New Books in Women's History

In her new book, Polly Plum: A Firm and Earnest Woman’s Advocate, Mary Ann Colclough, 1836–1885 (Otago University Press, 2017), Jenny Coleman, a senior lecturer and Director of Academic Programmes in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University, explores the life and letters of early New Zealand feminist Mary Ann Colclough, who wrote under the name Polly Plum. Coleman offers a biographical portrait of a too-long forgotten advocate for girls’ education, women’s rights and social reforms in New Zealand and around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Labeled in history as “mad,” Juana of Castile was in fact a complex figure whose sometimes emotional nature was exploited by the men around her as a way of limiting her ability to exercise her power as queen. Gillian B. Fleming’s Juana I: Legitimacy and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Castile (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), a volume in the publisher’s “Queenship and Power” series, examines the struggles she faced in ruling that were posed by her husband, her father, and her son. The second daughter of Fernando of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, the bright and willful Juana was raised to assume the traditional duties of a royal woman. It was the death of her brother Juan and her older sister Isabel of Aragon that placed her in line to succeed her mother. Though designated as the ruler of Castile in her mother’s will, when Isabel died in 1504, Juana soon found herself confined as part of a struggle between her father and her husband Philip, over control of Castile. As Fleming explains, many of the steps she undertook to assert herself during this time often played into the arguments made about her unsuitability for ruling, which became a recurring theme in the efforts to deny her rightful authority. Even after the deaths of first her husband and then her father, her son Charles continued her confinement as a means of ensuring his control over her kingdom, a confinement that continued until her death in 1555. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Veiled Superheroes: Islam, Feminism, and Popular Culture (Lexington Books, 2017) by Sophia Rose Arjana (with Kim Fox), takes us on a riveting journey through the world of superheroes and villains from the streets of New York to Pakistan. The book is a creative, masterful, and fascinating analysis of female Muslim superheroes in popular comic books and animation. Through the use of global examples, such as Ms. Marvel, Burka Avenger and Bloody Nasreen, just to name a few, Arjana engages her readers beyond reductive discussions of the veil, sexuality, and gender to highlight the ever-complex ways in which female Muslim superheroes can help us engage constructively with ideas of Islamic feminism, the Muslim female body, intersectionality, and even notions of violence. With supernatural powers, such through the mystical arts (i.e., Sufism), or human qualities of courage and bravery, the Muslimah superheroes featured in this study capture the real and complex lives of Muslim women globally, and the vast negotiations they have to contend with. In doing so, Arjana masterfully highlights that there is no singular Islamic feminist (or just Muslim) female experience. This book is a must read for anyone interested in religion, popular culture, and gender studies, while its accessibly written style, makes it an excellent resource for teaching religious, media, and gender studies for undergraduate students. M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Schoolhouse Wreck: The Betsy DeVos Story (Strong Arm Press, 2018), Jason Linkins delivers a searing critique of controversial Trump administration Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The book tracks the DeVos family’s accumulation of wealth through the multi-level marketing company Amway, which was founded by her Betsy DeVos’ father-in-law, and the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her book, Ugly Prey: An Innocent Woman and the Death Sentence That Scandalized Jazz Age Chicago (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi presents the story of Sabella Nitti, an Italian immigrant arrested in 1923 an accused of murdering her husband. Sabella was found guilty and became the first woman in Chicago sentenced to hang. Through meticulous research into court documents and other public records, Lucchesi shares the riveting narrative of Sabella’s case. Situating Sabella in the 1920s, and looking at the ways in which this case shows how the legal system set up to defend her failed Sabella at every turn, Lucchesi’s book walks readers through the trial where there was no evidence and no witnesses, but reporters and the jury knew one thing for certain, Sabella must be guilty: she was ugly. Describing how the press, judges, and juries decided the guilt or innocence of women based on their looks, Lucchesi examines how Sabella’s fellow inmates such as Beulah and Belva were able to charm their juries into acquitting them. She examines the role of Helen Cirese, the young lawyer who lead Sabella’s appeal giving her a jailhouse makeover in order to be more credible. Told with deep description, Ugly Prey makes sure that the story of Sabella Nitti is not lost. Instead, it is one that shows how the present day American justice system is not dissimilar to the system of the past in the ways that gender, class, and ethnicity are impact how individuals are treated throughout the justice system. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can war change women’s political mobilization? Using Rwanda and Bosnia as case studies Marie E. Berry answers these questions and more in her powerful new book, War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia Herzegovina (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Berry provides the reader with a solid history and background of how war came to be in each of these countries respectively. The book starts off by shedding light on the transformative nature of war and women’s political mobilization. Berry notes three major changes that are key throughout the book: demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. Starting with Rwanda, Berry sheds light on women’s roles as caregivers during and after the war, and how groups they formed for emotional support lead to starting programs and organizations. Moving to Bosnia, Berry lays out how this situation was similar and also different from Rwanda, noting, interestingly, that NGOs were basically non-existent there before the war. She concludes by noting the ways in which women mobilized politically but also the ways in which the changes that occurred have been limited by systemic issues like victim hierarchies or patriarchal backlash. Overall, the book is rich with information and written in a very clear, organized, and accessible way. The book will be enjoyed by anyone interested in women and war. Folks in sociology, political science, history, women’s studies, as well as those interested in Rwanda and Bosnia specifically, will find this book fascinating. This would fit well in a graduate level Sociology course and would be a solid anchor for a substantive class on women and war. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the impact of austerity on minority women? How has this impacted on already long standing forms of social inequality across England, France and Scotland? These questions are the subject of Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain (Policy Press, 2017), the new book from Dr. Leah Bassel, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Leicester, and Professor Akwugo Emejulu, a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick. The book foregrounds the narratives and understandings of minority women activists with regard to the current political moment. It challenges contemporary social policy analysis by using an intersectional approach to the impact of both state and third sector actions, as well as the political mobilizations associated with resistance. Drawing on a wealth of interview fieldwork, detailed policy analysis, and a deep but accessible theoretical framework, the book offers an important intervention on the failures of both right and left wing politics in response to the ongoing marginalization and poverty experienced by women of color. The book is an essential and important read for social policy, sociology, and politics scholars, as well as for anyone who seeks to understand the reality of the racialized and patriarchal contemporary state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the thrice-married widow of one of the richest dukes in Victorian Britain, Mary Mitchell lived a life often at variance with the expectations of propriety for her time. In The Life and Times of Mary, Dowager Duchess of Sutherland (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018), Catherine Layton goes beyond the headlines from her time to understand who Mary was and the world in which she lived. The daughter of an Oxford academic, Mary grew up in the interconnected world of the English elite. While her first marriage to an army captain proved unhappy, through it she encountered George Levenson-Gower, the fabulously wealthy third duke of Sutherland, a friend of the Prince of Wales who, like the future king, engaged in a series of extramarital affairs. Soon after her husband’s death in a shooting incident Mary became the duke’s mistress, marrying him within months of the duchess’s death in 1887. The duke’s own death in 1892 sparked a high-profile legal case that even led to Mary’s imprisonment for a brief period, yet the eventual settlement left her fabulously wealthy. Though married a third time to a Conservative politician, as Layton reveals, Mary’s subsequent separation from him before her death in 1912 and her final request to be buried next to the duke serve as conclusive evidence of where her heart ultimately lay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Keisha N. Blain teaches African American and gender and women’s history at the University of Pittsburg. Her book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) tells the story of an overlooked group of black women leaders in the aftermath of a declining Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist movement of the 1920s. Building on numerous religious and political ideologies, Garveyite women organized black workers from the Mississippi Delta to Harlem and built transnational alliances in the pursuit of global black liberation and nationalism. They followed strategies such the Greater Liberia Bill seeking funding from the U.S. government for black emigration to Africa. In doing so, they formed unlikely alliances and remained outside the established civil rights organizations tapping the frustrated aspirations of thousands of African Americans in mid-century America. Over a period of four decades, they never gave up on their dream of a return to Africa and building a black nation recognized on the international stage. Set the World on Fire, offers a continuous link between the nationalism of the Garvey movement and Black Power of the 1960s in which women were key. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Germany, beginning in the 1960s, a major population shift took place. The reason for it was the German guest worker program. Due to the German ‘economic miracle,’ the country was in growing need of cheap labor, and it found it in places like Turkey. Although it was assumed that these ‘guests’ would later on move back to their home countries, they unexpectedly often stayed in Germany, founded families and became Germans. In her new book Women Between Strange Cities (Interkulturelle Stadtnomadinnen: Inszenierungen weiblicher Flanerie- und Migrationserfahrung in der deutsch-türkischen und türkischen Gegenwartsliteratur am Beispiel von Aysel Özakın, Emine Sevgi Özdamar und Aslı Erdoğan [Königshausen & Neumann, 2017]), Jannica Budde, a postdoc at Paderborn University, analyzes German-Turkish as well as Turkish contemporary literature thus shedding some light on the German-Tukish-cultural relationship. Reading works from Aysel Özakın, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Aslı Erdoğan, she places particular emphasis on the female perspective. In Budde’s study, it becomes clear how German-Turkish and Turkish literature transcends stereotypical perceptions of Germany’s guest workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (University of Georgia Press, 2016), Lisa Ze Winters traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Gorée Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure’s centrality to the practices and production of diaspora, while engaging with issues of gender, theorized race and freedom, and identity. Lisa Ze Winters is an associate professor of African American Studies and English at Wayne State University, where she teaches African American literature, African diaspora studies, and Black Feminist thought. Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s nineteenth-century novel Iola Leroy has not always been considered a core text in the canon of African American literature. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, her work was dismissed as derivate and was erased by intellectuals until black feminist scholars such as Deborah McDowell and Hazel Carby undertook the crucial work of recuperating Harper’s writings and highlighting her important contributions to African American literature and history. Koritha Mitchell’s new critical edition of the book–Iola Leroy Or, Shadows Uplifted (Broadview Editions, 2018)—makes a timely contribution to the study of black literary and political history by contextualizing Harper’s life and work. In our contemporary moment where black women spearhead international movements for justice and equality such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too, but continue to be erased from public discourse and recognition, Mitchell’s foregrounding of Watkins Harper makes a crucial intervention in redressing the skewed narrative. Mitchell draws on the most recent scholarship and archival discoveries to provide a clearer picture of Watkins Harper and the importance of her novel then and now. Koritha Mitchell specializes in African American literature, racial violence throughout U.S. literature and contemporary culture, and black drama and performance. She examines how texts, both written and performed, have helped terrorized families and communities survive and thrive. Her study Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2011) won book awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her essay “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie” appears in the March 2012 issue of American Quarterly and her Callaloo journal article “Love in Action” draws parallels between racial violence at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today. She recently completed a book manuscript, “From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture.” For the most comprehensive picture of her current projects and activities, please visit Mitchell’s website. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Modeled on Bad Girls of Japan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press, 2017), edited by Nadia Yaqub and the late Rula Quawas stands apart from the edited volume crowd. It includes, not only academic entries, but personal essays and reflections on art by their artists, all centered on the theme of transgression, or to put it in the language of Bad Girls of the Arab World itself, bad girls. And there is no one bad girl. Some bad girls of the Arab world use their linguistic and cultural heritage to empower them, some rail against them. Some ally themselves with the West, some don’t think about the West and the East as binaries, but rather, apply a complicated, nuanced worldview to their universes. However, all are allotted their agency. Bad Girls of the Arab World will be a resource for students of the Middle East and the general public on gender and the Arab world. Nadia Yaqub is an associate professor at the Department of Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she is also chair of the Department of Asian Studies and adjunct associate professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She is also associate editor for film and theater at the Review of Middle East Studies, an editorial collective member with the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and an advisory board member with the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Her research interests include Arab cultural texts ranging from medieval literature and contemporary oral poetry to modern prose fiction and visual culture. She is the author of many articles and a book Pens, Swords, and the Springs of Art: The Oral Poetry Dueling of Palestinian Weddings in the Galilee (Brill Academic Publishers, 2006) and Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution will be coming out from University of Texas Press in July 2018. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pedagogue, composer, and conductor Nadia Boulanger was a central figure in Igor Stravinsky’s life during the middle part of his career, providing him with support, advice, and a discerning analytical and editorial voice when he was writing some of his most important compositions including the Symphony of Psalms and Persephone. Dr. Kimberly A. Francis has recently published two books related to the complicated and tangled relationship between these two people. The first, released in 2015 by Oxford University Press, is Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon. Just last month, Boydell and Brewer published Francis’s edition of their letters in Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence. In other hands, Teaching Stravinsky might have been a simple joint biography, but Francis grounds her work within a theoretical framework that promotes a new approach to musicology and other fields. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on cultural production, Francis reminds us that as long as musicologists insist on centering their scholarship on the lone composer/genius, someone who is almost always a man, we will miss how creative works are really a result of the complex interplay of networks of influence, and collaborators who participated in individual composers’ lives and music. She positions Boulanger as a participant in the cultural field of musical modernism, who used her position to influence Stravinsky’s compositions while also promoting and shaping his reputation as the premiere neo-classicist composer. At the center of Teaching Stravinsky is the long correspondence between Stravinsky, members of his family, and Boulanger which spans over forty years. In Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinkys, Francis edits and provides the English translation of most of the letters exchanged by the two friends providing readers not only the source material for her own work, but also an important resource for anyone interested in twentieth-century music. Both books have extensive companion websites. Perhaps most exciting in the Teaching Stravinsky website are the reproductions of pages from Stravinksy’s scores containing Boulanger’s comments with Francis’s explanations. The companion site for Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys holds all the letters in their original French. Kimberly A. Francis is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Guelph in Canada. Her work centers on twentieth and twenty-first century music and feminist musicology. She has published articles in many journals including The Musical Quarterly, Women and Music, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Her work has been recognized many times with awards such as a Glen Haydon Award for her dissertation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010, and the American Musicological Society’s Paul A. Pisk Prize and Teaching Fund Award. She was an International Fellow with the American Association of University Women. Her research has been supported by multiple grants including a General Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (20112013). She also serves as Editor-in Chief for the University of Guelph’s award-winning journal, Critical Voices: The University of Guelph Book Review Project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling (SUNY Press, 2017), Debarati Sen analyzes the paradoxes and promises of Fair Trade-organic tea production in Darjeeling, India. Based on more than a decade of feminist longitudinal ethnographic research, Sen investigates why independent women small farmers growing tea on their own land experience market-based social justice regimes like Fair Trade differently from women wage laborers in tea plantations. Simultaneously circumspect and hopeful of the extent and kind of empowerment Fair Trade can bring about, women workers nonetheless use sustainable development as a space to mobilize for more favorable intra-household relations, collective bargaining and access to resources. Everyday Sustainability received the Global Development Studies Book Award from the International Studies Association in 2018. Sen is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Conflict Management at the School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding and Development in Kennesaw State University. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite her prominent role in the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain, Christabel Pankhurst has not received the same degree of attention from scholars that had been given to her mother Emmeline or her sister Sylvia. In Christabel Pankhurst: A Biography (Routledge, 2018), June Purvis offers a thorough accounting of her life, revealing the full extent of her contribution to the campaign to win for women in Britain the right to vote. The eldest daughter of Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst, Christabel grew up in a household in which commitment to social reform was stressed as the highest value. Even before her graduation from university Christabel helped establish the Women’s Social and Political Union, which won national prominence through its pursuit of militant activism. Though Christabel’s activities forced her to move to France in 1912 in order to avoid arrest, she returned soon after the start of the First World War in order to support her nations war effort. Her belief that such support would earn women the vote partly validated in 1918 with a restricted extension of the franchise to women, yet her disillusionment with the conflict led Christabel to become a Second Adventist by the wars end. As Purvis details, the oratorical skills that made her such a successful campaigner for women’s suffrage were just as effective in her new role as a preacher, and she continued her efforts on behalf of her newfound faith to the end of her life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a believer in free thought, a campaigner for women’s rights, and as a supporter of abolition, Ernestine Rose had no shortage of causes to advocate. In The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (Oxford University Press, 2017), Bonnie Anderson explores the life of a remarkable 19th-century activist who dedicated herself to changing society for the better. Even as a young girl growing up in Russian-occupied Poland, Rose questioned the limitations imposed her by the beliefs of her time. As a teenager, she resisted the demands of her community and set out on her own by moving to Berlin. From there she made her way to London, where she encountered Robert Owen and embraced his philosophy. Upon her move to the United States in 1836 she became a public speaker and activist, working alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and others to change public opinion and advance reform. Though Rose saw her efforts to end slavery vindicated with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, ill health forced her to return to England just a few years later, where she continued to campaign for women’s suffrage up to the end of her long life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, in its numerous manifestations, continues to exert profound influence on the Jewish world, even as it undergoes pressure to change from both within and without. In Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism, and Women’s Equality (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Motti Inbari accesses recently obtained archival materials and personal correspondence in order to depict the dominant personalities of ultra-Orthodox movements from the late 19th through the 20th centuries, and ​how those movements continue to confront and resist modernity. Inbari, associate professor of religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, provides historical, psychological, and ideological perspectives on these complex and often competitive movements in Jewish religious life, in both Israel and the Diaspora. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 friendships that outlast the length of prison sentences, Muller’s work illustrates how female political prisoners adapted to and survived lengthy prison sentences for various “political” crimes. Muller discusses the interrogation process the women experienced, how they adapted to life behind bars, the records written by spies placed in the cells with the political prisoners, and how the women attempted to redefine themselves within an environment that controlled their daily lives. Muller’s work is a fascinating look at women as subjects in the Communist period of Polish history as well as a glimpse into women as subjects within the penal system. Dr. Muller is an Assistant Professor of history and the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professor in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is an adjunct history instructor and independent scholar near Houston, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 centuries to either social, political, or economic crises, Rapoport-Albert refuses to ignore the spiritual dimensions and efforts on the part Hasidism to renew religious practice. While others see a strict periodization in which there was a self-conscious founding and institutionalization, here we are given the sense of an organic pietistic movement informed by the Kabbalistic tradition but open to society rather than ascetic, and nurtured by a productive opposition. Moreover, rather than conceding to the common characterization of Hasidism as a folkish and populist movement, Hasidic Studies complicates this picture by uncovering a Hasidism that was shaped around its charismatic leaders. Throughout, the question of sources plays a central role, and rather than ignore as biased the attempts of Hasidim to write their own history, Rapoport-Albert excavates from these documents crucial evidence embedded unconsciously or matter-of-factly. The second half of the book attacks the apologetic representations of Hasidism as either egalitarian or proto-feminist – as giving women a new sense of “spiritual agency”—by showing them to be excluded from leadership as a rule and a family life divorced from traditional structures. Often Hasidism has been cast as a continuation of early modern heretical movements, particularly the messianic movement that arose around Sabbatai Zevi in the 17th and 18th centuries. However, Rapoport-Albert argues that Hasidism was in fact a retreat towards stricter traditional values, particularly regarding the prominent position given to women in the Sabbatean movement and its sexual mores. In Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbtai Zevi 1666 – 1816, a study of the life and afterlife of the messianic movement that arose around the messianic figure of Sabbtai Zevi, Rapoport-Albert sees female spirituality as its hallmark. Here women act as a key to the movement as a whole and in understanding its relationship to normative Judaism. The book suggests a movement with a feminist-like agenda in which women play an integral part of the messianic community—as leaders, prophets, and spiritual activists—in its reading into the nature of heresy, mysticism, and community in the early modern period. The two books are intertwined, not only thematically and as foils to one another, but by a methodological sophistication and sensitivity as well; Professor Rapoport-Albert presents a perspective deeply embedded in primary sources, that shines new light on modern Jewish history. Ada Rapoport-Albert is Emerita Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he sometimes wonders about the nature of political structures in the local cat community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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, 2017) is the first study to examine elocutionists who recited spoken word accompanied by music and proscribed movements that reflected the emotional meaning of the piece. Informed by archival sources gathered all over the country, Wilson Kimber engages with this practice through multiple lenses, including gender, race, and class as she untangles not only how elocution was performed, but also what it meant to its practitioners and audiences. She highlights important figures that some may know from other areas such as Kitty Cheatham, an advocate for and performer of African American spirituals, and the actress Fanny Kemble. However, most of the women she profiles were performers, entrepreneurs, and composers whose work has disappeared from public view as their artform fell out of favor. In addition to reciting in concert halls and for women’s clubs, professional elocutionists usually taught others and many founded their own schools in towns and cities throughout the United States. Their work helped create opportunities for women to move into professional occupations and contributed to twentieth-century conceptions of middle-class respectability. Dr. Wilson Kimber has videotaped several reconstructions of elocution performances which can be seen on her YouTube channel here. They are surprisingly humorous and address topics that people will recognize today including the pressure on women to dress fashionably, the excitement of a summer romance, and the aches and pains of aging. Learn more about The Elocutionists here. Marian Wilson Kimber is a professor in the School of Music at the University of Iowa. Her work centers on gender and music of the long nineteenth century in Germany and the United States. She has published articles on anti-Semitism in the reception of music by Felix Mendelssohn in The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History, the piano work of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel in The Journal of Musicological Research, and issues of feminist biography in the life of Fanny Hensel in Nineteenth–Century Music. The Elocutionists has been supported by subventions from the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society, as well as research funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. She is also an active member of the American Musicological Society and the University Iowa Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. 