New Books in Women's History

Originally, particularly in American writings, one of the explicit purpose of biography was to teach readers how to live. As Scott E. Caspar writes in Constructing American Lives (1999), in nineteenth-century America “biography remained the essential genre for creating American pantheons: collections of lives that represented the nation’s history, aimed to promote values or virtues or both.” This function, however, often flies under the radar. People read biography to learn about real lives; they may not be consciously paying all that much attention to the lessons they transmit.In What Jackie Taught Us: Lessons from the Remarkable Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Perigree paperback reprint, 2014), author Tina Santi Flaherty (philanthropist, businesswoman and former radio broadcaster) drops all pretense and explicitly mines the life of Jackie O- a life with which, 20 years after her death, many Americans still feel intimately familiar- to see what we can learn from it. The result isn’t a self help book so much as a book that shows how we instinctively use the stories of lives and integrate them into our own. It’s a provocative exercise.Re-released here to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Onassis’s death, this version of What Jackie Taught Us includes a series of new essays that represent an important contribution to, not only Flaherty’s book, but also “Jackie studies” in general. It’s a treat to have the legacy of someone who’s so seldom considered seriously (so often she’s reduced to dresses and hats) reevaluated by the likes of Edna O’Brien, Allen Packwood, and Malacky McCourt. And Liz Smith’s preface is a downright gem.Twenty years after her death, we’re still curious about Jackie. From Flaherty’s book, we get some clues as to why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The twentieth-century West witnessed a revolution in childbirth. Before that time, most women gave birth at home and were attended by family members and midwives. The process was usually terribly painful for the mother. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, doctors started to “medicalize” childbirth. Physicians began to think of ways to ease the pain of childbirth.Two main options were explored. One–drugs–is quite familiar to us, for it is the primary tool used by doctors to make women comfortable during the birth process today. The other–“psychoprophylaxis”–has now passed into memory. The most famous form of psychoprophylaxis, and the subject of Paula A. Michaels’ excellent book Lamaze: An International History (Oxford University Press, 2014), is known as the “Lamaze method.” Its history is fascinating and surprising: born in the Soviet Union (or was it the United Kingdom?), it migrated to France, and then to much of Europe. It then jumped the Atlantic and became a quasi-political force in the United States (“natural childbirth”). And Lamaze is still with us, though in a form hard to recognize. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many Muslim debates regarding women are solely situated in legal or political frameworks. For example, we often find this tendency in conversations about women’s leadership in the mosque or the politics of veiling. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, provides a unique approach to these discussions that puts feminist hermeneutics in dialogue with the thought of the prolific Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240). In Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) she explores contestations over embodiment and gender, spirituality and leadership, sexuality and power in order to rethink patriarchal epistemologies in contemporary Muslim discourses. She argues that contesting positions on gender in these debates are underpinned by certain assumptions about human nature, its gendering, and existence. Shaikh outlines the social and ritual consequences of spiritual (in)equality and initiates reflections on Islamic notions of the central category “human being.” Shaikh leads us through Ibn ‘Arabi’s dynamic anthropology, ontology, and cosmology and links abstract philosophical concepts with concrete daily relationships between men and women. In our conversation we discussed Islamic feminism, apophatic unsayings and hermeneutic of subversions, Ibn ‘Arabi’s interpersonal relationships with women, parallels between the macrocosm and microcosm, Muslim exegesis, notions of creation, interpretations of Adam and Eve, Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary, and masculine and feminine in Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her fourth book, Lynne Huffer argues for a restored queer feminism to find new ways of thinking about sex and about ethics. Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (Columbia University Press, 2013) brings forth a breadth of sources — known and less well-known, French and American, primary and secondary — ranging from Colette, Violette Leduc, and Marcel Proust to the book of Genesis, from Supreme Court cases to Virginie Despentes’ rape-revenge film Baise-moi, from Irigaray to Foucault, through which Huffer reads and writes toward a queer feminist future. Beautifully written and stimulating for the theorist and non-theorist alike, Huffer’s new book combines the personal and the scholarly in experimental ways, such as her analysis of the Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham story. Carefully navigating the couloirs of queer and feminist theory, this is a book about sexuality, ethics, alterity, betrayal, and love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes are the co-authors of authors of HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (Crown Publishers 2014). Allen is White House bureau chief at Bloomberg; Parnes is White House correspondent for The Hill.This is a big, buzzy book that has gotten a lot of media attention. Much of the book is about how important trust is to Hillary Clinton. Allen and Parnes refer to the “concentric circles of trust” that dominate the political decisions made by the Clintons. They also write that Hillary Clinton has a “bias for action” that compels her to focus on doing rather than debating. One of the most interesting parts of the book is about how Secretary Clinton embraced technology and relied on staff to integrate technology into diplomacy innovative ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do people make sense of their scriptures when they do not align with the way they envision these texts? This problem is faced by many contemporary believers and is especially challenging in relation to passages that go against one’s vision of a gender egalitarian cosmology. Ayesha Chaudhry, professor in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, examines one such passage from the Qur’an, verse 4:34, which has traditionally been interpreted to give husbands disciplinary rights over their wives, including hitting them. In Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition: Ethics, Law, and the Muslim Discourse on Gender (Oxford University Press, 2013) Chaudhry offers a historical genealogy of pre-colonial and post-colonial interpretations of this verse and their implications. Through her presentation she offers portraits of the “Islamic Tradition” and how these visions of authority shape participants’ readings of scripture. In our conversation we discuss the ethics of discipline, idealized cosmologies, marital relationships, legal interpretations, Muhammad’s embodied model, Muslim feminist discourses, effects of colonialism, and the hermeneutical space between modernity and tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In America, biographies of Presidents and First Ladies are a staple of the genre, but the relationship that exists between the two receives surprisingly less exploration, as though the biographies needed to be kept as separate as the offices in the East and West Wings. (The relationship of the Clintons being the notable exception.) Hopefully Will Swift‘s Pat and Dick: The Nixons, an Intimate Portrait of a Marriage (Threshold Editions, 2014)) augurs a new biographical trend towards serious examination of presidential relationships.It’s a daunting task- to not only humanize but probe the relationship that existed between a pair still, fifty years on, more easily reduced to the stereotypes of ‘Tricky Dick’ and ‘Plastic Pat’- but Swift gives a welcome corrective, portraying a surprisingly vulnerable Nixon whilst, perhaps even more importantly, providing a historically significant re-evaluation of his wife.For, of all the recent First Ladies, it’s Pat Nixon’s accomplishments that have been most overlooked, obscured as they were by a frosty public image and the downfall of her husband. In the public imagination, First Ladies are easily associated with social issues (Lady Bird Johnson and the environment, Michelle Obama and healthy eating, etc.), and yet Pat Nixon’s issue of ‘volunteerism’- both important and, perhaps, overly broad and, therefore, more difficult to quantify- seems to have fallen from historical view.As Swift demonstrates, however, her volunteerism platform was a springboard in improving American international relations. When, after the Peruvian earthquake of May 1970, Pat Nixon made a harrowing journey into the heart of Peru, to an area then called ‘The Valley of Death’, where she assisted and comforted survivors. ‘To have President Nixon send his wife here means more to me than if he had sent the whole American Air Force,’ said Peruvian President Velasco Alvarado. It’s a story that reveals the impact a First Lady can have, an impact that all to often goes unacknowledged, and an impact in whose preservation biography plays a key role. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s almost a cliché by now to say that we need stories of strong women, but that doesn’t lessen the fact that we do. And biography is a field uniquely poised to transmit such stories- of compelling, complex and, at times, contradictory female characters- to a broad audience. Case in point: Clare Mulley‘s The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (St. Martin’s, 2013).Yes, she loved and had a number of love affairs but, as Mulley makes clear, the significance of Granville’s life isn’t that she was, to all appearances, pathologically alluring to men. Rather, her life is riveting- it has meaning in the present day- because she seems not to have craved men nearly so much as she craved adventure, challenging work that put her at great risk.This was not simply adventure for adventure’s sake either, but adventure in service to a greater good, especially that of her homeland of Poland. For all her efforts as a secret service agent during World War II were in aid of her country, which is, in part, why the British government seemed never quite to know what to do with her and why this brilliant, imaginative woman was left to constantly lobby for a greater, more challenging, role.‘Intrepid’ is perhaps the best word to describe Granville as Mulley portrays her here. She kicked off her career as a spy by infiltrating Poland from Hungary on skis. Another time, arrested by the Gestapo, she talked her way out of imprisonment. Still later, when her comrades were arrested by the Gestapo, she swooped into the local office, demanding and securing their release.For her bravery, she was awarded the George Medal, the OBE, and the Croix de Guerre but there was, sadly, little room in the world after the World Wars for a Polish, female spy, and Granville slid into reduced circumstances that culminated in a tragic end: murdered by an obsessive admirer at a hotel in South Kensington.It’s a good story of a charismatic and difficult woman, a story that was nearly forgotten and one which Mulley is pulling from obscurity, rightfully so. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cindy Hooper is a veteran of various local, state, and national political campaigns. She is the founder of a national organization for African American women that is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Hooper is also a member of the American Political Science Association. Her new book, Conflict: African American Women and the New Dilemma of Race and Gender Politics (Praeger Press, 2012), draws on all of her experiences. Please listen to our lively exchange.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kristin A. Goss is author of The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice (University of Michigan Press 2013). She is associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University.Goss challenges the conventional wisdom about women’s group with new congressional hearing data. Rather than ebbing-and-flowing like waves, Goss suggests that the women’s groups have not always diminished in influence following a major policy success. The Paradox of Gender Equality should have a wide audience among interest group, gender studies, and social movement scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices