New Books in Women's History

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

Books
History
Social Sciences
1501
Jonathan Eig, “The Birth of the Pill: How Four ...
Jonathan Eig is a New York Times best-selling author of four books and former journalist for the Wall Street Journal. His book The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (W.W. Norton,
48 min
1502
Claire Virginia Eby, “Until Choice Do Us Part: ...
64 min
1503
Sally G. McMillen, “Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic...
Sally G. McMillen is the Mary Reynolds Babcock professor of history at Davidson College. In her book Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (Oxford University Press, 2015) McMillen has given us a rich biography of the life and times of the abolitionist and w...
64 min
1504
Julie Billaud, “Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics...
Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) by Julie Billaud is a fascinating account of women and the state and ongoing ‘reconstruction’ projects in post-war Afghanistan.
46 min
1505
Meryle Secrest, “Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography...
As Meryle Secrest notes in the introduction to her new book, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Knopf, 2014),”The most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth century is now just a name on a perfume bottle.” Were it not a book about Schiaparelli,
31 min
1506
Marion Holmes Katz, “Women in the Mosque: A His...
Recently, there have been various debates within the Muslim community over women’s mosque attendance. While contemporary questions of modern society structure current conversations, this question, ‘may a Muslim woman go to the mosque,
67 min
1507
Asma Sayeed, “Women and the Transmission of Rel...
Studies on the subject of women’s participation in religious and intellectual life in Islam have been few.Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013)byAsma Sayeed,
51 min
1508
Torild Skard, “Women of Power” (Policy Press, 2...
Torild Skard is the author of Women of Power: Half a Century of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers Worldwide (Policy Press, 2015). Skard is a senior researcher in women’s studies at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo and is a f...
32 min
1509
Melissa Dabakis, “A Sisterhood of Sculptors: Am...
In A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (Penn State University Press, 2014), Melissa Dabakis takes readers on an unexpected journey from Boston to Rome to discover multiple American women sculptors working in studios,
65 min
1510
Carol Faulkner, “Lucretia Mott’s Heresy” (U Pen...
Carol Faulkner is Professor of History at Syracuse University. Her book Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) is a beautifully written biography of the abolitionist a...
62 min
1511
Paula Kane, “Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticis...
Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America (UNC Press, 2013) is a detailed journey into the life of Margaret Reilly, an American Irish-Catholic from New York who entered the Convent of the Good Shepherd in 1921,
57 min
1512
Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, Astrid Henry,...
Our guest today, Linda Gordon, is professor of history and humanities as New York University. Gordon and her co-authors Dorothy Sue Cobble and Astrid Henry have written Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women’s Movements (Liv...
69 min
1513
Michelle Nickerson, “Mothers of Conservatism: W...
Recently, historians have shown that the modern conservative movement is older and more complex than has often been assumed by either liberals or historians. Michelle Nickerson‘s book, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton Uni...
52 min
1514
Victoria Hesford, “Feeling Women’s Liberation” ...
Victoria Hesford is an associated professor of Women and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. Her book Feeling Women’s Liberation (Duke University Press, 2013) examines the pivotal year of 1970 as defining the meaning of “women’s liber...
68 min
1515
Norma Jones, Maja-Bajac-Carter, Bob Batchelor, ...
While there are a number of studies of how women are represented in popular culture, Norma Jones, Maja Bajac-Carter, Bob Batchelor’s collection of essays Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture (Rowman and Littlefield,
64 min
1516
Kimberly A. Hamlin, “From Eve to Evolution: Dar...
Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014),
64 min
1517
Lisa Tetrault, “The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memor...
Lisa Tetrault received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. Tetrault’s book The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement,
59 min
1518
Stephanie Coontz, “A Strange Stirring: The Femi...
Stephanie Coontz is an award-winning social historian, the director of Research and Public Education at the Council for Contemporary Families and teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington.
63 min
1519
Jenny Kaminer, “Women with a Thirst for Destruc...
Jenny Kaminer‘s new book, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2014) analyzes Russian myths of motherhood over time and in particular, the evolving myths of the figure of the “bad mother...
50 min
1520
Laura Mattoon D’Amore, “Smart Chicks on Screen”...
One of the continuing issues of the entertainment industry is the treatment of women in movies and television. Even with a larger number of female writers, producers, and directors, roles often follow stereotypical and negative conventions.
63 min
1521
Wai-yee Li, “Women and National Trauma in Late ...
Wai-yee Li‘s new book explores writing around the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, paying careful attention to the relationships of history and literature in writing by women, about women, and/or in a feminine voice.
64 min
1522
Harleen Singh, “The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, His...
The Rani of Jhansi was and is many things to many people. In her beautifully written book The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Harleen Singh explores four representations of the famous warrior quee...
49 min
1523
Amy Evrard, “The Moroccan Women’s Rights Moveme...
Amy Evrard‘s first book, The Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2014), examines women’s attempts to change their patriarchal society via their movement for equality and rights. At the center of Evrard’s book is the 2004 reform...
63 min
1524
Janet Sims-Wood, “Dorothy Porter Wesley at Howa...
There was once a notion that black people had no meaningful history. It’s a notion Dorothy Porter Wesley spent her entire career debunking. Through her 43 years at Howard University, where she helped create the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center,
42 min
1525
Rebecca Rogers, “A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story...
In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only were women entitled to quality education,
30 min