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 dictionaries (the tezkire genre), Havlioglu contextualizes Mihri and tries to understand her as a product of her own time and as someone who understood her multiple roles in society well enough to subvert them. Didem Havlioglu is Instructor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke. Her interests include Modern/Ottoman Language and Literature, Islamic Aesthetics, Women and Gender in the Middle East, Women Writers in the Intellectual History of the Middle East. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 research, Arce brings to the readers attention not only the legacy of these women, the spaces they inhabited, and their impact during different moments in history the colonial era, the Mexican revolution, the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1930s-1950s but also the complex relations they had with the government. The critical narrative of Arce challenges the nobodiness, [el ninguneo] that these women had underwent for a very long time. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, NYC campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 sojourn. After Freedman returned to the States, the pair kept in touch for a while but their contact became increasingly sporadic. However, it began again in earnest when the folklorist emailed Seeger to check some facts for a writing assignment. During their subsequent exchange, Seeger asked if Freedman might know of anyone who would be interested in writing her biography. Immediately, Freedman volunteered herself. Eight years, many interviews, and much text-based research later, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2017) is the result. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Freedman covers multiple aspects of her subject’s rich story, including Seeger’s upbringing within a privileged musical family; her relationship with the aforementioned leftwing folksinger and songwriter, actor and playwright Ewan MacColl; her involvement in the production of the groundbreaking BBC Radio Ballads; her musical endeavors, many of which were collaborative; her involvement in the establishment of various initiatives such as the Critics Group, a key aim of which was to help young singers perform folk material in an appropriate manner; and her political activism. Freedman also writes about Seeger’s return to America in the early 1990s following MacColl’s death, then her subsequent relocation to Britain in 2010 where she continues to live and be astonishingly active. Seeger’s most recent album, Everything Changes, was released in 2014, and when this New Books in Folklore interview with Freedman was recorded in March 2018, she already had another one in the works. Freedman’s Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics is the first full length study of an important cultural figure and has been very well received since its publication last year. A recent review in the Journal of Folklore Research described the book as offering a comprehensive overview of Peggy Seeger’s life along with an absorbing history of the folk music revival. It also praises Freedman’s prose for being as approachable and entertaining as Seeger’s lyrics and informal, intimate performance style. Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Garbhavakranti-sutra, or Descent of the Embryo Scripture. Using this text as her point of departure, and reading across a wide range of genres, Amy explores birth metaphors, the journey of the fetus, and the concepts of purity, auspiciousness, and disgust, showing how the Buddhist depiction of female bodies operated against a backdrop of earlier South Asian ideas. The Descent of the Embryo Scripture speaks to the human condition, but especially to the status of women, fertility, the female body, and mothers. Amy argues that this Buddhist depiction of women’s bodies as disgusting and impure opened the way for a different kind of femininity for Buddhist nuns. Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 asks the reader to contemplate the ways in which wraparound services may actually be aiding in wraparound incarceration for these young women. By taking a life course approach, Flores gives a rich understanding of how these young women end up in their current institutions, from early histories of abuse and drug problems, then investigates how their lives change upon incarceration. Often, these young women are constantly monitored and punished, with the alternative day school mirroring incarceration in many ways. Following a rich history of feminist research, Flores considers how the criminal justice system is gendered, why we consider women’s particular activities as deviant, and the intersectionality of race, class, and gender in the everyday lives of these young women. This book gives a clear, deep, and insightful picture of the lived experiences of this often hidden population. This book would be perfect for any undergraduate Criminology class, as the writing is clear and accessible to a wide audience. The stories of these young women would be compelling in any graduate level Criminology or Social Stratification class. This book is also a must-read for anyone working in either wrap-around services or in the prison system. Sarah E. Patterson is a Sociology postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 television programs that focused on the world of the professional chef. The media perpetually uses men as icons to market the hot and sexy field of being a chef in the professional kitchen. All the while, the work of women in the kitchen is discounted as a domestic role. This devaluation remains intact because of the exclusion of women in professional kitchens. This helps men maintain the legitimacy of the profession and perpetuates the appearance of home cooking as women’s domestic duty. Dr. Deborah A. Harris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas State University. She focuses her teachings on courses in the area of stratification and inequality, qualitative research methods, rural aging, and the sociology of food. Harris’s published research has addressed the impacts of welfare reform on low-income women and their families, as well as how the closing of military facilities affects local communities. Dr. Patti Giuffre is the Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Sociology at Texas State University. She focuses her teaching and research in the area of work and occupation, gender, sexuality, and qualitative methods. She has conducted research on sexual harassment, sexual orientation discrimination, and experiences of LGBT workers in gay-friendly workplaces. She is also an active member of the American Sociological Associations sections on Sex and Gender and Organizations, Occupations, and Work and of the Sociologists for Women in Society. Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, and proslavery literature—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica. Sasha Turner is an Associate Professor of History at Quinnipiac University, where she teaches courses on the Caribbean and the African Diaspora, women, piracy, colonialism, and slavery. Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 population who has often been left out of these cultural formations. Kemp focuses on the representation of first-generation Maghrebi women in France in documentaries, short films, feature films, and telefilms. Her analysis revolves around filmic textual analysis and the production, audience reception, and distribution of these art forms in contemporary French society. Kemp is attuned to filmic genre conventions, narrative structures, and formal techniques that media producers and artists use to both appeal to large mainstream audiences while challenging dominant stereotypes about Muslims. In our conversation we discussed views of North Africans in French society, means for recovering voice in film, the role of religion in French cinema, the mediation of subjects in documentary films, the role of objects in voicing difference, expressing agency of women protagonists, the goals of dialogue and voiceover versus body language or non-verbal communication, and film’s ability to challenge dominant stereotypes in France. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, 2017), expands our knowledge of the role of black women from the Depression-era development of Allah Temple of Islam in Detroit to the formal group known as the Nation of Islam that expanded under the leadership in the 1960s and 1970s of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Women like Clara Muhammad, Burnsteen Sharrieff, and Thelma X Muhammad were essential to the development of the Nation of Islam’s goal of creating a black nation within the American nation. The Promise of Patriarchy shows how black women created notions of black womanhood and black motherhood that best helped them deal with the daily indignities of living in Jim Crow America. Ula Yvette Taylor is Professor and H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Department Chair in the African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Adam X. McNeil is a graduating M.A. in History student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his Undergraduate History degree at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University University in 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 understanding of the process by which Carl’s famous treatise, On War, came to be. Vanya E. Bellinger, currently a visiting professor at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, argues that Marie was a crucial foil for the development of Carl’s ideas over many years. Marie’s connections to the Prussian court (she was born into the prominent von Bruhl family) also helped to secure her husband’s often precarious position. Bellinger freely acknowledges Carl’s military genius but places Marie alongside her husband as an intellectual partner and political confidante, who played an important role in bringing one of the most famous works of military theory to the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 associate professor of history and director of the graduate social science education programs at Western Carolina University. Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, Mothers of Massive Resistance explores the local workers who promoted the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow. In rural communities and cities, white women performed various duties that upheld segregation and racism: rejecting marriage certificates, deciding on the racial identity of neighbors, canvassing communities for votes, and lobbying elected officials. And the work of white women was not restricted to the South. McRae also shows how this politics of Massive Resistance to de-segregation and civil rights plays out in cities in the North. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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’s so original about Bucar’s contribution is that it emphasizes how women dress, versus simply what they wear. Bucar looks at bad style, new media, global fashion, and religious authority in an account that gives agency to the subjects. But the book isn’t simply about Muslim women, but all women and is at its best when reminding the reader how dress functions in their own society. Elizabeth Bucar is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Northeastern University. She was previously Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is a religious ethicist who studies sexuality, gender, and moral transformation within Islamic and Christian traditions and communities and she received her PhD in religious ethics from the University of Chicago. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton Universitys Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 is not psychological but rather considers it a system of social control. Manne brings a fresh analysis to our understanding of “misogyny” and the related term “sexism.” Misogyny is selective because it targets those who fail to uphold the patriarchal standards of a woman’s place in a masculine world and works as the policing and enforcement branch of the ideology of sexism. Women caught in “asymmetrical moral support” roles are expected to offer respect, deference, admiration, and gratitude to favorably situated men and provide, especially elite men, with comfort, care, and sexual and emotional labor in many different situations. Misogyny shows up in conversation; office politics; and the dispensation of favors flowing from a man’s relative status, wealth, or celebrity. Rewards come to those who comply. In this scenario, women act as human givers rather than full and equal human beings. Manne’s book is one for the moment. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 fiftieth anniversary. Ashley D. Farmer’s Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (University of North Carolina Press Press, 2017) increases scholarly and mainstream audiences’ knowledge of black women’s centrality in theorizing and organizing Black Power and black nationalist circles throughout the majority of the twentieth century. Not only does Farmer’s work push our grasp of the black women who influenced the Black Power Movement from within, but Remaking Black Power is also the first comprehensive study of black women’s intellectual production throughout the Black Power era. What makes Remaking Black Power such a compelling history is that it uses similar source material as prior scholars, but Farmer uses them much differently. Accessing untapped sources of cartoons, political manifestos, and political essays, Farmer asserts that they were important sites which redefined black womanhood and ultimately black thought in general. As the Black Power movement grew throughout the world, black women were central to the movement’s expansive visions of black freedom and political organizing. Ultimately, Remaking Black Power deepens our understanding of what black intellectual history is, and what groups are considered “intellectuals.” Ashley D. Farmer is a historian of black women’s history, intellectual history, and radical politics. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the African American Studies Program at Boston University. Farmer also is a leader of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and a regular blogger for Black Perspectives. Click here to read the introduction to Remaking Black Power. Ashley Farmer can be reached through Twitter at @drashleyfarmer Adam X. McNeil is a graduating M.A. in History student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his Undergraduate History degree at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University University in 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 attributes of the mind were tied to bodily and social concepts of female weakness and sentiment and male strength and reason. Beginning with the seventeenth-century salon culture of Paris, in which women were dominant and within an expanding commercial print culture, women and men conceptualized the gendered notions of what was required for polite conversation and intellectual agility. The exertion of labor was set against the desirability of the creativity and ease of play. La Vopa examines the works of multiple prominent thinkers and the positive recasting of the labor of the mind and who was qualified to engage in it. The author also shows how those engaged in debate attempted to live out their ideal for intellectual life. In course of a century and half, ideas about the nature of intellectual labor and the limits of the gendered mind formed the foundations of modernity. This episode of New Books in Intellectual History was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 conventional wisdom surrounding Boko Haram and women, most notably their presentation as victims lacking autonomy, and provides an insightful examination of these women who dominate much of Western perceptions of the African continent. Claiming that violence has been gendered during this conflict, Matfess provides a much needed reexamination of the nature of insurgency and the complexity of gender within Boko Haram. Hilary Matfess is a research analyst, a PhD student at Yale University in the Political Science Department, and a contributor to the Nigeria Social Violence Project at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Jacob Ivey is an Assistant Professor of History at the Florida Institute of Technology. His research centers largely on the British Colony of Natal, South Africa, most notably European and African systems of state control and defence during the colony’s formative period. He tweets @IveyHistorian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, ethnographer, oral historian, and prolific independent scholar Luisa Del Giudice, who is also the editor of the volume and the driving force behind it. The seed for the book began some years ago, when a career crisis led Del Giudice to question many aspects of her life. In the process, she developed an acute awareness of its often fragmented nature, a fragmentation exacerbated, if not caused, by an academic establishment that tends to looks askance on its members bringing any aspect of their personal lives, still less their spiritual beliefs, into their work. Del Giudice decided to push back against the resulting dichotomous state, which effectively pits the pursuit of knowledge (academia) against the pursuit of wisdom (spirituality). She contacted a number of women, most of whom she knew personally, and asked if they would be willing to provide written reflections on their lives to date often complex and multifaceted lives that encompassed a range of personal and professional identities. She encouraged each to describe how their existence has accrued meaning and purpose, as well as any spiritual leanings underpinning that process. The result is a kind of textual “Wise Women’s Circle.” It includes four folklorists (aside from Del Giudice herself, there is Mary Ellen Brown, Sabina Magliocco, and Christine Zinni) along with contributors whose professional backgrounds embrace a range of other scholarly disciplines, as well as practitioners of law, medicine, public health, and art. The spiritual and cultural leanings expressed are similarly diverse and include Catholicism, Paganism, Episcopalianism, Jungian Psychology, Judaism and Zen Buddhism. The paths of the women have often been shaped by societal and cultural expectations and institutional constraints. Despite the singular nature of each essay, a number of recurring themes emerge, not least the importance of cultural heritage, the challenges of combining a professional role with that of a domestic caregiver, workplace side-lining, the power of story-telling, and, perhaps most notably, an ongoing experience of existing within a creative, albeit uncomfortable, state of betwixt and betweeness. Del Giudice describes the contributors as “masters of bricolage and diverse resources who find meaning in lonely marginalized places, who struggle to weave together disparate aspects of life to make them meaningful” (23). All can speak to lessons learned, rewards gained, and the critical need for women’s voices to be heard. Overall, this collection is designed to inspire its readers to examine their own lives, to help them clarify their own sense of purpose, and then commit to fulfilling it, despite the obstacles which will surely arise. Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Taylor. Driven Toward Madness tells the story of how fugitive slave Margaret Garner and her family escaped to free Ohio in late January 1856, only to be captured in a cabin outside of Cincinnati. What happened as the Garner family were being apprehended is the climax of the story; Taylor shows what drove Margaret’s attempt to kill all four of her children, while only successfully doing so by way of decapitating her two year-old daughter Mary. Based in history, Taylor uses various theoretical frameworks like trauma studies, pain studies, black feminist theory, and literary criticism to broaden our understandings of the why surrounding Margaret Garner’s murder of her child. Taylor broadens popular understandings of black womanhood, resistance, and what are acceptable forms of gendered violence. In doing so, Taylor displays the ways antagonistic groups like abolitionists and pro-slavery activists both used Garner’s story for their own causes without necessarily recognizing Garner’s agency and humanity. Ultimately, Taylor expresses how far a person could go to protect their child from bondage, even if that meant taking their life so they reached freedom elsewhere. Author Nikki M. Taylor is Professor of History and History Department Chair at Howard University. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century African American History. Her sub-specialties are in Urban, African American Women, and Intellectual History. Adam McNeil is a graduating M.A. in History student at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and received his Undergraduate History degree at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, modest form of dress that wrapped around a woman’s head and body. She reads textiles like texts and challenges us to both read existing primary sources differently and seek out new primary sources. Khartoum at Night shows us how the centrality of the tobe shaped everyday life, but how the tobe itself was shaped by continuity and rupture in Sudanese society. What we have as a result is a story that gives agency to its actors and ultimately, the story of imperial Sudan. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1976, the landmark supreme court case Estelle v. Gamble, established that under the Eighth Amendment “deliberate indifference” to the health needs of incarcerated individuals was tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment. Now, jails and prisons are one of the rare places in the contemporary U.S. where healthcare is deemed a right and not a privilege. In her new ethnography Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women behind Bars (University of California Press, 2017), physician and Anthropologist, Carolyn Sufrin, examines what this means for incarcerated women when health care, coercion and violence coalesce. In addition to describing in detail how women experience healthcare and motherhood in custody, she offers us devastating diagnoses of how broken our current health and social safety nets are that women come to desire the cruel relative safety of jail. My conversation with Dr. Sufrin just begins to tackle the rich, beautiful and devastatingly complex lives of the women she encountered and cared for as both a clinician and social scientist. While an academic monograph, this book is accessible to scholars, activists and concerned citizens alike. Dana Greenfield, PhD is a medical anthropologist and an MD candidate at the University of California, San Francisco. Her dissertation explored how the quantified-self movement and digital health technologies are shaping new ways of deriving personal and medical meaning out of new forms of data. Next year, she will begin a residency in Pediatrics. She can be reached at [email protected], or on Twitter @DanaGfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks to Scott Straus, Leanne Fujii and others, we know quite a bit about how men behaved during the genocide in Rwanda. But we know surprisingly little about women’s actions during that crisis. Sara Brown begins to remedy this in her excellent new study Gender and Genocide in Rwanda: Women as Rescuers and Perpetrators (Routledge, 2017). Sara spent months interviewing Rwandan women. The result is a thoughtful analysis of the role gender played in facilitating or discouraging rescue and violence. As Brown says in the interview, she starts by asking the most basic question: how many, where, how? From there she moves on to examine the way women’s choices were rooted in a historical context in which a few women possessed power but many ordinary women found their choices and actions constrained. Brown highlights the way in which women were empowered by the context of genocide. Some used this opportunity to (attempt to) save lives. Others used it to loot, to demand violence, or even to kill or to rape. Brown ends her story by highlighting the way the same norms that had empowered, protected and betrayed women during the fighting shaped their lives after the genocide was over. It’s a sobering reminder of the power of gendered assumptions in the face of a breakdown of other social norms. This podcast is part of an occasional series on the genocide in Rwanda. The series began with an interview with Michael Barnett. Future interviews will feature Erin Jessee, Tim Longman, Herman Salton and others. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Beyond the Silver Screen: A History of Women, Filmmaking and Film Culture in Australia, 1920-1990 (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Mary Tomsic, an ARC Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Melbourne, explores the history of women’s engagement with filmmaking and film culture in Australia. From early women in film, like Lottie Lyell, to feminist filmmakers of the 1970s, Tomsic charts women’s involvement with film as political and cultural action. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Regine Jean-Charles’ Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014) foregrounds black women as speaking subjects in narrating and protesting sexual violence. Jean-Charles emphasizes a transnational black feminist framework that makes a critical intervention in rape cultural criticism. She contends in this work that taking rape as a starting point to theorize colonial and postcolonial violence provides a more effective way to understand the gendered contours of violence. Drawing on a range of primary sources including novels, photographs and films from Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Jean-Charles highlights the global implications of sexual violence and the importance of paying attention to its representation in order to rethink the very fundamental notions of human rights. Regine Michelle Jean-Charles is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College where she teaches classes on francophone literature, black feminisms, African film, and Haitian Studies. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Narratives of Resistance in the Francophone World examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Claudia Leeb’s new book, Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism: Toward a New Theory of the Political Subject (Oxford University Press, 2017), takes up pressing issues within contemporary political and feminist theory, especially as we consider the point of action and the instance of movement. This book marries together important questions within political theory, feminist theory, and economics with specific focus on the idea of subject and how an individual subject may be poised towards action, particularly in context of moving towards a more equitable political and economic system. Leeb’s book, which theorizes about the contested nature of the political subject, explores the concept of the political subject in outline as she has titled this theory. This reinterpretation of the political subject is as an incomplete political subject, given the contested interpretations of this concept in political theory, feminist theory, and psychological theory. The text goes on to examine key political and feminist theorists in framing the positioning of the political subject, putting Marx, Adorno, and Lacan and other Frankfurt School theorists into conversation with feminist theorists. Leeb, as a result of theorizing the capacity for action by the political subject in outline, explores the tension between theory and practice, noting this mediated relationship, and delving into why there is such tension between theory and practice, especially within the academe. The issue of transformative agency, especially a kind of intersectional transformative agency that integrates both feminist and economic impulses, is at the center of Leeb’s analysis and presses on some of the limits of theory as disconnected from the practice of politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrea L. Turpin is an Associate Professor of History at Baylor University. Her book, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837-1917 (Cornell University Press, 2017), begins with the early institutions of higher learning and the contest over the idea of separate and unique education. She examines the gender history of both private and state colleges. Evangelical Protestant commitments to personal conversions and missions fuel women’s higher education beyond rudimentary instructions preparing them for domestic life. The objective was a godly social order based on the individual relationship with God. After the Civil War the influence of religious liberals, increased emphasis on research and growing demands for women’s education instigated a reevaluation of the university’s role in moral preparation. Separate men’s, women’s and co-education institutions multiplied and moved toward seeking the public good in sex-specific ways. Women trained for social service professions; men for government and institutional leadership. The shift away from personal piety to gendered character formation and service to nation created increasingly rigid notions of separate male and female cultures in the public life of the Progressive Era. Turpin’s examination highlights the role of higher education in constructing the moral and gender map of a nation. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are your impressions when you think of the flapper? Who is she in your mind? When and where does she exist? In her new book Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper (Reaktion Books, 2017), Linda Simon tracks the historical narrative surrounding the flapper from the late-nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth century. Using sources from popular culture and from people of the time, Simon asserts that the image of the flapper did not appear out of a single historical moment but rather was invented over the decades. The flapper did not limit its impact to fashion and women’s attitudes, but also intersected with debates about race, immigration, politics, and the like. Simon’s book is an excellent and very accessible narrative on the flapper and will be of interest to anyone fascinated with gender and the history of the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century. Linda Simon is professor emerita of English at Skidmore College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices