New Books in Women's History

Annette Joseph-Gabriel talks with Tiffany Gill about the history of African American travel in the late twentieth century and its significance to Black communities across the lines of class and gender. Joseph-Gabriel is an assistant professor of French at the University of Michigan, College of Literature, Science and the Arts.Gill is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies & History and Cochran Scholar at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry and the co-editor (with Keisha Blain) of To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (University of Illinois Press, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joan Wallach Scott’s contributions to the history of women and gender, and to feminist theory, will be familiar to listeners across multiple disciplines. Her latest book, Sex and Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2017) is a compelling analysis of the discourse of secularism in the modern democratic (imperial) nation-states of “the West”. A profound challenge to assumptions that secularism has come with the assurance of gender equality, the book moves from the processes of secularization of the nineteenth century, through the era of the Cold War, and on to the notion of a “clash of civilizations” that continues to inform and shape the politics of gender and the gendering of politics in our current moment.Revisiting decades of scholarship by historians and theorists of gender, religion, the family, and politics, the first three chapters of the book trace persistent and emergent forms of gender inequality that accompanied the insistence on a separation of Church and state in nineteenth-century sites committed to modernity and forms of liberal democracy. Examining the identification of women with religion; the substitution of biological rationales for religious justifications of gendered hierarchies across multiple domains; and the history of women’s suffrage in secular states, this first section of the book synthesizes as it analyzes in order to reveal the ways and reasons secularism did not bring about women’s equality. Subsequent chapters of the book move from the imbrication of gender and secularism during the Cold War to a critique of a “sexual emancipation” that would eventually fixate on Islam as the “enemy” of a secular “West”. Moving from France to other states in Europe, to the United States, and back again, Sex and Secularism will change the way readers (and listeners!) think about the politically powerful and gendered keywords of the book’s title.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for New Books in French Studies, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Where in the world do working moms have it best? In her new book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton University Press, 2019), Caitlyn Collins explores how women balance motherhood and work across the globe. Using interviews with middle class working mothers in Sweden, East and Western Germany, Italy, and the United States, Collins digs deep into how policies and cultural values shape these women’s lives. This book will be of interest to any working parent and would be a great addition to any sociology of family or sociology of work course.Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957 (NYU Press, 2017), Nancy Mirabal details New York Cuban diasporic history between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with keen attention to how political debates about the potential future, visibility, and belonging in Cuba played out along issues of race and gender. By shifting moments of importance in Cuban and U.S. history, it becomes clear exactly how contentious the differing opinions on how to move the island away from Spanish colonial rule and the role it would come to play – if any – on the political, racial, and economic landscape of the United States. Mirabal utilizes vast archival material spanning club records, literary texts, newspapers, photographs, and oral histories to tell how exiled Cuban migrants formed, maintained, and disagreed within social clubs in New York. Her inclusion of labor history, intellectual history, political history, social history, and immigration history makes for an incredibly detailed and dynamic history.Mirabal is committed to writing a history that focuses on the experiences and intellectual debates of Afro-Cubans during a period of enslavement, empire, and colonialism. Further, she tells how the movement of peoples and ideas of revolution and independence were both being informed and redefined by an exiled Afro-Cuban experience well before and after 1898. Mirabal writes, “Afro-Cuban migrants were some of the most incisive, powerful, and radical voices in the exile nationalist movement, so much so that by the mid- to late nineteenth-century, meanings of Cubanidad were inextricably tied to ending slavery, racial equality, and a promise of enfranchisement” (6). Suspect Freedoms recounts a history of how nation-building in Cuba, which was dependent largely on diasporic intellectuals, was a racialized and masculinist project dependent on the white supremacy, anti-blackness, and patriarchy. Even then, the intricacies with which Dr. Mirabal recounts Black migrant’s, women’s, and Black women’s experiences and resistance to such fault lines within this century-long period of Cuban diasporic history is masterful.Jonathan Cortez is a Ph.D. candidate of American Studies at Brown University. They are a historian of 20th-century issues of race, labor, (im)migration, surveillance, space, relational Ethnic Studies, and Latinx Studies. Their research focuses on the rise of federally-funded encampments (i.e., the concentration of populations) from the advent of the New Deal until post-WWII era. Their dissertation, “The Age of Encampment: Race, Surveillance, and the Power of Spatial Scripts, 1933-1975” reveals underlying continuities between the presence of threatening bodies and the increasing surveillance of these bodies in camps throughout the United States. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz and their personal website www.historiancortez.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II–era "victory girls" to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms.Building on a new generation of research on postwar society, Littauer tells the history of diverse young women who stood at the center of major cultural change and helped transform a society bound by conservative sexual morality into one more open to individualism, plurality, and pleasure in modern sexual life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Microhistories are an important method of investigating an historical moment with a fine-grain focus that can puncture holes in the generalizations that historians sometimes make. In her new book, Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louis Rebecca McCord (University of South Carolina Press, 2019), Candace L. Bailey uses a close reading of the music owned and performed by three prominent women in antebellum Charleston to demonstrate the varied experiences and perspectives of figures who also had much in common. All three women were sophisticated, well-traveled, and moved in the highest social circles of the planter class in Charleston. Yet, each woman had unique educational backgrounds, upbringings, and musical choices. They all experienced the Civil War and its aftermath quite differently. Rather than confining herself simply to an analysis of the musical repertoire each woman owned, Bailey examines the scores with the attention often reserved for Medieval manuscripts to discern the implications of the publishers, source of the scores, and the handwritten markings left by her subjects as they learned the music. She thoroughly contextualizes the collections within the time period, the milieu of upper-class Southern women, the history of Charleston, and, most importantly, the lives of the three women as evidenced by other documents they and those in their circle left behind. In doing so, Bailey reminds us that we must balance studying sweeping historical trends with the lived experiences of individuals.Candace Bailey is a Professor of Music at North Carolina Central University. She began her career studying seventeenth-century British keyboard music, but in the last decade has devoted much of her research time to the role of music among middle- and upper-class women in the Southern United States during the nineteenth century. Charleston Belles Abroad is her third book, and she has published articles in many journals including the Journal for the Society for American Music, Music & Letters, and the Journal for Musicological Research. In 2015, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Award for Faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. She will be a Fellow of the National Humanities Center for the 2019–2020 academic year.Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel’s new book, Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2019), uncovers the hidden history of the arrival of physical education for girls in the late-nineteenth century, it’s expansion beyond schools, and the subterranean struggles of girls and women to play and expand access and support for sports across Latin America. While sports has often been sidelined in histories of gender, class, nationalism, and the so-called Social Question in the region, Elsey and Nadel show how women’s involvement in sports animated eugenic debates over healthy citizens, nationalism, and proper motherhood in government, the Church, and the press. Beginning with women’s sports clubs in schools and moving to charity events, informal play, and regional leagues, women began to take up previously denied national and international pastimes much earlier than previously acknowledged. With women’s sports facing opposition, underfunding, neglect, silence, and outright outlawing (in the case of futbol in Brazil) throughout the twentieth century and up to the current World Cup, the authors show how generations of women athletes’ struggles and memories wove together a vibrant history of play, competition, and resilience. Despite the title, the book explores women’s involvement in tennis, track, gymnastics, basketball, and futbol (soccer), and medical and media debates over which activities were “properly” or “improperly” feminine for women’s psychology, bodies, and futures as mother’s. It covers case studies in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, and El Salvador.Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last week, I had the privilege to talk with Dr. Kristen R. Ghodsee about her most recent book Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) and the behind-the-scene details of its making. Ghodsee is a professor in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of nine books and many more articles and essays.Second World, Second Sex addresses a telling gap in the historiography of women rights movements – the contributions of the Second World women rights activists. While careful not to idealize the socialist authoritarian regimes, Ghodsee reveals how deeply problematic and unfair it is to define feminism based on Western-inspired definitions of self-fulfillment or grassroot activism and to dismiss the achievements of women’s state organizations in the Eastern bloc as top-down policies and socialist propaganda.Aiming to retell the UN Decade for Women from a non-Western perspective, this book follows the participation of the Bulgarian and Zambian delegations in the international conferences in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985). The author makes use of a painstaking multi-site archival research and compassionate oral histories, to reconstruct the conferences and their context of arduous preparations and ideological tensions. The book’s approach to the conferences is very factual but also offers a lot of context, which helps the reader to better understand the main points of conflict between the Western delegates and the delegates from the developing and non-aligning countries. Ironically, what was rebranded in the 1990’s as “intersectionality” was the main argument of the state socialist women activists much earlier, namely, that the discussions of women’s rights separately from other social injustices such as racism, imperialism and colonialism are ultimately futile.Curiously enough, Ghodsee’s comparative overview of the state of women’s rights before the UN Decade reveals that socialist states were forerunners of women’s rights with generous maternal leaves and state-run childcare among others. Moreover, the author reminds us, that the US government’s attention to women’s issues in the 1960s was actually a direct response to the threat coming from the USSR where women’s brains and forces were put into service of the rivalry with the West.Thus, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, Ghodsee sees the current political and cultural hegemony of the West as rather disadvantageous in terms women’s rights. There is no rivalry to push governments to do better and women remaining in the periphery hardly benefit from having equal access to the free market in their crime-ridden and economically dependent from the West countries with dismantled welfare systems.Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Pacific Northwest was a hotbed of labor radicalism in the early twentieth century, where the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World (commonly known as the “Wobblies”) fought for better working conditions for all workers regardless of race, sex, or creed. The historian Heather Mayer takes a new look at the well-worn vision of the Wobblies as predominately radical young, itinerant men. Her new bookBeyond the Rebel Girl: Women and the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, 1905-1924 (Oregon State University Press, 2018) finds women played a crucial role in the politics of the union. These women expanded the radical vision of the union beyond the workplace to include birth control, sexual emancipation, and freedom of choice in marriage.Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @rydriskelltate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard? Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South. Shennette Garrett-Scott's new book, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) tells the fascinating story of just such an endeavor, first the Independent Order of St. Luke, and then the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, founded in Richmond in 1903. Along the way, she tells the tale of force-of-nature strong women, particularly Maggie Lena Walker, who wouldn't take no for an answer as she built up a culture of business and entrepreneurship against incredibly long odds and never-ending efforts by regulators and competitors to thwart her efforts. It makes for gripping reading.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices