New Books in Women's History

The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random factual odds and ends. This is one of the challenges of writing biography- one must become expert on so many things- and also one of the pleasures of reading it: the fact that a biography can reveal something not simply about another person, but also provide an in-depth glimpse into other worlds. Such is the case with Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite‘s Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) which, in the course of exploring a grisly unsolved murder, immerses the reader in the 1930s Paris underworld.In 1937, Laetitia Toureaux was discovered in the first class car of ametrotrain with a 9-inch knife stuck in her neck. In Murder in the Metro, Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite untangle Toureaux’s complicated life–she was, at one time, simultaneously spying for the Italian government, the Paris police, and the French terrorist organization the Cagoule–in an effort to give a plausible explanation for how and why she might have died.However, their work extends beyond sleuthing; Murder in the Metrois a gripping story, but it’s also an effort to call scholarly attention to the use of terrorism during France’s Third Republic and, following World War II, the subsequent downplaying–even, at times, obfuscation–of such acts. Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite write that, in 1937, Toureaux’s life and death “offered a perfect tableau for the press to explore and expound upon the issues of gender and, to a lesser extent, class.” Today, she still acts as a tableau of sorts, her history merging with that of the Cagoule to provide a canvas from which scholars–with Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite leading the charge–can explore the nuances of the times in which she lived: a period marked by progress and innovation, but also violence and political unrest, all set against the clouds of a fast-approaching war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Barbara Palmer and Dennis Simon are authors of Women and Congressional Elections: A Century of Change (Lynne Rienner, 2012). Palmer is associate professor of political science at Baldwin Wallace University and Dixon is professor of political science at Southern Methodist University. They have combined to write a deeply informative book about the trajectory of women in congress. The book offers many great anecdotes from the trail blazers: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (the first woman to run for congress), Margaret Chase Smith (the first woman elected to the Senate), and Shirley Chisom (the first African American woman elected to Congress). The authors also put together a new dataset of the universe of women candidates for office. What they find about where women succeed and the challenges they face after winning reveals a lot about what it means for a woman to run for office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the Elector of Saxony who favored testing medical remedies on others before using them on her friends and family. Elisabeth was an invalid patient whose preferred treatments included topical remedies and ministrations from the “almighty physician,” but never “the smear.” We meet these three lively women in the pages of Alisha Rankin‘s wonderful new book on the medical practices of noblewomen from the last decades of the sixteenth century. Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2013) considers the intellectual and social contexts of healing practices in early modern Germany, focusing on elite women who spent much of their adult lives devising and administering medicinal remedies. The book argues that noblewomen were celebrated as healers not despite their gender, but because of it, offering a useful corrective to the historiography of gender and the sciences in early modernity. Rankin situates three in-depth case studies within a careful exploration of some of the main factors that enabled the kind of success that noblewomen-healers like Dorothea of Mansfield and Anna of Saxony enjoyed in sixteenth-century Germany: more opportunities for information exchange through local communities and wider epistolary networks; an increasing focus on empirical knowledge in its many forms; and the foundation role of written medicinal recipes as a form of kunst. It is a thoughtfully written and very clearly argued work that informs many aspects of the history of gender, of science and medicine, and of practical epistemologies. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reporter Anne-Marie O’Connor uses the iconic gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to engage us in the exciting cultural life of fin-de-siecle Vienna, where wealthy Jewish patrons supported the work of ground-breaking artists, lived in grand homes on the famous Ringstrasse, and thought life was good and they were valued as Austrians. With O’Connor’s background in art and her skills of investigative reporting, we come to know the people who turn the art world upside down during the last years of the Empire. Klimt, rock star artist of his era, is in great demand. Her family treasured his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the Austrians came to regard it as their Mona Lisa. Adele Bloch-Bauer, as O’Connor explains, was different. This wealthy Jewish woman hosted “Red Saturdays” at home, salons in which she voiced her opinions on the issues of the day, eager to implement reforms to improve workers’ lives. O’Connor characterizes her as “an unfinished woman,” for she died at 43. Wishing to immortalize Klimt, she directed that the portraits and landscapes that she and her husband had in their home be given to the Austrian Gallery. But after Adele died, life changed for Jews in Vienna: in 1938, the Anschluss made Austria part of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s henchmen commandeered Adele’s home and helped themselves to paintings and other works of art. Her family survived, barely. When the war ended, Austria kept the Klimts. When the battle to recover the Klimt portrait resumed in Los Angles in the 1990s, O’Connor interviewed Maria Altmann, niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, who spearheaded the family’s legal case. Working with Altmann was attorney Randol Schoenberg, grandson of the famed composer and passionate advocate in the battle to recover the painting. Listen to this interview for further details of The Lady in Gold and read the book to learn more.(See the Artsy page on Klimt; it’s terrific.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beverly Bossler‘s new book will be required reading for anyone interested in women and gender in China’s history. Covering nearly five centuries of transformations, it also offers a fascinating rethinking of the histories of neo-Confucian thought, of commercialization, and of the family in China. Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The title says it all: Diana Vreeland was, in fact, that Empress of Fashion, reigning over Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute for half a century. As a result, her life story stretches the conventions of biography, which so often presents mid-century women’s lives merely as a series of relationships. Amanda MacKenzie Stuart‘s Empress of Fashion: Diana Vreeland, A Life (Thames & Hudson, 2013) provides a stunning alternative: the work narrative.Vreeland’s is the story of an individual who, through sheer will, became the person she wanted to be. Today, we often read biography for inspiration and Vreeland herself searched for such in the lives she encountered and read, as Stuart writes: “At this point Diana wobbled back toward the idea of finding a great person on whom to model herself: ‘then by that I can become great.'” And yet she came up short, writing in her diary, “You know for years I am and always have been looking out for girls to idolize because they are things to look up to because they are perfect. Never have I discovered that girl or that woman. I shall be that girl.”Stuart’s portrait of Vreeland revolves around this notion that she, a woman who was not considered conventionally attractive, excelled in the world of beauty by virtue of this vision- this driving idea of being The Girl and showing readers how they might be their own version of The Girl as well. The element that separates the notion of The Girl from fashion journalism today is that The Girl was- at least in the beginning- attainable, more an attitude supplemented by seasonal accessories and small touches than a look defined by brand names.In the end, as Stuart mentions in our interview, Vreeland’s is a story of great hope: that one doesn’t have to a be a conventional beauty to be fashionable, one doesn’t have to be a man to produce exceptional work, one doesn’t have to conform to the lives and standards of others to be great. Simply by being herself, by being that girl she couldn’t find anywhere else, Vreeland became an icon. As a friend recalled: “She didn’t merely enter a room, she exhilarated it.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s rare that a person’s name comes to represent an object, but such is the case with Lilly Pulitzer. Just say ‘Lilly’ and it conjures images of simple sheath dresses in vivid colors. But what of Lilly Pulitzer herself? As Kathryn Livingston’s Lilly: Palm Beach, Tropical Glamour, and the Birth of a Fashion Legend (Wiley, 2012) reveals, the woman was just as vivid as the dresses her name came to evoke.Born and married into privilege, Lilly Pulitzer wasn’t your typical debutante. She walked around Palm Beach barefoot and had a pet monkey. Boasting a similar background Jackie Kennedy and an extra shot of joie de vivre, she seems, from Livingston’s portrait, like a woman who would make excellent company at cocktail hour.She was also a bit of an entrepreneurial genius. Hoping to break out of a post-partum depression, Pulitzer opened an orange juice stand on Worth Avenue, selling juice to tourists and the Palm Beach hoi polloi, including the Kennedys. Ultimately, she would build an entire empire based solely upon the pattern for a simple sheath dress intended to hide orange juice and sweat stains.But, as the title suggests, Lilly is as much the story of Pulitzer as of Palm Beach itself. Unlike most residents, who were seasonal, the Pulitzers lived in Palm Beach year-round. Thus, Lilly’s story is one of both personal and local success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How were black women manumitted in the Old South, and how did they live their lives in freedom before the Civil War? Historian, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (Associate Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University in Bloomington) answers this complex question by explaining the precarious nature freedom for African American women in Charleston before the Civil War in Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (UNC Press, 2011). In three tightly woven sections, she tells stories that reveal what it meant to glimpse, build and experience freedom from the early national period to the end of the antebellum era. Her beautifully written prose, coupled with thorough research to understand black women’s experiences in antebellum Charleston, makes her work an important contribution to the historical literature. Furthermore, her book has been awarded several prizes, namely the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize (2012) from the Southern Association of Women Historians, the George C. Rogers Jr. Award (2011) from the South Carolina Historical Society, and the Anna Julia Cooper – CLR James Book Award (2011) from the National Council for Black Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Extreme metal, punk, and hardcore. Slayer. Sick of it All. Cro-Mags. Decapitated. Behemoth. Musically aggressive rock bands with growling vocals and lyrics about annihilation, death, and dismemberment. A genre of music that, even more than more mainstream music genres, seems to be the province of (straight) white males. But wait. In What are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal (Bazillion Points, 2012), Laina Dawes examines an overlooked and numerically small segment of the extreme music scene: black women. Putting her sociological training to good use, Dawes presents a macro structural cultural analysis of race in North America (Dawes is Canadian) and how this plays out in the micro-arenas of high school community and heavy metal shows. Using in-depth interviews with a number of black women punk and metal artists including Skin, Sandra St. Victor, Militia Vox, Diamond Rowe, Urith Myree, Tamar-Kali, Ashley Greenwood, Yvonne Ducksworth, Camille Douglas, Alexis Brown, and others, Dawes highlights the self and societal contradictions of being black, female, and a fan of extreme music. Most significantly, the black friends of these women accuse them of not being black enough and their white metal friends (and strangers, for that matter) are dumbfounded about what a black woman might find interesting in this world of white males. The answer to both, writes Dawes, is easy: Metal fandom allows these women to be themselves, to be individuals, to escape the narrow confines of prescribed gender and race roles in North American society.Laina Dawes is a music and cultural critic and opinion writer, an active public speaker, and a contributor to CBC Radio. She is also a current affairs columnist for Afrotoronto.com and contributing editor for Blogher.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Divorce was virtually impossible in Imperial Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church monopolized matrimony, and it rarely granted divorce except in extraordinary cases of adultery, abandonment, sexual impotence, or exile. Marriage as an unbreakable religious sacrament still held. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, Russian perceived a “crisis of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices