New Books in Women's History

Feminism's Empire (Cornell UP, 2022) investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing "pro-imperialist" and "anti-imperialist" as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposed—yet employed—approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation. Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of "nature" that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Feminists faced similar barriers to full incorporation due to the gendered contradictions inherent in universalism. The system presumed citizenship to be male and thus positioned women as outsiders. Feminism's Empire connects this critical struggle to hierarchical power shifts in racial and national status that created uneasy linkages between French feminists and imperial authorities.Dr. Carolyn J. Eichner about is a Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Feminism’s Empire is her third book. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune came out in 2004 and The Paris Commune: A Brief History came out in 2022. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune was published in French as Franchir les barricades: les femmes dans la Commune de Paris (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020). Translated by Bastien Craipain, it was a finalist for the Prix Augustin Thierry in 2021, an award from the city of Paris for a historical study concerning the period between Antiquity and the late 19th century. In 2022-2023 she will be a Fulbright Research scholar in France and will be in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patricia Anne Simpson joins Jana Byars to talk about Early Modern Women's Work: Kinship, Community, and Social Justice (Routledge, 2025). The book examines the contributions of female writers, artists, scientists, religious leaders, and patrons who engaged in entrepreneurial, intellectual, and emotional labor in German-speaking Europe. Through individual and collective authorship, the women analyzed in this study assert a claim to kinship and community, often beyond the hegemonic, heteronormative relationships to family, religion, and monarch. The contributions of early modern women to the construction of productive work spaces and the establishment of intellectual and actual communities are often overlooked or underestimated in scholarship on this period. This book serves as a cultural corrective to suppositions of gender-coded work, because alongside the dominant history of the private sphere as a feminine domain, a counter-narrative emerges with collective authorship. Despite the disparities in their biographies, the women whose work Simpson foregrounds highlight a range of early modern concerns, primarily but not exclusively in German-speaking Europe. These include debates about women's education and erudition; migration and displacement in search of religious or professional freedom; a persistent but varied discourse about female authorship and creative agency; and the assertion of subjectivity against the violent, fractious history of the Thirty Years' War and beyond. This book will be an ideal resource for students, scholars, and all those interested in German and European studies, women and gender studies, and the history of early modern work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Among the many things expectant parents are told to buy, none is a more visible symbol of status and parenting philosophy than a stroller. Although its association with wealth dates back to the invention of the first pram in the 1700s, in recent decades, four-figure strollers have become not just status symbols but cultural identifiers.There are sleek jogging strollers for serious athletes, impossibly compact strollers for parents determined to travel internationally with pre-ambulatory children, and those featuring a ride-on kick board or second, less “babyish” seat, designed with older siblings in mind. Despite the many models available, we are all familiar with the image of a harried mother struggling to use a stroller of any kind in a public space that does not accommodate it. There are anti-stroller evangelists, fervently preaching the gospel of baby wearing and attachment parenting. All of these attitudes, seemingly about an object, are also revealing of how we believe parents and children ought to move through the world.Amanda Parrish Morgan's book Stroller (Bloomsbury, 2022) is part Object Lessons, a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologists-the majority of whom were men-control over information about women's bodies.However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. Pregnancy Test (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores how the pregnancy test has not always lived up to the fantasy that more information equals more knowledge. Karen Weingarten examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A vibrant, meticulously researched celebration of the women and non-binary skateboarders who defied a hostile industry and redefined skateboarding around the world With enthusiasm and empathy, Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides: A History of Badass Women Skateboarders (ECW Press, 2025) celebrates the relentless participation of women in skateboarding from the 1960s onward who defied a hostile industry to carve out their own space through underground networks. Skater librarian Natalie Porter presents interviews and meticulous research, including the DIY zines created by female and non-binary skaters as a means of communication, to expose this unacknowledged story while offering a personal narrative about the importance of community-building and validation, with or without your own video game. Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides disrupts the image of skateboarding as an exclusive male domain, offering historical context for the seemingly rapid progress of female skaters today seen competing on the Olympic stage. Discover how the collective action of a grassroots movement in the 1980s established meaningful change, building a foundation that has led to greater inclusion and diversity, which has inspired women, girls, and non-binary youth worldwide to roll on a skateboard for the first time or rediscover their youthful obsession as an adult and feel inspired to drop once again. Craig Gill is a writer, researcher and historian based in Vancouver, BC. He is the author of Caddying on the Color Line, a history of African American golf caddies in the U.S. South. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers--from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton UP, 2023), Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison's fictional story alongside the lives of real medieval women--from a maid who travelled around Europe, abandoned her employer, and forged a new career in Rome to a duchess who married her fourth husband, a teenager, when she was sixty-five. Turner also tells the incredible story of Alison's post-medieval life, from seventeenth-century ballads and Polish communist pop art to her reclamation by postcolonial Black British women writers.Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a-kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Little is known about the African women who came to Europe from the 1870s onwards, nor do we dare to imagine them as wealthy, elegantly dressed individuals with refined tastes and fluent in several languages. The Krio Fernandino represented a multisited, multilocal, transnational, transcontinental and Afropolitan community that lived between Africa and Europe from the late 19th century onwards. African Women’s Histories in European Narratives: The Afropolitan Krio Fernandino Diaspora (1850-1996) (Leuven University Press, 2025) explains how the Krio Fernandino, and particularly their women, transcended the barriers of race and gender in colonial Africa and in Spain. Aixelà-Cabré highlights a fascinating journey across cultures and continents, unearthing a compelling narrative of African women's empowerment in their home continent and in Catalonia. This research highlights a women's history that resonates on regional, national and transcontinental levels; a genuine Euro-African and Afro-European legacy to be preserved for future generations. This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to JSTOR's Path to Open pilot. Yolanda Aixelà-Cabré is Senior Researcher in Anthropology at the IMF center of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research-CSIC. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A righteous sister identifies herself as a biker. She might wrench, or maintain, her own bike, and she prefers to ride with other righteous sisters. Righteous Sisterhood: The Politics and Power of an All-Women's Motorcycle Club (Temple UP, 2025) is Dr. Sarah Hoiland’s insightful ethnography about an all-women motorcycle club (MC). She recounts stories of women bikers for whom riding in an MC is “an act of rebellion” and “liberating” even as it constrains—a reactionary populist version of the American Dream dipped in “girl power.” Granted unprecedented access to the MC’s initiation rituals, annual ceremonies, and the extensive socialization process, Dr. Hoiland investigates this fascinating subculture, why women choose to join, and why, in some cases, they exit or become exiled. Righteous Sisterhood also reveals complex and contradictory gender and political dynamics within the club and within the larger subculture. The MC provides a unique, liberatory, womanist space within the larger male-dominated MC social world, but these women remain outsiders, with political voices that are lost in the misogyny of alt-right spaces. As Dr. Hoiland emphasizes, the quest for righteous sisterhood is about finding individual excellence and camaraderie while seeking recognition and immortality within the MC. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Western democracies are haunted. Michael Hanchard suggests that the specter of race is what haunts our democracies, but it may be more accurate to suggest that they are haunted by their own racialized death machines—by racialized premature death. If this haunting is not adequately attended to, democracies cannot fulfill their function. Even W. E. B. Du Bois, whose lynching-as-crucifixion stories are important among the stories of Black peoplehood and represent an important attempt to reckon with death in democracy, did not attend to the haunting. But many innovative Black female democrats did. Black women face a crisis of premature death. They are 10 percent of the US female population yet represent 59 percent of women murdered. Their deaths are most often instances of intimate partner violence and occur in private, whereas most large-scale Black political mobilization centers on deaths that are “spectacular.” The centrality of spectacular death has functioned to marginalize Black women in the stories of Black peoplehood and has ensured that they are not the main beneficiaries of large-scale Black political mobilization. But the dearth of mobilization around the deaths of women has not stopped Black women from attending to that which haunts our democracy. Moreover, it is not simply Du Bois’s abolition democracy toward which the women have worked. Their work has involved experimentation with novel democratic forms, and we should think about that work—their methods and the substance of their contributions—within the framework of “Morrisonian truant democracy,” which provides the solution to the problem of mobilization. Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2025) Professor Shatema Threadcraft is the Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Shatema continued their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Like any set of star-crossed lovers, Elaine and Charles came from different worlds. Elaine, an acclaimed childhood poet from a remote corner of the Massachusetts Berkshires, traveled to the Dakota Territories to teach Native American students, undaunted by society’s admonitions. Charles, a Dakota Sioux from Minnesota, educated at Dartmouth and Boston University Medical School, was considered by his Euro-American mentors the epitome of an assimilated Indian. But when they met just ahead of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, the magnetic pull of love brought them together despite the tremendous odds stacked against them.Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Julie Dobrow offers a dual biography of Elaine Goodale and Ohíye’Sa, (Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman), exploring their individual lives as well as their highly publicized interracial marriage. Both well-known in their own time– Elaine as a poet, journalist, and advocate for Indian education and Charles as writer, public speaker, and ardent activist for Indian rights– their marriage started with a shared vision to work on behalf of Indians. In the face of extreme prejudice, financial burden, and personal tragedy however, the marriage began to unravel.Dr. Dobrow paints an intimate, emotional portrait of the Eastmans’ lives drawn from Elaine and Charles’s letters, papers, and hundreds of accounts of the Eastmans’ lives from newspapers. Along the way, she skillfully illuminates the shifting late 19th and early 20th century definitions of Indigenous identity, and reveals how the Eastmans’ legacies reflect changing American attitudes toward gender, interracial relationships and biracial children. The result is a compelling new history that weds the private and the political, and Native America and the United States of America– entwined yet separated, inextricable yet never fully joined, just like Elaine and Charles themselves. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices