New Books in Women's History

Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Georgetown University Press, 2019), investigates the mobilization of female fighters, women’s roles in combat, and what happens to women when conflicts end. The book focuses on three case studies of asymmetric conflicts. Jessica Trisko Darden contributes research looking at Ukraine, Alexis Henshaw discusses the civil war in Columbia, and Ora Szekle...

With prison reform a topic of international conversation and debate, Marica Morgan’s Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender and Race offers an in-depth and unique analysis of a population largely lost in these debates and discussions: black women. By centering their experiences, Morgan offers and intersectional and psychodynamic examination of the prison worker and the organ...

Katherine Preston’s new book, Opera for the People: English-Language Opera & Women Managers in Late 19th-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2017) is the first complete overview of the repertoire, companies, performers, and managers that provided English-language opera to Americans after the Civil War. Preston is one of the pioneers of the musicological study of American musical culture duri...

What is the relationship between popular misogyny and popular feminism? In Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny(Duke University Press, 2018), Sarah Banet-Weiser, Professor of Media and Communications and Head of Department at the LSE's Department of Media and Communications, explores these two interrelated ideas in order to analyse a range of examples including the body positivity move...

While the campaign to win for women the right to vote in America was waged on a national scale, this often obscures the fact that the most of battles took place at the state level, where local perspectives were key. Sara Egge’s book Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920 (University of Iowa Press, 2018) spotlights this by focusing on three counties in the states of Iowa, Minnesot...

Today we will be talking to Alicia Malone, the author of The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women (Mango Publishing Group, 2018). Malone is a film critic and host on Turner Classic Films who has compiled a list of 52 films directed by women, from the early days of Hollywood... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Revised Edition) (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), Smadar Lavie analyzes the racial and gender justice protest movements in Israel. She suggests that Israeli bureaucracy is based on a theological notion that inserts the categories of religion, gender, and race into the foundation of citizenship. In this revised...

Westerns are having a bit of a moment in the early twenty-first century. Westworld was recently nominated for eight Emmys, the hit show Deadwood is slated for a return to television in the next few years, and in 2015 Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight grossed over $150 million. Victoria Lamont’s Westerns: A Women’s History (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), looks at the first moment of the W...

In his new book Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Ivan Simic explores how Yugoslav communists learned, adapted, and applied Soviet gender policies in their efforts to build their own egalitarian society after World War II. Attending to the gap between ideas and practices, he discusses how the deeply entrenched patriarchal norms within Yugoslav societ...

The story of Muslims in America has primarily been told through the experiences of men and often revolves around narratives of immigration. Sylvia Chan-Malik, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, expands upon and challenges this scholarly pattern in Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (NYU Press, 2018). Chan-Ma...

I left the kitchen radio on while reading Jacqueline Rose‘s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) in preparation for this interview. It was June. Putting the book down for a minute to get a glass of water, I heard a news report that the children of refugee women were being removed from them at the American border. Rose is nothing if not prescient in her thinking a...

In her new book, Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (Wayne State University Press 2017), Rachel Harris presents one of the first comprehensive studies of the place and role of women in Israeli cinema and Israeli society more widely. Looking at a variety of films from the early days of Israeli cinema until today, Harris examines some of the particular challenges women in Israel face...

Interviewing one member of Congress is a feat for most researchers. Interviewing nearly 100 and almost every women member of Congress is remarkable. Even more remarkable is what we can learn from that data collection about the perceptions of women members of Congress, especially about the way they perceive recent partisan polarization and the changing role of gender, race, and ethnicity. Such is t...

The New Negro Movement is typically seen as a Harlem-based project. Dr. Treva Lindsey’s important book, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C. (University of Illinois Press, 2017), however, challenges the centrality of Harlem to the movement. Dr. Lindsey considers how important institutions like Howard University were pivotal centers where Black women fought against gender...

How should we understand disability? In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Dr. Shelley Tremain explores this complex question from the perspective of feminist philosophy, using the work of Michel Foucault. The book is a fascinating critique of much contemporary philosophy and policy, providing a detailed, but easy to follow overview of key works in...

Who doesn’t remember their first trip to the county fair? The greasy hotdogs and popcorn and cotton candy. The lights and sounds of the seemingly endless games and rides and shows on the midway. But maybe most of all, the sense of wonder inspired by real people who could contort their bodies into incredible shapes with ease, and show off amazing feats of agility and strength you never thought poss...

In Off the Cliff: How the Making of ‘Thelma & Louise’ Drove Hollywood to the Edge (Penguin, 2018), Becky Aikman explores the making of Thelma & Louise, a 1991 film that challenged traditional Hollywood culture. The film cast two women as the stars, running from their lives and the law. An outlaw film that was a long shot, but became one of the most influential films of the past 30 years. Aikman te...

For the most part women in the classical world have suffered from what Duane W. Roller terms “near-invisibility,” obscuring the consequential roles that at times they played in government and politics. In his book Cleopatra’s Daughter: And Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era (Oxford University Press, 2018), Roller recounts the lives of more than a half-dozen women in the last decades of the 1st...

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of J...

In studying the pre-Revolutionary films of Evgenii Bauer, Dr. Rachel Morley (Lecturer in Russian Cinema and Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London) discovered the ubiquity of the female performer as a character in the cinema of this era, from “Oriental” and “Gypsy” dancers... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historians have gotten the story of the colonial Ohio River Valley all wrong, argues Susan Sleeper-Smith in Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (Omonundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Sleeper-Smith, a Professor of History at Michigan State University and soon-to-be Interim Director of the D’arcy McNickle Cent...

In the course of investigating marriage patterns among Russian peasants in the 18th and 19th century, Northwestern University history professor John Bushnell discovered an unusually high rate of unmarried women in particular parishes and villages with high populations of Old Believers. In Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry: Spasovite Old... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone...

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet, as Rebekah J. Buchanan notes in her new book, Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018), a group of girls and young wome...

There are few living American classical composers for whom an academic biography has been published, but Libby Larsen deserves this type of study. At the opening of her book, Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Denise Von Glahn describes her subject’s life as a “polyphony”—made up of multiple strands of music, career, and family. In order to make sense of...

In her new book, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks (Oxford University Press, 2018), Sumita Mukherjee highlights the centrality of Indian women in the fight for the vote in the first half of the twentieth century. Taking up a geographic organization around global “contact zones,” Mukherjee skillfully guides readers through multiple sites of Indian suffragette network...