New Books in Women's History

Megan Threlkeld is an associate professor of history at Denison University. Her book Pan-American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) provides a rich transnational examination of the years following World War I and American women activists who saw themselves global leaders in promoting women’s rights and international peace. U.S. internationalists such as Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Doris Stevens sought to build friendships with Mexican women, including educator Margarita Robles de Mendoza and feminist Elena Torres. They established new organizations, sponsored conferences and rallied for peaceful relations between the two countries at a time of tense or broken diplomatic ties. The efforts at an apolitical “human internationalism” were complicated by differences in ideologies, and cross-cultural misunderstanding that took for granted that Mexican women wanted the same political rights as U.S. women. To U.S. women, Mexican nationalism appeared as an obstacle while the revolutionary spirit of Mexico inspired its female citizens to focused on wide-ranging social reform and international economic justice. Despite failures internationalism endured through women’s political involvement in the Peace with Mexico campaign, and the establishment of the Inter-American Commission on Women. Pan American Women exposes the ideological and racist views that brought failure to building an inter-American movement for peace and equality and illuminates the role of U.S. feminism and women’s activism in forwarding imperialism abroad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Eig is a New York Times best-selling author of four books and former journalist for the Wall Street Journal. His book The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2014) gives us a lively narrative history of the development and marketing of the birth control pill. He presents us with four risk-taking outsiders whose path became intertwined in the pursuit of a reliable and simple contraceptive. The feminist Margaret Sanger, in her campaign for the rights of women, sought a reliable birth control method as a means to sexual and social liberation. The genius scientist Gregory Pincus’s research stretched the boundaries of law and ethics and tied him to the business interest of Searle pharmaceuticals. The wealthy socialite Katharine McCormick’s singular focus and funding kept the research going. The handsome promoter John Rock, a Catholic infertility doctor, was willing to go against his church’s teaching and provide untested drugs to desperate patients. The story begins in the radical and sexually freewheeling Greenwich Village of the early twentieth century. Eig follows Sanger’s crusade for birth control information, cultural change, scientific victories and defeats, and the marketing of what became the first FDA-approved contraceptive pill in 1960. This is a well-researched and riveting story of four exceptional people and a revolution in the intimate lives of women and men. The birth control pill forever changed how we think about marriage, sexuality, and parenting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Clare Virginia Eby is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. In Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Eby examines the origins of how we think of marriage through the theoretical and experimental reform of the institution in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sally G. McMillen is the Mary Reynolds Babcock professor of history at Davidson College. In her book Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (Oxford University Press, 2015) McMillen has given us a rich biography of the life and times of the abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucy Stone. Born in 1818 into a farming community in Massachusetts, Stone a precocious and determined girl set her sights not on marriage but on education and self-development leading her to a earning a degree from Oberlin College. Against her parents’ wishes for their daughter, she chose to pursue a career as a public speaker on behalf of abolition and women’s rights. Rising from relative obscurity she became known as a passionate and persuasive speaker crisscrossing the country and speaking to thousands. Her gender, her confident demeanor, and the unpopular views brought both admiring and hostile audiences. Along the way, she forged political alliances and personal friendships with the leading abolitionists and women’s rights advocates including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, and Wendell Phillips. Her many associations including significant contributions to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, American Equal Rights Association, and founding the American Woman Suffrage Association and the Woman’s Journal framed her 50-year career. McMillen also provides a private portrait of a principled Lucy Stone battling bouts of self-doubt, exhaustive travel, and difficult financial and political challenges within and without the suffrage movement. As the mother of Alice Stone Blackwell and the wife of Henry Browne Blackwell, her partner- in-arms, she undertook a domestic life that stood against the marital customs of her day. Avoiding self-promotion and refusing to participate in building her historical legacy she was left out of the national Memorial Sculpture to women’s rights at the U.S. Capitol rotunda diminishing her place among Mott, Stanton and Anthony. McMillen recovers not only a committed advocate but also one who against societal norms lived out her ideals of an independent, full, and self-directed life for women. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) by Julie Billaud is a fascinating account of women and the state and ongoing ‘reconstruction’ projects in post-war Afghanistan. The book moves through places such as gender empowerment training programmes and women’s dormitories, and analyses such topics as the law and veiling in public. Subtle and engaging, Kabul Carnival is a rare and much needed anthropological insight into women’s lives in Afghanistan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Meryle Secrest notes in the introduction to her new book, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Knopf, 2014),”The most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth century is now just a name on a perfume bottle.” Were it not a book about Schiaparelli, it’s a sentence many people might assume was being applied to Coco Chanel, for Chanel looms large as the fashion designer of the last century. But Schiaparelli was, as Secrest reveals, more than a fashion designer: she was an artist. And, through her collaborations with SalvadoreDali, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and others, she was in the vanguard of surrealism and transformed women’s fashions into an art form.Who was Schiap? It’s hard to know. But then we can never know everything about another person, which iswhat makes reading biography so beguiling: the illusion that we could. It’s a circumstance Secret openly acknowledges. “A great many aspects of Elsa Schiaparelli’s life will probably never be known,” Secrestwrites. “She was not much of a letter writer… If she had a diary, it has not survived. Her memoir is an example of an evasiveness that was almost automatic.” And yet, there are things we can know: Schiaparelli’s “gambler’s instinct” and “conjurer’s sleight of hand”; that she was famously difficult, a perfectionist, voracious reader, and excellent skier; that smoking was her one indulgence.She was, also, an extraordinarily gifted artist who worked very, very hard. In 1922, she had “no money, no career, no future, and a very sick daughter.” Five years later, Vogue was callingher V-neck sweater with 3/4-sleeves and a trump l’oeil bow “an artistic masterpiece.” Secrest’s biography is, ultimately, a compelling story of a complicated, determinedworking woman, and we need all the stories like that we can get. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recently, there have been various debates within the Muslim community over women’s mosque attendance. While contemporary questions of modern society structure current conversations, this question, ‘may a Muslim woman go to the mosque,’ is not a new one. In Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice (Columbia University Press, 2014), Marion Holmes Katz, Professor of Islamic Studies at New York University, traces the juristic debates around women’s mosque attendance. Katz outlines the various arguments, caveats, and positions of legal scholars in the major schools of law and demonstrates that despite some differing opinions there was generally a downward progression towards gendered exclusion in mosques. were engaged in at the mosque, the time of day, the permission of their husbands or guardians, attire, and the multitude of conditions that needed to be met. Later interpreters feared women’s presence in the mosque because they argued it stirred sexual temptation. Katz pairs these legal discourses with evidence of women’s social practice in the Middle East and North Africa from the earliest historical accounts through the Ottoman period. In our conversation we discuss types of mosque actdivities, Mamluk Cairo, women’s educational participation, the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the transmission of knowledge, European travelers accounts of Muslim women, night prayers, mosque construction, debates about the mosque in Mecca, and modern developments in legal discussions during the 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Studies on the subject of women’s participation in religious and intellectual life in Islam have been few.Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013)byAsma Sayeed, professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA, is a much needed addition to the fields of early and classical Islamic history, the study of hadith and its transmission, and women’s studies. Professor Sayeed leads readers through nine centuries, from the seventhto sixteenth century CE, of religious, social, and intellectual history of women’s participation as transmitters of hadith, the words and actions of Muhammad. Women’s participation within this area was not static, but ebbed and flowed throughout history as demonstrated in this book’s four chapters. Women were critical in the dissemination of hadith in the first century of Islam. As the study of hadith became more specialized from the fourthto tenthcentury, women were marginalized as transmitters which Sayeed validates through biographical dictionaries and chronicles as well as quantitative data from chains of transmissions, isnads, from numerous hadith collections. By the tenthcentury, the canonization of hadith was by and large complete. This ushered in a new phase in which women again became important actors in the reception and propagation of hadith. This period would last until the end of the Mamluk period and the rise of Ottomans in the sixteenthcentury, but this second decline would be for different reasons. Throughout each phase of this history, Professor Sayeed provides case studies on different women to further her argument on the participation of women, even at the least active moments, as propagators of hadith. Professor Sayeed has brought new understanding of women’s intellectual lives in the history of Islam and has opened the door for further inquiry into this subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Torild Skard is the author of Women of Power: Half a Century of Female Presidents and Prime Ministers Worldwide (Policy Press, 2015). Skard is a senior researcher in women’s studies at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo and is a former member of parliament and the first woman president of the Norwegian Upper House, among many other appointments.Skard takes on an enormously ambitious project in her recent book. She seeks out to examine the achievements and life stories of nearly the universe of the world’s female political leaders from the 1960s up to the current era. Organized both chronologically and geographically, Skard includes over 70 leaders in 50 countries, and uncovers a variety of paths to power, regional patterns and variation, and fascinating individual stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (Penn State University Press, 2014), Melissa Dabakis takes readers on an unexpected journey from Boston to Rome to discover multiple American women sculptors working in studios, winning public commissions, and earning artistic renown in the mid-19th Century. The book navigates through the worlds of sculpture, feminism, American and Italian politics, slavery and abolition, expatriate circles, Roman culture, and Italian independence struggles. Dabakis illuminates the critical period from 1850 to 1876 when American women sculptors not only forged professional artistic careers but also participated in and impacted feminist and abolitionist movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices