New Books in Women's History
1,358 episodes - English - Latest episode: 27 days ago - ★★★★★ - 7 ratingsDiscussions with scholars of women's history about their new books
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Marie de Vignerot, Richelieu's Forgotten Advisor and Heiress
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesDespite being one of the most influential women of 17th century France, Marie de Vignerot has been largely forgotten. The niece, heiress, and advisor to the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, Marie was deeply motivated by her Catholic faith, yet never re-married after she became a widow at 18. She shaped France and the French empire's political, religious, and cultural life as the unconventional and independent Duchesse d’Aiguillon, a position exceedingly uncommon for a woman to possess in her own ...
Rina Verma Williams, "Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 45 minutesHow has the participation of women in Hindu nationalist politics in India changed over time? More broadly, what has their changing participation meant for women, Hindu nationalism, and Indian democracy? In Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), Rina Verma Williams places women's participation in religious politics in India into historical and comparative perspective through a focus on the most important Hindu nationalist ...
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, "Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America" (UNC Press, 2023)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America (UNC Press, 2023), Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South; some also carried the institution to far-flung places like California, New York, ...
William W. Parsons and Regina M. Matheson, "The Pink Wave: Women Running for Office After Trump" (NYU Press, 2023)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesHow and why the election of Donald Trump inspired more women to enter politics. Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election shocked and dismayed many women, and motivated many to run for office at all levels of government. In The Pink Wave: Women Running for Office After Trump (NYU Press, 2023), Regina M. Matheson and William W. Parsons explore this inspiring phenomenon and its impact on women's representation. Drawing on national surveys and in-depth intervi...
Maggie Hennefeld, "Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema" (Columbia UP, 2024)
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesCan you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has...
Heather Akou, "On the Job: A History of American Work Uniforms" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThrough a variety of archival documents, artefacts, illustrations, and references to primary and secondary literature, On the Job: A History of American Work Uniforms (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Heather Akou explores the changing styles, business practices, and lived experiences of the people who make, sell, and wear service-industry uniforms in the United States. It highlights how the uniform business is distinct from the fashion business, including how manufacturing developed outside of the t...
Amy Absher, "Fritzie: The Invented Life and Violent Murder of a Flapper" (U Oklahoma Press, 2023)
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 31 minutesOne January day in 1923, a young boy came across the dead body of a twenty-year-old woman on a San Diego beach. When the police arrived on the scene, they found the woman’s calling card, which read simply, “I am Fritzie Mann.” Yet Fritzie’s identity, as revealed in this compelling history, was anything but simple, and her death—eventually ruled a homicide—captured public attention for months. In Fritzie: The Invented Life and Violent Murder of a Flapper (U Oklahoma Press, 2023), historian Amy...
Coretta M. Pittman, "Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)
March 19, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesLiteracy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries by Coretta M. Pittman (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) traces the evolution of Black women’s literacy practices from 1892 to 1934. Pittman explores two distinct but related eras of Black women’s writing—the Women’s Era of the 1890s and early 1900s, and the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Casting a wide net, Pittman analyzes fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic...
The Pioneering Life of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesManu Bhagavan and Ellen Chesler discuss Bhagavan’s latest book on Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (Penguin, 2023), admired sister of India’s founding Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and a pioneering public servant, diplomat, and women's rights advocate, in her own right. They talk about the Nehru’s privileged upbringing and elite education, their conversion to a Gandhi inspired ascetism, the hardships of repeated jail sentences during the struggle against British colonialism, as well as the many infl...
Nancy Folbre, "The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy" (Verso, 2021)
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 29 minutesNancy Folbre’s The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy (Verso, 2021) asks the questions of why and under what conditions overlapping systems of exploitation persist and decline. Folbre adds this book to a long repertoire of studying the economics of care, social reproduction, household-state relations, and women’s coalition building. In making sense of the gender-skewed outcomes of capitalist development, the undervaluation of care, and the dynamics of...
Caitlin Davies, "Private Inquiries: The Secret History of Female Sleuths" (The History Press, 2023)
March 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDismissed as ‘Mrs Sherlock Holmes’ or amateurish Miss Marples, mocked as private dicks or honey trappers, they have been investigating crime since the mid-nineteenth century – everything from theft and fraud to romance scams and murder. In Private Inquiries: The Secret History of Female Sleuths (The History Press, 2023), Caitlin Davies traces the history of the UK’s female investigators, uncovering the truth about their lives and careers from the 1850s to the present day. Women like Victorian...
Tayo Agunbiade, "Untold Histories of Nigerian Women: Emerging from the Margins" (Cambridge Scholars, 2023)
March 14, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesUntold Histories of Nigerian Women: Emerging from the Margins (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023) is a curation of insightful and engaging narrations aimed at freeing women from the margins of Nigeria's history. It chronicles their protest movements against colonial administrations, including "monster" petitions on taxation and food price controls. It details a string of remarkable political landmarks which highlight women's historical credentials as nationalists, as well as their voice in ...
Judith Tick, "Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song" (Norton, 2023)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesElla Fitzgerald (1917–1996) was one of America’s greatest musicians. In this major biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer who Transformed American Song (Norton 2023), Judith Tick documents Ella’s importance as a music maker, the ups and downs of her career, and her place in the music industry. Singers are often sidelined in histories of jazz, and jazz critics often celebrated instrumentalists over vocalists in their commentary. Consequently, many authors have not taken Ella seri...
Rebecca Rego Barry, "The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells" (Post Hill Press, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesThe Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author (PostHill Press, 2024) by Rebecca Rego Barry is the first biography of one of the “lost ladies” of detective fiction who wrote more than eighty mysteries and hundreds of other works between the 1890s and the 1940s. Carolyn Wells (1862–1942) excelled at writing country house and locked-room mysteries for a decade before Agatha Christie entered the scene. In the 1920s, when she was churning out three or more books an...
Sofia Rehman, "Gendering the Hadith Tradition: Recentering the Authority of Aisha, Mother of the Believers" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesGendering the Hadith Tradition: Recentering the Authority of Aisha, Mother of the Believers (Oxford UP, 2024) presents for the first time a partial translation and study of Imam Badr al-Din al-Zarkashi's work, al-Ijaba li-Iradi ma Istadraktahu Aisha Ala al-Sahabah-"The Corrective: Aisha's Rectification of the Companions. "It critically analyses from the perspective of hadith criticism a number of sections presenting Aisha's refutations and corrections of key Companions including, Umar b. al-K...
Sharon D. Wright Austin, "Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors" (Temple UP, 2023)
March 11, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesPolitical Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors (Temple UP, 2023) explores black women's experiences as mayors in American cities. The editor and contributors to this comprehensive volume examine black female mayoral campaigns and elections where race and gender are a factor--and where deracialized campaigns have garnered candidate support from white as well as Hispanic and Asian American voters. Chapters also consider how Black female mayors govern, from discu...
Jad Adams, "Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
March 10, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesDecadent Women: Yellow Book Lives (Reaktion, 2023) by Jad Adams chronicles the vibrant and passionate women who wrote for the 1890s journal The Yellow Book. During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent Women is an account of some of these women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journal The Yellow Book. For the first time, based on original research, Dr. Adams describes t...
Raanan Rein and Susanne Zepp-Zwirner, "Untold Stories of the Spanish Civil War" (Routledge, 2024)
March 10, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourUntold Stories of the Spanish Civil War (Routledge, 2024) is the first scholarly volume to offer an insight into the less-known stories of women, children, and international volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. Special attention is given to volunteers of different historical experiences, especially Jews, and voices from less-researched countries in the context of the Spanish war, such as Palestine and Turkey. Of an interdisciplinary nature, this volume brings together historians and literary ...
Ben Rothenberg, "Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice" (Dutton, 2024)
March 07, 2024 09:00 - 43 minutesIn July 2021, Naomi Osaka—world number 1 women’s tennis player—lit the Olympic Cauldron at the Tokyo Olympic Games. The half-Japanese, half-American, Black athlete was a symbol of a more complicated, more multiethnic Japan—and of the global nature of high-level sports. Osaka is now about to start her comeback, after taking some time off following the birth of her child. She’s not just an athlete: She’s a media entrepreneur, venture investor, and mental health advocate—with that latter label c...
Edda Fields-Black, "Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourMost Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and...
Horace J. Maxile, Jr. and Kristen M. Turner, "Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher's Guide" (Routledge, 2022)
February 27, 2024 09:00 - 33 minutesRace and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher’s Guide provides concrete information and approaches that will help instructors include women and people of color in the typical music history survey course and the foundational music theory classes. This book provides a reconceptualization of the principles that shape the decisions instructors should make when crafting the syllabus. It offers new perspectives on canonical composers and pieces that take into account musical, cultu...
Judith Pearson, "Crusade to Heal America: The Remarkable Life of Mary Lasker" (Mayo Clinic Press, 2023)
February 27, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesMary Woodard Lasker had a singular goal: saving lives by increasing medical research. Together with her husband, advertising genius Albert, they created the Lasker Foundation, bestowing the Lasker Awards. Known as the "American Nobels," these became the most prestigious research awards in America. The Laskers' next step was transforming the sleepy and ineffectual American Society for the Control of Cancer, reinventing it as the American Cancer Society in 1944. But the real increase in medical...
Angela Wanhalla, "Of Love and War: Pacific Brides of World War II" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
February 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourBetween 1942 and 1945 more than two million servicemen occupied the southern Pacific theater, the majority of whom were Americans in service with the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. During the occupation, American servicemen married approximately 1,800 women from New Zealand and the island Pacific, creating legal bonds through marriage and through children. Additionally, American servicemen fathered an estimated four thousand nonmarital children with Indigenous women in the South Pac...
Simon Partner, "Koume's World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration" (Columbia UP, 2023)
February 22, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1864, on a midsummer’s day, Kawai Koume, a 60-year old matriarch of a samurai family in Wakayama, makes a note in her diary, which she had dutifully written in for over three decades. There are reports of armed clashes in Kyoto. It’s said that the emperor has ordered the expulsion of the foreigners, and it’s also said that a large band of vagabond soldiers has gathered in Senju in Edo. It’s said that in Edo people are wearing their [winter] kimono linings, and in Nikko it has been snowing....
Tom Hamilton, "A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France" (Oxford UP, 2024)
February 19, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesParis, 1599. At the end of the French Wars of Religion, the widow Renée Chevalier instigated the prosecution of the military captain Mathurin Delacanche, who had committed multiple acts of rape, homicide, and theft against the villagers who lived around her château near the cathedral city of Sens. But how could Chevalier win her case when King Henri IV's Edict of Nantes ordered that the recent troubles should be forgotten as 'things that had never been'? A Widow's Vengeance After the Wars of...
Sarah Parry Myers, "Earning Their Wings: The WASPs of World War II and the Fight for Veteran Recognition" (UNC Press, 2023)
February 16, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesEstablished by the Army Air Force in 1943, the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program opened to civilian women with a pilot's licence who could afford to pay for their own transportation, training, and uniforms. Despite their highly developed skill set, rigorous training, and often dangerous work, the women of WASP were not granted military status until 1977, denied over three decades of Army Air Force benefits as well as the honour and respect given to male and female World War II ve...
Alison M. Downham Moore, "The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 14, 2024 09:00 - 45 minutesIn The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing (Oxford University Press, 2022), Alison Downham Moore discusses her contribution to the history of women's ageing. Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doct...
Anru Lee, "Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
February 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourOn the podcast today, I am joined by Professor Anru Lee, who is professor of anthropology at John Jay College, the City University of New York. Anru will be talking about her new book, Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan, which was published just last year in 2023 by University of Hawai’i Press. Haunted Modernities interrogates the nature of shared expressions of history, sentiment and memory as it investigates the role of the tragic death of twenty-fi...
Brydie Kosmina, "Feminist Afterlives of the Witch: Popular Culture, Memory, Activism" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
February 06, 2024 09:00 - 54 minutesFeminist Afterlives of the Witch: Popular Culture, Memory, Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) by Dr. Brydie Kosmina investigates the witch as a key rhetorical symbol in twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist memory, politics, activism, and popular culture. The witch demonstrates the inheritance of paradoxical pasts, traversing numerous ideological memoryscapes. This book is an examination of the ways that the witch has been deployed by feminist activists and writers in their political ...
Courtney Brannon Donoghue, "The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch to Premiere" (U Texas Press, 2023)
February 04, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesConversations about gender equity in the workplace accelerated in the 2010s, with debates inside Hollywood specifically pointing to broader systemic problems of employment disparities and exploitative labor practices. Compounded by the devastating #MeToo revelations, these problems led to a wide-scale call for change. Courtney Brannon Donoghue's book The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch to Premiere (U Texas Press, 2023) traces female-driven filmmaking across development, financing, ...
Robin Judd, "Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust" (UNC Press, 2023)
February 02, 2024 09:00 - 46 minutesFacing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry. Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother surviv...
Georgina Hickey, "Breaking the Gender Code: Women and Urban Public Space in the Twentieth-Century United States" (U Texas Press, 2023)
February 02, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFrom the closing years of the nineteenth century, women received subtle--and not so subtle--messages that they shouldn't be in public. Or, if they were, that they were not safe. Breaking the Gender Code: Women and Urban Public Space in the Twentieth-Century United States (U Texas Press, 2023) tells the story of both this danger narrative and the resistance to it. Historian Georgina Hickey investigates challenges to the code of urban gender segregation in the twentieth century, focusing on org...
Black Women, Ivory Tower: Revealing the Lies of White Supremacy in American Education
February 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourToday’s book is: Black Women, Ivory Tower: Revealing the Lies of White Supremacy in American Education (Broadleaf Books, 2024), by Dr. Jasmine L. Harris, which is an exploration of what it means to be a Black woman in higher education. Dr. Jasmine Harris shares her own experiences attempting to be a Vassar girl and reckoning with a lack of legacy and agency, while examining the day-to-day impacts on Black women as individuals, and the longer-term consequences to their professional lives, and ...
Emma Bridges, "Warriors' Wives: Ancient Greek Myth and Modern Experience" (Oxford UP, 2023)
February 01, 2024 09:00 - 50 minutesEpic poetry and tragic drama provide us with some of the richest ancient Greek depictions of women who are married to soldiers. In tales of the Trojan War, as told by Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, we encounter these mythical warriors' wives: Penelope, isolated but resourceful as she awaits the return of Odysseus after his lengthy absence; the war widow Andromache, enslaved and displaced from her homeland after the fall of Troy; the unfaithful and murderous Clytemnestra; and Tecm...
Why are there more women in parliament than ever before, and does it matter?
January 31, 2024 09:00 - 30 minutesWhy do some countries do better than others in advancing women as political leaders and in promoting women’s rights? And what difference does this make to women’s everyday lives? In this episode CEDAR’s Nic Cheeseman talks to Aili Mari Tripp, a world leading researcher of women’s movements, who explains why there are more women in parliament than ever before, and the role that gender quotas have played in this trend. We also discuss why some authoritarian governments gone to greater lengths t...
Why are there more women in parliament than ever before, and does it matter?
January 31, 2024 09:00 - 30 minutesWhy do some countries do better than others in advancing women as political leaders and in promoting women’s rights? And what difference does this make to women’s everyday lives? In this episode CEDAR’s Nic Cheeseman talks to Aili Mari Tripp, a world leading researcher of women’s movements, who explains why there are more women in parliament than ever before, and the role that gender quotas have played in this trend. We also discuss why some authoritarian governments gone to greater lengths t...
Eviane Leidig, "The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization" (Columbia UP, 2023)
January 31, 2024 09:00 - 42 minutesOn mainstream social media platforms, far-right women make extremism relatable. They share Instagram stories about organic foods that help pregnant women propagate the “pure” white race and post behind-the-scenes selfies at antivaccination rallies. These social media personalities model a feminine lifestyle, at once promoting their personal brands and radicalizing their followers. Amid discussions of issues like dating, marriage, and family life, they call on women to become housewives to cou...
Holly A. Baggett, "Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review" (Northern Illinois UP, 2023)
January 30, 2024 09:00 - 39 minutesHolly A. Baggett's Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is the first book-length account of the lives and editorial careers of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the women who founded the avant-garde journal the Little Review in Chicago in 1914. Born in the nineteenth-century Midwest, Anderson and Heap grew up to be iconoclastic rebels, living openly as lesbians, and advocating causes from anarchy to feminism and free love. Their...
Caitlin Killian, "Failing Moms: Social Condemnation and Criminalization of Mothers" (Polity Press, 2023)
January 29, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesThe role of mother is often celebrated in the United States as the most important job in the world but Dr. Caitlin Killian argues that American motherhood is increasingly monitored and perilous. From preconception, through pregnancy, and while parenting, she argues that women are held to ever-higher standards and punished – both socially and criminally – for failing to live up to these norms. Using historical accounts, public health pronouncements, social psychological research, and course ca...
Elinor Cleghorn, "Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World" (Dutton, 2022)
January 28, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesMedicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. Over centuries, women’s bodies have been demonised and demeaned until we feared them, felt ashamed of them, were humiliated by them. But as doctors, researchers, campaigners and most of all as patients, women have continuously challenged medical orthodoxy. Medicine’s history has always been, and is still being, rewritten by women’s resistance, strength and incredible courage. In this ground-breaking history Dr. Elinor Cleghorn unpacks ...
Eugenio Refini, "Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy" (Legenda, 2022)
January 25, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesAs per William Shakespeare, ‘all the world’s a stage’. But what if the human soul was a stage too? What if the stage of the world and the stage of the soul coincided? And what if the soul was also the main character of the play? These questions are at the core of Eugenio Refini's book Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy (Legenda, 2022), which explores pedagogical uses of allegorical drama in Italy in the decades around 1600, with a focus on the place of...
Genevieve Alva Clutario, "Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898-1941" (Duke UP, 2023)
January 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourBeauty is often dismissed as superfluous and frivolous cultural consumption. In her book, Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898-1941 (Duke UP, 2023), Genevieve Clutario asks the readers, "what can we gain by taking beauty seriously?" (3) What does it tell us about national identity formation and intimate connections between overlapping empires? Bringing together sartorial styles and women's labor by critically engaging with archival documents ranging fr...
David J. Brick, "Widows Under Hindu Law" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 25, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesDuring British colonial rule in India, the treatment of high-caste Hindu widows became the subject of great controversy. Such women were not permitted to remarry and were offered two options: a life of seclusion and rigorous asceticism or death on the funeral pyre of a deceased husband. Was this a modern development, or did it date from the classical period? In Widows Under Hindu Law (Oxford UP, 2023), David Brick offers an exhaustive history of the treatment and status of widows under classi...
Catherine Powell-Warren, "Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
January 22, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesJana Byars speaks with Catherine Powell-Warren about Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). The conversation begins by examining the ways modern scholars are radically changing our understanding of the position of early modern women one monograph at a time before dialing in on a book that does just that. At once collector, botanist, reader, artist, and patron, Agnes Bloc...
Chelsea Schields, "Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean" (U California Press, 2023)
January 21, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesChelsea Schields's book Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (U California Press, 2023) reveals how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world's largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reprodu...
Jessica Goethals, "Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe Roman singer, courtesan, and writer Margherita Costa won prominence and fame across the courts of Italy and France during the mid-seventeenth century. She secured a steady stream of elite patrons – including popes, queens, grand dukes, and influential cardinals – while male poets and librettists wrote celebratory poetry on her behalf. In addition to her appearances as a soprano on the opera stage, Costa published a remarkable fourteen full-length texts across an expanse of genres: burlesq...
Aimee Loiselle, "Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 17, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesIn the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources--union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories-...
Sujin Lee, "Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
January 17, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesIn 2007, Japan’s health minister referred to women ages 15-50 as “birthing machines.” The context was a speech about Japan’s declining birthrate and projected population shrinkage. As Sujin Lee shows in Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan (Stanford UP, 2023), neither population anxieties nor the idea of women as childbearing devices whose wombs were the property of the state are new. However, when the “population problem” became a public preoccupation for po...
Emma Gleadhill, "Taking Travel Home: The Souvenir Culture of British Women Tourists, 1750-1830" (Manchester UP, 2022)
January 16, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn the late eighteenth-century, elite British women had an unprecedented opportunity to travel. Taking travel home uncovers the souvenir culture these women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship and science. Key characters include forty-three-year-old Hester Piozzi (Thrale), who honeymooned in Italy; thirty-one-year-old Anna Miller, who accompanied her husband on a Grand Tour; Dorothy Richards...
Elisabeth Gernerd, "The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear and Accessories in the Late 18th-Century Atlantic World" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
January 14, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourFrom rumps and stays to muffs and handkerchiefs, underwear and accessories were critical components of the 18th-century woman's wardrobe. They not only created her shape, but expressed her character, sociability, fashionability, and even political allegiances. These so-called ephemeral flights of fashion were not peripheral and supplementary, but highly charged artefacts, acting as cultural currency in contemporary society. The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear and Accessories in the Late 18th-C...