New Books in Women's History

Today we talked to Dr. Anna Muller about her latest book, If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford University Press, 2017). Using archival research as well as oral interviews with many of the women in her book, Muller paints a portrait of life within the walls of Polish prisons for political prisoners. From harrowing tales of interrogation, to the creation of f...

Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender is a collection of essays that spans over 40 years and challenges many received notions about the history of Hasidism —its origins, the evolving nature of its structure, its leadership and perhaps most controversially, the role of women in the movement. Unlike other historians who have attributed the rise of Hasidism in the late 18th and early 19th cen...

In Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva explores an influential figure in the history of Russian Catholicism. A Russian noblewoman and Catholic convert living in Paris in the early to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse University Press, 2017) by Didem Havlioglu is at once an intellectual history and biography of sorts of Mihri Hatun, a fifteenth century Ottoman poet. It considers the question of what happens when a woman enters a field dominated by men; in this case, poetry. Using her own poetry and biographical di...

Although largely forgotten today, elocution was a popular form of domestic and professional entertainment from the late nineteenth century until around World War II. Elocution is the dramatic reading of poetry, adapted plays, and other types of monologues by a solo performer. Dr. Marian Wilson Kimber’s new book, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (University of Illinois Press, 20...

In Mexico’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women (SUNY Press, 2017), Christine Arce rightfully stresses that these two figures have greatly influenced Mexico’s national identity, arts, and popular culture. However, their personal names and presences have remained hardly recognized by the state and in the historical narratives. Through a skillful and deep archival r...

When folklorist Jean Freedman first met Peggy Seeger in 1979, Freedman was an undergraduate on her junior year abroad in London, while her American compatriot had been living in the UK for two decades. Their encounter took place in the Singers’ Club, a folk music venue that Seeger and her husband Ewan MacColl founded in the early 1960s and to which Freedman returned many times during her London so...

Birth and suffering are deeply linked concepts in Buddhism, and their connection has shaped how the bodies and status of women were understood. Join us for a conversation with Amy Paris Langenberg about her book Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom, published by Routledge in their series Critical Studies in Buddhism. Amy takes as her focus an early first millennium work, the G...

What are the lives of young incarcerated Latinas like? And what were their lives like before and after their incarceration? In his new book, Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wrap-Around Incarceration (University of California Press, 2017), Jerry Flores explores these questions and more through ethnographic research along with interviews, focus groups, and collection of secondary data. Flores as...

In Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre trace the historical evolution of the profession, analyze more than two thousand examples of chef profiles and restaurant reviews, and conduct in-depth interviews with thirty-three women chefs. There are a number of recent books, magazines, and televi...

When British planters, abolitionists and colonial officials confronted the reality of the end of the slave trade, they envisioned reproducing laborers rather than forcibly importing them. Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) book places pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood at the center... Learn more about your ad c...

Sasha Turner’s Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Child-Rearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) reveals enslaved women’s contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children in plantation-era Jamaica. Turner argues that, as the source of new labour, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them...

In the fifth podcast of Arguing History, Lynn Dumenil and Christopher Capozzola consider the relationship between America’s involvement in World War I and the granting of women the right to vote. As they note, when the war broke out women were enjoying considerable momentum at the state level, having won... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Connections between France and North Africa have long been shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and economics. This intercultural relationship has also been mediated through the arts. In Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in France (Liverpool University Press, 2016), Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, Assistant Professor of French at the University of Rhode Island, examines one populati...

The Nation of Islam and other black nationalist groups are typically known for their male leaders. Men like the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Minister Malcolm X or Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey are notable examples. But what about the work of black women in these groups? Ula Yvette Taylor’s new book, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 20...

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an important and fascinating book that not only tells the story of a remarkable woman’s life during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and Restoration. Based on a recently discovered cache of letters between Marie von Clausewitz and her renowned husband, Carl, it also dramatically expands our...

Much attention has been drawn to the role of white women in the recent Alabama senate election and the earlier election of Donald J. Trump as president. Today’s racial and gender politics have long historic roots, according to Elizabeth McRae, the author of Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Oxford University Press, 2018). Gillespie McRae is an associat...

We’ve featured a few books on fashion and the Muslim world recently, all part of an effort to re-orient the study of women in the Muslim and Arabic-speaking worlds. Elizabeth Bucar’s Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Harvard University Press, 2017) uses three different Muslim populations, Iran, Indonesia and Turkey, to look at what Muslim women wear and how it reflects individual agency. What...

Kate Manne is an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University. As a feminist and moral philosopher, Manne examines an idea that has been inadequately addressed in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2017). She argues that misogyny is on the wane as a working concept and situates her analysis in recent news stories and events. She offers a definition that...

Black Power was one of the most iconic movements of the twentieth century. Recent documentary treatments like The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 in 2011 and The Black Panthers: Vanguards of the Revolution in 2015 brought the Panthers into the households of a new generation. When combined with Beyonce’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime performance, the Black Power movement’s memory hit a high note upon its...

Anthony J. La Vopa is professor emeritus of history at North Carolina State University. His book, The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), is an erudite intellectual history that explores how cultivated men and women in early modern France and Britain thought about the intellectual capacities of each sex. The manly and feminine...

Today we talked with Hilary Matfess about her new book Women and the War on Boko Haram: Wives, Weapons, Witnesses, just recently published by Zed Books in 2017. Drawn from her extensive research and interviews from 2015 to 2017, Matfess’ book attempts to convey the myriad ways in which women have shaped the development and course of the Boko Haram insurgency. She attempts to debunk much of the con...

On Second Thought: Learned Women Reflect on Profession, Community, and Purpose (University of Utah Press, 2017) is a collection of thirteen essays by women, all in the second half of their lives, in which they contemplate the ways in which the different facets of their identities—personal, professional and spiritual—have hitherto unfolded and intertwined. Among their number is the folklorist, ethn...

You may know Toni Morrison’s famed novel Beloved, but do you know much about the true story of the woman depicted in that story? You will know about the real story and more, by reading her biography called Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio (Ohio University Press, 2016) authored by Howard University Professor of History and Department Chair Nikki Tayl...

Marie Grace Brown’s Khartoum at Night: Fashion and Body Politics in Imperial Sudan (Stanford University Press, 2017) is in many ways a history of fashion in Sudan, but in so many ways, its much more than that. It is the story of women in Sudan, as well as the story of their bodies and movement. Brown weaves together women’s education, women’s health, activism and more through the tobe, a popular,...