New Books in Women's History

The birth of the American republic produced immense and existential challenges to Native people in proximity to the fledgling nation. Perhaps none faced a greater predicament than the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (popularly known as the Iroquois). Divided by the U.S.-English conflict, their landbase ransacked by American soldiers and speculators, their once considerable political power reduced, and their culture threatened by an influx of zealous missionaries — such is what historian Matthew Dennis in his powerful new book, Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), has termed “the colonial crucible.”Yet, Dennis persuades us, “the Seneca story is not mere prologue.” One of the Six Nations residing in what became western New York State, the Seneca adapted to the invasion of their homeland, building upon elements of their culture and selectively embracing change to survive the economic and political transformations of the post-Revolutionary period. The revelations of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, blended with elements of Christianity, yielded a new and powerful religion that rejected white degradation. But in the process, the prophet challenged the powerful position of women in Seneca society, as accusations of witchcraft – newly focused on women – led to violence.As western New York continues its decades long process of deindustrialization, losing population with every closed down factory, the Seneca Nation remains, vibrant as ever. Matthew Dennis’ fascinating new book helps us see just how they did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re all familiar with the film cliche of the little band of soldiers who in ordinary life never would have had met, but who learn to appreciate each other in the battles of World War II. All white, of course: African Americans would have to wait till the integration of the armed forces. But still, there’s a kind of earnest 1940s diversity in those movies: maybe a wide-eyed kid from the farm, a privileged college boy, and a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. With some subplot about a faithful girlfriend, or maybe an unfaithful one, back home.In the Red Army, the situation was a little different. There, the women were snipers, tank drivers, combat pilots, machine gunners, and the like: skilled purveyors of lethal violence, serving side by side with men (and sometimes above them, as their commanding officers). This was the first Soviet generation, educated in co-educational schools where everyone participated in paramilitary exercises and no one took home economics. When the long-awaited war with Germany came, women of this cohort took for granted that they would take up arms.Anna Krylova‘s book, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press, 2010), tells their story. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, letters, oral histories, and state records, Krylova reveals a world in which neither men nor women considered the “woman soldier” to be an oxymoron. And she reveals how this history was thoroughly marginalized after the war.Anna Krylova is associate professor of history at Duke University, and her book is the 2011 winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. It’s a great read for anyone interested in the Second World War – and it’s a thoughtful lesson in the possibilities for reimagining gender.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For years, biographers have been fascinated by the Mitfords, a quiet aristocratic British family with six beautiful daughters, nearly all of them famous for their controversial and stylish lives.There’s Nancy, the novelist who had a love affair with Charles de Gaulle’s Chief-of Staff; Pamela, the only sister who opted for a quiet life; Diana, the family beauty who married a Guinness then ditched him in favor of the founder of the British Union of Fascists; Unity, who had a crush on Hitler and unsuccessfully attempted to kill herself on the eve of World War II; Jessica, who eloped with a Communist at the age of 17; and Deborah, who married the Duke of Devonshire. In Leslie Brody‘s Irrepressible (Counterpoint Press, 2010), it’s Jessica Mitford–known throughout her life as Decca– who, at long last, has the chance to shine.She was a rebel almost from infancy. As Brody writes, “Soon after Jessica Mitford moved with her family to Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire, she began to plot her escape from it.” Her escape was spectacular, to be sure. As a teenager, she eloped with Winston Churchill’s nephew and ran off to the Spanish War. The couple eventually settled in America, where Mitford would remain after his death, later remarrying and becoming a journalist. Ultimately, she would be most famous for her expose of the American funeral industry, which was published in 1963 as The American Way of Death, but her work on civil rights and social justice was equally influential.Throughout Irrepressible, Brody includes direct quotes that let Mitford’s unique perspective shine through. And, as a white British woman with Communist leanings, Jessica Mitford provides a view of America- a country with an independent streak as fierce as her own- unlike that of any other. She was a “muckraker” in the truest and best sense of the word. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would a Presidential campaign be without a good dose of reproductive politics? To be sure, many of us are surprised to see contraception, and not just abortion, called into question – but maybe that’s because the intensity of abortion politics has allowed us to forget just how recently the issue of contraception was as fraught as the issue of abortion. And in any case, recent tussles over teen access to over-the-counter emergency contraception might have reminded us that debates about contraception are hardly closed.In her new book The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception in the United States (Rutgers University Press, 2011), Heather Munro Prescott helps us to understand the politics of emergency contraception. Initially a side-product from research into infertility, hormonal contraceptives – both the “regular” and the “emergency” kind – became the subject of heated battles in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist health care advocates protested that the medical establishment was pushing potentially unsafe medications on women who were not fully informed of side-effects. With conservatives’ attack on reproductive rights starting in the 1980s, however, feminist health care advocates and the medical profession became allies in the battle for continued access. This alliance bore results in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as the FDA reluctantly agreed to approve over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception (although not for minors).Heather Munro Prescott is a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University. If you care about reproductive rights, you’ll want to take a look at her book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is your gender essential to who you are? If you were a man instead of a woman, or vice versa, would you be a different person? In her new bookThe Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011), Charlotte Witt found that most people answered that obviously they’d be different if their gender differed – even though many feminist philosopher friends considered gender essentialism to be false. Thus a philosophical inquiry was born: what is gender essentialism, why might it be true, if it is true, and what consequences does this answer have for ourselves and societies?In this engaging volume, Witt – who is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire – argues that a certain form of gender essentialism is true. Gender is the social role that unifies us as social individuals, an ontological category distinct from both human organisms and persons. By distinguishing social individuals from persons, Witt hopes to promote the idea that the point of feminism is not giving women more choices, but about reconfiguring social roles so that they no longer oppress and exploit women. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth West has written an insightful study about the presence of African spirituality in the autobiographies, poetry, speeches and novels of African American women, ranging from Phylis Wheatley to Harriet Wilson to Zora Neale Hurston. West’s book is titled African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being (Lexington Books, 2011).It’s a powerful read!West’s two blubists, literary critics Georgene Bess Montgomery and Dana Williams, do not hold back in expressing their admiration of the work . Both detail how useful the book is to readers, students, and teachers of African American studies. Montgomery writes that “while [the authors West studies] have received much critical attention and analysis, [West’s] analysis is quite original and provocative.” And Williams adds that West’s book “is an important first step in advancing new frameworks through which to read African American literature.”This provocative examination of how Motherland spirituality inflects, influences, and sometimes challenges and often times mingles with Anglo-Christianity as a rhetorical device for black female authors is too important to miss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a whole, the genre of biography trends towards linear narratives–wherein the events of a subject’s life are tracked in the order that they occurred. This makes sense, as it’s how we live our lives, but there are advantages that come with non-linear structure. In the case of Karen Abbott‘s American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life & Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (Random House, 2012), the benefit is that the book reads like a slick, sexy film noir and it is virtually impossible to put down.The life of Gypsy Rose Lee- “this Dorothy Parker in a G-string”, famous for her “burlesque of burlesque”- is perhaps best likened to a Greek drama. The relationship between Gypsy, her controlling mother and the younger sister who stole her name offers enough material for a whole master’s thesis on Freud, and that’s just one of the many tangled relationship dynamics here worthy of analysis. And yet, Abbott exercises masterful control over her colorful cast of characters, all while guiding three separate narrative strands.We enter the narrative at three distinct points and flip between them throughout: Gypsy, post-1939; Gypsy, pre-1939; and the Minsky Brothers burlesque clubs in the 1920s. If you’re not a biographile, the transitions might even slip by unnoticed, incrementally heightening the drama with each page until, at the book’s crescendo, you find you’re almost winded. American Rose is an ambitious story told in an ambitious style and, much like modern art, it looks effortless because it is impeccably well done. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nearly twenty years after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, biographers are not only continuing to tell her story but finding provocative new ways to do so. In particular, a big bravo to William Kuhn for considering the former First Lady in a context that (a) has nothing to with her husbands, and (b) brings fresh perspective.Jackie’s post-“Camelot” years–namely, her marriage to Onassis and her publishing career–are often given short shrift, but Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books (Anchor Books, 2011) steps in to fill the later gap and it’s downright revelatory.What we read reveals much about who we are. That’s the idea behind Reading Jackie and it seems simple enough. But, in viewing Jackie Onassis’s life through the lens of the books she edited, Kuhn produces something quite sophisticated- a nuanced portrait of a thwarted artist for whom reading was a vital means of participating in the art world. As Kuhn writes: “That sense early on of what she could not do was at the nub of Jackie’s self-image as a reader. Coupled with the sense of limitation was a determination to work around it, to participate in the creative and artistic activity that gripped her imagination.”It’s a daring approach and more than a little meta –to write a biography examining a series of books with the claim that they comprise the biographical subject’s autobiography– but Kuhn more than pulls it off. He clearly delights in both his subject and her work, and one leaves Reading Jackie not only with an appreciation of Jackie Onassis’s books, but also a renewed appreciation of her- this woman “who helped put enduring statements of why art matters into print.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One lesson that the ever-present trickster figure in African American folklore teaches is how to use signifying to protect one’s intimate self. A challenge of writing Dorothy West’s life is getting beyond the masks she presents before the ever-prying gaze. To get around the problem, the biographer must think in unconventional ways. In Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color (Rutgers University Press, 2012), Cherene Sherrard-Johnson abandons the old battle between fact versus fiction; instead, she focuses on Dorothy West’s masks and what they show. Sherrard-Johnson respectfully evades West’s tactics of elusion and reveals a black woman artist with an acute awareness of the performative nature of class, and a keen sense of the intricacies of intra-racial identity.Dorothy West arrived to New York at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance. Although her first novel, The Living Is Easy (1948) was critically acclaimed it was not until the re-issue of her novel in 1982 that literary scholars and readers alike began to take a closer look at what she had to say. Publication of The Wedding (1995), as well as Oprah Winfrey’s TV miniseries based on the novel three years later, placed West in the limelight before she passed away in 1998.Sherrard-Johnson, professor of English at the University of Wisconsin ­Madison, offers readers more than the conventional biography that beginsand ends with the birth and death of the subject. As she maps West’smovement from Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard to Moscow, Russia and back again, Sherrard-Johnson treats readers to a myriad of responses to thequestion Dorothy West asks in the epigraph of her introduction: “Why wouldanybody write a book about me?” Should you desire to see one way to meet the challenge of catching anelusive figure while being mindful of the intrusive gaze, a good start is to read ChereneSherrard-Johnson’s fine book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s.And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her life is made to fit the standard template of the tortured artist: early ambition, a meteoric rise to fame, a string of meaningless love affairs and substance abuse leading to an early death.In light of this tendency, Carolyn Burke‘s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (Knopf, 2011) serves as a much needed corrective, breathing life back into the chanteuse’s legacy. During her short life Piaf consistently demonstrated an extraordinary boldness- in her relationships, yes, but also in her singing, her spirituality, her artistic collaborations and her commitment to France during World War II.And the music! That voice! “Non Je Ne Regrette Rien” seems to pulse beneath the text of Burke’s book and, reading it, one cannot help but be steered back to Piaf’s records. Burke was undoubtedly conscious of this as it’s where she got her title.“That kid Piaf tears your guts out.” So said Maurice Chevalier after hearing the 19-year-old newcomer sing in a Parisian nightclub. Nearly 50 years after death, as No Regrets proves, she still does.*No Regrets will be available in paperback on April 1, 2012, from Chicago Review Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices