New Books in Women's History

Dr. Aideen O'Shaughnessy is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Lincoln. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Gender Studies Research from Utrecht University and a BA in Sociology and French at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on gender, health, and social movements and she is particularly interested in the study of reproductive health,...

Women of the Mafia: Power and Influence in the Neapolitan Camorra (Cornell UP, 2024) by Dr. Felia Allum dives into the Neapolitan criminal underworld of the Camorra as seen and lived by the women who inhabit it. It tells their life stories and unpacks the gender dynamics by examining their participation as active agents in the organisation as leaders, managers, foot soldiers, and enablers. Felia A...

Spain's former African colonies-Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara-share similar histories. Both are under the thumbs of heavy-handed, postcolonial regimes, and are known by human rights organizations as being among the worst places in the world with regard to oppression and lack of civil liberties. Yet the resistance movement in one is dominated by women, the other by men.  In Silenced Resistan...

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde's teachings on "the creative power of difference" may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today. Lorde's understanding of survival was not simply...

Kaitlin Sidorsky’s new book, All Roads Lead to Power: The Appointed and Elected Paths to Public Office for US Women (University Press of Kansas, 2019), is an extremely well written and important analysis of women in public life and public service. This book combines qualitative and quantitative research to examine appointed and elected state positions, particularly in regard to gender, and conclud...

Martha Rampton, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dog...

In The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Ana Stevenson explores the ubiquity of what she terms the “woman-slave analogy” in nineteenth-century US feminist discourse. Using examples from the women’s suffrage, abolition, dress-reform, and labor movements, among others, Steveson reconstructs the creation of this theoretical framework that imagi...

Billie Holiday is one of the most iconic jazz performers of all time. Her voice is certainly unmistakable but for many her religious sensibilities may be invisible. In Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press, 2018), Tracy Fessenden, Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, delineates the religious worlds that shape...

Behavioral scientist Alison Fragale offers powerful new insights and a practical playbook for women to advance in any workplace, full of tips, tricks, and strategies to help secure that elusive corner office. Over decades of research, speaking engagements, and mentorship, psychologist and professor Alison Fragale encountered recurring questions from high powered and early career women alike: How d...

In Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia(New York University Press, 2019), Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, shifts the lens on the well-known narrative of Virginia’s founding to reveal the previously untold and utterly compelling story of the youths who, often unwillingly, entered into cross-cultural relationsh...

Today I talked to Anne Landau and Margaret Sinclair, the translators of Through the Morgue Door: One Woman’s Story of Survival and Saving Children in German-Occupied Paris (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) n 1934, at the age of fourteen, Colette Brull-Ulmann knew that she wanted to become a pediatrician. By the age of twenty-one, she was in her second year of studying medicine. By 1942, Brull-Ulman and...

Mia Zapata and the Gits: A True Story of Art, Rock and Revolution (Ferel House, 2024) by Steve Moriarty, shares the story of the Seattle based The Gits and their charismatic front person Mia Zapata. The Gits were on the verge of international rock stardom but on July 7, 1993, days before their third US tour, Mia Zapata, The Gits 27-year-old singer-songwriter, was brutally assaulted and murdered by...

Princess Izabela Czartoryska was a towering figure of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century European cultural and intellectual life. Married at sixteen to a distinguished older aristocrat, she amassed learning, influence, and a role in both Polish and European statecraft through encounters with figures ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Joseph II of Austria. After the liquidation of her...

How did ideas of masculinity shape the British legal profession and the wider expectations of the white-collar professional? Brotherhood of Barristers: A Cultural History of the British Legal Profession, 1840–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Ren Pepitone examines the cultural history of the Inns of Court – four legal societies whose rituals of symbolic brotherhood took place in their...

How can we diversify the creative industries? In Craft as a Creative Industry (Routledge, 2024), Karen Patel, an Associate Professor in Media and Director of the Centre for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts (CEDIA) at Birmingham City University, examines the craft industries of Australia and the UK to show new ways of organising these crucial parts of the economy. The book uses case st...

Well into the early nineteenth century, Luanda, the administrative capital of Portuguese Angola, was one of the most influential ports for the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1801 and 1850, it served as the point of embarkation for more than 535,000 enslaved Africans. In the history of this diverse, wealthy city, the gendered dynamics of the merchant community have frequently been overlooked. V...

Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea: Silent Politics (Routledge, 2020) examines how women in Guinea articulate themselves politically within and outside institutional politics. It documents the everyday practices that local female actors adopt to deal with the continuous economic, political, and social insecurities that emerge in times of political transformations. Carole Ammann argues that wom...

Poet Laureate of Kentucky Crystal Wilkinson’s food memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Clarkson Potter, 2023), honors her kitchen ghosts, five generations of Black Appalachian women. She contends, “The concept of the kitchen ghost came to me years ago, when I realized that my ancestors are always with me and that the women ar...

Tracing women’s experiences of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly in the second trimester, before legal viability, shows how such events are positioned as less ‘real’ or significant when the foetal being does not, or will not, survive. Invisible Labour: The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England (Berghahn, 2024) by Dr. Aimee Louise Middlemiss describes the...

Ayn Rand is a provocative and polarizing figure. Strongly pro-capitalist and anti-communist, Rand was a dogmatic preacher of her moral philosophy. Based on what she called "rational self-interest", Rand believed in prosperity-seeking individualism above all.  Alexandra Popoff's deeply researched biography traces Rand's journey from her early life as a privileged secular Jew in pre-revolution St. P...

Mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women often frame their faith as oppressive: they are empowered only when they leave their community. For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age (NYU Press, 2024), by Jessica Roda, flips this notion on its head. Drawing on six years of fieldwork between New York and Montreal, Roda examines modern perfor...

Why do "second wave" and "trans feminism" rarely get considered together? Challenging the idea that trans feminism is antagonistic to, or arrived after, second wave feminism, Emily Cousens re-orients trans epistemologies as crucial sites of second wave feminist theorising. By revisiting the contributions of trans individuals writing in underground print publications, as well as the more well-known...

Vice President Kamala Harris is poised to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. The path to this nomination and the generation election has been a bit unusual—with President Joe Biden deciding not to pursue re-election but doing so after the primary season has concluded. Thus, there is a rather condensed election season, and Vice President Kamala Harris has worked to bring the Democ...

Anne Gray Fischer speaks about her path to and through research, including how sex workers informed her analysis of policing and state violence, the role of law enforcement in struggles over economic development, and the intellectual and practical factors of research design. Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Wome...

Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton UP, 2024) sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during th...