New Books in Women's History

Carol Faulkner is Professor of History at Syracuse University. Her book Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) is a beautifully written biography of the abolitionist and Quaker Lucretia Mott. Committed to liberty and equality based on the divine light within, Mott was one the earliest American activist for immediate emancipation and by extension the full rights of women. Faulkner argues that Mott has been cast as a demure religious matron rather than the radical firebrand she was. Partly, this is due to Mott not having left many of her thoughts in writing, expressing herself primarily through long extemporaneous speeches. Faulkner corrects for this by providing vivid details of Mott’s life and takes us through the Nantucket childhood and time at Nine Partners Boarding School where she received the best education of the era; her joining the Hickite movement; collaboration with William Lloyd Garrison and the founding of the interracial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society; and her connections with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and women’s rights. Mott considered herself a heretic rejecting dogma, church authority, and the preeminence of scripture for an ethic of pacifism, individual liberty, and radical equality. Her theological views are brought into sharp relief against the backdrop of multiple schisms within Quakerism and anti-slavery. Rather than a frail and domestic Mott, Faulkner offers a courageous ideologue unafraid to risk her own safety in defense of principle, committed to moral suasion, immediate emancipation, and vilified for her disruptive outspokenness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America (UNC Press, 2013) is a detailed journey into the life of Margaret Reilly, an American Irish-Catholic from New York who entered the Convent of the Good Shepherd in 1921, taking the name Sister Crown of Thorns. During the 1920s and 1930s, Sister Thorn became known as a stigmatic who bled the wounds of Christ. In this microhistory of Thorn’s story, Professor Paula Kane immerses readers in a world in transition, where interwar Catholics retained deep mystical devotionalism, yet also began to claim a confident new role as assimilated Americans. She does so through a very provocative question: “How did a stigmatic help ordinary Catholic understand themselves as modern Americans?” In the process, Professor Kane explores religious practice and mysticism through a number of theoretical literatures–including theology, psychology, feminism, sociology, and cultural studies–opening up multiple new avenues for scholars of religion to consider. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest today, Linda Gordon, is professor of history and humanities as New York University. Gordon and her co-authors Dorothy Sue Cobble and Astrid Henry have written Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women’s Movements (Liveright, 2014).The book documents the women’s movement since the winning of the franchise in 1920. Its aim is to recapture feminism as a social movement. The authors address a diversity of issues and demonstrate feminism’s ubiquitous influence in changing American society. Cobble, Gordon, and Henry’s definition of feminism, or feminisms, is capacious; it is, they say, really an “outlook.” Each of the authors covers one of three feminist eras of the last century.They take on numerous myths, including the idea that the movement is dead or unnecessary. By focusing on less known women active on the ground rather than political leaders, they challenge the assumption that the movement was largely white and upper middle-class. By emphasizes intersectionality, the authors forward women’s differing critical concerns. They dispute the idea that feminism is only about women. Finally, they examine the myth that gains in leadership and power by a few elites is a victory for all women. The authors have enlarged the feminist tent and recovered a social movement that even today is re-shaping society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recently, historians have shown that the modern conservative movement is older and more complex than has often been assumed by either liberals or historians. Michelle Nickerson‘s book, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton University Press, 2012) expands that literature even further, demonstrating not only the longer roots of conservative interest in family issues, such as education, but also the important role women played in shaping the early movement. Mothers of Conservatism does this by examining the role of women in the rise of grassroots conservatism during the 1950s. Nickerson explains how women in Southern California became politicized during the height of the Cold War, coming to see communist threats in numerous, mostly local, battles. These women, who were primarily homemakers, argued that they had a special political role as mothers and wives, translating their domestic identities into political activism. Nickerson traces their activism in battles over education and mental health issues among others. She further explains the ideology behind their activism and demonstrates how important these women were to shaping the coming conservative movement and in the long-term, the Republican Party.Mothers of Conservatism draws on rich archival material as well as on oral history interviews conducted by the author. With these archival sources and interviews, Nickerson brings the activists’ stories, politics, and humanity to life. In this interview, we discuss the ideology, activism, and legacy of the women as well as Nickerson’s experience interviewing her sources. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Victoria Hesford is an associated professor of Women and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. Her book Feeling Women’s Liberation (Duke University Press, 2013) examines the pivotal year of 1970 as defining the meaning of “women’s liberation.” Applying a theory of emotions to the rhetoric of mass media and the response of movement participants, Hesford demonstrates how our memory of the movement has been formed by either feelings of attachment, or dis-identification that hide its complexity and heterogeneity. The movement came to represent a radical form of feminism standing against the more staid liberal feminism of Betty Friedan. Instead of ideologically driven, Hesford argues that women’s liberation engaged in the “politics of emotion.” She demonstrates how the visceral media coverage and participant’s experience were mutual constituted in the “feminist-as-lesbian.” The language and multiple images of the feminist as a guerilla fighter, subversive and pathological, evoked the lavender menace and the “woman-identified-woman” within the movement. The lesbian became a defining figure used as a psychic weapon against women, or to denote sexual autonomy and political defiance. Central to her provocative analysis is the often-neglected figure of Kate Millet and her 1970 book Sexual Politics. The media’s outing of Millet, hounding by movement insiders to declare her lesbianism, and the spectacle of a self-fashioning response in the autobiography Flying offers a window into the feelings of betrayal, anger and depression that propelled the movement and evidence of its attachment to definitions of socially acceptable femininity. Instead of focusing on “what really happened,” the political triumphs and failures, Hesford looks to how emotions, both personal and social, shaped the movement and our memories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While there are a number of studies of how women are represented in popular culture, Norma Jones, Maja Bajac-Carter, Bob Batchelor’s collection of essays Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)looks at the heroine. From discussions of traditional characters such as Wonder Woman and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a history of how a group of women’s rights advocates turned to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to answer the eternal “woman question.” Hamlin’s fascinating intellectual history uncovers how the new evolutionary science provided multiple arguments by which to advance the cause of women’s rights in the home and society. Many scholars are familiar with the Enlightenment, religious, and socialist origins of feminist thought. Hamlin suggests another significant strand of thought offered by the science of human origins. She argues that Darwinism, often with unorthodox interpretations, was effective in overturning a central ideological obstacle to women’s equality–the biblical story of Eve. Charles Darwin’s theory, against his own conservative views, turned upside down traditional ideas about women. Freethinkers, socialist, sexologist seized on evolutionary science to build arguments against recalcitrant traditional views. They asserted that their contemporary culture was a construct of erroneous ideas calling for change, in order to live in accordance to the evolutionary laws of nature. As “reform Darwinists,” Hamlin’s subjects stood against social Darwinism, religious teaching, and custom. Yet, evolutionary science under male control was deployed to reassert women’s subordination. Sex difference as interpreted by many male scientists pointed to female intellectual inferiority. Women, mostly outside the science establishment, called on the evidence of “woman’s experience” against claims of scientific men.Hamlin offers a lucid narrative of how a group of women intervened in a period between the demise of Eve, as the metanarrative for the meaning of womanhood, and the masculinist consolidation of evolutionary science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lisa Tetrault received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. Tetrault’s book The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) uncovers the politics behind the creation of an origins myth for women’s rights. Typically, the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States is dated to 1848, at the meeting in Seneca Falls, NY. This origins story, however, did not become commonplace until much later, a story not told during the antebellum period, but a story created in response to Reconstruction-era politics with broad-reaching implications for the direction of the movement. The myth also was effective for women’s rights leaders to deal with division within the movement and an attempt to unify a very diverse understanding of women’s rights. The Myth of Seneca Falls, poses a corrective to the narrative of Seneca Falls as the origin of women’s rights. Tetrault’s work brings attention to conflicts in a narrative that often jumps from 1848 to the final triumph–a woman’s right to vote–in 1920. Our author examines the creation of the myth, the lessons it provided, and the ways in which it transformed the women’s movement. Myths, she argues, are not false; rather they serve as shorthand for larger stories. They also neatly obscure conflict and contingency. While scholars have written alternative histories, Tetrault sees Seneca Falls as having undue influence and seeks to decenter the narrative by illuminating its contested nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephanie Coontz is an award-winning social historian, the director of Research and Public Education at the Council for Contemporary Families and teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. In A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (Basic Books, 2014), Coontz reveals why so many women in the early 1960s found Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique (1963) speaking to them personally. Freidan identified an unnamed problem allowing women to see the self-doubt and depression they suffered as no longer a personal issue, but a social one. Coontz’s work is both a social history of women at mid-century and a reception history of Friedan’s book: A book regarded as one of the most influential in the twentieth century and a catalyst for the 1960s women’s movement. Coontz’s narrative provides a vivid picture of the realities and the contraction in the post-war lives of many women. She also critically examines Friedan and responds to the charge that the Feminine Mystique was too white and middle class. Including the voices of minority and working class women’s response to the book, Coontz provides a fresh way for understand Friedan’s legacy. This is not a story only trying to make sense of the past, but shows how the feminine mystique in new guises continues to reproduce itself in contemporary society. Consumerism, the search for meaningful work, and equity between men and women both a home and at work, are enduring issues we all continue to contend with. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jenny Kaminer‘s new book, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2014) analyzes Russian myths of motherhood over time and in particular, the evolving myths of the figure of the “bad mother.” Her study examines how political, religious, economic, social, and cultural factors affect Russians’ conception of motherhood throughout history: what motherhood is, and what it should be. Kaminer focuses on three critical periods of transformation and consolidation: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. She investigates how good and bad mothers are depicted in various works of literature and culture, from Anna Karenina to media depictions of Chechen female suicide bombers in 2002. Winner of the 2014 Prize for Best Book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women’s Studies from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices