New Books in Women's History

Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Georgetown University Press, 2019), investigates the mobilization of female fighters, women’s roles in combat, and what happens to women when conflicts end. The book focuses on three case studies of asymmetric conflicts. Jessica Trisko Darden contributes research looking at Ukraine, Alexis Henshaw discusses the civil war in Columbia, and Ora Szekley provides insights into conflict involving Kurdish groups. The book includes lessons for policy makers on women’s motivations for joining armed groups and unique issues facing female combatants during reintegration.Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With prison reform a topic of international conversation and debate, Marica Morgan’s Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender and Race offers an in-depth and unique analysis of a population largely lost in these debates and discussions: black women. By centering their experiences, Morgan offers and intersectional and psychodynamic examination of the prison worker and the organizational nature of the prison. This book offers added insight into not only the prison system as a place of employment, but also for any white-male-dominated organization. Taking the reader through the experiences of black women prison employees, Morgan highlights the importance of intersectional qualitative methodology when investigating institutional or organizational culture. Black Women Prison Employees is a necessary and timely read for policymakers and researchers interested in organizational structures and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katherine Preston’s new book, Opera for the People: English-Language Opera & Women Managers in Late 19th-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2017) is the first complete overview of the repertoire, companies, performers, and managers that provided English-language opera to Americans after the Civil War. Preston is one of the pioneers of the musicological study of American musical culture during the nineteenth century. In one of her earlier books, Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825–60 (University of Illinois Press, 1993), Preston established that opera was one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the United States. In Opera for the People, Preston focuses on English-language opera companies that traveled throughout the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century bringing European operas and operettas performed in English translation to big cities and small towns alike. She argues that the middle-class audience cultivated by English-language troupes eventually turned their attention to musical theater beginning around 1900. Many of the troupes Preston examines were managed by their leading prima donnas, which complicates the traditional view of nineteenth-century American women as confined to the private sphere. Despite wielding significant artistic and economic power, these women were accepted by their peers and the musical press. Bolstered by her stringent attention to detail and impressive primary research, Preston’s monograph finishes the account of the history of opera in America she began twenty-five years agoKatherine K. Preston is the David N. and Margaret C. Bottoms Professor (emerita) at the College of William and Mary. She has published multiple books including Music for Hire: Professional Musicians in Washington, D.C. 1877-1900 and a scholarly edition of George Bristow’s Symphony No. 2, along with many articles in journals and collected editions. A past president of the Society for American Music, Preston has been active in promoting the study of American music throughout her career and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Fulbright Foundation. She will deliver the annual American Musicological Society lecture at the Library of Congress on April 16, 2019, which will be available on the Library’s website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the relationship between popular misogyny and popular feminism? In Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny(Duke University Press, 2018), Sarah Banet-Weiser, Professor of Media and Communications and Head of Department at the LSE's Department of Media and Communications, explores these two interrelated ideas in order to analyse a range of examples including the body positivity movement, confidence, #gamergate, seduction communities, and women in tech. These examples, along with extensive discussion of media examples including advertising, and a theorisation of the 'economy of visibility', demonstrate the important work of popular feminism, its limits, and the misogynist backlash aimed at arresting feminism's progress. The book engages and explains our current politics, with important lessons for both sides of the Atlantic, as well as a media analysis with global implications. As a result the book is an important read across the social sciences, politics, and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While the campaign to win for women the right to vote in America was waged on a national scale, this often obscures the fact that the most of battles took place at the state level, where local perspectives were key. Sara Egge’s book Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870-1920 (University of Iowa Press, 2018) spotlights this by focusing on three counties in the states of Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota, charting the development of the campaigns for women’s suffrage there. As Egge explains, though women in the Gilded Age were expected to confine their activities to the private sphere, their involvement in community activities served as the basis for the assertion of their voting rights by signaling their willingness to assume the basic responsibilities of citizenship. By participating in local organizations and temperance campaigning women claimed a space in the public sphere, one upon which their successive efforts to win the suffrage in those states were built. This assertion of citizenship proved vital to the eventual success of the movement once the United States entered the First World War in 1917, as this civic activism served as a demonstration of loyalty proving that women deserved to exercise the right to vote. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we will be talking to Alicia Malone, the author of The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women (Mango Publishing Group, 2018). Malone is a film critic and host on Turner Classic Films who has compiled a list of 52 films directed by women, from the early days of Hollywood... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Revised Edition) (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), Smadar Lavie analyzes the racial and gender justice protest movements in Israel. She suggests that Israeli bureaucracy is based on a theological notion that inserts the categories of religion, gender, and race into the foundation of citizenship. In this revised and updated edition Lavie connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War, providing an extensive afterword that focuses on the developments in Mizraḥi feminist politics and culture between 2014 and 2016 and its relation to Palestinians. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Westerns are having a bit of a moment in the early twenty-first century. Westworld was recently nominated for eight Emmys, the hit show Deadwood is slated for a return to television in the next few years, and in 2015 Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight grossed over $150 million. Victoria Lamont’s Westerns: A Women’s History (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), looks at the first moment of the Western over a century ago. The Western is traditionally thought of as an overtly masculine genre with male writers telling stories about mostly male protagonists (think The Man in Black, John Wayne, and Gus McCrae). Lamont, an associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo, examines several books from the 1880s to the 1920s and argues that women writers were crucial to the development of the genre’s forms, with some books even predating Owen Wister’s supposedly genre-founding title, The Virginian. Moreover, these women published mostly under their own names and found considerable financial success and critical acclaim. In doing so, they used the genre to critique gender roles, class structures, and American colonialism. It was not until the 1920s that mass market literature magazines and pulp publishers began to market Westerns as by, for, and about men, and in doing so erased the genre’s female history. Lamont places these authors in their context, and in doing so reveals much about female life and literature in the turn of the century American West.Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Ivan Simic explores how Yugoslav communists learned, adapted, and applied Soviet gender policies in their efforts to build their own egalitarian society after World War II. Attending to the gap between ideas and practices, he discusses how the deeply entrenched patriarchal norms within Yugoslav society created numerous obstacles when it came to changing gender norms and policies. Tracing how considerations of gender affected wide-ranging arenas from labour policies, to the collectivization of agriculture, to policies concerning youth sexuality, to the law banning the veil for Muslim women, Simic demonstrates how Soviet models continued to inform Yugoslav policies long after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948.Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story of Muslims in America has primarily been told through the experiences of men and often revolves around narratives of immigration. Sylvia Chan-Malik, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, expands upon and challenges this scholarly pattern in Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (NYU Press, 2018). Chan-Malik centers Black Muslim women’s involvement in U.S. communities and the various spaces of social identity that are frequently ignored in scholarship. Crucial to her analysis is how social racial-religious formation informs both lived religion and how Muslim women are represented in public. “Being Muslim,” therefore, can be variously embodied in Black Muslim womanhood. Through an episodic exploration of Islam in twentieth and twenty-first century America Chan-Malik demonstrates the crucial ways race, gender, and religion intersect. In our conversation we discussed the “blackness” of American Islam, the Ahmadiyya Movement, domesticity, the Nation of Islam, Betty Shabazz, cultural representations of Black Muslim women, the problem with feminism and how it can be deployed, American perceptions of Iranian’s 1979 revolution, and environmentalism and food justice.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices