New Books in Women's History

Now and then we feature a book on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies whose author we ought to have had on the show some time ago. The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade Along the Mekong (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) is one such book. Sverre Molland wrote his tandem ethnography of traffickers and anti-traffickers while researching on the border of Thailand and Laos in the 2000s, after a stint in an anti-trafficking project in which the incongruities of identifying and criminalizing alleged human traffickers became all too obvious to him. Bringing an anthropological lens to the juridical and economic categories that are usually deployed both to explain and address the phenomenon of trafficking for sex, Molland shows that the premises on which anti-trafficking programs operate are unsound. The movement of women and girls in and out of the sex trade is deeply socially embedded. Only by attending to the many varied ways that recruitment into the trade occurs can it be understood. With that, moralizing and paternalistic projects for trafficking’s elimination, as well as indicator projects for its enumeration, might be set to one side, and replaced with other ways of knowing and dealing with the phenomenon that might be rather more sensible, if less aspirational.Sverre Molland joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about the many layers of deception and consent in sex work, bad faith among traffickers and anti-traffickers, the misguidance of the market metaphor, teens trading teens, agency, structural violence, and the trend towards privately funded anti-trafficking and anti-slavery projects in Southeast Asia.Listeners of this episode may also be interested in:Holly High, Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos Denise Brennan, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United StatesNick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Brittney C. Cooper, who is an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, explores the intellectual genealogy and geography of the work of African-American women over the course of more than a century in her book, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, 2017). While knitting together an understanding of the intellectual achievements and contributions of many African-American women, Cooper pays particular attention to Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, Pauli Murray, Toni Cade Bambara and the engagement that these women had with ideas, highlighting the contributions they made to racial knowledge, questions of gender, and civic engagement within the United States, from the period after Reconstruction through the 1970s. Cooper than provides a contemporary epilogue, integrating into her research the conversation around the beginnings of the #blacklivesmatter movement and the women who started it, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, and how they, like the race women who preceded them, have been compelled to attest to their primacy in thinking about and then coming together to form this more recent social movement.Cooper traces the spaces where Black female intellectual engagement took place, in places like the National Association for Colored Women, the club movement, and the pages of the political magazine, Voice of the Negro, as well as how some of this movement migrated into college and university classrooms and programs. Cooper’s book engages with the actual ideas and concepts that many of these women voiced or wrote, as well as analyzing the intellectual conversations these women had with each other on occasion, but more particularly with their contemporaries. Beyond Respectability is both accessible and sophisticated in the discussion of American intellectual history, race, gender, sexual orientation, black feminism, citizenship, and social engagement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s (Routledge, 2017), Macedonian researcher, peace-worker, and activist Ana Miskovska Kajevska analyses the way feminists in Belgrade and Zagreb reacted to the (post-)Yugoslav wars, with an emphasis on their discourses and activities regarding (sexual) war violence and on each other. Using a Bourdieu-based methodology supplemented by interviews, she challenges common assumptions that were not subject to scholarly debate before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the capital of the African nation of Angola today stands a statue to Njinga, the 17th century queen of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms. Its presence is a testament to her skills as a diplomat, warrior, and leader of her people, all of which she demonstrated over the course of a reign described by Linda Heywood in Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (Harvard University Press, 2017). The daughter of the Ndongo king Mbande a Ngola, Njinga grew up in a west central Africa that was facing growing encroachment by Portugal, who were major customers in the regions slave trade. Seeking to extend their control, the Portuguese challenged Njinga’s succession to the throne in 1624, prompting a war that lasted for three decades. To persevere, Njinga had to navigate the complex politics of the region, gaining control of the Matamba kingdom and pursuing ties with both the Vatican and the Dutch to provide a counterweight to the Portuguese. The treaty signed with Portugal in 1656 was a testament to her success, allowing her to focus on establishing a legacy of an independent kingdom that she could pass on to her sister after her death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historically, foreign policy has been seen as a sphere shaped and determined by the concerns of men alone. In ‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Julie Gottlieb demonstrates the fallacy of such a view when applied to understanding how Britain responded to the growing aggressiveness of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. By highlighting the activities of politically-engaged women from across the ideological spectrum, she details the range of efforts they undertook from hosting social engagements with politically prominent individuals to lobbying on key issues in their efforts to sway the development of foreign policy. As she reveals, much of the debate over appeasement was framed in gendered terms, often citing the concerns of women as justification for concessions to avoid war. Gottlieb also assesses the attitudes of British women generally towards appeasement, drawing upon the fledgling efforts of public opinion polling to identify their positions on the issues and the influence they exerted politically. The result is a nuanced reassessment of the development of appeasement and the debates that took place over it, both in the years prior to the war and in the months that followed Britain’s entry into it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeanette Jouili‘s fascinating new book Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2015) navigates practices and challenges of living pious ethical lives in inhospitable conditions. Through a finely textured analysis of quotidian practices of piety among conservative Muslim women in France and Germany, this book offers a nuanced and analytically rich examination of the intersection of ethics, secular conditions, and religious normative imaginaries. The strength of this book lies in the way it brilliantly hues the tensions of everyday life with sharp theoretical reflections on questions of ethics, moral agency, and gender. Although a commentary of aspirations of piety among Muslim women in Europe, this book also shows fractures in European promises of pluralism.SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at stareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Were women a problem in early modern Japan? If they were, what was the nature of the problem they posed? For whom, and why? Marcia Yonemoto‘s new book explores these questions in a compelling study that brings together the public discourse on women in the Tokugawa period (including prescriptive literature,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her book, Dr. Joyce Brothers: The Founding Mother of TV Psychology (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Kathleen Collins presents an extensive history of the woman who is arguably the most famous television psychologist. Starting with Brothers’ appearance as a boxing expert on the $64,000 Question in the 1950s, and bringing readers through her decades-long career in television and radio, Collins argues that Brothers created the personal approach to psychology that became the norm for television other popular media. Collins examines the different ways that Brothers created a career for herself for over 50 years, looking at her role as psychologist, as well as her roles as guest star, actor, and media celebrity. She looks at the ways Brothers used her savvy business sense to create a multilayered career that made vital contributions to psychology, television, and U.S. cultural history. Collins uses Brothers’ personal papers and her published interviews as well as her own interviews with Brothers’ daughter and colleagues to create a well-researched and informative exploration into this television icon.Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. 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

When America went to war against Germany in 1917, the scale of the conflict required the mobilization of women as well as men in order to achieve victory. In The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Lynn Dumenil describes the many ways in which women participated in the war effort and the ways in which it transformed their lives. As she notes, in the years leading up to the war increasing numbers of American women were employed outside the home and involved in the public sphere. For many the politically-engaged among their number, the decision to go to war presented an opportunity to demonstrate their gender’s patriotism and worthiness for the vote. Thousands showed their support for the soldiers by participating in a variety of volunteer activities, with some even traveling to Europe to work in canteens or as nurses. Many more took up the jobs that the men left behind, filling the void created by their enlistment. These efforts were celebrated in the popular media of the time, though often with the message that these new roles were only temporary. Yet as Dumenil demonstrates, while postwar gains were indeed limited, the involvement of women in the war accelerated many of the changes taking place in politics and society, changes which were reflected in new attitudes and expectations held by these women in the 1920s and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caterina Corner lived a life that was composed of a mixture of adventure, power, and tragedy. The daughter of a Venetian patrician and merchant, she was married to the king of Cyprus while barely a teenager. Within two years of voyaging to her new home in 1472, she became a mother, a widow, and the ruler of Cyprus, over which she reigned until she was dethroned by her Venetian benefactors in 1489. In Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2015), Holly Hurlburt describes the life and artistic legacy of this remarkable woman. As she explains, much of our image of her is shaped by the portraits and other artwork of her, both from her reign and afterward. In combination with the extant documentary record, they reveal how Caterina maintained and projected her authority as queen in a tumultuous time while facing challenges from several Mediterranean powers. Ever after her removal to a community in northern Venice, she maintained her influence and dignity as the lady of Asolo, both as a noble landowner and as a Renaissance patron. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices