Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Alissa Klots is the first to explore the evolution of domestic service in the Soviet Union, set against the background of changing discourses on women, labour, and socialist living. Even though domestic service conflicted with the Bolsheviks' egalitarian message, the regime embraced paid domestic labor as a temporary solution to the problem of housework.Analyzing sources ranging from court cases to oral interviews, Dr. Klots demonstrates how the regime both facilitated and thwarted domestic workers' efforts to reinvent themselves as equal members of Soviet society. Here, a desire to make maids and nannies equal participants in the building of socialism clashed with a gendered ideology where housework was women's work. This book serves not only as a window into class and gender inequality under socialism, but as a vantage point to examine the power of state initiatives to improve the lives of household workers in the modern world.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Antoinette Burton's Gender History: A Very Short Introduction introduces the field of gender history--its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places since the 1970s.Inevitably political, gender history has taken aim at the broader field of historical narrative by asking who counts as a historical subject, what difference gender makes, and how attention to it subverts reigning assumptions of what power, culture, economics, and identity have been in the past--and what they are today. The book explores how gender analysis has changed interpretations of the histories of slavery, capitalism, migration, and empire.As a field, gender history has been extraordinarily influential in shaping several generations of scholars and students. The fact that its early emphasis on the relationship between masculinity and femininity was part of a larger set of challenges to universal history by poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism positions it at the heart of some of the most fractious intellectual debates of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And, as part of the movement toward gender equality that is key to modern western progress, gender history has been caught up in the culture wars that continue to shape post-global society. What is intriguing and ultimately defining about gender history is the way that the centrality of gender, so important for revealing how identity is structured in and through regimes of power, has been unable to hold its own over the half century of the field's own history. The practice of gender history has always run up against the forces of race, class, and sexuality that challenge the singularity of gender itself as an explanatory category of historical analysis. That powerful, unruly tension is at the heart of this Very Short Introduction.Antoinette Burton is a feminist historian of 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire, and Director of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois. She is also the Principal Investigator for Mellon Foundation grants which support The Odyssey Project and the 16-partner consortium, Humanities Without Walls. In 2023 she was appointed to the Board of Illinois Humanities. She also serves as the chair of the Faculty Board of the University of Illinois Press.Her most recent book, Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Lifeworlds is available open-access here.Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South, and unmarried in a culture that offered women few options other than marriage. She was American born when most American Jews were immigrants. She affirmed and maintained her dedication to Jewish religious practice and Jewish faith while many family members embraced Christianity. Yet she also lived well within the social parameters established for Southern white women, espoused Southern values, and owned enslaved African Americans.The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai is one of the few surviving Civil War diaries by a Jewish woman in the antebellum South. It charts her daily life and her evolving perspective on Confederate nationalism and Southern identity, Jewishness, women's roles in wartime, gendered domestic roles in slave-owning households, and the centrality of family relationships. While never losing sight of the racist social and political structures that shaped Emma Mordecai's world, the book chronicles her experiences with dislocation and the loss of her home.Bringing to life the hospital visits, food shortages, local sociability, Jewish observances, sounds and sights of nearby battles, and the very personal ramifications of emancipation and its aftermath for her household and family, The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai offers a valuable and distinct look at a unique historical figure from the waning years of the Civil War South.Dianne Ashton was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and World Religions at Rowan University. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Hanukkah in America: A History and Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America.Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Rowan University. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920; Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890-1940; Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925; and Ballet Class: An American History.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934 (University of Chicago Press, 2024) historian Dr. Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Dr. Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman.Dr. Motyl delves into how these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside cafés and wandering through city streets helped create novel conceptions of gender. Exploring the emergence of a new womanhood, Embodied Histories presents a new account of how gender, the body, and the city merge with and transform each other, showing how our modes of being are radically intertwined with the spaces we inhabit.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What identity does the post-2000s Inland Tibet Class (ITC) generation mean? How do Sinophone-Tibetan films articulate the expression of such identity? How does affective visuality mediate the cultural, political, and gender identity formation of female artists of the post-2000s ITC generation?Jinyan Zeng, a researcher at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden, introduces her research in this podcast episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, hosted by Ning Ao, PhD student at the Centre. The episode is produced by Lisa Sihvonen, student intern at the Centre. China has introduced a policy of Inland Tibet Class (ITC) to educate talented Tibetan pupils from Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) in Chinese language boarding schools since 1985. Jinyan Zeng’s recent article Visualising the Post-2000s Inland Tibet Class Generation focuses on the experiences of female artists, filmmakers, and writers of the ITC who were born in the 1990s and early 2000s.Following the experience of the Sinophone-Tibetan filmmaker Kangdrun in a Chinese language education environment, her films, and Tibetan cultural communities, Jinyan Zeng’s research contributes to a fresh understanding of modern Tibetan authors’ generational relationships; the expressive styles of female Sinophone-Tibetan authors.Her gender analysis of the ITC generation critically contributes to Tibetan studies and China studies both theoretically and methodologically. A new volume titled Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere (Bloomsbury Academic), co-edited by Jinyan Zeng with Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen came out in December 2024.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia) Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland) Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania) Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) Norwegian Network for Asian Studies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s book is: Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials (Scribner, 2024), by Dr. Marion Gibson, which explores the global history of witch trials across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, told through thirteen distinct trials that illuminate a pattern of demonization and conspiratorial thinking that has profoundly shaped human history. Some of them are famous like the Salem witch trials, and some lesser-known, like the 1620s witch trial on Vardø island, Norway, where an indigenous Sami woman was accused of murder; the last witch trial in France in 1731, where a young woman was pitted against her confessor and cult leader; and a trial in Lesotho in 1948, where British colonial authorities executed local leaders. Exploring how witchcraft was feared, then decriminalized, and then reimagined as gendered persecution, Witchcraft takes on the intersections between gender and power, indigenous spirituality and colonial rule, political conspiracy and individual resistance. Offering a striking, dramatic journey unspooling over centuries and across continents, Witchcraft offers insights into some of the cruelest moments in history, reclaims voices that have been silenced, and asks us to seriously consider how we will create a future without further witch trials.Our guest is: Dr. Marion Gibson, who is Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles, and seven academic books on witches in history and literature. She is General Editor of the series Elements in Magic for Cambridge University Press. Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials is her most recent book.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.Listeners may enjoy this playlist: Fierce We Refuse You're Doing It Wrong Gender-Creative Parenting Reinventing Her Life The Turnaway Study Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

She was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. Yet beyond these celebrated accomplishments there is another dimension to Frances Perkins’s story. Without fanfare, and despite powerful opposition, Perkins helped save the lives of countless Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.“Immigration problems usually have to be decided in a few days. They involve human lives. There can be no delaying,” Perkins wrote in her memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew. In March 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by FDR. As Hitler rose to power, thousands of German-Jewish refugees and their loved ones reached out to the INS—then part of the Department of Labor—applying for immigration to the United States, writing letters that began “Dear Miss Perkins . . .”Perkins’s early experiences working in Chicago’s famed Hull House and as a firsthand witness to the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire shaped her determination to advocate for immigrants and refugees. As Secretary of Labor, she wrestled widespread antisemitism and isolationism, finding creative ways to work around quotas and restrictive immigration laws. Diligent, resilient, empathetic, yet steadfast, she persisted on behalf of the desperate when others refused to act.Based on extensive research, including thousands of letters housed in the National Archives, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Citadel Press, 2025) adds new dimension to an already extraordinary life story, revealing at last how one woman tried to steer the nation to a better, more righteous course. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers (U Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families by shaping relationships between users. Moving beyond the story of male-dominated computer culture, this book emphasizes the neglected history of the influence of women’s culture and feminist critique on the development of personal computing despite women’s underrepresentation in the industry.Proposing the notion of “companionate computing,” Reem Hilu reimagines the spread of computers into American homes as the history of an interpersonal, romantic, and familial medium. She details the integration of computing into family relationships—from helping couples have better sex and offering thoughtful simulations of masculine seduction to animating cute robot companions and giving voice to dolls that could talk to lonely children—underscoring how these computer applications directly responded to the companionate needs of their users as a way to ease growing pressures on home life.The Intimate Life of Computers is a vital contribution to feminist media history, highlighting how the emergence of personal computing dovetailed with changing gender roles and other social and cultural shifts. Eschewing the emphasis on technologies and institutions typically foregrounded in personal-computer histories, Hilu uncovers the surprising ways that domesticity and family life guided the earlier stages of our all-pervasive digital culture.Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Mie Nakachi about Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (Oxford UP, 2021)In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize abortion on demand. But in 1936, the Soviet leadership criminalized abortion: the collectivization of the early 1930s was followed by famine that took the lives of millions of people, and the government grew eager to recover the population. Drawing on an amazing wealth of archival material, Nakachi traces the dynamic of Soviet reproductive policies that were invariably guided by pronatalist goals but almost always had damaging consequences. The 1944 Family Law, aimed at making up for the enormous human losses of World War II (27 million people died, 20 million of them men), relieved men of parental responsibilities, legal or financial, thereby encouraging them to father children out of wedlock. Given the devastation of the war and inadequate levels of government support, many women sought to avoid such births. Their only recourse was abortion, which remained illegal and, as a result, often led to grave medical complications or even death—on top of being criminally punishable. Doctors were generally sympathetic to the women’s plight but they could not challenge the system. It was only in the mid-1950s that abortion was decriminalized, but until the end of the Soviet Union, modern contraception was barely available and abortion remained the primary method of birth control. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

South of My Dreams: Finding My American Home, A Memoir (U South Carolina Press, 2024) by F. K. Clementi follows the adventures and misadventures of Fania, a quixotic heroine, who dreamed all her life of making it big in New York City. Growing up in 1970s Italy, she felt constrained by a stale environment, a corrupt society, and a national culture hostile to women's independence. In pursuit of her childhood fantasy, and heavily influenced by Hollywood films, she leaves everything behind to begin her new life in New York, where she thinks her American Dream awaits. Instead, her American nightmare begins. South of My Dreams, published in 2024 by the University of South Carolina Press, is a story of irreparable trauma graced by intense love, faithful friendships, and inspiring mentors. Simultaneously merciless and humorous, Clementi's memoir is an inspiring account of a woman's disillusionment and personal rebirth in the polyglot neighborhoods of New York City, enriched by her portraits of life, love and work. South of My Dreams will resonate with all who fight hard for what they want and refuse to put aside their childhood dreams.Hosted by Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices