New Books in Women's History

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

Books
History
Social Sciences
1501
Shabana Mir, “Muslim American Women on Campus: ...
In the post 9/11 era in which Muslims in America have increasingly felt under the surveillance of the state, media, and the larger society, how have female Muslim students on US college campuses imagined, performed,
51 min
1502
Tine M. Gammeltoft, “Haunting Images: A Cultura...
Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of California Press,
66 min
1503
Christina Laffin, “Rewriting Medieval Japanese ...
Known primarily as a travel writer thanks to the frequent assignment of her Diary in high school history and literature classes, Nun Abutsu was a thirteenth-century poet, scholar, and teacher, and also a prolific writer.
64 min
1504
Wendy Lower, “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in ...
It seems quite reasonable to wonder if there’s anything more to learn about the Holocaust. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have been researching and writing about the subject for decades. A simple search for “Holocaust” on Amazon turns up a stun...
57 min
1505
Rachel Rinaldo, “Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Fe...
Are Islam and feminism inherently at odds? Is there a contradiction between piety and gender justice? This is the guiding theme for Rachel Rinaldo, professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, in her book Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism i...
61 min
1506
Tina Santi Flaherty, “What Jackie Taught Us” (P...
Originally, particularly in American writings, one of the explicit purpose of biography was to teach readers how to live. As Scott E. Caspar writes in Constructing American Lives (1999), in nineteenth-century America “biography remained the essential g...
25 min
1507
Paula A. Michaels, “Lamaze: An International Hi...
The twentieth-century West witnessed a revolution in childbirth. Before that time, most women gave birth at home and were attended by family members and midwives. The process was usually terribly painful for the mother.
68 min
1508
Sa’diyya Shaikh, “Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: ...
Many Muslim debates regarding women are solely situated in legal or political frameworks. For example, we often find this tendency in conversations about women’s leadership in the mosque or the politics of veiling. Sa’diyya Shaikh,
53 min
1509
Lynne Huffer, “Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Fe...
In her fourth book, Lynne Huffer argues for a restored queer feminism to find new ways of thinking about sex and about ethics. Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (Columbia University Press,
68 min
1510
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, “HRC: State Sec...
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes are the co-authors of authors of HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (Crown Publishers 2014). Allen is White House bureau chief at Bloomberg; Parnes is White House correspondent for The Hill.
19 min
1511
Ayesha Chaudhry, “Domestic Violence and the Isl...
How do people make sense of their scriptures when they do not align with the way they envision these texts? This problem is faced by many contemporary believers and is especially challenging in relation to passages that go against one’s vision of a gen...
45 min
1512
Will Swift, “Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intim...
In America, biographies of Presidents and First Ladies are a staple of the genre, but the relationship that exists between the two receives surprisingly less exploration, as though the biographies needed to be kept as separate as the offices in the Eas...
43 min
1513
Clare Mulley, “The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets a...
It’s almost a cliché by now to say that we need stories of strong women, but that doesn’t lessen the fact that we do. And biography is a field uniquely poised to transmit such stories- of compelling, complex and, at times,
39 min
1514
Cindy Hooper, “Conflict: African American Women...
Cindy Hooper is a veteran of various local, state, and national political campaigns. She is the founder of a national organization for African American women that is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Hooper is also a member of the American Political Sc...
28 min
1515
Kristin A. Goss, “The Paradox of Gender Equalit...
Kristin A. Goss is author of The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice (University of Michigan Press 2013). She is associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University.
24 min
1516
Kathleen Wellman, “Queens and Mistresses of Ren...
Queens and royal mistresses of the Renaissance were the Hollywood celebrities of their time, which explains their enduring magnetism for writers, artists, and the public. Historians and scholars, however, have long ignored them.
65 min
1517
Susan Ware, “Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King...
If you’re younger than 45 or so, you probably don’t remember the “Battle of the Sexes.” This tennis match, between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, is one of the iconic moments in American history of the 1970s.
51 min
1518
Jennie Burnet, “Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Me...
In our fast-paced world, it is easy to move from one crisis to another. Conflicts loom in rapid succession, problems demand solutions (or at least analysis) and impending disasters require a response. It is all we can do to pay attention to the present...
63 min
1519
Julie Berebitsky, “Sex and the Office: A Histor...
How to research the history of sexual harassment in the office, when the term sexual harassment was only invented in 1975 and it was long tabou to even use the word sex in conversation? Using an array of rich sources — from Treasury Department archives...
63 min
1520
Jonathan D. Wells, “Women Writers and Journalis...
It’s getting harder and harder to trailblaze in the field of American Studies. More and more, writers have to follow paths created by others, imposing new interpretations on old ones in never-ending cycles of revision.
62 min
1521
Elizabeth Winder, “Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia ...
It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly pronounced in the case of iconic figures of the 20th century (think: Marilyn Monroe,
34 min
1522
Mishuana Goeman, “Mark My Words: Native Women M...
The maps drawn up by early settlers to plot their inexorable expansion were not the first representations of North American space. Colonialism does not simply impose a new reality, after all, but attempts to shatter and discard whole systems of underst...
58 min
1523
Sikivu Hutchinson, “Godless Americana: Race and...
Why does it seem like everyone in the atheist movement is white and male? Are African-American women less interested in secularism? In her book, Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (Infidel Books, 2013), Dr.
35 min
1524
Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, “Elizabeth Patterson B...
What is a celebrity? And how has the definition of celebrity changed over the course of American history? Those questions are central to Charlene M. Boyer Lewis‘s book Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic (Univers...
60 min
1525
Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite,...
The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random factual odds and ends. This is one of the challenges of writing biography- one must become expert on so m...
50 min