New Books in Women's History

For the most part women in the classical world have suffered from what Duane W. Roller terms “near-invisibility,” obscuring the consequential roles that at times they played in government and politics. In his book Cleopatra’s Daughter: And Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era (Oxford University Press, 2018), Roller recounts the lives of more than a half-dozen women in the last decades of the 1st century BC and early decades of the 1st century AD to show how they exercised power during the early years of the Roman Empire. Drawing upon a tradition of royal women in the ancient Near East, these women – Cleopatra Selene, Glaphyra of Cappadocia, Salome of Judaea, Dynamis of Bosporous, Pythodoris of Pontos, Aba of Olbe, and Mousa of Parthia – all played crucial roles as rulers in kingdoms on the periphery of the Augustan empire. As Roller explains, their success in maintaining their positions both depended in part upon the support of powerful women in the Augustan family and, in turn, served as role models for royal women in the Roman imperial courts for centuries afterward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

History is only recently opening up to previously marginalized groups: it is only just now that women’s history is being explored across different historical fields. Eve Krakowski in Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Women’s Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture (Princeton University Press, 2017) uses Cairo Geniza documents, and Jewish and Islamic legal writings to bring us the stories of Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). She looks at how women functioned in a patronage culture, how women moved within society prior to being married and how that changed after becoming a wife. We talk to her about how to think of women in the pre-modern world, how her book fits into the pre-existing scholarship, what family history means in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, how the Cairo Geniza looms large in her work, and what her approach is to her research.Eve Krakowski is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She is a social historian of the medieval Middle East, interested especially in family life and in how law and religion worked in mundane, everyday settings. Her research focuses on urban Jews in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt (969–1250), a population who accidentally left behind some of the most detailed and varied sources about ordinary life to have survived the premodern world: the Cairo Geniza documents. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department Before going to Princeton, she spent two years as a Blaustein post-doctoral fellow in the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University, and one year as a Rabin post-doctoral fellow in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. She has an ACLS Grant and a NEH grant, with Marina Rustow.Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In studying the pre-Revolutionary films of Evgenii Bauer, Dr. Rachel Morley (Lecturer in Russian Cinema and Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London) discovered the ubiquity of the female performer as a character in the cinema of this era, from “Oriental” and “Gypsy” dancers... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historians have gotten the story of the colonial Ohio River Valley all wrong, argues Susan Sleeper-Smith in Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (Omonundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Sleeper-Smith, a Professor of History at Michigan State University and soon-to-be Interim Director of the D’arcy McNickle Center at the Newberry Library, reads colonial sources against the grain and uses material culture to demonstrate how the Great Lakes region was a prosperous multicultural zone characterized by trade and agriculture well into the eighteenth century. Moreover, women played a central (and heretofore under-appreciated) role in the fur trade and agricultural work that made the Ohio River Valley such a fertile and bountiful region. Indigenous societies such as the Miami, Wea, and Shawnee have often been characterized as living primarily off hunting and suffering through ever-increasing reliance on fur trading and geopolitical chaos wrought by adjacent colonial empires. Sleeper-Smith instead paints a picture of primarily agricultural towns defined by their stability up until the years of American conquest and displacement. Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest is a much needed counterweight to narratives about the early American west which have for decades gone largely unquestioned.Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the course of investigating marriage patterns among Russian peasants in the 18th and 19th century, Northwestern University history professor John Bushnell discovered an unusually high rate of unmarried women in particular parishes and villages with high populations of Old Believers. In Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry: Spasovite Old... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet, as Rebekah J. Buchanan notes in her new book, Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018), a group of girls and young women were about to start making their own waves. We now call them “the riot grrls,” after one of the zines that they created of the same name. In 1991 Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe were members of the punk band Bratmobile, and Wolfe explained why they chose this name: “we had thought about Girl Riot and then we changed it to Riot Grrl with the three ‘r’s’ as in growling. It was a cool play on words, and also a kind of expression about how there should be some kind of vehicle where your anger is validated.” That growl started a movement—of youth culture, of music and print culture, of political activism, and of a new punk feminism—that thrived in the 90s and has remained a lasting influence on how we think about women, music, and culture. Buchanan takes us into world of the riot grrls through their own creations, the zines that they wrote, published, and circulated to understand who they were, what they were about, and why magazines like Time were so wrong.Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks (Oxford University Press, 2018), Sumita Mukherjee highlights the centrality of Indian women in the fight for the vote in the first half of the twentieth century. Taking up a geographic organization around global “contact zones,” Mukherjee skillfully guides readers through multiple sites of Indian suffragette networking: from Britain and its commonwealth, to international locales in the US and Europe, to eastern locations like Burma, before concluding in India. This mapping of transnational connections foregrounds the truly global dimensions of the suffrage movement and the ways that Indian women’s locality informed their calls for political equality. Mukherjee broadens our understandings of global histories of suffrage, expanding our focus beyond national borders all while putting Indian women front and centre in the struggle for the vote.Sumita Mukherjee is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Bristol, where she researches transnational mobilities of South Asians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Jess Clark is an Assistant Professor of History at Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario). She is currently writing a history of the beauty business in Victorian London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are few living American classical composers for whom an academic biography has been published, but Libby Larsen deserves this type of study. At the opening of her book, Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Denise Von Glahn describes her subject’s life as a “polyphony”—made up of multiple strands of music, career, and family. In order to make sense of Larsen’s long and accomplished career (and her hundreds of pieces of music), Von Glahn divides the biography into a close examination of the factors that most influenced Larsen’s life and music: family, religion, nature, the academy, gender, technology, and her collaborations. In each chapter, Von Glahn weaves a consideration of Larsen’s life with analyses of some of her major compositions. Larsen grew up and still lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has always considered herself something of an outsider in the world of classical music. She does not live in New York City (the epicenter of American classical music); she does not hold an academic appointment; she has never applied for some of the institutional grants that often support contemporary composers’ work; and she is a woman in a field still dominated by men. While she was in graduate school, Larsen helped found the American Composers Forum which has become one of the most important organizations that supports the work of new composers in the United States. Today, Larsen is one of America’s most successful composers having written for many of the best orchestras, opera companies, instrumental and vocal soloists in the country. Her music is eclectic, thoughtful, never pretentious, and always concerned with communicating with the listener.Denise Von Glahn is the Curtis Mayes Orpheus Professor of Musicology at Florida State University where she is the Coordinator of the Musicology Area and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas. Her work centers on music and place, ecomusicology, gender studies, and biography. She has published three previous award-winning monographs: The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape, Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices (coauthored with Michael Broyles), and Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World. She has received multiple grants including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Henry and Edna Binkele Classical Music Fund. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Von Glahn has won university awards for her undergraduate and graduate teaching.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (Columbia University Press, 2017), Natalie Robins examines the life of writer and socialite Diana Trilling (1905-1996). Trilling wrote for The Nation, Harpers, and Partisan Review as well as popular magazines McCalls and Vogue. In addition, she wrote Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor and four other books. The wife of professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling, Diana also edited his work, serving as his most trusted confidant. Robins shares the inner struggles Diana endured through her relationship with Lionel as well as her competing public and private work. In this thorough biography, Robins’ extensive and well-researched history of Trilling sheds insight into Diana’s life. She examines Trilling’s position in anticommunist liberal politics, family feminism, and the university literary circles. Spotlighting an influential member of New York City culture, Robins’ work on Diana Trilling is an important addition to literary and popular history of the 1960s.Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The award-winning author Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History at the University of Texas. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (Basic Books, 2017) is a biography of the riveting life of Lucy Parsons. As an activist, writer and speaker, Parsons embodied the most radical expression of the battle for labor rights in American history, yet her life remains a mystery. Born an enslaved woman in 1851 of mixed lineage, the circumstances of her birth and early life are unknown. Exceedingly beautiful and articulate, she met and married Albert Parsons, a confederate army veteran, in Waco, Texas in 1872. Their politics shifted from loyal Republicans to socialism and finally to anarchism advocating for white labor in Chicago. As a dynamic and radical duo engaged in extensive writing, charismatic speaking and alliances across multiple labor organizations, they became symbols of unrelenting agitation against industrial capitalism. Their call for armed resistance and involvement with the Haymarket bombing and trial, led to the execution of Albert leaving Lucy Parsons to carry their mutual legacy alone. Jones has brought to life an enigmatic figure whose compelling presence left a mark on the history of the radical movement for labor rights.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in August, 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices