New Books in Women's History

Addie Wyatt stands at the intersection of unionism, feminism, and civil rights activism in post-World War II America. In Reverend Addie Wyatt: Faith and the Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality (University of Illinois Press, 2016), Marcia Walker-McWilliams recounts her life within the context of a nation she helped to change. Born in Mississippi, Addie Cameron grew up in Chicago, where despite her skills as a typist she could only find employment on the floor of a meatpacking plant. As a member of the interracial United Packinghouse Workers of America, she soon moved full time into union work, organizing workers and fighting for their rights. In her capacity as a union official she began a lifelong participation in the civil rights movement by raising funds on behalf of Montgomery Improvement Association during the 1955 bus boycott campaign, and in the 1970s formed coalitions designed to promote African American and female participation in the labor movement. As Walker-McWilliams demonstrates, throughout the many struggles she undertook Addie Wyatt’s faith was an important constant, providing her with a set of values and a source of emotional strength that helped her to persevere against the difficulties she faced. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lori Marso’s new book, Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter (Duke University Press, 2017), delves into Simone de Beauvoir’s political thought, feminism, and activism. The text is a fascinating exploration of these topics and complexities, but Marso takes Beauvoir’s work even further, connecting these concepts to what Marso has defined as the encounter interpreting Beauvoir’s account of the idea of freedom and the experience of freedom not only as an individual but in its relationality. Marso’s impressive engagement with Beauvoir is not just in exploring the theoretical partnering that Beauvoir has with her intellectual contemporaries like Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon, but also in putting Beauvoir into conversation with other theorists and artists, like Lars von Trier–through Beauvoir’s work on Marquis de Sade, or Allison Bechdel–as a fellow feminist theorist, or Hannah Arendt–on the topic of confronting evil and violence. The book is structured into three sections, focusing the reader’s attention on the concepts of enemies, allies, and friends, and how these personal relationships are, by definition, political, and how Beauvoir’s work and thought can and should be used to analyze contemporary cultural artifacts as well as the urgent issues of her day. Marso interrogate Beauvoir’s concept of freedom but not without also connecting that concept to its relational engagement with violence, with oppression, with colonialism, and with the broader expanse of how we think about ourselves within personal and political structures and encounters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer Fleeger‘s Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine (Oxford University Press, 2014) tells the story of women in film and their representation as aberrations, but also as moments of emancipation and agency. Fleeger’s book discusses exceptional voices such as Kate Smith, known as the First Lady of Radio;... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the American Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Julia Mickenberg tells the story of women both famous and unknown, committed radicals and adventure seekers who went to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. She explores their motivations and experiences, as well... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rosalind Rosenberg‘s book Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a multi-layered and rich biography of Pauli Murray, an activist, lawyer and Episcopal priest whose life intersected with the most significant civil and human rights issues of the twentieth century. As a mixed raced woman who felt that her identity was at odds with her body before transsexual had become part of the popular consciousness, Murray’s life provides insight into a lived intersectionality of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Beginning with her southern upbringing, we follow Murray through multiple educational, vocational and identity challenges she suffered. In a journey through a dislocated life, she contributed to multiple movements and institutions working with many key social leaders such as Thurgood Marshall, Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Friedan. Appearing as a one-person social movement with a deep religious faith she pursued justice not only for herself but also for others. Rosenberg has provided sympathetic insight into the personal cost that Murray incurred on the road to a more equitable society. Rosalind Rosenberg is Professor of History Emerita at Barnard College.Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The daughter of the emperor Theodosius I, Galla Placidia successfully navigated the tumultuous politics of the late Roman Empire to rule as regent for her son Valentinian III. In Rome’s Christian Empress: Galla Placidia Rules at the Twilight of the Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), Joyce Salisbury details the extent of this accomplishment by situating it within the context of her time. Orphaned at an early age, Placidia grew up in the household of Stilicho, a Vandal general who had established himself as the most powerful figure in the western Empire. The sacking of Rome in 410 made her the captive of the victorious Goths, eventually marrying their leader Ataulf. After the tragic death of their son and Ataulf’s subsequent assassination brought her hopes of establishing a Romano-Gothic dynasty to an end, she was forced by her ruling half-brother Honorius to marry his general Constantius III. With Constantinus and Honorius’s deaths leaving her son Valentinian as emperor, Placidia became regent for the boy, in which capacity she dealt with the problems of barbarian invasions, rebellious commanders, and the many other challenges of an empire in decline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leigh Fought is an assistant professor of history at Le Moyne College. Her book Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers a detailed and rich portrait of Frederick Douglass’ private and public life and his many relationships with women. From his enslaved mother Harriet, Sophia Auld the slave mistress that sparked his interest in reading, to his wife of forty-four years Anna Murray, daughter Rosetta and his white second wife Helen Pitts; these were the women who populated his private world. From each he learned lessons about the workings of race, gender and class in America and prepared him to collaborate with many antislavery women including Julia Griffiths, Maria Weston Chapman and Amy Post. He saw his fight for abolition as part of “woman’s cause” bringing him into contact with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Seeing himself as “woman’s rights man,” who had attended the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention in 1848, he was perplexed by the betrayal of many woman’s rights advocates. Fought fills in much of what is lacking in the female “empty space” in the study of Douglass allowing a fuller understanding of his life and ideas. This is an invaluable contribution to Douglass studies.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Now and then we feature a book on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies whose author we ought to have had on the show some time ago. The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade Along the Mekong (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) is one such book. Sverre Molland wrote his tandem ethnography of traffickers and anti-traffickers while researching on the border of Thailand and Laos in the 2000s, after a stint in an anti-trafficking project in which the incongruities of identifying and criminalizing alleged human traffickers became all too obvious to him. Bringing an anthropological lens to the juridical and economic categories that are usually deployed both to explain and address the phenomenon of trafficking for sex, Molland shows that the premises on which anti-trafficking programs operate are unsound. The movement of women and girls in and out of the sex trade is deeply socially embedded. Only by attending to the many varied ways that recruitment into the trade occurs can it be understood. With that, moralizing and paternalistic projects for trafficking’s elimination, as well as indicator projects for its enumeration, might be set to one side, and replaced with other ways of knowing and dealing with the phenomenon that might be rather more sensible, if less aspirational.Sverre Molland joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about the many layers of deception and consent in sex work, bad faith among traffickers and anti-traffickers, the misguidance of the market metaphor, teens trading teens, agency, structural violence, and the trend towards privately funded anti-trafficking and anti-slavery projects in Southeast Asia.Listeners of this episode may also be interested in:Holly High, Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos Denise Brennan, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United StatesNick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Brittney C. Cooper, who is an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, explores the intellectual genealogy and geography of the work of African-American women over the course of more than a century in her book, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, 2017). While knitting together an understanding of the intellectual achievements and contributions of many African-American women, Cooper pays particular attention to Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, Pauli Murray, Toni Cade Bambara and the engagement that these women had with ideas, highlighting the contributions they made to racial knowledge, questions of gender, and civic engagement within the United States, from the period after Reconstruction through the 1970s. Cooper than provides a contemporary epilogue, integrating into her research the conversation around the beginnings of the #blacklivesmatter movement and the women who started it, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, and how they, like the race women who preceded them, have been compelled to attest to their primacy in thinking about and then coming together to form this more recent social movement.Cooper traces the spaces where Black female intellectual engagement took place, in places like the National Association for Colored Women, the club movement, and the pages of the political magazine, Voice of the Negro, as well as how some of this movement migrated into college and university classrooms and programs. Cooper’s book engages with the actual ideas and concepts that many of these women voiced or wrote, as well as analyzing the intellectual conversations these women had with each other on occasion, but more particularly with their contemporaries. Beyond Respectability is both accessible and sophisticated in the discussion of American intellectual history, race, gender, sexual orientation, black feminism, citizenship, and social engagement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s (Routledge, 2017), Macedonian researcher, peace-worker, and activist Ana Miskovska Kajevska analyses the way feminists in Belgrade and Zagreb reacted to the (post-)Yugoslav wars, with an emphasis on their discourses and activities regarding (sexual) war violence and on each other. Using a Bourdieu-based methodology supplemented by interviews, she challenges common assumptions that were not subject to scholarly debate before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices