New Books in Women's History

Among the many things expectant parents are told to buy, none is a more visible symbol of status and parenting philosophy than a stroller. Although its association with wealth dates back to the invention of the first pram in the 1700s, in recent decades, four-figure strollers have become not just status symbols but cultural identifiers. There are sleek jogging strollers for serious athletes, impos...

In Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge UP, 2022), assistant professor of history at Missouri State University, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez explores the longue durée history of birth control and abortion in China from the Republican period to the present day. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, oral histories, posters, films, novels, and...

The pill has rocked our society to its core: but have we fully examined all its repercussions? Influential author and essayist Mary Eberstadt thinks we've only scratched the surface; in her most recent book, Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited (Ignatius Press, 2023) she argues that the papal encyclical Humane Vitae predicted our deep loneliness and other modern woes. Mary Eberstadt holds the Pa...

An extended conversation between Lauren Fournier, writer, independent curator, artist, and author of Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism and writer, educator and philosopher McKenzie Wark (A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, Capital Is Dead, Reverse Cowgirl.) Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux   Learn more about you...

The overturning of Roe v. Wade has led to a flurry of commentary and wondering, "Where next?" But, it also begs deeper questions: what is the history of abortion and sex-positivity within the feminist movement, and how did Roe affect our views on sex? Feminist legal scholar Dr. Erika Bachiochi is the founder and director of the Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute and a fellow at...

Damon Kruskowski, author of Ways of Hearing and The New Analog, previously member of Galaxie 500 and currently a member of Damon & Naomi interviews Rose Simpson about her book Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden. Rose is an English former musician. Between 1968 and 1971, she was a member of the Incredible String Band, with whom she sang and played bass guitar, violin, and percussion. Between 1967 and 1971...

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation (U Georgia Press, 2021) offers a comparative sociocultural and spatial history of white supremacist women involved in massive resistance. The book focuses on segregationist grassroots activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Charleston, South Carolina from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Dr. Rebe...

In Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India (Duke UP, 2022), Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggle...

Frances Willard (1839-1898) was one of the most prominent American social reformers of the late nineteenth century. As the long-time president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Willard built a national and international movement of women that campaigned for prohibition, women's rights, economic justice, and numerous other social justice issues during the Gilded Age. Emphasizing wha...

In From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969 (U Nebraska Press, 2020), Alicia Gutierrez-Romine examines the history of criminal abortion in California and the role abortion providers played in exposing and exploiting the faults in California’s anti-abortion statute throughout the twentieth century. Focused on the patients who used this underground network and the ph...

Today I interview Julia Serano about her new book, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Fight Back (Seal, 2022). Serano is an activist, performer, and acclaimed author of Whipping Girl, Excluded, and other books. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Guardian, TIME, Salon, and Ms. In Sexed Up, Serano argues that sexualization is a far more pervasive problem that we migh...

Lauren Fournier, writer, independent curator, artist, and author of Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism discusses her forthcoming book with writer, educator and philosopher McKenzie Wark (A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, Capital Is Dead, Reverse Cowgirl.) In the 2010s, the term “autotheory” began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which...

Tai Shani (Turner Prize winning artist, educator and author of Our Fatal Magic) and Amy Hale (anthropologist, folklorist, and writer) discuss the work of artist, occultist and writer Ithell Colquhoun to celebrate the publication of Amy’s book Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of The Fern Loved Gully. This book offers the first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colqu...

In this series of interviews from The MIT Press Podcast, we'll be drawing on the research of various authors to reflect on some of the issues shaping the American political landscape of today. In this episode Carol A. Stabile discusses her book The Broadcast 41 (published in April of last year by Goldsmiths Press.) In her book, Carol traces the history of forty-one women who were forced out of Ame...

From The Lady Eve, to The Big Valley, Barbara Stanwyck played parts that showcased her multidimensional talents but also illustrated the limits imposed on women in film and television. Catherine Russell’s A to Z consideration of the iconic actress analyzes twenty-six facets of Stanwyck and the America of her times. Russell examines Stanwyck’s work onscreen against the backdrop of costuming and oth...

Is it right that, despite the promises of feminism, women’s bodies remain at the mercy of state, society and religion? Should a scantily clad woman, or a promiscuous one, be worth less than a fully covered woman, or a chaste one? Are being sexy and being smart really mutually exclusive? Can a woman be both body and brain? Dr. Victoria Bateman has confronted these questions with actions as well as...

Child abandonment, theft, kidnapping, prostitution, bigamy, and murder! Bad Bridget is a must-read examination of crime and Irish emigrant women in the U.S. and Canada, written by Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, and out now with Sandycove. Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a very good place to be a woman. Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America...

Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Scientists once thought of an individual's period as useless, and some doctors still believe it's unsafe for a menstruating person to swim in the ocean wearing a tampon. Period: The Real Story of Menstruation (Princeton UP, 2023) counters the false theories that ha...

Anna Ott died in the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane in 1893. She had enjoyed status and financial success first as a physician's wife and then as the only female doctor in Madison. Throughout her first marriage, attempts to divorce her abusive second husband, and twenty years of institutionalization, Ott determinedly shaped her own life. Kim E. Nielsen explores a life at once irregular an...

The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood (Beacon, 2020) by Naomi McDougall Jones is a brutally honest look at the systemic exclusion of women in film—an industry with massive cultural influence—and how, in response, women are making space in cinema for their voices to be heard. Generation after generation, women have faced the devastating reality that Holly...

The heroic romance is one of the West's most enduring narratives, found everywhere, from religion and myth to blockbuster films and young adult literature. Within this story, adolescent girls are not, and cannot be, the heroes. They are, at best, the hero's bride, a prize he wins for slaying monsters. Crucially, although the girl's exclusion from heroic selfhood affects all girls, it does not do s...

In 1943, three books appeared that changed American politics forever: Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Together, they laid the groundwork for what became the modern libertarian movement. Even more striking were the women behind these books: Paterson, a brilliant but misanthropic journalist whose weekly column ma...

Equality between the sexes has long been recognized as a fundamental moral and legal objective of the UN, and more recently of many governments and international financial and development institutions. Women's empowerment has long been recognized as essential to the larger development objectives of the UN and the international community. Extensive empirical data from all over the world today infor...

Actresses and Mental Illness: Histrionic Heroines (Routledge, 2018) investigates the relationship between the work of the actress and her personal experience of mental illness, from the late nineteenth through to the end of twentieth century. Over the past two decades scholars have made great advances in our understanding of the history of the actress, unearthing the material conditions of her wor...

In Peak TV’s Unapologetic Jewish Woman: Exploring Jewish Female Representation in Contemporary Television Comedy (Lexington Books, 2022), Samantha Pickette analyzes the ways in which contemporary American television is establishing a new version of the Jewish woman and a new take on American Jewish female identity that challenges the stereotypes of Jewish femininity proliferated on television sinc...