New Books in Women's History

Calamity Jane was a celebrity of the 19th century American West, yet the woman portrayed in the newspapers and dime novels was one very different from the actual person. In The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), Richard Etulain sorts through over a century of fiction and half-truths to uncover who Calamity Jane was in real life. Born Martha Canary, she was orphaned at a young age and left to provide for her siblings. Working a variety of jobs, she came to Deadwood in 1876, where she soon received national press attention both for her unusual persona and her brief association with “Wild Bill” Hickok. Yet these accounts were usually more fabrication than fact, and often did not reflect the difficult circumstances of her life. Suffering from alcoholism, she lived an itinerant and unstable existence, one in which her drinking impeded her efforts to provide for herself and her daughter and led to her early death. Etulain’s biography gets to the truth of Calamity Jane’s life, as well as the development of her posthumous reputation in print, in movies, and on television. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the first substantive account of the birthplace of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Robyn C. Spencer’s The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Duke University Press, 2016) rewrites elitist accounts that narrowly defined the party by its male leaders and masculine militarism. With a panoramic and critical lens on the role that gender politics played in effecting and affecting the Revolution – an internal and external activist project of overcoming oppression – Spencer’s organisational history weaves the urban parameters of Oakland, California, into a national and international narrative of racial consciousness. A book that Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams, has said “tears down myths and distortions,” The Revolution Has Come traverses the BPP’s uncritical embrace of heteropatriachy in self-defense tactics, the dialectic relationship of state oppression and Black Women’s leadership of the party, the role of community programs in reshaping notions of masculinity and the personal toll of sexual double-standards in unspoken dating rules. Using archival and interview research that includes artwork, wiretap transcripts, poems, trial documents and the BPP’s newsletter, Spencer provides an example of historical scholarship that forefronts the voices and mouthpieces of the BPP to creates a unique intimacy with the “coming of age” of the men and women who set the groundwork for current iterations of Black resistance. In the words of Spencer herself, “this book is right on time,” and is necessary reading for activists and scholars alike who are attempting to define the gendered assumptions and history of strength, self-care and endurance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte was a celebrity in 19th century America thanks in no small measure to her brief marriage to Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother Jerome. In A Woman of Two Worlds: Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (Maryland Historical Society, 2016), Alexandra Deutsch draws upon the documents and artifacts Elizabeth’s family donated to describe her life. The daughter of a wealthy American merchant, her charm and beauty captivated Jerome, who married her in 1803 only to leave her and her unborn two years later at the emperors insistence. Though the Bonapartes sought to distance themselves from Elizabeth, she spent the next several decades doggedly fighting to win acceptance of her son and his children as members of the Bonaparte line, all while building a fortune of her own. Deutsch details these efforts by using Elizabeth’s possessions to describe the various ways in which she associated herself with the Bonaparte family, an effort that was every bit as important to her as the ongoing legal struggle to confirm her son’s legitimacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) by Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva casts a new look at the traditional representation of Russian women and village life in scholarship. Grounding the imagery of a Russian woman in the network of her relationship... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in 2013, in The New York Times, essayist Christy Wampole declared that we are in a moment of “the essayification of everything.” She noted how not only the genre, but also the genres inventor, Michel de Montaigne, seemed to be popping up everywhere and she saw the essay “a talisman of our times.” Why? What about the essay struck her as so current, so important? Wampole thought that “the genre and its spirit provide an alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary America.” The essay is the opposite of the rant, the polemic, the click-bait, the crude headline, and the stupid sound-byte. The essay invites complexity, contradiction, nuance–all of those qualities that mark the real experience of our public and private lives. Essays want to reckon with the rich immensity that is in us and is us. Now, if you’re like me and feel despair about the degree of dogmatic thinking that now dominates our social and political life in 2017, if you hate the fact that, say, a hastily composed tweet by a recently elected official can clog our public debate and prevent us from addressing issues that demand attention to complexity, contradiction, and nuance, then I encourage you to check out a new collection of essays edited by Marcia Aldrich. Its entitled Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women (University of Georgia Press, 2016) and includes many of the best essayists in America. In essays by Cheryl Strayed, Roxanne Gay, Dana Tommasino, and Aldrich herself, the essay achieves its fullest potential as Wampole described it in 2013. The essay’s spirit, she proclaimed, “resists closed-ended, hierarchical thinking and encourages both writer and reader to postpone their verdict on life. It is an invitation to maintain the elasticity of mind and to get comfortable with the worlds inherent ambivalence. And, most importantly, it is an imaginative rehearsal of what isn’t but could be.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic carte de visite portraits of herself at lectures and by mail. Cartes de visite, similar in format to calling cards, were relatively inexpensive collectibles that quickly became a new mode of mass communication. Despite being illiterate, Truth copyrighted her photographs in her name and added the caption “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. Sojourner Truth.” Featuring the largest collection of Truth’s photographs ever published, Enduring Truths: Sojourners Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is the first book to explore how she used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself. A Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California at Berkeley, the book’s author, Dr. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French and American art, visual and material culture, particularly in relation to the politics of race and colonialism. Dr. Grigsby writes on painting, sculpture, photography and engineering as well as the relationships among reproductive media and new technologies from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Dr. Grigsby is also the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including two Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowships, a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, a History of Art Undergraduate Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Art Historical Education, and The Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of California at Berkeley. Some of Dr. Grigsby’s previous works include Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France and Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal. In addition to her teaching, Dr. Grigsby is currently conducting research for a book project tentatively titled Creole Looking: Portraying France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century, which will examine France’s relationship to the Caribbean and Americas. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the eve of the 2016 election, it is worth reflecting on the history of women’s voting. Up to this weighty task is a new book by J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht. They are the authors of Counting Women’s Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Corder is professor of political science at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and Wolbrecht is associate professor of political science and director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. Textbooks have long given scant details of how the first women voters turned out at the polls. Corder and Wolbrecht compile new data and methods to provide nuance and detail to this issue. What they find is that women’s voting patterns varied greatly by political context. Where women lived, the parties they supported, and the competitiveness of elections related to strongly to turn out. Because context mattered so much, women intensified partisan differences in some parts of the country, while they introduced dramatic new dynamics in others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

LaShawn Harris is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. Sex Workers, Psychics and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, (University of Illinois Press, 2016) offers a colorful look at the lives of black urban women who worked and lived in the space between the legitimate and illegal economy. Her subjects are women not previously considered in histories of the working class: mothers, single ladies, churchwomen, hustlers, and partygoers who worked in the underground economy. Motivated by many factors, they sought economic autonomy, to provide for their families, or individual pleasure and fulfillment. The underground economy offered women a break from middle class respectability and opportunities to forge complex identities of self-sufficiency and an escape from the confines of New Negro womanhood. Working outside the wage system in illegal gaming, sex work or as supernatural consultants, they experienced the dangers and thrill of illicit trade, and challenged black progressive crusaders and promoters of racial uplift. As entrepreneurs and cultural produces, they reinforced and reconfigured the race, gender and class hierarchies of black urban life. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Moran’s Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (University of Georgia Press, 2016) provides a compelling investigation of how O’Connor’s initial reputation of a Southern female writer over the years evolved into her status of great American writer. The subtitle of the book–Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers–hints at a variety of details contributing to a literary multilayered portrait. In his research, Dr. Moran considers a number of critical reviews, readers reactions, and publishers commercial decisions while following the trajectory of O’Connor’s reputation. In the introduction, Dr. Moran notes that his book is “less a work of literary criticism than of a book history and cultural analysis” (9). His research invites a discussion of how the perception of literary texts is (or can be) shaped through conversations about them. Creating Flannery O’Connor draws on the theory of “rules of notice”–readers are supplied with keys to read and understand literary works and instigates a number of questions, which Dr. Moran addresses while de-constructing O’Connor’s portrait. Who identifies” rules of notice?” How, if at all, do they change? What do they inform about texts and their authors? If the initial reputation of O’Connor was primarily shaped by critical reviews, as years and decades elapsed since the publication of her early writings the environment that surrounds, absorbs, and modifies O’Connor’s works has, undoubtedly, significantly changed. To his survey of reputation production media, Dr. Moran adds the film industry and online resources: each domain presents O’Connor’s works from a different perspective. Through the de-construction of O’Connor’s literary portrait that has been created over decades through a number of venues, Dr. Moran re-creates a new version: elusive, fluid, and changing. Daniel Moran teaches history at Monmouth University; he has taught English at Rutgers University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jelena Batinic’s Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2015) examines the role women played in the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance. By placing gender and gender relations at the forefront of her analysis, Batinic provides insightful history of a unique phenomenon—guerrilla warfare in which tens of thousands of women took direct military roles. Based on vast amount of archival sources, Batinic demonstrated how gender was the main organising force of the Partisan movement. In this interview, we have talked about the main arguments of the book, particularly focusing on gender relations within the movement. Additionally, the interview will also introduce our listeners to the Balkan conflict during the Second World War and explore how and why the remarkable story of the Partisan women fell into oblivion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James D. Boys is the author of Hillary Rising: The Politics, Persona, and Policies of a New American Dynasty (Biteback Publishing, 2016). Boys is an associate professor of international political studies at Richmond University. Just in time for the election, Hillary Rising explores the full biography of Hillary Clinton. Boys draws on original interviews with close associates of Hillary Clinton, in addition to much recently declassified materials from the Clinton archive. For those who havent made up their mind, Hillary Rising provides one more piece of information. For those who know the biography, there is considerable to be learned about the political education and career path Clinton travelled to the 2016 election. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sister Mary Corita, IHM (1918-1986), was a beloved artist and teacher whose role as the rebel nun continues to inspire contemporary audiences. Corita joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 when she was just eighteen years old, and soon after became an initially reluctant Art teacher at Immaculate Heart College. Corita remained part of the community on Franklin and Western Avenues in Hollywood until 1968 when Los Angeles archbishop Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, and other conservatives, targeted the orders reformist ways. Corita’s Pop Art styled prints celebrating the presence of God in the most ordinary of everyday subjects (Mary is the juiciest tomato of all) drew the ire of McIntyre in particular. At age fifty, she took one of many unconventional steps and left the order to start life anew as an independent woman. In Corita Kent: Art and Soul: The Biography (Angel City Press, 2015), April Dammann traces Corita’s path as an artist and religious woman who participated in the heady scene of the Los Angeles art world in the 1960s while engaging her own devout spirituality at the same time. Coritas journey into printmaking took her beyond the confines of the college to the world of the most famous artists and designers in Los Angeles including Charles Eames, John Cage, Edward Kienholz, and Tony Duquette. She interacted with Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and other members of Los Angeles literary avant-garde. Clad in her nuns habit, Corita was more than a picturesque observer of the scene, however. Her highly refined silkscreens combining word and image with meticulously placed colors transformed the medium. She culled subject matter from the ideas of thinkers and social commentators ranging from Goethe to Isaiah, to John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and radical priest and soul mate Daniel Berrigen. Corita’s students, many of whose voices color Dammann’s carefully researched book, were