New Books in Women's History artwork

New Books in Women's History

1,398 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★★ - 7 ratings

Discussions with scholars of women's history about their new books

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Episodes

Alison S. Fell, "Warrior Women: The Cultural Politics of Armed Women, c.1850-1945" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

June 14, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutes

Alison S. Fell's book Warrior Women: The Cultural Politics of Armed Women, c.1850-1945 (Cambridge UP, 2023) examines women warriors as vehicles of mobilisation. It argues that women warrior figures from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War are best understood as examples of 'palimpsestic memory', as the way they were represented reflected new contexts while retaining traces of legendary models such as Joan of Arc, and of 'travelling memory', as their stories crosse...

Payal Arora et al., "Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)

June 12, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutes

The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from artisanal work to salon services to ride-hailing and construction. A feminist reimagining of the fu...

Jacqueline Beatty, "In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America" (NYU Press, 2023)

June 11, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutes

Patriarchal forces of law, finance, and social custom restricted women’s rights and agency in revolutionary America. Yet women in this period exploited these confines, transforming constraints into vehicles of female empowerment. Through a close reading of thousands of legislative, judicial, and institutional pleas across seventy years of history in three urban centers, Jacqueline Beatty illustrates the ways in which women in the revolutionary era asserted their status as dependents, demandin...

Randy Grigsby, "This Labyrinth of Darkness and Light: Henrietta Szold, the Rescue of Children from Hitler's Europe and Her Palestine Experience" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2022)

June 08, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutes

Drawing on Henrietta Szold's letters and diary, extensive research, and historical sources of that time in Germany and Palestine, the book is a powerful narrative and spellbinding rescue story that brings to life one of the darkest and yet most inspirational chapters in Jewish history. Szold was seventy-three, founder of Hadassah, the Jewish Zionist women's organization, when she was appointed to direct Youth Aliyah, and over the next decade transported over 20,000 Jewish children from Nazi E...

Athene Donald, "Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)

June 07, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutes

Why are girls discouraged from doing science? Why do so many promising women leave science in early and mid-career? Why do women not prosper in the scientific workforce? Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science (Oxford UP, 2023) looks back at how society has historically excluded women from the scientific sphere and discourse, what progress has been made, and how more is still needed. Athene Donald, herself a distinguished physicist, explores societal expectations during both ...

Feminism Against Progress: A Conversation with Mary Harrington

June 06, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutes

Is feminism compatible with progress? Reactionary feminist Mary Harrington thinks not. In this interview, she discusses the history of feminism, her own journey from proponent to radical opponent of progress, the impact of technology on women and society, and, of course, her new book, Feminism Against Progress (Regnery, 2023). Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd and widely-published essayist. You can her book, Feminism Against Progress here. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, "The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States" (Columbia UP, 2023)

June 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Poor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media renders them invisible or casts them as racialized and undeserving "welfare queens" who exploit social safety nets. Even when Black women voters are celebrated, the voices of the poorest too often go unheard. How do Afro-descendant women in former slave-holding societies survive amid multifaceted oppression?  In The Politics of Survival: Black ...

Amber Knight and Joshua Miller, "Prenatal Genetic Testing, Abortion, and Disability Justice" (Oxford UP, 2023)

June 01, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutes

The routinization of non-invasive prenatal genetic testing (NIPT) raises urgent questions about disability rights and reproductive justice. Supporters defend NIPT on the grounds that genetic information about the fetus helps would-be parents make better family planning choices. Prenatal Genetic Testing, Abortion, and Disability Justice challenges that assessment by exploring how NIPT can actually constrain pregnant women's options. Prospective parents must balance a complicated array of facto...

Tazeen M. Ali, "The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam" (NYU Press, 2022)

May 28, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutes

The Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is the first of its kind in the United States. Since 2015, the WMA has provided a space for Muslim women to build inclusive communities committed to gender and social justice, challenging the dominant mosque culture that has historically marginalized them through inadequate prayer spaces, exclusion from leadership, and limited access to religious learning. In The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Comm...

Michaela Chamberlain, "Misogyny in Psychoanalysis" (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022)

May 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Today I talked to Michaela Chamberlain, author of Misogyny in Psychoanalysis (Phoenix Publishing House, 2022) Chamberlain’s book is a product of “cumulative trauma” whose original starting point was an interest in in menstruation where, in psychoanalytic literature filled with papers on “micturition and feces”, there is a “startling lack of writing on the monthly passing of menstrual blood.” Chamberlain realized that this absence was a symptom of something bigger. That something is misogyny. ...

Robert F. Trager and Joslyn N. Barnhart, "The Suffragist Peace: How Women's Votes Lead to Fewer Wars" (Oxford UP, 2022)

May 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

In the modern age, some parts of the world are experiencing a long peace. Nuclear weapons, capitalism and the widespread adoption of democratic institutions have been credited with fostering this relatively peaceful period. Yet, these accounts overlook one of the most dramatic transformations of the 20th century: the massive redistribution of political power as millions of women around the world won the right to vote. The Suffragist Peace: How Women Shape the Politics of War (Oxford Universit...

Baba Padmanji, "Yamuna's Journey" (Speaking Tiger Books, 2022)

May 25, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutes

In 1856, the East India Company imposed the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act, allowing widows to remarry after their husband’s death. The Act was controversial at the time: Hindu traditionalists, particularly in higher castes, prevented widows from remarrying to protect the family’s honor, and even teenage and child widows were expected to live lives of austerity. The following year, the Marathi author Baba Padmanji publishes Yamuna’s Journey: one of the first, if not the first, novel in an Indian ...

Heather Augustyn, "Rude Girls: Women in 2 Tone and One Step Beyond" (2023)

May 25, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutes

In her latest book, Rude Girls: Women in 2 Tone and One Step Beyond (Sally Brown Publishing, 2023), Heather Augustyn explores the ska revival in the UK during the lates 1970s and 1980s. The 2 Tone label represented unity of black and white in both the content of the songs, and appearance of the bands. While race may have been central to this declaration, where did gender fit in? Many bands had few, if any, women in their lineup and so women had to do it for themselves. Empowered by punk and i...

Sarah Mellors Rodriguez, "Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

May 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

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 other media, she delves into the diverse attitudes, policies, and practices of birth control and...

Amanda Parrish Morgan, "Stroller" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

May 24, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutes

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, impossibly compact strollers for parents determined to travel internationally with pre-ambulatory chil...

Full Version: Lauren Fournier and McKenzie Wark on Autotheory

May 23, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

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 your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After the Pill: A Conversation with Mary Eberstadt

May 23, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutes

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 Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic information center in Washington, D.C., and is a ...

Srila Roy, "Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India" (Duke UP, 2022)

May 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

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 struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. R...

Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden: A Girl's Life in the Incredible String Band

May 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

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 Rose Simpson lived with the Incredible String Band (Mike Heron, Robin Williamson and Licorice Mc...

Rebecca Brückmann, "Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation" (U Georgia Press, 2021)

May 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

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. Rebecca Brückmann combines theory and detailed case studies to interrogate the “roles, actions, self-...

Christopher H. Evans, "Do Everything: The Biography of Frances Willard" (Oxford UP, 2022)

May 21, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutes

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 what she called "Do Everything" reform, Willard became a central figure in international movements i...

Julia Serano, "Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back" (Seal Press, 2022)

May 20, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutes

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 might recognize. She explores such questions as: Why do we perceive men as sexual predators and women...

Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism

May 19, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutes

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 memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends...

Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of The Fern Loved Gully

May 19, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutes

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 Colquhoun, situating her art within the magical contexts that shaped her imaginative life and work. Af...

America & Democracy Ep. 3: Carol A. Stabile on the Red Scare

May 18, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutes

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 American television and radio in the 1950s as part of a censorship program often referred to as the ...

Catherine Russell, "The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: Twenty-Six Short Essays on a Working Star" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

May 17, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutes

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 other aspects of filmmaking. But she also views the actress’s off-screen performance within the Holl...

Victoria Bateman, "Naked Feminism: Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty" (Polity Press, 2023)

May 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

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 words. She has appeared naked on national television, on stage, in art and at protests – using he...

Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, "Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women" (Sandycove, 2023)

May 16, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutes

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 were many, many young women who travelled on their own, hoping for a better life. Some lived live...

Kate Clancy, "Period: The Real Story of Menstruation" (Princeton UP, 2023)

May 15, 2023 08:00 - 28 minutes

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 have long defined the study of the uterus, exposing the eugenic history of gynecology while providi...

Kim E. Nielsen, "Money, Marriage, and Madness: The Life of Anna Ott" (U Illinois Press, 2020)

May 14, 2023 08:00 - 14 minutes

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 and unexceptional. Historical and institutional structures, like her whiteness and laws that libera...

Naomi McDougall Jones, "The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood" (Beacon, 2020)

May 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

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 Hollywood is a system built to keep them out. The films created by that system influence everything fr...

Leah Phillips, "Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction: Reframing Myths of Adolescent Girlhood" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

May 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

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 so equally- whiteness and able-bodiedness are taken as markers of heightened, fantasy femininity. ...

Timothy Sandefur, "Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Freedom in an Age of Darkness" (Cato Institute, 2022)

May 11, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutes

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 made her one of the nation's most important literary critics; Lane, a restless writer who secretly ...

The Everyday Feminist with Latanya Mapp Frett

May 11, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutes

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 informs and supports the thesis that countries and regions just do better when women are educated, for...

Fiona Gregory, "Actresses and Mental Illness: Histrionic Heroines" (Routledge, 2018)

May 09, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutes

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 working life, the force of her creative agency and the politics of her reception and representation....

Samantha Pickette, "Peak TV's Unapologetic Jewish Woman: Exploring Jewish Female Representation in Contemporary Television Comedy" (Lexington, 2022)

May 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

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 since its inception. Using case studies of streaming, cable, and network comedy series from the past ...

Rupal Oza, "Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India" (Duke UP, 2022)

May 06, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutes

In Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India (Duke UP, 2022), Rupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is not only a violation of the body but a language through which a range of issues—including caste and gender hierarchies, control over land and labor, and the shape of justice—are contested. Rather than focus on the laws governing rape, Oza closely examines rape charges to show how the victims and survivors of rape recla...

Elisabeth B. Armstrong, "Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949" (U California Press, 2023)

May 06, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutes

In 1949, women from across the world traveled to Beijing for the Asian Women’s Conference to discuss how to combat the dual threats of colonial rule and a new post-war global imperialism. These activists developed a groundbreaking political strategy, which assigned different roles to women living in colonial nations and those still colonized, arguing that both had a part to place in creating a more just global peace.  In Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of...

Shenila Khoja-Moolji, "Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality" (Oxford UP, 2023)

May 05, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutes

In her moving, sophisticated, and analytically groundbreaking new book Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford UP, 2023), Shenila Khoja-Moolji recounts and engages critical narratives of displacement and migration to examine the formation of religious communities. A central theme of this book is the idea of an Isma‘ili ethics of care, as Khoja-Moolji documents with meticulous care the powerful manifestations and consequences of everyday ...

Stéfanie von Hlatky, "Deploying Feminism: The Role of Gender in NATO Military Operations" (Oxford UP, 2022)

May 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

In 1995, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing launched the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. Successive UN Security Council resolutions highlighted the need to include more women in peace processes, the perpetration of gender-based violence during war, the underrepresentation of women as peacekeepers, and the need for greater diversity at all levels of governance to respond to international security challenges. These norms seemed clear, feminist, and ambitious.  Dr. Stéfanie...

Jo Littler, "Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political" (Lawrence Wishart, 2023)

May 01, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutes

What is the history and future of feminism? In Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political (Lawrence Wishart, 2023), Jo Littler, Professor of Social Analysis and Cultural Politics at City, University of London, collects almost a decade of interviews with key thinkers in contemporary feminism. United by a shared left feminist perspective, interviewees including Nancy Fraser, Akwugo Emejulu, Sheila Rowbotham, Hilary Wainwright, Wendy Brown and Angela McRobbie, reflect on their w...

Annie Zaleski, "Lady Gaga: Applause" (Palazzo Editions, 2022)

April 30, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutes

As one of the world's best-selling musicians, Lady Gaga has set the musical bar high. Since her debut album, The Fame (2008), she has sold more than 124 million records and scooped numerous awards, including twelve Grammy Awards and eighteen MTV Music Video Awards. Yet she is much more than a musician. At the helm of the Haus of Gaga--a close-knit circle of behind-the-scenes creatives--Lady Gaga is a performance artist like no other; her forward-thinking fashions and innovations mark her out ...

Downeast Maine and the Unseen Story of Rural America: A Conversation with Gigi Georges

April 28, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutes

Gigi Georges has had an extensive career in politics, public service, and academia. She joins Madison's Notes to discuss her new book, Downeast: Five Maine Girls and the Unseen Story of Rural America. Georges discusses rootedness, the importance of home, life in rural America, the double-edged sword of "Progress," and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The History of Contraception

April 27, 2023 19:35 - 15 minutes

An interview with Donna J. Drucker, author of Contraception, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. We discuss reproductive justice, the history of contraceptive technology and how the future of contraception can offer more choice and more freedom for every kind of person. The development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the late nineteenth century to the present, viewed from the perspective of reproductive justice. The beginning of the modern contraceptive era be...

Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman. "Feminists Reclaim Mentorship" (SUNY Press, 2023)

April 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives-- sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same old hierarchies and inequities. The stories gathered in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship (SUNY Press, 2023) challenge our fundamental assumptions about mentorship, illuminating the obstacles that make it difficult to connec...

Catherine Grant, "A Time of One's Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art" (Duke UP, 2022)

April 22, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutes

In A Time of One's Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art (Duke UP, 2022) Catherine Grant examines how contemporary feminist artists are turning to broad histories of feminism ranging from political organizing and artworks from the 1970s to queer art and activism in the 1990s. Exploring artworks from 2002 to 2017 by artists including Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, Pauline Boudry, and Renate Lorenz, Grant maps a revival of feminism that takes ...

Vanessa Wilkie, "A Woman of Influence: The Spectacular Rise of Alice Spencer in Tudor England" (Atria Books, 2023)

April 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

For readers of historical biography, meet Alice Spencer Stanley Egerton—the 16th century English noblewoman who was determined to bring her family into the upper strata of society. Born the daughter of an upstart sheep farmer in 1560, Alice’s marriages and maneuvers into and through aristocratic circles as well as the judicial system point to one clear example of a woman relying on her own influence to navigate a society that was not necessarily receptive women exercising power. Although Spen...

Kerri Lynn Stone, "Panes of the Glass Ceiling: The Unspoken Beliefs Behind the Law's Failure to Help Women Achieve Professional Parity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

April 21, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutes

More than fifty years of civil rights legislation and movements have not ended employment discrimination. Kerri Lynn Stone's Panes of the Glass Ceiling: The Unspoken Beliefs Behind the Law's Failure to Help Women Achieve Professional Parity (Cambridge UP, 2022) reframes the discourse about the "glass ceiling" that women face with respect to workplace inequality. It explores the unspoken, societally held beliefs that underlie and engender workplace behaviour and failures of the law, policy, an...

Reading

April 20, 2023 08:00 - 22 minutes

Swati Moitra explains how reading can be a subversive and even revolutionary act in certain socio-historical contexts. She draws especially from her own work in the history of women’s reading practices in nineteenth and early twentieth century India, in particular the region of Bengal. She talks about the dual indices of literacy and pleasure in her work, and its affiliations to fields like book history and print cultural studies. Swati Moitra (M.Phil., Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor at the De...

Shelly M. Jones, "Women Who Count: Honoring African American Women Mathematicians" (American Mathematical Society, 2019)

April 16, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutes

African-Americans and women are increasingly visible in professional mathematical institutions, organizations, and literature, expanding our mental models of the mathematics community. Yet early representation also matters: We begin building these models as soon as we begin seeing and doing mathematics, and they can be slow to adapt. In her wonderful activity book Women Who Count: Honoring African American Women Mathematicians (MAA Press, 2019), Dr. Shelly Jones invites children, and their pa...

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