New Books in Gender

Michelle Markel, an award-winning author and former journalist who has written for The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, talks about books she’s written about two strong and brave women Clara Lemlich and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The first book, Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers Strike of 1909 (Balzer + Bray, 2013), is illustrated by Caldecott Honor Artist Melissa Sweet and tells...

Jelena Batinic’s Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2015) examines the role women played in the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance. By placing gender and gender relations at the forefront of her analysis, Batinic provides insightful history of a unique phenomenon—guerrilla warfare in which tens of thousands of women took direct m...

In Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire (Karnac Books, 2016), Psychoanalyst Jill Gentile explores the intersection between Freuds fundamental rule of free association and freedom of speech in a democracy, two subjects with obvious connections; however, as Gentile points out, surprisingly few writers have attempted to linked the two. In this interview, which spans the history o...

For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we hear from Patricia Strach, the author of Hiding Politics in Plain Sight: Cause Marketing, Corporate Influence, and Breast Cancer Policymaking (Oxford University Press, 2016). Strach holds a dual appointment in the Departments of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Albany, State University of New York. Hiding Politics in Plain Sight...

In Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2015), Carina E. Ray interrogates the intersections of race, marriage, gender and empire in this thought-provoking study that challenges the notion of identity and the politics that surround it. Ray plumbs the depth of an array of archival material, which includes travel narratives, vi...

With the 2016 presidential election in full swing and rhetoric surrounding each candidate becoming more polarized, how does gender impact the way that people behave politically? Monika McDermott in her new book Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2016) seeks to answer this question. In her analysis, McDermott argues that gendered personalities are a p...

Ellen Widmer’s new book tells a story of the life and work of a literary family in China, in order to open out into a fascinating discussion of the ramifications of that story for how we understand and produce relationships between fiction and history. Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) looks carefully at the wor...

Katherine Turk is assistant professor of history at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her book Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) explores how women tested the boundaries of work place equality following the passing of the Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The under staffed Equal Employment Opportunity Commi...

Marisa J. Fuentes’, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) is an important new book that challenges historians to think more carefully about the methods and categories with which they have described and analyzed slavery. Marisa Fuentes uses fragmentary evidence about five enslaved women in 18th century Barbados to take up larger questi...

How can we explain the “occlusion of embodied power” and “lack of attention to race, gender, and sexuality” in the discipline of political science, a field “that claims power as a central analytical concept” (17)? In her new book, Embodied Power: Demystifying Disembodied Politics (Routledge, 2016), Mary Hawkesworth (Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University) brings inter...

In Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2015), Holly Allen offers a fascinating analysis of how notions of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship were challenged and defined during the Great Depression and into the war years. By focusing on popular and official narratives, she provides new insights into the questions of masculinit...

Recent controversies surrounding sexual harassment and assault on college campuses have sparked heated discussions surrounding the everyday experiences of women on college campuses. Female students and faculty members have often felt at odds with their institutions and other members of their workplaces when sexual harassment and assault enter the work environment. What is one to do when experienci...

The gender binary is recently giving way to gender infinity, and our youngest members of society are both driving and benefiting from this evolution. They’re finding novel ways of expressing their true gender identities, whether or not those match what’s on their birth certificates. But the journeys of these gender creative children are often bumpy, as they encounter psychological, physical, and e...

The story of the martyrdom of Husayn, the prophet Muhammad’s grandson, is recounted annually around the world. More broadly, the communal retelling of the lives of Shia imams has played an important part in shaping Shia identity and practice. Matthew Pierce, Assistant Professor of Religion at Centre College, examines the early canonization of these life stories in Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams...

Ellen Fitzpatrick is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Her book The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (Harvard University Press, 2016) provides the story of three women, out of over two hundred women, who pursued the presidency. In the nineteenth century, when women were denied the vote, the self-made Victoria Woodhull, a political and religiou...

When Abraham Lincoln wrote that the better part of one’s life consists of his friendships, it is likely that he had in mind his friendship with Joshua Speed. Starting as roommates in Springfield, the two formed an extraordinarily close attachment, one that provided both men with considerable support at an important point in their respective lives. In his book Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln: The E...

Among the achievements of Irish medicine in the twentieth century was ending the persistent epidemic of tuberculosis throughout the island, and one of the central figures in that effort was Dorothy Stopford Price. In her book Dorothy Stopford Price: Rebel Doctor (Irish Academic Press, 2014), Anne Mac Lellan provides readers with an account of the life of a pioneering MD and medical researcher. The...

In her new book The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band (PM Press, 2016), Michelle Cruz Gonzales tells her story as a member of a feminist hardcore punk band. The band, Spitboy, emerged in the early 90s in the Bay Areapunk scene. The book provides an insider’s view of the scene, what it was like touring, and how a young Xicana found herself in a genre of music that typically iden...

Over the past quarter-century, scientists have been mapping and exploring the human genome to locate the genetic basis of disease and track the histories of populations across time and space. As part of this work, geneticists have formulated markers to calculate percentages of European, African, and Amerindian genetic ancestry in populations presumed to originate or inhabit particular geographic r...

In the introduction to Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos (University of Hawaii Press, 2015), historian Simon Creak writes that Laos, a country that has never won an Olympic medal, may seem an unlikely place to study the history of sport. Yet from the uplands of mainland Southeast Asia, Creak draws on rarely accessed archival material to tell a fascinating and nuanc...

April R. Haynes is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth- Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Haynes shows how the campaign against masturbation redefined women’s sexuality and reformulated the battle for political rights. Beginning with Sylvester Graham’s “Lecture to Mother...

Cassandra A. Good is the Associate Editor of the Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington. Her book Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a historical examination of the cross-gender friendships that formed against great social odds and popular opinion that held that these relationships were...

Aisha Geissinger’s monograph, Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Brill, 2015), contributes to the growing field of intersections between gender studies and Qur’anic studies. Unlike some recent studies that have explored the role of gender in the Qur’an itself or in applications of the Qur’an, Professor Geissinger takes a st...

Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) considers a wide range of issues that are both specific to the particular history of hysteria, and more broadly applicable to the history medicine. Arnaud pays...

Biography is a genre of largely unexamined power: a literary field that preserves stories of lived lives and, through them, perpetuates notions that there are certain ways lives can be lived. This is particularly true of the lives of women, which are often, in biography, confined to the marriage plot and detailed as events in the lives of men. As Jessa Crispin writes in her new book, The Dead Ladi...