New Books in Women's History

Harriet Tubman is best known as one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad. As a leading abolitionist, her bravery and selflessness has inspired generations in the continuing struggle for civil rights. Now, National Book Award nominee Erica Armstrong Dunbar presents a fresh take on this American icon blending traditional biography, illustrations, photos, and engaging sidebars that illuminate the life of Tubman as never before.Not only did Tubman help liberate hundreds of slaves, she was the first woman to lead an armed expedition during the Civil War, worked as a spy for the Union Army, was a fierce suffragist, and was an advocate for the aged. She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman (37 Ink, 2019) reveals the many complexities and varied accomplishments of one of our nation’s true heroes and offers an accessible and modern interpretation of Tubman’s life that is both informative and engaging.Filled with rare outtakes of commentary, an expansive timeline of Tubman’s life, photos (both new and those in public domain), commissioned illustrations, and sections including “Harriet By the Numbers” (number of times she went back down south, approximately how many people she rescued, the bounty on her head) and “Harriet’s Homies” (those who supported her over the years), She Came to Slay is a stunning and powerful mix of pop culture and scholarship and proves that Harriet Tubman is well deserving of her permanent place in our nation’s history.Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. McNeil focuses on eighteenth and early nineteenth century Black Women’s histories of slavery and freedom under the direction of Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Before WWII, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women's labors. Over time, the ILO embraced non-discrimination and equal treatment. It now promotes fair globalization, standardized employment and decent work for women in the developing world. In Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Eileen Boris illuminates the ILO's transformation in the context of the long fight for social justice.Boris analyzes three ways in which the ILO has classified the division of labor: between women and men from 1919 to 1958; between women in the global south and the west from 1955 to 1996; and between the earning and care needs of all workers from 1990s to today. Before 1945, the ILO focused on distinguishing feminized labor from male workers, whom the organization prioritized. But when the world needed more women workers, the ILO (a UN agency after WWII) highlighted the global differences in women's work, began to combat sexism in the workplace, and declared care work essential to women's labor participation. Today, the ILO enters its second century with a mission to protect the interests of all workers in the face of increasingly globalized supply chains, the digitization of homework, and cross-border labor trafficking.Eileen Boris is the Hull Professor and Chair of the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she directs the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice.Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute’s Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rwanda and South Africa have some of the highest rates of women’s political representation in the world, with significant growth particularly in the last 20 years. Through interviews with eleven women who have held formal political leadership since 1994 in Rwanda and South Africa, Women Political Leaders in Rwanda and South Africa: Narratives of Triumph and Loss (Barbara Budrich, 2016) explores the ways in which life experiences, education, activism, and social and cultural identities have shaped the individual journeys and contributions of women in politics in the two countries and investigates role of women’s political representation in achieving social and economic progress in the aftermath of conflict. Author Naleli Morojele, Human Rights Officer at the South African Human Rights Commission and PhD candidate at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, presents an in-depth look at the challenges that women encounter as they navigate patriarchal power structures and gendered expectations in the legislature, the home, and society at large and balance conflicting political identities based on gender, race, and class as they work to effect change.Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why Don′t Women Rule the World?: Understanding Women′s Civic and Political Choices (Sage, 2019) is a comprehensive and useful addition to the established literature on women and politics. This book, authored by four political scientists with a diversity of training and expertise, delves into a broad and extensive overview of the issues that have long surrounded women in civic life and in pursuing positions of power and leadership. J. Cherie Strachan and Lori M. Poloni-Staudinger, Shannon L. Jenkins, Candice D. Ortbals start with an anthropological understanding of how and where sex-specific societal roles were established, leading to the establishment of patriarchal structures and societal norms, and how these structures, norms, expectations, and roles have long kept women out of the public sphere. The thrust of Why Don’t Women Rule the World? is to help students and scholars understand women and politics, analyzing the limits that women have faced, and exploring how and where these limits have been dismantled and where they still remain. While the book is generally focused on women and politics in the United States, it is not limited to this perspective, and ably integrates comparative analyses and global examples of women and politics. The book also provides “ambition activities” at the end of each chapter, allowing readers, especially students, to consider their own capacities within the context of the information and knowledge they are learning about throughout the book. This is an excellent textbook for anyone teaching or working within the field of women and politics, but it is also accessible and useful for general readers who want to learn more about women and politics.Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In their co-authored book, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State(Cornell University Press, 2017), Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello examine the many distinct, yet interconnected, groups that fought for women’s suffrage in New York State before 1917. New York produced some of the most well-known figures in suffrage history, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but Goodier and Pastorello have dedicated chapters to the activism of rural, black, working-class, and radical women alongside the supportive role played by men. Taking into account the innovative techniques and technologies employed by suffragists across the state, Goodier and Pastorello offer an in-depth exploration into one of the most important social movements in U.S. history.Chelsea Gibson is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Binghamton University. Her research explores the reception of Russian terrorist women in the United States before 1917.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gerry Milligan’s Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2018) takes as its subject the woman warrior in early modern Italy as she was and as she was represented across varied types of texts, both literary and historical. What emerges is a discursive construction of the role gender played in the concept of warfare during this time period. How are women depicted in relation to warfare? Are they non-combatant innocents protected by male warriors? If this is not (only) the case, how does the representation of the woman warrior illuminate men and masculinity in the Italian Renaissance? How are gender roles rewritten, challenged, and reaffirmed in the texts under consideration? How do the figures of the virago and the woman warrior resonate with 21st century gender norms? These are some of Milligan’s questions, as well as some of the topics, we consider in this podcast.Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Recent scholarly essays focus on serial television in Italy, the UK, and North America; masculinities in Italian cinema and media studies; and student filmmakers. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la future consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Nicoletta Marini-Maio (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore, 2020). She is President of the American Association for Italian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How are notions of justice and equality constructed in Islamic virtue ethics (akhlaq)? How are Islamic virtue ethics gendered, despite their venture into perennial concerns of how best to live a good and ethical life? These are the questions that Zahra Ayubi, an assistant professor of religion at Dartmouth college, examines in her new book Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2019). Using akhlaq literature by al-Ghazali, Davani and Tusi, Ayubi closely studies the ways in which these male Muslim scholars constructed ideas of the self (nafs), particularly in relation to the family and the society. Despite the ethicists’ differing sectarian and theological orientations in Islam, they still concluded that the status of a perfect ethical human was only achievable by a male elite. Meaning that the capacity to utilize rational faculty, which is central to self-refinement, was deemed not accessible to females, slaves, and non-elite males. In unpacking these gendered and hierarchical dynamics around ethics and comportment, Aybui masterfully applies feminist and gender analysis to deconstruct ethical texts. In light of her findings, she calls for a “philosophical turn” that must employ critical gender analysis when reading these texts not only in the context of Islamic philosophy, but broadly in the study of Islam. The book is a must read for scholars and students interested in Islamic philosophy and gender and Islamic studies.M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism(Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found on here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tammy Vigil’s new book, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992-2016 (University Press of Kansas, 2019), examines the contemporary “first spouses” on the campaign trail, at the nominating conventions, and pays particular attention to how these women (and one man, the 2016 case of former President Bill Clinton) position themselves and are positioned within a fairly narrow role in relation to their candidate-husbands. Vigil’s analysis is particularly interesting and informative in how we think about the role of public women in our country, especially in relation to the White House and their unelected roles within the political sphere. Vigil frames her examination of these dyads (the winning and losing first spouses) in context of our thinking about how women should inhabit, or not inhabit, political space. This draws on classical understandings of republican motherhood, and she traces how gendered framing and traditional expectations continue to dominate how first wives and aspirational first spouses are considered by the public, especially during the presidential campaigns themselves. This research is interdisciplinary, pulling together gender and women’s studies, political science, communication, popular culture, and history in a very readable and fascinating analysis.Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Kirkpatrick a lecturer in Religion, Philosophy and Culture at King’s College London and author of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Kirkpatrick has given us a biography that addresses the puzzle and contradictions of the life of the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir drawn from never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how choices shaped her life. Beauvoir, a writer and feminist icon, won prestigious literary prizes and scandalized many with her now classic The Second Sex. She is now celebrated, but during her life she was a controversial figure both by conventional and feminists’ standards. As one who chose to write about lived ideas, both in fiction and essays, rather than build philosophical systems she was easily dismissed as Jean-Paul Sartre’s overly loyal side kick. Kirkpatrick shows how Beauvoir’s thinking evolved as a feminist and a philosopher – labels she was reluctant to embrace. The author reexamines the overemphasis on Beauvoir’s atheism, the extent of her political engagement, and her ethical failures in regard to third parties in the Sartre/Beauvoir relational triads. Beginning with her childhood to her adoption of Sylvie Le Bon, Kirkpatrick focuses on the significant relationships in Beauvoir’s life to expand our understand of how they shaped her thinking about the nature of subjectivity. Becoming Beauvoir demonstrates how the choices we make shape who we become.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the intellectual history of feminist thought seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the American Society for Legal History’s podcast Talking Legal History Siobhan talks with Hendrik Hartog about his book The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North (UNC Press, 2018). The Trouble with Minna is also used as a vessel to explore some of the topics discussed in Law and Social Inquiry's May 2019 “Review Symposium: Retrospective on the Work of Hendrik Hartog.” Hartog is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus at Princeton University. This episode is the first in a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program.In this intriguing book, Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna’s case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate—about care as a “mere voluntary courtesy”—became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about “good Samaritans.” Using Minna’s case as a springboard, Hartog explores the statutes, situations, and conflicts that helped produce a regime where slavery was usually but not always legal and where a supposedly enslaved person may or may not have been legally free.In exploring this liminal and unsettled legal space, Hartog sheds light on the relationships between moral and legal reasoning and a legal landscape that challenges simplistic notions of what it meant to live in freedom. What emerges is a provocative portrait of a distant legal order that, in its contradictions and moral dilemmas, bears an ironic resemblance to our own legal world.Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices