New Books in Women's History

In her new book, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Maternalism, Eugenics and Professional Identity (University of Toronto Press, 2019), Melissa Kravetz examines how German women physicians gained a foothold in the medical profession during the Weimar and Nazi periods, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany reveals the continuity in rhetoric, strategy, and tactics of female doctors who worked under both regimes. Additionally, she explains how and why women occupied particular fields within the medical profession, how they presented themselves in their professional writing, and how they reconciled their medical perspectives with their views of the Weimar and later the Nazi state.Melissa Kravetz is an assistant professor of history at Longwood University.Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (Wayne State University Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915-1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz's rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz's life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life.From Left to Right is structured in four parts. Part 1 tells the story of Dawidowicz's childhood, adolescence, and college years when she was an immigrant daughter living in New York City. Part 2 narrates Dawidowicz's formative European years in Poland, New York City (when she was enclosed in the European-like world of the New York YIVO), and Germany. Part 3 tells how Dawidowicz became an American while Polish Jewish civilization was still inscribed in her heart and also explores when and how Dawidowicz became the voice of East European Jewry for the American Jewish public. Part 4 exposes the fissure between Dawidowicz's European-inflected diaspora nationalist modern Jewish identity and the shifting definition of American liberalism from the late 1960s forward, which also saw the emergence of neoconservatism. The book includes an interpretation of her memoir From that Place and Time, as well as an appendix of thirty-one previously unpublished letters that illustrate the broad reach of her work and person.Dawidowicz's right-wing politics, sex, and unabashed commitment to Jewish particularism in an East European Jewish key have resulted in scholarly neglect. Therefore, this book is strongly recommended for scholars and general readers interested in Jewish and women's studies.Nancy Sinkoff is the Academic Director of the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers—New Brunswick.Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professors Melissa Walker of Converse College and Giselle Roberts of Australia’s La Trobe University, editors of the Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South series, discuss the field of documentary editing and how the personal writings of southern women reveal the broader history of life in the U.S. South during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.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

How did Catholic mysticism shape politics and religion in 20th-century Germany? What do seers, stigmatics, and Marian apparitions reveal about broader cultural trends? Michael O’Sullivan’s award winning new book examines how longing for the divine paradoxically drove secularism. In Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 (University of Toronto Press, 2018), O’Sullivan shares the stories of women who found agency in religious institutions as conduits of the miraculous amid political chaos. In a fascinating examination of politics and religious authority, Disruptive Power shows how miracles sustained religiosity, while ultimately speeding the collapse of church authority.Michael O'Sullivan teaches a broad range of courses on European history at Marist College in New York. He earned his BA from Canisius College, and his MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina.Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erika Engstrom is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her latest book, Feminism, Gender, and Politics in NBC’s Parks and Recreation (Peter Lang, 2017), analyzes the various ways the series presented feminism as a positive force, such as the satirical portrayal of patriarchy; alternative depictions of masculinity; the feminist ideology and political career of main character Leslie Knope; the inclusion of actual political figures; and depictions of love and romance as related to feminist thinking.A much-needed treatment that adds to the literature on feminism in media and popular culture, this book serves as an ideal resource for instructors and scholars of gender and mass media, women’s studies, and media criticism by investigating Parks and Recreation’s place in the continuum of other feminist-leaning television programs.Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her book, Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641-1699 (Cornell University Press, 2018), Sher Banu Khan provides a rare and empirically rich view of queenship in early modern maritime Southeast Asia. Four women ruled the Muslim realm of Aceh in succession during the second half of the seventeenth century. Their reign – with the acquiescence of the religious elite in the kingdom - was remarkable in a society where women were not seen as natural rulers, and where in more recent history, public leadership by women was discouraged. Writing against extant historiography that depicts this era as a period of decline, Khan argues instead that the queens of Aceh enabled diplomatic and trading networks to prosper and asserted Acehnese sovereignty in encounters with European powers.In our conversation, we discuss the challenges in multi-lingual archival work, how studying queens can help us to reframe the idea of decline, the gendering of authority and leadership as well as the place of female authority in the Muslim world.Sher Banu Khan is an associate professor of Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore.Faizah Zakaria is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is completing her first monograph on dialectical relationships between landscape and religious conversions in maritime Southeast Asia. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of women's political involvement has focused heavily on electoral politics, but throughout the twentieth century women engaged in grassroots activism when they found it increasingly challenging to feed their families and balance their household ledgers. Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines how working- and middle-class American housewives used their identity as housewives to protest the high cost of food. In doing so, housewives' relationships with the state evolved over the course of the century. Shifting the focus away from the workplace as a site of protest, Emily E. LB. Twarog looks to the homefront as a starting point for protest in the public sphere.With a focus on food consumption rather than production, Twarog looks closely at the ways food--specifically meat--was used by women as a political tool. Engaging in domestic politics, housewives both challenged and embraced the social and economic order as they sought to craft a unique political voice and build a consumer movement focused on the home.The book examines key moments when women used consumer actions to embrace their socially ascribed roles as housewives to demand economic stability for their families and communities. These include the Depression-era meat boycott of 1935, the consumer coalitions of the New Deal, and the wave of consumer protests between 1966 and 1973. Twarog introduces numerous labor and consumer activists and their organizations in both urban and suburban areas--Detroit, greater Chicago, Long Island, and Los Angeles.Emily E. LB. Twarog is an Associate Professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations, and Affiliate Faculty in the Gender in Global Perspectives Program and European Union Center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.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

Argentina promotes itself as a country of European immigrants. This makes it an exception to other Latin American countries, which embrace a more mixed—African, Indian, European—heritage. Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (University of Alabama Press, 2020) traces the origins of what some white Argentines mischaracterize as a “black disappearance” by delving into the intimate lives of black women and explaining how they contributed to the making of a “white” Argentina. Erika Denise Edwards has produced the first comprehensive study in English of the history of African descendants outside of Buenos Aires in the late colonial and early republican periods, with a focus on how these women sought whiteness to better their lives and that of their children.Erika Edwards argues that attempts by black women to escape the stigma of blackness by recategorizing themselves and their descendants as white began as early as the late eighteenth century, challenging scholars who assert that the black population drastically declined at the end of the nineteenth century because of the whitening or modernization process. She further contends that in Córdoba, Argentina, women of African descent (such as wives, mothers, daughters, and concubines) were instrumental in shaping their own racial reclassifications and destinies.This volume makes use of a wealth of sources to relate these women’s choices. The sources consulted include city censuses and notarial and probate records that deal with free and enslaved African descendants; criminal, ecclesiastical, and civil court cases; marriages and baptisms records and newsletters. These varied sources provide information about the day-to-day activities of cordobés society and how women of African descent lived, formed relationships, thrived, and partook in the transformation of racial identities in Argentina.Adam McNeil is a 2nd-year Ph.D. Student in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Megan Burke considers the relationship of sexual violence to lived time by reexamining and building upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir, and in conversation with Judith Butler, María Lugones, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and many others. Through developing a feminist phenomenology of time, Burke allows us to consider how racialized colonial sexual domination structures feminine subjectivity. By focusing our attention on temporality, Burke deepens our understanding of how the past haunts the present, giving rise to sexual domination, as well as how we can actualize latent possibilities to lay those ghosts to rest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019) is an extensive compendium of Mary Wollstonecraft as a writer, as an interlocutor, as a philosopher and political theorist, and as a feminist thinker. The text, which is impressive in its reach, breath, and considerations, will be of use to any reader or scholar who may want to learn more about Mary Wollstonecraft, her thought, and her influence. But it is much more extensive than that, since it provides deep scholarly examination of all of Wollstonecraft’s works, as well as considering the context for Wollstonecraft’s work, and those with whom she was in intellectual encounters, and those with whom she had contemporary engagement as well.In this wide-ranging survey of Mary Wollstonecraft, Sandrine Bergès, Eileen Hunt Botting, Alan Coffee have done an exceptional job of bringing together experts from a diversity of disciplines and perspectives. The Wollstonecraftian Mind projects both backwards and forwards, positioning Wollstonecraft’s thinking within the philosophical tradition in the first section of the text, and then, in the final section, projecting it forward, through a collection of chapters that explore her legacy. The text is part of The Philosophical Mind series at Routledge that examines, in substantial depth, the work of an individual thinker, and The Wollstonecraftian Mind follows the contours of many of the other volumes in this series. The central sections of the book examine the works themselves, the ideas with which Wollstonecraft was in dialogue, and explorations of her philosophy. This is an incredibly useful text and resource for scholars and students, with accessible analyses and an array of considerations and perspectives.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, 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