New Books in Women's History

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, contradictory female characters- to a broad audience. Case in point: Clare Mulley‘s The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (St. Martin’s, 2013).Yes, she loved and had a number of love affairs but, as Mulley makes clear, the significance of Granville’s life isn’t that she was, to all appearances, pathologically alluring to men. Rather, her life is riveting- it has meaning in the present day- because she seems not to have craved men nearly so much as she craved adventure, challenging work that put her at great risk.This was not simply adventure for adventure’s sake either, but adventure in service to a greater good, especially that of her homeland of Poland. For all her efforts as a secret service agent during World War II were in aid of her country, which is, in part, why the British government seemed never quite to know what to do with her and why this brilliant, imaginative woman was left to constantly lobby for a greater, more challenging, role.‘Intrepid’ is perhaps the best word to describe Granville as Mulley portrays her here. She kicked off her career as a spy by infiltrating Poland from Hungary on skis. Another time, arrested by the Gestapo, she talked her way out of imprisonment. Still later, when her comrades were arrested by the Gestapo, she swooped into the local office, demanding and securing their release.For her bravery, she was awarded the George Medal, the OBE, and the Croix de Guerre but there was, sadly, little room in the world after the World Wars for a Polish, female spy, and Granville slid into reduced circumstances that culminated in a tragic end: murdered by an obsessive admirer at a hotel in South Kensington.It’s a good story of a charismatic and difficult woman, a story that was nearly forgotten and one which Mulley is pulling from obscurity, rightfully so. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Science Association. Her new book, Conflict: African American Women and the New Dilemma of Race and Gender Politics (Praeger Press, 2012), draws on all of her experiences. Please listen to our lively exchange.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.Goss challenges the conventional wisdom about women’s group with new congressional hearing data. Rather than ebbing-and-flowing like waves, Goss suggests that the women’s groups have not always diminished in influence following a major policy success. The Paradox of Gender Equality should have a wide audience among interest group, gender studies, and social movement scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Enlightenment philosophers used descriptions of powerful women in the French court to mock the monarchy. Nineteenth-century historians propagated myths about these historical women to discredit the monarchy and to justify the exclusion of women from the French republic. Feminist scholars have eschewed royal women as subjects because their influence stemmed from their sexual and romantic association with kings and not because of their own merit. And contemporary historiography in France has long turned away from political elites to focus on social and cultural sites of inquiry.Kathleen Wellman, in Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France (Yale University Press, 2013, Yale), argues that women of the French court deserve our undivided attention because they greatly influenced the French Renaissance. Between the mid-15th century to the end of the 16th century, women such as Agnès Sorel, Anne of Brittany, Diane de Poitiers, Catherine de Medici, and Marguerite de Valois, acted with agency, carved out spheres of influence, overcame constraints, and made use of their positions for personal and political ends, and in the process influenced the course of French history. Wellman’s engrossing account of royal women compels us to revise our understanding of the French Renaissance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. It represented a breakthrough moment for women in sports, a symbol of the progress women were making to finally receive something like equality of opportunity and resources in athletics.For Billie Jean King, however, the match was only a small part of a life lived in the pursuit of the opportunity for access and success for herself and for women in general. As Susan Ware outlines in her outstanding new book Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), King saw herself not simply as an athlete, but as an advocate for women in athletics. Throughout her career, King lent her voice and her reputation to those pushing institutions and leaders to let women play. The result was, as Ware puts it, revolutionary.Ware’s book is biography at its best. It examines King’s life on its own terms. But it doesn’t stop there. Instead, it uses King’s life as a lens through which to view the broader social and cultural conflicts that swept through American society in the 1970s and after. Anyone reading the book will have a much greater sense of why the world we live in today is so dramatically different than the one in which our parents or grandparents grew up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 moment. Lingering on the consequences of the past seems to take too much of our finite attention.Jennie Burnet‘s fantastic new book Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), offers a useful corrective to this fascination with the immediate. Jennie is interested primarily in what it means to live in a society ruptured by violence. She writes about how people try to speak, or not speak, about the killing that destroyed their families or those of their neighbors. She reflects on how the government’s decision to try to forestall future violence by eliminating ethnic categories affects individuals’ efforts to shape their own identity and self-understanding. She analyzes the way practices of memorialization reflect changing ways of understanding and narrating past atrocities. And she allows her subjects to share the challenges of living in a world where the past is always present.Jennie, both in print and in the interview, is thoughtful, articulate and compassionate. I hope the interview gives you a taste of the richness of her book.Genocide Lives in Us won the 2013 Elliot Skinner Book Award from the Association for Africanist Anthropology. It also received an honorable mention for the 2013 Melville J. Herskovits Award from the African Studies Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 to trial records, congressional investigation files to films and novels, popular weeklies and dailies to postcards, advertisements to confession magazines, private papers to employment advice guides — Julie Berebitsky takes the reader on a discovery of sexuality in the white collar-office from the Civil War to the present day.Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power and Desire (Yale University Press, 2012) analyzes sexual relations, non-consensual and consensual, among co-workers, arguing that the 19th-century ideal of the passionless woman gave way by World War One to an ideal of feminine attractiveness, one that was later transformed by Helen Gurley Brown in the 1960s into a professional strategy for its time. At the same time, feminist groups and the secretarial labor movement coalesced to fight back against decades of discrimination and sexual violence in the office against women workers. Berebitsky concludes her book with an analysis of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas case, which brought the issue of sexual harassment into the living rooms of Americans. This case, and the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton affair, demonstrate that there is both continuity and change in American attitudes towards sex at the office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. But Jonathan Daniel Wells did find something new: Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge UP, 2011; paperback, 2013) is the first to focus in on women journalists, both black and white, in the nineteenth-century American South. The South had a vital periodical marketplace where curious women could engage with politics, belles lettres, science, diplomacy, and other allegedly unfeminine subjects. Examining evidence from both writers and readers, Wells’s book asks questions about literary culture, celebrity, the limits of dissent, and North-South differences that readers will find refreshing and engaging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, Jacqueline Onassis, Elvis Presley, F. Scott Fitzgerald), and an area in which the partial life biography can play an interesting role. Whereas biographers have more traditionally opted for what we call “cradle-to-grave” narratives, the partial life biography instead offers a slice of a life- a particular period that is explored in-depth. Such is the case with Elizabeth Winder‘s Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953(Harper, 2013).Plath’s is a story most everyone knows, and yet her time working in New York as an intern in Mademoiselle has not previously been studied outside of the context of all that came after, which is surprising because it’s an interesting period but also because her experiences then formed the basis for what she would later write in The Bell Jar. The summer is of not just biographical interest, but literary significance as well.There is about Pain, Parties, Work an inevitable sense of clouds brewing- the summer will end, Plath will return home, and she will attempt suicide by taking pills and crawling under her mother’s house- but there’s also a sensation of joy: the joy of young women alone in a big city, experimenting with boys and clothes and make-up and work. Pain, Parties, Work is bolstered by the fact that Winder was able to secure interviews with many of Plath’s fellow interns, voices that have been notably absent in many of the earlier accounts and which lend an immediacy to a well-known story. The interviews with these women do much to flesh out the concrete details of the experience as well as Plath’s unique struggles within it.The Plath we have here is young and eager, fond of make-up and boys, and already displaying a rare gift for words. The clouds are on the horizon, yes- we all know that- but, in the meantime, the city and the thrill of discovery provide an intoxicating distraction. Summer is a time in which anything can happen. Reading Winder’s narrative and meeting Plath in this context, one feels that keenly: the excitement of a girl in the city, the hope and heat of New York, an electricity in the air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 understanding. Indigenous maps preceded the colonial encounter and indigenous maps persist is this extended colonial moment.In Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Mishuana Goeman finds in the poetry and prose of Native women authors the maps of both colonialism’s persistence and resistance to its ongoing containments. Goeman shows how writers like E. Pauline Johnson, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Heid Erdrich point toward a Native future beyond the settler models of territory, jurisdiction, and race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices