New Books in Women's History

Extreme metal, punk, and hardcore. Slayer. Sick of it All. Cro-Mags. Decapitated. Behemoth. Musically aggressive rock bands with growling vocals and lyrics about annihilation, death, and dismemberment. A genre of music that, even more than more mainstream music genres, seems to be the province of (straight) white males. But wait. In What are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal (Bazillion Points, 2012), Laina Dawes examines an overlooked and numerically small segment of the extreme music scene: black women. Putting her sociological training to good use, Dawes presents a macro structural cultural analysis of race in North America (Dawes is Canadian) and how this plays out in the micro-arenas of high school community and heavy metal shows. Using in-depth interviews with a number of black women punk and metal artists including Skin, Sandra St. Victor, Militia Vox, Diamond Rowe, Urith Myree, Tamar-Kali, Ashley Greenwood, Yvonne Ducksworth, Camille Douglas, Alexis Brown, and others, Dawes highlights the self and societal contradictions of being black, female, and a fan of extreme music. Most significantly, the black friends of these women accuse them of not being black enough and their white metal friends (and strangers, for that matter) are dumbfounded about what a black woman might find interesting in this world of white males. The answer to both, writes Dawes, is easy: Metal fandom allows these women to be themselves, to be individuals, to escape the narrow confines of prescribed gender and race roles in North American society.Laina Dawes is a music and cultural critic and opinion writer, an active public speaker, and a contributor to CBC Radio. She is also a current affairs columnist for Afrotoronto.com and contributing editor for Blogher.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Divorce was virtually impossible in Imperial Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church monopolized matrimony, and it rarely granted divorce except in extraordinary cases of adultery, abandonment, sexual impotence, or exile. Marriage as an unbreakable religious sacrament still held. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, Russian perceived a “crisis of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life. Towards the end of Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life(Penguin, 2011) biographer Lisa Chaney allows her subject to speak for herself. Chanel writes: ‘Today, alone in the sunshine and snow… I shall continue, without husband, without children, without grandchildren, without these delightful illusions… I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be.’ Chanel’s is a life that, all these years later, still reads as radical, which puts into perspective how terribly shocking it must have appeared in the early 20th century.Chaney has chosen an unusually challenging subject. Mired in myths, some of them of her own devising, the image of Chanel that has been passed down to us is clouded at best and, as Chaney acknowledges, quoting L.P. Hartley’s statement in The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’The story of Chanel’s life emerges in more muted tones than one might expect, with gray areas aplenty, from which it is unreasonable to demand clarity or place judgment.And yet Coco Chanel remains an uncompromising account. Chaney doesn’t ignore Chanel’s capacity for storytelling but, rather, explores the meanings of her stories, their unrealities, and the significance of the details that Chanel chose to omit. She doesn’t side-step the controversies surrounding Chanel’s life during the occupation of Paris, but instead grapples head-on with the moral ambiguities and compromises that occurred during the Occupation and in Vichy France.What emerges is an unflinching portrait of a complex, intelligent, unapologetic, incredibly hard working woman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many people have probably heard of Betty Friedan, Bela Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Andrea Dworkin, all stars of Second Wave Feminism. They were also all Jewish (by heritage if not faith). As Melissa R. Klapper shows in her new book Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940 (New York University Press, 2013), this was no accident. Freidan et al. inherited a rich tradition Jewish women’s activism in the U.S. These women did not burn their bras (it’s not clear that any feminists did, actually), but they did fight for the vote, for birth control, and for peace. In this interview, Melissa explains why, how, and to what extent they succeeded. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who is Motown’s first real star? The answer, of course, is Mary Wells, singer of such classics as “My Guy,” “Bye Bye Baby,” “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” and “Two Lovers,” among others. All of these hits were released in just four years between 1960 and 1969. In Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar (Chicago Review Press, 2012) author Peter Benjaminson chronicles the life of this singular performer from her early days as a young rock ‘n’ roll diva to her last years struggling with cancer. Along the way we learn that Wells was a tireless performer. She never stopped touring, never stopped reaching for the brass ring of financial success that eluded her for much of her career. It seems she never did receive the money she felt she deserved for the songs she released for Motown, while the record company appeared to rake in a handsome profit. She left Motown in 1964, released records with a number of different labels over the next twenty-six years, and finally received a paltry $100,000 from a law suit she filed against Motown in the late eighties. Whatever the case, Benjaminson shows well how Mary Wells star still shines bright. Her songs are known by most everyone, they are ingrained in the American popular psyche.Peter Benjaminson is the author of The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard, The Story of Motown, and co-author of Investigative Reporting. He has written numerous articles for the Detroit Free Press and Atlanta Journal-Constitution among others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement (Lexington Books, 2012), the second installment of his hip hop trilogy, Reiland Rabaka again discusses, in great detail, many of the essential historical, musical, aesthetical, political, and cultural movements and moments of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first African America. Building on his overtly Africana, feminist, and queer critical theoretical analyses of black movements in Hip Hop’s Inheritance (the first installment), Rabaka uses a more comparative historical eye in this book to show how (A) there are many aspects of early blues, jazz, bebop, and soul musical movements, especially as they related to other political and cultural movements of their times, that can inform us as to the place of modern rap and neo-soul movements and their relationships with other modern cultural and political movements, and (B) the modern hip hop movement (musical and otherwise) can benefit from an understanding of the ways actors in these other movements (musical and otherwise) dealt with situations similar to their own. In this way, Rabaka passionately argues, rap music can take its rightful political, aesthetic, and cultural place in the ongoing historical struggle of African Americans (men and women, straight and gay) to overthrow the bonds of oppression that have characterized their experiences in U.S. society.Reiland Rabaka is associate professor of African, African American, and Caribbean studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Humanities Program and the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is also an affiliate professor in the Women and Gender studies Program and a research fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America. He is the author of ten books, including Against Epistemic Apartheid, Du Bois’s Dialectics, and the forthcoming third installment of his Hip Hop trilogy, The Hip Hop Movement.Click here to listen to my previous interview with Rabaka about Hip Hop’s Inheritance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The art salon is sadly less prevalent in our day than in days past, but it is far from obsolete. In its heyday, the salon provided people- particularly women Natalie Barney, orPerle Mesta)- with an extraordinary power to shape cultural tastes and contemporary art.In the early 20th century, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s salons in Florence and New York drew astonishing talents to her doorstep. Her gift for bringing artists together so they might collaborate and draw inspiration from one another played out even more grandly at the art colony she and her third husband founded in Taos, New Mexico. Over the years, they would play host to such luminaries as D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, and Georgia O’Keeffe.Though she’s remembered more for her gift for building artistic communities, Luhan was an artist in her own right. Her book Winter in Taos is considered a classic of New Mexican literature and her four-volume memoir vividly explores the changes in Victorian sexuality, politics, art, and culture as the modern age approached. However, despite their candor, the memoirs were not wholly forthcoming: Luhan’s writings about her struggles with depression, sexuality, and venereal disease were restricted at the behest of her family until the year 2000.In her excellent biography, The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture (University of New Mexico Press, 2012), Lois Rudnick- who has been studying Luhan’s life for over 35 years- explores these newly available documents, presenting Luhan’s writing alongside her own analysis, to draw new conclusions about Luhan’s life, loves, and work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean for a contemporary scholar to be trusted with the unfinished autobiography of a dance legend? How does one ensure that the integrity of their research matches the depth of life experience embodied in their subject’s narrative? Who is best served by the sharing of the untold stories of those whose narratives have been historically marginalized? And what does it mean for today’s dancers to learn about those who have paved the way for them under harsh and unjust circumstances? These were the questions I had in mind when I was lucky enough to interview historian and dancer Yael Tamar Lewin, author of Night’s Dancer, The Life of Janet Collins (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), a soaring work that includes Ms. Collin’s unfinished autobiography.Born in 1917, Janet Collins was raised in Los Angeles and has the historic distinction of being the first African – American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. A dancer with demonstrable skill in both ballet and modern dance vocabularies, Janet’s career included performances on television, in film and on Broadway. Despite her triumphs as an artist, Ms. Collins faced intense racial bias throughout her career as a dancer, choreographer and teacher. An accomplished painter and deeply spiritual person, Janet’s story is tenderly and meticulously recounted in both her own words and through Ms. Lewin’s wonderful research. The book stands as a testament to any dancer today wishing to fulfill their artistic potential in a world that can be unwelcoming and cold. Notably, Yael’s research on Collins began during her own undergraduate studies and took shape over several years during which a trusting relationship budded between subject and author. This model of scholarship and the resulting work shares lessons on how to handle the narrative of a beloved artist with care. Yael Tamar Lewin is a writer, editor, choreographer, and alternative medicine practitioner. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Barnard College and Columbia University, and has performed with several dance companies, including her own. She lives in New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I confess I knew nothing about Julia Child prior to reading Bob Spitz‘s new book. And yet, from the dramatic opening passages through its 500+ pages, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Knopf, 2012) held me captive.How many people, much less women, change our attitudes, beliefs, and culture? Julia Child did. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that she did so by becoming a television star at the age of 50.One of the problems of biography is that women’s lives are so often written so badly. Whereas the telling of men’s lives emphasizes adventure, in the lives of women biographers tend to emphasize relationships and romance. Not so Dearie.From the outset, Spitz contends that Child led a life of adventure and, while her relationships play a role in the story, they are not at its center. Rather, Child is the star from page 1. Thus, Dearie is an unconventional story of an unconventional woman who made unconventional decisions. Which is to say, biographically speaking, it is a breath of fresh air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2005, Amina Wadud led a mixed-gender congregation of Muslims in prayer. This event became the focal point of substantial media attention and highlighted some of the tensions within the Muslim community. However, this prayer gathering was the culmination of a series of events and embodied several ongoing intra-Muslim debates. In American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer (University of Texas Press, 2012), Juliane Hammer, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, outlines the circumstances leading up to the prayer event and employs it as point of convergence to explore the multiple discourses surrounding Muslim gender issues. The debates following the prayer fell into two discursive frameworks, legal and symbolic. Hammer explores these themes through a broader body of sources written by American Muslim women both in relation to exegetical projects or legalistic frameworks leading towards gender equality or human rights. While gender remains central to the arguments of the book Hammer uses this subject to examine various issues related to contemporary Islam, including participation, leadership, law, media, and self-representation. In our conversation, we discuss the disintegration of traditional modes of authority, “progressive” Muslims, embodied tafsir, feminism, the permissibility and validity of women lead prayer, the hijab, book covers, mosques, networks, Asra Nomani, and Amina Wadud, but are only able to scratch the surface of this wonderful book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices