEnulty’s next book The Woman with the Wicked Face: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Theda Bara will be released by Histria Press, Spring 2027. She is the author of The Delafield & Malloy Investigations series and Cinnamon Girl. She lives in Florida where she teaches a course in magazine writing at Florida A&M University.   trishmacenulty.com

Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 116 (May 2026)