New Books in Women's History

Why We Cook: Women on Food, Identity, and Connection (Workman, 2021) includes essays, recipes, interviews and profiles of more than 100 women in the world of food; from restaurateurs and activists, to food writers, professional chefs, and home cooks. Curated, researched and beautifully illustrated by author and artist Lindsay Gardner, it brings together the stories and perspectives of a diverse array of female voices who are transforming food across the world.Find more about the book at here.Visit the author’s website here and follow her work on social media @lindsaygardnerartDaniela Gutiérrez Flores is a PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Ora Szekely about Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Georgetown UP, 2019), which she co-edited with Jessica Trisko Darden and Alexis Henshaw.Why do women go to war in non-state armed groups? Despite the reality that female combatants exist the world over, we still know relatively little about who these women are, what motivates them to take up arms, how they are utilized by armed groups, and what happens to them when war ends. Through a comparative analysis of women's participation in different non-state armed groups, Insurgent Women addresses women's involvement in civil war at three different points in the conflict lifecycle: recruitment, conflict participation, and conflict resolution. By examining the ongoing civil war in Ukraine, the conflicts in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, and the civil war in Colombia, the authors find that there is no single profile of a female combatant. Rather, women's roles in and motivations for joining insurgent groups vary. The practical and theoretical implications of Insurgent Women suggest that policymakers and scholars must pay more attention to the complex motivations and roles that female combatants play in waging war in order to secure peace. This is an accessible and timely work that will be a useful introduction to another side of contemporary conflict.Dilan Okcuoglu is post-doctoral fellow at American University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although scholars have emphasized the importance of women’s networks for civil society in twentieth-century Japan, Women and Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japan (University of Michigan Press, 2020) is the first book to tackle the subject for the contentious and consequential nineteenth century. The essays traverse the divide when Japan started transforming itself from a decentralized to a centralized government, from legally imposed restrictions on movement to the breakdown of travel barriers, and from ad hoc schooling to compulsory elementary school education. As these essays suggest, such changes had a profound impact on women and their roles in networks. Rather than pursue a common methodology, the authors take diverse approaches to this topic that open up fruitful avenues for further exploration. Most of the essays in this volume are by Japanese scholars; their inclusion here provides either an introduction to their work or the opportunity to explore their scholarship further. Because women are often invisible in historical documentation, the authors use a range of sources (such as diaries, letters, and legal documents) to reconstruct the familial, neighborhood, religious, political, work, and travel networks that women maintained, constructed, or found themselves in, sometimes against their will. In so doing, most but not all of the authors try to decenter historical narratives built on men’s activities and men’s occupational and status-based networks, and instead recover women’s activities in more localized groupings and personal associations.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the political ferment of early twentieth century New York City, when socialists and reformers battled sweatshops, and writers and artists thought a new world was being born, an immigrant Jewish woman from Russia appeared in the Yiddish press, in Carnegie Hall, and at rallies. Her name was Rose Pastor Stokes, and she fought for socialism, contraception and workers’ rights.What set her apart was not just the strength of her speeches or the passion of her commitments, but her marriage to James Graham Phelps Stokes, the wealthy Episcopalian son of one of the oldest and most elite families in the United States. Over the course of their marriage they lived in an apartment on the Lower East Side, a private island in Long Island Sound, and a townhouse in Greenwich Village.The book Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020) explores her life, her unlikely marriage and the great hopes of the Progressive Era in New York City.Hochschild, a master of deeply researched narrative history, is the author of ten books—among them King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa and Spain In Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. He has won widespread recognition for his writing and received the Theodore Roosevelt—Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Historical Association.Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University, is co-author of both All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York (Columbia) and Metropolitan lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (Norton/Smithsonian). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maureen Mahon’s book, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (Duke University Press, 2020), focuses on the contributions to rock and roll by African American women from Big Mama Thornton to Tina Turner, and the erasure and marginalization of most of these women in other histories of popular music. Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll and puts them back into a narrative that generally emphasizes the role of white male guitar players in the development of the genre. She considers how the racialized vocal timbre of African American women’s voices has shaped rock from the girl groups of the early 1960s to the background singers who created the sound of some of the most iconic tracks recorded by the bands of the British invasion. Running throughout the book is a deep analysis of how the stereotypes about Black women crashed into the lived experiences of her subjects, affecting their careers, their relationships, and their music. By uncovering this hidden history, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality (Princeton University Press, 2021) presents an inspiring look at how US women and their global allies pushed the nation and the world toward justice and greater equality for all. Reclaiming social democracy as one of the central threads of American feminism, Dorothy Sue Cobble offers a bold rewriting of twentieth-century feminist history and documents how forces, peoples, and ideas worldwide shaped American politics. Cobble follows egalitarian women’s activism from the explosion of democracy movements before World War I to the establishment of the New Deal, through the upheavals in rights and social citizenship at midcentury, to the reassertion of conservatism and the revival of female-led movements today.Cobble brings to life the women who crossed borders of class, race, and nation to build grassroots campaigns, found international institutions, and enact policies dedicated to raising standards of life for everyone. Readers encounter famous figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Mary McLeod Bethune, together with less well-known leaders, such as Rose Schneiderman, Maida Springer Kemp, and Esther Peterson. Multiple generations partnered to expand social and economic rights, and despite setbacks, the fight for the many persists, as twenty-first-century activists urgently demand a more caring, inclusive world.Putting women at the center of US political history, For the Many reveals the powerful currents of democratic equality that spurred American feminists to seek a better life for all. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cinderella stories captured the imagination of girls in the 1950s, when dreams of meeting the right man could seem like a happy ending, a solution to life's problems. But over the next fifty years women's lives were transformed, not by the magic wand of a fairy godmother, nor by marrying princes, but by education, work, birth control--and feminism. However, while widening opportunities for women were seen as progress, feminists were regularly caricatured as man-haters, cast in the role of ugly sisters, witches or wicked fairies in the fairy-tale.Carol Dyhouse's new book Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the reshaping of women's lives, loves and dreams since 1950, the year in which Walt Disney's film Cinderella gave expression to popular ideas of romance, and at a time when marriage was a major determinant of female life chances and teenage girls dreamed of Mr Right and happy endings. It ends with the runaway success of Disney's Frozen, in 2013--a film with relevance to very different times. Along the way, it illuminates how women's expectations and emotional landscapes have shifted, asking bold questions about how women's lives have been transformed since 1950. How have women's changing life experiences been mirrored in new expectations about marriage, intimacy, and family life? How have new forms of independence through education and work, and greater control over childbearing, altered women's life ambitions? And were feminists right to believe that sexual equality would improve relationships between men and women?Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to tie your cloth to that of another person, as in the Ghanaian tradition, or to be in full dress? How is fashion photography in a colonial and decolonial context more than just a "look" but in fact a looking and a looking at?Join author Catherine McKinley (she/her) and host Lee M. Pierce (they) for a discussion of these provocative questions in the context of fashion photography by and about pan-African women from the 1870s to the 1970s.Most of us grew up with images of African women that were purely anthropological—bright displays of exotica where the deeper personhood seemed tucked away. Or they were chronicles of war and poverty—“poverty porn.” But now, curator Catherine E. McKinley draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos, spanning the 150-year arc of photography on the continent, to tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihoods. Featuring works by celebrated African masters, African studios of local legend, and anonymous artists, The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Womanhood (Bloomsbury, 2021) captures the dignity, playfulness, austerity, grandeur, and fantasy-making of African women across centuries. McKinley also features photos by Europeans—most starkly, striking nudes—revealing the relationships between white men and the black female sitters where, at best, a grave power imbalance lies. It’s a bittersweet truth that when there is exploitation there can also be profound resistance expressed in unexpected ways—even if it’s only in gazing back. These photos tell the story of how the sewing machine and the camera became powerful tools for women’s self-expression, revealing a truly glorious display of everyday beauty.Discussion welcome! Connect with author Catherine McKinley on Instagram @the_african_lookbook and the_mckinley_collection and host Lee M. Pierce on Gmail, Instagram and Twitter @rhetoriclee.Special thanks to Oslo-based Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupado (nemieppeba) for contributing a series of collages to the work to deepen the way in which we engage the original photos and their histories. If you enjoyed this interview you may also enjoy New Books Network interviews with Anne Cheng about Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson about Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which granted women the right to vote nationwide, was the culmination of a long and oftentimes contentious campaign that had its origins in the beginnings of the nation itself. In American Women’s Suffrage: Voices from the Long Struggle for the Vote, 1776-1965 (Library of America, 2020) Susan Ware provides readers with a sampling of the letters, articles, speeches, and other contemporary documents that reflect both the ideas of the movement and the arguments deployed against it. Her selections demonstrate how the battle of women’s suffrage was itself a part of a broader campaign for women’s rights in the early 19th century. Though it was galvanized by the activism of women from the abolitionist movement, the solidarity born of common oppression was shattered after the Civil War, when many suffragists expressed frustration with their exclusion from the voting rights being granted to Blacks. While a corps of dedicated activists continued their campaign into the 20th century, it was only in the 1910s that momentum shifted decisively in their direction. As Ware demonstrates, their success in gaining ratification in 1920 was less the conclusion of women’s efforts for political quality than it was the end of one stage and the beginning of a new effort to turn the newly-won franchise into political power – an effort that continues down to the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (University of Washington Press, 2021), Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women's reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe.To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions--about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world.Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices