New Books in Women's History

Feminist Geography Unbound: Discomfort, Bodies, and Prefigured Futures, edited by Banu Gökarıksel, Michael Hawkins, Christopher Neubert, and Sara Smith (West Virginia University Press, 2021) is a collection of papers by a diverse range of up-and-coming scholars in feminist geography. Addressing topics from Dalit activism to tiny houses to restrictions on transgender bathroom use, the collection challenges the "comfort feminism" promoted by white middle-class feminists and asks us to embrace productive discomfort in scholarship and activism to seek out a better future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are here today with Sara Ritchey, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, about her new book, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health, out with Cornell University Press this year, 2021.The author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell, 2014) and numerous articles, including “Caring by the Hours: the Psalter as a Source of Gendered Healthcare,” “Health, Healing, and Salvation: Hagiography as a Source of Medieval Healthcare,” “The Wound’s Presence and Bodily Absence: The Experience of God in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript,” Dr. Ritchey discusses her profound understanding in the intersection of religious practice (writ large) and the practice of medicine (writ large) in the Medieval era.In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical.The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns.Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1836, an enslaved six-year-old girl named Med was brought to Boston by a woman from New Orleans who claimed her as property. Learning of the girl's arrival in the city, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) waged a legal fight to secure her freedom and affirm the free soil of Massachusetts. While Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled quite narrowly in the case that enslaved people brought to Massachusetts could not be held against their will, BFASS claimed a broad victory for the abolitionist cause, and Med was released to the care of a local institution. When she died two years later, celebration quickly turned to silence, and her story was soon forgotten. As a result, Commonwealth v. Aves is little known outside of legal scholarship. In The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), Karen Woods Weierman complicates Boston's identity as the birthplace of abolition and the cradle of liberty, and restores Med to her rightful place in antislavery history by situating her story in the context of other writings on slavery, childhood, and the law.Karen Woods Weierman is Professor of English and the former director of the Commonwealth Honors Program at Worcester State University. She is the author of One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820–1870, published in 2005 by the University of Massachusetts Press. Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick. His teaching and research interests examine eighteenth and nineteenth century African American women’s history and the history of slavery and emancipation in early America and the Atlantic world. Follow him on Twitter @Jerrad_Pacatte! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello Everyone and welcome back to New Books in History, a network on the New Books Network. I’m Jana Byars, your host, and I’m here today with Angela Firkus, Professor of History at Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri to talk about her new book, America’s Early Women Celebrities: The Famous and Scorned from Martha Washington to Silent Film Star Mary Fuller, out this year, 2021 with McFarland & Company.Well before television and the internet, there were women who sought fame, flirted with infamy, and actively engaged with their fan base. In today’s pop culture world, it can be hard to understand what the lives of these women were like. In their pre-suffrage world, women who attracted attention were considered scandalous and it was largely uncommon for women to become celebrities. Women who rose to fame in those times had to put up with societal standards for women on top of the lack of privacy and free speech.This book provides the details and context to let us know the women who captured America’s heart in the18th and 19th centuries. Rather than looking at influential women who strictly avoided notoriety, it covers the lives of 18 celebrities like Lydia Maria Child, Sojourner Truth, and Jane Addams. The conversation covers the meaning of celebrity and how women use power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hawraa Al Hassan’s Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba’thist State: Contending Discourses of Resistance and Collaboration, 1968-2003 (University of Edinburgh Press, 2020) is unique because it both explores discourse concerning women and how women themselves used literature to create a site of resistance to the state. Al-Hassan’s work is also inclusive, as it joins a wider call to make literary studies a space in which works which were previously considered propagandistic can also be seriously considered. My hope for the book is that it will shift perspectives in literary studies to different foci, painting a more complete vision of the literary history of the Arabic language.Dr Hawraa Al-Hassan is an associate fellow of the Higher Education Academy, having taught Arabic and modern history of the Middle East at the University of Cambridge. Hawraa completed her PhD in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge and gained an MA in Comparative Literature at University College London. She is interested in the cultural history of the Arab world in so far as it relates to totalitarianism, propaganda and nationalism. Hawraa’s research focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to the Arab novel as a conduit of group identities. Her current project explores Iraqi Ba’thist involvement in the production of literary and media discourses on gender and nation, whilst considering the potential of resistive ‘counter-public’ spaces, be they Islamic or secular. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A close friend and muse of many of postrevolutionary Mexico's greatest artists, Luz Jiménez's likeness appears across Mexico City in the form of painting, photography, and sculpture. Jiménez's ubiquity has earned her the titles of "the most painted woman in all of Mexico" and "the archetype of Indigenous Mexican woman." And yet the details of her complex life as an Indigenous woman at mid century have long remained shrouded by artistic depictions of her face and body. Jiménez's experience of hypervisibility and simultaneous erasure in postrevolutionary Mexico is no anomaly; during the early to mid-twentieth century, Indigenous women were idealized and objectified as relics of Mexico's past as cultural elites sought to manufacture a distinctly mestizo future. The experiences of modern Indigenous women constitute the focus of Natasha Varner's new book, La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2020), a vivid recovery of the intersections of settler colonialism, gender, visual culture, and modernity.Varner employs methods from the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies and settler colonial studies in an innovative new study of postrevolutionary Mexican visual culture. Drawing upon a range of midcentury media - including newspapers, photography, film, postcards and tourism materials, and more - Varner weaves together narratives of visibility, erasure, survivance, dispossession, and identity that ultimately center upon on Indigenous women's experiences and livelihoods. Despite efforts to erase Indigenous women from Mexico's future, La Raza Cosmética impresses upon us a powerful reminder of Indigenous women's persistence in Mexico - at midcentury as well as in the present.Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edited by Drs. Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Snyder, As if She Were Free (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a collective biography of African and African-descended women across the Americas. This collection of twenty-four beautifully crafted chapters, spans across centuries and geographies, giving us a varied and textured reading of women’s lives and experiences. More importantly than that, and herein lies the revolutionary character of this book, As If She Were Free changes our ways of understanding and conceptualizing freedom and emancipation, ultimately transforming how we narrate the past of our societies and understand our present. As the editors of the book tell us in this interview, this is a feminist project at its core, a useful history for today because African and African-descended women in the Americas, both in the past and present, have crafted their own understandings of freedom, advocated for new ways of defining and living freely, and achieved revolutionary changes in our societies. Enjoy this wonderful conversation!PS. By the end of the interview, you may notice Tatiana Seijas does not answer some questions. The recording of this episode occurred during the Texas Winter storms, and she had to rush home before sunset. Her commitment to this interview, even under such circumstances, was remarkable even if not surprising for those of us who know her and her love for history.Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Carol J. Adams about two of her classic texts that have recently been republished.The first book we discuss, first published in 1990, is The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, a landmark text in the ongoing debates about animal rights. In the two decades since, the book has inspired controversy and heated debate. The Sexual Politics of Meat argues that what, or more precisely who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture, and that the meanings attached to meat eating are often clustered around virility. We live in a world in which men still have considerable power over women, both in public and in private. Carol Adams argues that gender politics is inextricably related to how we view animals, especially animals who are consumed. Further, she argues that vegetarianism and fighting for animal rights fit perfectly alongside working to improve the lives of disenfranchised and suffering people, under the wide umbrella of compassionate activism.The second book we discuss, first published in 2004, is The Pornography of Meat. For 30 years, since the publication of her landmark book The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams and her readers have continued to document and hold to account the degrading interplay of language about women, domesticated animals, and meat in advertising, politics, and media. Serving as sequel and visual companion, The Pornography of Meat charts the continued influence of this language and the fight against it. This new edition includes more than 300 images, most of them new, and brings the book up to date to include expressions of misogyny in online media and advertising, the #MeToo movement, and the impact of Donald Trump and white supremacy on our political language. Never has this book--or Adams's analysis--been more relevant.Carol J. Adams is the author of numerous books, including The Sexual Politics of Meat, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals, and The Pornography of Meat. She is the co-editor of several pathbreaking anthologies, including most recently Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (with Lori Gruen). Her work is the subject of two recent anthologies, Defiant Daughters: 21 Women of Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Art of the Animal: 14 Women Artists Explore The Sexual Politics of Meat, in which a new generation of feminists, artists, and activists respond to Adams' groundbreaking work.Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In their groundbreaking new book, Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice: Processes of Canonization, Subversion, and Change (McGill, 2020), Nevin Reda and Yasmin Amin raise excellent questions about the existence and formation of a canon in the Islamic tradition. This exciting book comprises ten chapters, organized into three sections: The Qur’an and Its Interpretation; Figurative Representation: Hadith and Biographical Dictionaries; and, finally, Fiqh and Its Application. The volume brilliantly and carefully responds to criticisms against Islamic feminism, such as the claim that Islamic feminist scholarship lacks methodological rigor. Some of the overarching themes that each chapter in the volume shares are providing more ethical and egalitarian interpretations of gendered verses in the Qur’an and interrogating the idea of canonization in Islam. Each author accomplishes this by challenging the unfounded assumption of an established canon in the Islamic tradition; by raising questions about what ijma’ (or consensus) is and if it has ever existed on given issues; and/or by using the methodologies of pre-modern male scholars of Islam only to produce significantly different interpretations on the same matter. Among the topics covered are polygamy, divorce, child marriage, women’s public participation, interreligious marriage, stoning, and so much more.In today's conversation with Yasmin Amin and Nevin Reda, we discuss the major contributions of the book, the process of compilation, what the authors mean by decanonization and by subverting the canon if one exists, some of the specific chapters of the book, such as on child marriage, polygamy, and biographies of women, and the question of ethical interpretations of the Qur’an in the context of gender.Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She is currently working on a book project on Muslim women's marriage to non-Muslims in Islam. Shehnaz runs a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy?!, where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy and uproot it from Islam (ambitious, she knows). She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By combining the spirit of fiction with the fabulism of Indian mythology and in-depth academic research, Vanessa R. Sasson shares the evocative story of the Buddha from the perspective of a forgotten woman: Yasodhara, the Buddha's wife.Although often marginalized, Yasodhara's narrative here comes to life. Written with a strong feminist voice, we encounter Yasodhara as a fiercely independent, passionate and resilient individual. We witness her joys and sorrows, her expectations and frustrations, her fairy-tale wedding, and her overwhelming devastation at the departure of her beloved.It is through her eyes that we witness Siddhattha's slow transformation, from a sheltered prince to a deeply sensitive young man. On the way, we see how the gods watch over the future Buddha from the clouds, how the king and his ministers try to keep the suffering of the world from him and how he eventually renounces the throne, his wife and newly-born son to seek enlightenment.Along with a foreword from Wendy Doniger, Yasodhara and the Buddha (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) includes a scholarly introduction to Yasodhara's narrative and offers extensive notes along with study questions, to help readers navigate the traditional literature in a new way, making this an essential book for anyone wanting to learn about Buddhist narratives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices