New Books in Women's History

A colourful account of women's health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today's viral trends. Victorian women ate arsenic to achieve an ideal, pale complexion, while in the 1790s balloon corsets were all the rage, designed to make the wearer appear pregnant. Women of the eighteenth century applied blood from a black cat's tail to problem skin, while doctors in the 1880s promote...

In the tense years of the early Cold War, American and Soviet women conducted a remarkable pen-pal correspondence that enabled them to see each other as friends rather than enemies. In a compelling new perspective on the early Cold War, prizewinning historian Alexis Peri explores correspondence between American and Soviet women begun in the last years of World War II and continuing into the 1950s....

On Tuesday 13 September 2022, all Mahsa Amini has planned is a day shopping in Tehran. Her birthday is next week. But she is arrested as she comes out of the subway – the Guidance Patrol deem her hijab inadequate. On Friday she is pronounced dead. By Sunday, women have taken to the streets across Iran, setting their headscarves on fire and cursing the Supreme Leader. Months later, workers down the...

In Confucian Feminism: A Practical Ethic for Life (Bloomsbury, 2024), Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee expands the theoretical horizons of feminism by using characteristic Confucian terms, methods, and concerns to interrogate the issue of gender oppression and liberation. With its theoretical roots in the Confucian textual tradition, this is the first re-imagining of Confucianism that enriches, and is enri...

In Soviet Nightingales: Care under Communism (Cornell UP, 2022), Susan Grant examines the history of nursing care in the Soviet Union from its nineteenth-century origins in Russia through the end of the Soviet state. With the advent of the USSR, nurses were instrumental in helping to build the New Soviet Person and in constructing a socialist society. In the interview, we explore Susan's approach...

Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt. Together, Joséphine and Térézia shed the underwear cages and massive, rigid ga...

In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker's midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse. The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024) brings to life the remarkable relationships Whit...

In her latest memoir, Landed: A Yogi's Memoir of Places & Poses (2024, Vine Leaves Press),  American-born Jennifer traces her journey-both on and off the yoga mat-reckoning with her adopted country (Israel), midlife hormones (merciless), cross-cultural marriage (to a Frenchman) and their imminent empty nest (a mixed blessing), eventually realizing the words her yoga teachers had been offering for...

Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin (Berghahn Books, 2024) by Dr. Meghana Joshi engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context. This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who cam...

Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; the critical essay collection Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018); and the chapbooks The Tw...

Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellectual through their engagement with the classical world in early modern France. Bringing together the fields of classical reception and women writers, Helena Taylor looks at various female novelists, translators, poets, playwrights, and essayists to see...

Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the otherwise partisan abortion debate. Little attention, however, has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish their infants for private adoption. Through the lens of reproductive justice, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Moth...

In All the Rage: Power, Pain, Pleasure: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty 1860-1960 (Pegasus Book, 2024) richly detailed account, Virginia Nicholson provides a richly detailed account to take us to the Frontline of Beauty to reveal the power, the pain and the pleasure involved in adorning the female body. At the heart of this history is the female body. The century-span between the crinoline an...

There She Goes Again: Gender, Power, and Knowledge in Contemporary Film and Television Franchises (Rutgers UP, 2023) interrogates the representation of ostensibly powerful women in transmedia franchises, examining how presumed feminine traits—love, empathy, altruism, diplomacy—are alternately lauded and repudiated as possibilities for effecting long-lasting social change. By questioning how these...

In 1939, when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation's collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (Uni...

Today I talked to Christopher Paul Clohessy about Half of My Heart: The Narratives of Zaynab, Daughter of Alî (Gorgias Press, 2020). As Abû ʿAbd Allâh al-Ḥusayn, son of ʿAlî and Fâṭima and grandson of Muḥammad, moved inexorably towards death on the field of Karbalâʾ, his sister Zaynab was drawn ever closer to the centre of the family of Muḥammad, the 'people of the house' (ahl al-bayt). There she...

Today’s book is: Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of Rochester Press, 2024) by Dr. Donna J. Nicol, which examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Black Woman on Board tells...

The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of one of contemporary India’s most contentious disputes: a long-running struggle over women’s access to the Hindu temple at Sabarimala. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the temple, which had traditionally been forbidden to women aged ten to fifty because their presence offended...

How did Jane Austen become a cultural icon for fairy-tale endings when her own books end in ways that are rushed, ironic, and reluctant to satisfy readers' thirst for romance?  In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), Austen scholar Dr. Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey journeys through the iconic novelist's books in the first full-length study of Austen's endin...

Feminist Discourse in Irish Literature: Gender and Power in Louise O'Neill's Young Adult Fiction (Routledge, 2022) addresses the role of YA Irish literature in responding and contributing to some the most controversial and contemporary issues in today's modern society: gender, and conflicting views of power, sexism, and consent.  This volume provides an original, innovative, and necessary examinat...

Charmian Mansell joins Jana Byars to talk about Female Servants in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2024).  What was it like to be a woman in service in early modern England? Drawing on evidence recorded in church court testimony, Mansell excavates experiences of over a thousand female servants between 1532 and 1649. Intervening in histories of labour, gender, freedom, law, migration...

In their book Women, Households, and the Hereafter in the Qur’an: A Patronage of Piety (Oxford UP/Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2024), Karen Bauer and Feras Hamza make a compelling and thought-provoking argument about the role of everyday life in the Qur’an. They aptly demonstrate that the idea of households and women is integral to the salvific message of the Qur’an, to the Qur’an’s understanding...

Growing up in West Texas, Jane Little Botkin didn’t have designs on becoming a beauty queen. But not long after joining a pageant on a whim in college, she became the first protégé of El Paso’s Richard Guy and Rex Holt, known as the “Kings of Beauty”—just as the 1970’s counterculture movement began to take off. A pink, rose-covered gown—a Guyrex creation—symbolizes the fairy tale life that young w...

When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man's-land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered, not named. How will they escape? In The Heads of...

During the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system, stars were carefully cultivated and promoted, but at the price of their independence. This familiar narrative of Hollywood stardom receives a long-overdue shakeup in Emily Carman’s new book. Far from passive victims of coercive seven-year contracts, a number of classic Hollywood’s best-known actresses worked on a freelance basis within the restrictiv...