beneficiaries of Corita’s aesthetic and intellectual explorations. As we reconsider the life of Corita Kent, we are confronted, in the quiet yet powerful manner of the artist herself, with a woman whose contributions to the radical forms of the 1960s are immense. Kirstin L. Ellsworth has a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University (2005) and currently, is an Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hill. Email: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The life of the German-born, pioneering American psychoanalyst, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, is intriguing enough in itself, but in the biography, To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (Other Books, 2005), we learn that Fromm-Reichmann played an integral role in mid-century psychoanalysis. In this interview, with the author, psychologist, and historian, Gail Hornstein, we trace not only Fromm Reichmann’s many accomplishments, but also the history of Chestnut Lodge where she worked for many years, her relationships with Erich Fromm and Harold Searles, as well as the cultural impact of the book written by her patient Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden. To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World is essential reading for anyone interested not only in the history of American psychoanalysis, but also psychoanalysis in general. You can find Chris Bandini on Twitter @cebandini. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ellen Widmer’s new book tells a story of the life and work of a literary family in China, in order to open out into a fascinating discussion of the ramifications of that story for how we understand and produce relationships between fiction and history. Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marisa J. Fuentes’, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) is an important new book that challenges historians to think more carefully about the methods and categories with which they have described and analyzed slavery. Marisa Fuentes uses fragmentary evidence about five enslaved women... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent controversies surrounding sexual harassment and assault on college campuses have sparked heated discussions surrounding the everyday experiences of women on college campuses. Female students and faculty members have often felt at odds with their institutions and other members of their workplaces when sexual harassment and assault enter the work environment. What is one to do when experiencing gender-based discrimination in the academic workplace? Ellen Mayock in her recent book Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) seeks to put a name to the phenomenon that many women in academia face as well as provide solutions to institutional failures that allow for these experiences of harassment and assault to occur. Drawing upon feminist theory, linguistics, and the power of personal narratives, Mayock discusses how gender shrapnel occurs in the academic workplace. The later chapters of the book provide very tangible solutions to gender shrapnel that individuals and institutions can embark upon in order to curb the instances of gender shrapnel in academia. Ellen Mayock is currently the Ernest Williams II Professor of Romance Languages within the Department of Romance Languages at Washington and Lee University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Anyone can make a difference. Find a problem, get some friends together, and go fix it. Remember you don’t have to change the world, just change your world.” –Joan Trumpauer Mulholland In the early 1960s, in the segregated South, a white teenager, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, made a conscientious decision to join the Civil Rights struggle. In doing so she put her life at risk, but given her family history (the first relative to come to America did so as an indentured servant in the 1600s; her grandmother was a suffragette) she could not sit idly by as blacks were treated like second-class citizens. She organized non-violent sit-ins, attended a predominately black college, and participated in protests including the March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery March. She was arrested and held on death row; she was spit on, dragged off her stool and threatened with violence at a Woolworths lunch counter sit-in, yet she never relented. Now readers of all ages can learn more about this extraordinary woman in She Stood for Freedom: The Untold Story of a Civil Rights Hero, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland (Shadow Mountain, 2016). The picture book is for ages 4 to 8; the illustrated biography is for ages 8 and older and includes primary source photographs and documents from the period. She Stood for Freedom has been nominated for the 2017 Amelia Bloomer Award, part of the American Library Association’s Task Force on Social Responsibility recognizing the best feminist books for young readers that “affirm positive roles for girls and women.” Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ellen Fitzpatrick is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Her book The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (Harvard University Press, 2016) provides the story of three women, out of over two hundred women, who pursued the presidency. In the nineteenth century, when women were denied the vote, the self-made Victoria Woodhull, a political and religious outsider, ran on a platform of change and reform. In the 1940s, the pragmatic Republican Margaret Chase Smith entered politics as the result of the “widow’s mandate.” She stayed in Congress for over two decades and ran for president in 1964. The Democrat Shirley Chisholm took on the double jeopardy of running as the first black woman to seek the presidency in 1972. Her grassroots base included black community activists and feminists. All three women faced structural obstacles rather than lack of grit. Hillary Clinton’s presidential run in 2008 would again challenge the American resistance to breaking the highest glass ceiling and demonstrated how much and how little the prospects for a woman president had changed. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carol McCabe Booker is a Washington, D.C. attorney and former journalist. In the 1960s and 70s, she covered civil rights for the Voice of America, freelanced articles for The Washington Post, Readers Digest, Ebony, Jet, and Black Stars, and reported from Africa, including the Nigerian warfront, for Westinghouse Broadcasting stations. After retiring in 2008, she helped her husband, journalist Simeon Booker, write Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement, which received widespread critical acclaim following its publication by the University Press of Mississippi. After Simeon and trailblazing reporter Alice Dunnigan were inducted into the black journalists Hall of Fame in 2013, Carol tracked down Dunnigan’s out-of-print autobiography to recover her fascinating story for a modern audience. The daughter of a sharecropper born in rural Kentucky, Dunnigan went on to become the first African American female reporter accredited by the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Senate, and fashioned an illustrious career in journalism and politics in the nation’s capital. Alone Atop The Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press (University of Georgia Press, 2015) is an updated, annotated edition of a classic yet forgotten memoir which illustrates how Dunnigan overcame race and gender barriers to break into the highest echelons of the national press. James West is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. His research focuses on African American business enterprise and print culture, with a particular interest in Chicago. His current book project examines the role of EBONY magazine as an outlet for popular black history. He tweets @chitownanddown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Among the achievements of Irish medicine in the twentieth century was ending the persistent epidemic of tuberculosis throughout the island, and one of the central figures in that effort was Dorothy Stopford Price. In her book Dorothy Stopford Price: Rebel Doctor (Irish Academic Press, 2014), Anne Mac Lellan provides readers with an account of the life of a pioneering MD and medical researcher. The daughter of an Anglo-Irish family, she trained as a doctor while Ireland participated in a world war and fought for its independence. As a member of Cumann na mBan, she provided medical care for members of the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence against the British. Following the war, she became a pediatrician, in which capacity she developed her interest in the tuberculosis vaccine BCG then being introduced in Europe. As Dr. Mac Lellan demonstrates, Price’s tireless championing of tuberculosis vaccination in the 1930s and 1940s played a key role in winning acceptance for both the vaccine and the nationwide campaign that ended the scourge of the disease in Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band (PM Press, 2016), Michelle Cruz Gonzales tells her story as a member of a feminist hardcore punk band. The band, Spitboy, emerged in the early 90s in the Bay Areapunk scene. The book provides an insider’s view of the scene, what it was like touring, and how a young Xicana found herself in a genre of music that typically identifies itself as male and white. Gonzales reflects on the gender and racial politics that shaped punk music and explores her political and racial awakening while performing in the band. She discusses how audiences responded to an all-women band and the roots of Spitboy’s conflict with the riot Grrrl bands. The Spitboy Rule is an unflinchingly honest look at Gonzales’s life in Spitboy and offers tremendous insight into the 90s punk scene. The podcast delves deep into all of these questions and explores Gonzalez’s recent career as a professor and writer. Michelle Cruz Gonzales writes memoir and fiction and teaches English at Las Positas College. Born in East LA in 1969, MCG grew up in Tuolumne, a tiny California Gold Rush town. She played drums and wrote lyrics for three bands during the 1980s and 1990s: Bitch Fight, Spitboy, and Instant Girl. Gonzales currently lives in Oakland, California with her family. She blogs at https://pretty-bold-mexican-girl.com and some of her solo music can be heard at https://soundcloud.com/michelle-gonzales-52. Richard Schur, Professor of English at Drury University, is the host for this podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

April R. Haynes is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth- Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Haynes shows how the campaign against masturbation redefined women’s sexuality and reformulated the battle for political rights. Beginning with Sylvester Graham’s “Lecture to Mothers” to reform-minded women to the black abolitionists Sarah Mapps Douglas’s sex education lectures to African American women, masturbation became a topic with both gender and racial import. After a long history of neglect, it became tied to issues of purity, virtue and self-government. Through women reformers the proscriptions against masturbation were popularized and institutionalized. Haynes sheds light on the continued attention given to masturbation in American culture and the women’s movement, demonstrating its political significance. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cassandra A. Good is the Associate Editor of the Papers of James Monroe at the University of Mary Washington. Her book Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a historical examination of the cross-gender friendships that formed against great social odds and popular opinion that held that these relationships were highly irregular and impossible to maintain chaste. Beginning with the relationships of Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson; Eloise Richards Payne and William Ellery Channing; Charles Greely Loring and Mary Pierce and their elite circle, Good explores the depth of feelings, the language and tokens of love, issues of propriety, and the social and political risks of cross-gender friendship. These complicated relationships embodied the essential republican values of equality, freedom, choice, and virtue and challenged marriage as the ultimate human connection. Through her historical work, Good offers an opportunity to rethink the ways cross-gender friendships remain problematic. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) considers a wide range of issues that are both specific to the particular history of hysteria, and more broadly applicable to the history medicine. Arnaud pays special attention to the role played by language in the definition of any medical category, basing her analysis on a masterful analysis of a spectrum of written medical genres (including dialogue, autobiography, correspondence, narrative, and polemic) that have largely been forgotten by the history of medicine. Arnaud asks, “What made it possible to view dozens of different diagnoses as variants of a single pathology, hysteria?” The answer can be found in a long process of rewriting and negotiation over the definition of these diagnoses enabled this retrospective assimilation, which was driven by enormously diverse political and epistemological stakes. In a series of fascinating chapters, the book interweaves the history of hysteria with studies of gender, class, literature, metaphor, narrative, and and religion. It’s an expertly-researched and compellingly-written account that will amply reward readers interested in the histories of medicine and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks to the writings of Procopius and other detractors, the Byzantine empress Theodora (c. 495-548 CE) has long been viewed as a depraved and spiteful woman who was a negative influence on her husband Justinian. In his new book Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint (Oxford University Press, 2015), historian David Potter draws upon a wide range of sources to offer a very different view of her life and times. From relatively humble beginnings she became a successful actress and the mistress of a powerful Byzantine official. After being abandoned by her lover, she caught the attention of Justinian, who married her in spite of the risk that doing so posed to his chances of becoming emperor. Once she became empress in 527, she not only undertook the considerable duties of empress but served as well as an influential adviser to her husband, shaping the politics, religion, and society of her age. By setting her into the context of 6th century Byzantium, Potter fills in many of the gaps in our understanding of Theodora, showing in the process just how remarkable she was as both a person and as a leader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a trailblazing attorney, Bessie Margolin lived a life of exceptional achievement. At a time when the legal profession consisted almost entirely of men, she earned the esteem of her colleagues and rose to become one of the most successful Supreme Court advocates of her era. Doing so, as Marlene Trestman demonstrates in Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin (Louisiana State University Press, 2016), required overcoming not just the ingrained assumptions that men had towards professional women during that time but also the poverty of her early childhood and the loss of her mother when Margolin was only three years old. As Trestman reveals, Margolin exploited to the full the opportunities she was given as a ward of the Jewish Orphans Home in New Orleans, which provided her with a comfortable upbringing and a good education. From Newcomb College and Tulane University, Margolin went on to a fellowship at Yale University and a career in the federal government, which she began by participating in the defense of some of the most important laws to come out of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program and concluded by championing measures mandating equal pay and opposing age discrimination. And yet Trestman shows that for all of the sacrifices she made to establish a career for herself, Margolin did so on her own terms and in a way that many Americans can relate to today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are solutions to marital problems always best solved through legal means? Should alternative dispute resolutions be celebrated? In her latest book The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India (University of California Press, 2015) Srimati Basu answers such questions and many more through explorations of ‘lawyer free’ courts and questions surrounding understandings of domestic violence, analyses of the way rape intersects with marriage and how kinship systems change with legal disputes and by delineating the most important acts that frame marriage law in India. Theoretically and politically astute the book offers an ethnographic insight into legal sites of marriage trouble in India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Women’s history, if they had any, consisted in their being beautiful enough to become events in male lives,” the feminist academic Carolyn R. Heilbrun noted in a series of 1997 lectures, suggesting the need for new narratives and new ways of writing women’s lives. Brooke Hauser‘s Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman is an exciting new entry into group of books that have emerged in the last few years to offer provocative and innovative biographical readings of women’s lives (Kate Bolick’s Spinster, for example). In Enter Helen, Hauser contextualizes Helen Gurley Brown’s experience, demonstrating how the times in which she lived affected her and she, in turn, affected them. In many ways a misfit, Gurley Brown’s approach made many in the women’s movement uneasy. Rather than arguing for the overthrow of the patriarchy, she advocated that women use everything at their disposal to make it in a man’s world. Advice that might ring a little retro, it was nonetheless well intentioned. And, in a long career devoted to the advancement of women, Gurley Brown worked tirelessly to make visible narratives that might otherwise have remained unavailable to her readers. She did not think she was beautiful and her life was far more than an event in the life of a man. It was the main event, and it’s a life whose impact continues to be felt to this day- particularly in the magazine and advertising industries but also in the lives of single women discovering and re-discovering her classic book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First things first: Matthew H. Sommer‘s new book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the history of China and/or the history of gender. Based on 1200 legal cases from the central and local archives of the Qing dynasty, and focusing on the rural poor rather than the elite,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter L. Laurence is an associate professor of urban design, history and theory at Clemson University School of Architecture. His book Becoming Jane Jacobs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) is an intellectual biography of the architecture critic and neo-functionist Jane Jacobs and how she came to write the 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Beginning with Jacobs’s arrival in New York City in 1934 with only a high school diploma and writing aspirations Laurence follows her career to the pages of Architectural Forum under the editorial direction of Douglas Haskell. At the magazine she honed her critical skills and was exposed to the latest in urban design and renewal working with leading architects and planners. Laurence argues that there are persistent myths about Jacobs, including her status as a housewife and an amateur urban activist who surprisingly wrote a classic, or a genius. Rather, Jacobs transformed herself into a sophisticated critic influenced by the ideas of a wide circle of intellectuals and wrote a great deal before and after her most well known work. Death and Life of Great American Cities synthesized many previous ideas and proposed a new way to think about cities that considered the social networks and perspective of the person on the street rather than top-down planning that disregarded the human element for efficiency and form. Her vision for the city was of a living system with flexibility, creativity, and diversity offering a sense of connection by mixing the old and the new. Laurence offers not only the evolution of Jacobs’s ideas but also the ways mid-century intellectuals conceived of the cities we now live in. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“There still exists little organized sense of what a woman’s biography or autobiography should look like,” Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote in her 1988 classic, Writing A Woman’s Life, noting, “Even less has been told of the life of the unmarried woman.” One can only hope that Kate Bolick‘s Spinster is a sign that, nearly thirty years later, the circumstances Heilbrun described are, at long last, about to change. Bolick burst onto the national scene when her article in The Atlantic, entitled “All the Single Ladies,” went viral in November 2011. But Spinster is a departure from her reportage rather than a continuation or a sequel– a biographical/autobiographical/sociological mash-up that is engaging, observant, and fiercely critical. Examining the socio-historical phenomenon of the feme sole, Bolick mines her own experiences and the lives she’s read about to examine how, as Heilbrun suggested, we use the stories of other lives to navigate our own. “Taken together,” Bolick writes of the people whose lives interested her, “they were a dynasty of adopted uncles and aunts adults who weren’t my parents who opened portals to lives I couldn’t have imagined until they showed me how.” This is a process of which we are often unconscious as it’s happening, but which becomes visible in hindsight. It is also, I believe, one of the great values of reading biography: the ability of these stories of other people’s lives to open possibilities within our own. It’s a dynamic not limited to stories of the lives of women, but it does appear to hold particular resonance for female readers, perhaps due to the relative cultural scarcity of representations of unconventional female lives. In her quest to become a writer, Bolick notes, “Maeve Brennan served a psychological purpose for me. By climbing into her point of view and trying it on for size I was cobbling together a template for my own future.” Spinster provides compelling evidence of both the personal and collective power of stories and our use of them. It also reveals something of the life of the unmarried woman, elegantly illuminating an experience that has, up to now, been culturally undervalued and, often, biographically ignored. Oline Eaton is a doctoral researcher at King’s College London. She is writing a biography of Jackie Onassis and has written extensively on the subjects of biography, celebrity, and gossip, and the flow of stories through culture. Her work can be found at FindingJackie.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth A. Wilson‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of science studies and feminist theory. In its introduction, Gut Feminism (Duke University Press, 2015) lays out two major ambitions: it seeks “some feminist theoretical gain in relation to how biological data can be used to think about minded and bodily states,” and seeks “some feminist theoretical gain in relation to thinking about the hostility intrinsic to our politics.” The book shows that the gut is an organ of the mind via an exploration of melancholia, depression, some fascinating psychoanalytic literature, and contemporary conversations and debates about psychopharmaceuticals. Wilson’s book unflattens biology, offering an incredibly helpful way to think about anatomy as an ever-changing site of entanglement that enacts “malleability, heterogeneity, friction, and unpredictability.” Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode features Michelle Chase, who joins us to discuss her fascinating new book, Revolution Within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). The book is a rich and nuanced history of women’s participation in the movements of resistance that began in the immediate aftermath of Fulgencio Batista’s coup d’etat in 1952—resistance that culminated in the overthrow of Batista in the Cuban revolution of 1959. Eschewing both official top-down narratives of women’s liberation as well as anti-communist accounts of women’s cooptation, Revolution Within the Revolution demonstrates that women’s activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process. It also centers urban activism in the years leading up to the Cuban Revolution, and reveals how focusing on the city changes our understanding of how the Revolution evolved and triumphed. What’s more, the book is also a history of how notions of gender roles in Cuba at midcentury—questions of marriage and family, of masculinity and femininity—were both defined by and came to define the revolutionary moment, dialectically shaping the strategy of both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, men and women alike. Michelle Chase is an Assistant Professor of History at Bloomfield College, where she teaches courses on Latin American and Caribbean History and World History. You can follow her on Twitter at @michaymicha. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Domna Stanton‘s latest book The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: Women Writ, Women Writing (Ashgate, 2014) is a series of six case studies with important literary, historical, and theoretical implications for how we think about gender in the seventeenth century and beyond. In two parts, the first focused on male and the second focused on female writers in this period, the book examines critically key works by Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre, La Guette, La Fayette and Sévigné. In close readings that situate authors and texts within a broader historical context, Stanton examines gender as a dynamic, relational construct across multiple genres, including drama in its comic and tragic forms, letters, treatise, novella, and memoir. Departing from the premise that the querelle des femmes must also be understood as a querelle des hommes, The Dynamics of Gender is concerned throughout with women and men, femininity and masculinity, writers and the written-about. Drawing on and engaging with the critical theoretical work and insights of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, The Dynamics of Gender makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how gender and power work and shift in and across texts and time. This is a book about bodies and/of writing that pursues important questions about what it meant to write as men and women historically, and about what “reading-as-a-feminist” might mean into the present and future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pakistan is often caricatured and stereotyped as a volatile nuclear country on the precipice of disaster. Such depictions are often especially acerbic when comes to the issue of Women’s rights in the country. In her important new book, Interpreting Islam, Modernity, and Women’s Rights in Pakistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Anita Weiss, Professor of International Studies at the University of Oregon, provides a much-needed corrective to such sensationalist stereotypes. By exploring how multiple state and non-state actors have engaged the question of gender and women’s rights over time and space, Weiss demonstrates ways in which a diversity of voices in Pakistan conduct what she calls “everyday Ijtihad,” thus offering a much more nuanced and informed perspective. In our conversation, we talked about a range of issues such as the history of the Pakistani state’s approach towards defining and engaging women’s rights, the role of Progressive NGOs like the Aurat Foundation, Orthodox Islamist voices on this question, and the Tehrik-i Taliban in Swat. This lucidly written book contains a plethora of useful information and analysis for specialists and non-specialists alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hildegard of Bingen was many things: a religious leader, a prolific letter-writer, a visionary prophet, possibly a compiler of medical lore, and certainly one of the most important composers of the 12th century. In recent years, Hildegard’s reception in academic circles has, for good and compelling reasons, focused on her status as a powerful, educated, and brilliantly creative woman in an era when few women were afforded such opportunities. But this has not been Hildegard’s only legacy. Jennifer Bain‘s recent book, Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of Medieval Composer (Cambridge University Press,2015), charts the 19th-century reception of Hildegard’s life and music, and in doing so provides valuable perspective on the version of Hildegard that we know and love today. As Bain demonstrates, Hildegard has been in an almost constant state of revival since the early 19th century, and at every turn she has meant something different: depending on the interests of the scholars who were reviving her (who were, themselves, grappling with very specific historical circumstances, including the long-term fallout of the Napoleonic wars and the very long-term fallout of the Protestant Reformation), Hildegard has been important as a German, a Catholic, a Benedictine, and a mystic, as well as as a woman. Further reading/listening: For listeners who are unfamiliar with Hildegard’s music, here is LaReverdie’s recording of one of the melodies mentioned in the interview: O virga ac diadema. There are also three publications by Prof. Bain which expand on issues that we discussed in this interview: “Hildegard on 34th Street: Chant in the Marketplace.” Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 6, no. 1 (2004). “Hildegard, Hermannus, and Late Chant Style.” Journal of Music Theory 52, no. 1 (2008). “Hooked on Ecstasy: Performance ‘Practice’ and the Reception of the Music of Hildegard of Bingen,” in The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Medieval and Renaissance Music: Essays in Honour of Timothy J. McGee, ed. Brian Power and Maureen Epp (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 253-273. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joan Judge‘s wonderful new book takes readers into the pages of the Funu shibao (the Women’s Eastern Times), a “Shanghai-based, nationally distributed, protocommercial, gendered journal that was closely attuned to the concerns of its readers, the rhythm of everyday life, and the shifting global conjuncture” and a wonderfully rich historical... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is hip hop defined by its artists or by its audience? In Home With Hip Hop Feminism, Aisha Durham returns hip hop scholarship to its roots by engaging in an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach to studying hip hop. Rooting her study in the Diggs Park Public Housing Project in Norfolk, Virginia, Durham examines what hip hop means to ordinary and everyday women who see themselves as hip hop, equals to the rappers and other artists who receive greater recognition and scholarly attention. By focusing on gender and social class, Durham explores the sexual scripts that women find and negotiate within hip hop and how hip hop continually navigates socio-economic boundaries. She also considers how the very act of studying and writing about hip hop can turn a hip hop “insider” into an outsider. The book spends considerable attention looking at Queen Latifah and Beyonce as key figures who both reinforce and interrogate dominant representations of African American women. Aisha Durham is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research about Black popular culture explores the relationship between media representations and everyday life. She examines how controlling images or power-laden stereotypes are produced by media makers and interpreted by media audiences to make sense of blackness in the “post” era. She is co-editor of Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (2007) and Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method, and Policy (2007). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alice J. Kang has written Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Kang is assistant professor of political science and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Much attention is paid to Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East, especially the contentious role of women’s rights in those countries. Less attention has been paid to Muslim democracies in Africa. Kang’s book focuses on the politics of women’s rights in one such country: Niger. Women’s rights activists in Niger have fought to participate in democratic governance, but haven’t won every recent battle. Kang highlights several successes as well as policy areas where women’s organizations have failed to win policy victories. The book has much to say about social movements and also the evolving way Muslim majority democracies grapple with human rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Identity, Youth, and Gender in the Korean American Church (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Dr. Christine Hong explores the lives of female Korean American Mainline Christian adolescents. Hong’s work, an exercise in feminist ethnography and practical theology, focuses on the difficulties these young women encounter as people who face marginalization within both broader American society and their own faith communities, and discusses ways to help them overcome these obstacles. Hong’s sensitive analysis is sure to benefit anyone interested in religion, ethnicity, and youth in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nanxiu Qian, professor at Rice University, discusses her new book Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform (Stanford University Press, 2015). Qian argues that the role women played in the late Qing reform movements has heretofore been overlooked by historiography. Leading reformer Xue Shaohui was a critical poet, prose writer, educator, translator, and journalist. Xue married the literary traditions and scientific and technological advances of China and of the West. Her culturalist vision of women also married the writing-women tradition with her forward beliefs in gender equality. No subservient wife, Xue Shaohui played a central role in the reform networks of women and men and in the vibrant culture of debate that planted the seeds for women’s education and women’s visible role in public life in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does gender make war, and how does war make gender? In Gender, War, and Conflict (Polity Press, 2014), Laura Sjoberg (University of Florida) analyzes war and conflict through a gendered lens, arguing for the need for “gender mainstreaming” in the study of war. Paying attention to women, femininities, men, masculinities, and queerness, the book challenges the invisibility of gender in most analyses of war of conflict, even as gender plays a pivotal role in the function of war economies, in motivating people to fight wars, in conflict sexual violence, in interstate relations, and much more. Ultimately, Sjoberg makes the claim that the gendered structures of international politics make war possible, a dynamic we will miss unless we interrogate the ways that war and conflict are caused, justified fought, experienced, and felt from a feminist perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We live in a world awash with pornography, in the face of which anti-porn feminist philosophizing has not had much impact. In How to Do Things With Pornography (Harvard University Press, 2015), Nancy Bauer takes academic philosophy to task for being irrelevant and argues that philosophers should emulate Socrates in giving people reasons to reflect on their settled views. Bauer, who is professor of philosophy and dean of academic affairs for arts and sciences at Tufts University, considers the sexual objectification of women in contemporary society from several overlapping angles. She discusses the sense of empowerment that young women feel in today’s ‘hookup culture’ and defends a radical new reading J.L. Austin’s work on language that is at odds with the standard interpretation behind prominent feminist critiques of pornography. She also considers how white male dominance in academic philosophy has contributed to its lack of effectiveness, while applauding recent efforts by some to increase its diversity and its engagement with the public. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard H. King is Emeritus Professor of American and Canadian Studies at The University of Nottingham. His book Arendt and America (University of Chicago, 2015) is an intellectual biography and transnational synthesis of ideas and explores how the German-Jewish exile and political thinker Hannah Arendt’s American experience shaped her thought as she sought an alternative to totalitarianism. Her books The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution display the marks of her engagement with the American Republic of the Founders and the possibilities of its survival under the threat of mass society. King examines her corpus as she engaged with the diversity of thought from the Western political tradition to mid-century America allowing us to see the range of her ideas. Her interests were neither social nor cultural, but the political sphere. In Cold War America, she became part of a moral center of the New York intellectuals and forged relationships with people such David Reisman, Dwight MacDonald, Irving Howe, and Mary McCarthy. Arendt expressed a continual concern with the nature of political action, the possibility of new beginnings and the idea of the “banality of evil,” introduced in the controversial 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Difficult to categorize ideologically, Arendt sought a “worldly” politic, rather than politics based in idealism or pragmatism. Her thought influenced post-war thinking on political participation, civil disobedience, race, the Holocaust and the meaning of republicanism and liberalism. King has given us a portrait of a complex, and often ironic, relationship of a seminal thinker with America as a place and a set of ideas and institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Megan Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor in writing, literature and publishing. Her book Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Mariner Books, 2013) won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Marshall has written a beautiful and detailed portrait of the nineteenth-century political thinker, women’s rights advocate, and writer Margaret Fuller. Fuller’s childhood begins in Cambridgeport, MA where under the tutelage of her demanding father, Timothy Fuller, she was immersed in the classics excelling in language, literature, and philosophy. Her prospects limited by her gender, considered plain and often lonely, Fuller went on to build an intellectual life and relationships with the leading transcendentalists. Her New England circles included the most prominent thinkers of her day, the Channings, the Peabody sisters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Nathaniel Hawthrone. Frequently earning a living as a teacher, she went on to write and edit the transcendentalist journal The Dial and began a series of lectures and discussion for women known as “conversations.” The erudite and intellectually confident Fuller struggled with creating and living out a new feminine ideal that included the life of the mind, intimate cross-gender friendships, and mutuality, which she attempted to work out in her relationships with Emerson, James Clarke and others. After her tragic death at sea in 1850, she is best remembered for her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), at the time considered controversial and bold, explored the assumed nature of men and women and their relationship and proposed a new model for egalitarian marriages of mutuality and respect. Marshall has given us a compassionate biography of a remarkable woman who was born ahead of her time and inspired generations of feminists. 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 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As slavery came to an end in the Caribbean’s British colonies, officials and local reformers began to worry about how and whether they would convince their newly freed workforce to continue working. More specifically, they worried about underpopulation, and whether the formerly enslaved population was reproducing quickly enough. This was... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her wonderful new book Polygyny: What it Means When African American Muslim Women Share Their Husbands (University Press of Florida, 2015), Debra Majeed, Professor of Religious Studies at Beloit College, provides an analytically robust and moving account of the aspirations, paradoxes, and problems attached to polygyny in the African American Muslim community. By combining ethnography, history, and performance studies, Majeed seamlessly weaves together the theological, legal, and sociological dynamics of living polygyny. Readers of this book are treated to a riveting and incredibly lucid portrayal of a complicated phenomenon that brings together intimate individual stories and the broader historical and societal conditions that generate those stories in a remarkably effective fashion. In our conversation, we talked about the idea of Muslim Womanism, the methodology of dialogical performance, the Qur’an and polygyny, the paradoxes of polygyny, Imam W.D Mohammed’s teachings on polygyny, and the emotional and psychological impact of polygyny n children and women. This is among those rare books that are at once methodologically exciting and complex and yet astonishingly accessible and well written. Polygyny should also make an excellent reading in courses on gender and Islam, Islamic law, American Islam, and American Religion more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah H. Jacoby‘s recent monograph, Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on the extraordinary life and times of the Tibetan laywoman Sera Khandro and uses her story to examine a number of important issues in the study of Tibetan Buddhism. Sera Khandro was born in 1892 to well-off parents in cosmopolitan Lhasa, but ran-away to eastern Tibet at the age of fifteen, hoping to fulfill her religious aspirations. After enduring various hardships, she eventually became the consort of a monk at the age of twenty. After a tumultuous nine years during which she was subjected to the ill-will of many residents of the monastery where she resided and during which time she bore two children, she moved in with the lama under whom she had originally studied, a man whom she considered her original teacher, whose consort she became (attaining spiritual liberation in the process), and whose biography she would eventually write after his death. After three years, her spiritual partner died, and Sera Khandro spent the last sixteen years of her life teaching widely throughout eastern Tibet and engaged in writing. She died in 1940. Jacoby’s study is based in large part on two previously unexamined sources: a biography that Sera Khandro wrote of her male teacher, and Sera Khandro’s own autobiography. There are very few pre-1950s’ Tibetan primary sources authored by women, and these two documents allow Jacoby a unique view of a period usually seen through male eyes. In her discussion of Sera Khandro’s writings, Jacoby locates the aforementioned autobiography in the context of Tibetan literature, on the one hand, and explains autobiography’s role in the construction of religious identity in Tibet, on the other. Related to this issue is what Jacoby calls “autobiographical ventriloquy”: claims that one makes about ones own spiritual attainments by putting words in the mouth of another character. In the case at hand, Sera Khandro records conversations that she has with dakinis in which these celestial beings, in response to Sera Khandro’s expressions of doubt about her own progress along the Buddhist path, assert that she has in fact attained a high level of spiritual attainment. In addition to her interactions with dakinis, Sera Khandro established relationships with the semi-legendary Yeshe Tsogyel and with autochthonous deities in eastern Tibet. Drawing on the theory of “relational selfhood,” by which an autobiographical subject’s identity is constructed through that subject’s depiction of his or her relationships with other social actors, Jacoby shows that Sera Khandro’s own identity as a treasure revealer depended on the relationships she had with both those in her immediate environment (e.g., the local deities) and those in the mythic past (e.g., Yeshe Tsogyel). In this way, religious legitimacy–at least in the case of Sera Khandro–depended on both local and pan-Tibetan associations. In the final two chapters of the book Jacoby discusses Sera Khandro’s role as a consort. She looks at the various ways in which Sera Khandro herself understood such practices and in which she used men as consorts for practices aimed at furthering her own spiritual progress. This close analysis provides the reader with a much more nuanced view of Tibetan Buddhist attitudes towards sexual practices. And in the final chapter Jacoby shows that while we usually think of such practices as thoroughly impersonal and soteriological in character, in the case at hand Sera Khandro’s own feelings of affection for her partner Drime Ozer cannot be easily disentangled fr... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Waiting several hours in line for a hug is well worth it for thousands of people, the devotees of the Guru, Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi. In Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (University of California Press, 2014), Amanda Lucia, Associate Professor of Religion at UC Riverside, provides a rich ethnographic account of Amma’s American followers and convincingly argues that there is much to learn here about gender, interpretation, and contemporary American religiosity. Amma’s devotees in the United States are usually “inheritors” or “adopters” of Hindu traditions, which shapes their interpretive vantage point and understandings of Amma as Hindu goddesses or feminist. American multiculturalism and romantic orientalist attitudes frequently reifiy cultural differences further structuring the interrelations between South Asian and non-Indian devotees in the American context. In our conversation we discuss female religious leaders, darshan, gurus in American context, purity and ritual, women’s empowerment, village and urban transformations, Devi Bhava, and gendered interpretations of Hinduism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps? Today’s interview marks the conclusion of my summer-long series of podcasts on the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi Germany, its satellite states and the regions it controlled. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the Holocaust Museums’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Sarah Helm about the women’s camp of Ravensbruck, Nik Wachsmann about the evolution of the concentration camp system and Dan Stone about the liberation of the camps. Today I’ll conclude the series with an interview with Shelly Cline about female guards in the camps. This is something of a departure for the podcast, which usually focuses on the authors of published books. But Shelly’s dissertation “Women at Work: The SS Aufseherin and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust” (Ph. D. Diss, U of Kansas, 2014) is a perfect conclusion to the series. It examines carefully and thoughtfully the women who served as guards in concentration camps across Germany and its territories. In the manuscript, Shelly suggests that we will better understand the guards’ experience and perspective if we look at them from the perspective of people working at a job, a job they applied for, trained for, and worked at, one they sometimes liked, but often found stressful and difficult. It’s a fascinating notion, one that made me stop and think many times while reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices