New Books in Women's History

I confess I knew nothing about Julia Child prior to reading Bob Spitz‘s new book. And yet, from the dramatic opening passages through its 500+ pages, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Knopf, 2012) held me captive.How many people, much less women, change our attitudes, beliefs, and culture? Julia Child did. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that she did so by becoming a television star at the age of 50.One of the problems of biography is that women’s lives are so often written so badly. Whereas the telling of men’s lives emphasizes adventure, in the lives of women biographers tend to emphasize relationships and romance. Not so Dearie.From the outset, Spitz contends that Child led a life of adventure and, while her relationships play a role in the story, they are not at its center. Rather, Child is the star from page 1. Thus, Dearie is an unconventional story of an unconventional woman who made unconventional decisions. Which is to say, biographically speaking, it is a breath of fresh air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2005, Amina Wadud led a mixed-gender congregation of Muslims in prayer. This event became the focal point of substantial media attention and highlighted some of the tensions within the Muslim community. However, this prayer gathering was the culmination of a series of events and embodied several ongoing intra-Muslim debates. In American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer (University of Texas Press, 2012), Juliane Hammer, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, outlines the circumstances leading up to the prayer event and employs it as point of convergence to explore the multiple discourses surrounding Muslim gender issues. The debates following the prayer fell into two discursive frameworks, legal and symbolic. Hammer explores these themes through a broader body of sources written by American Muslim women both in relation to exegetical projects or legalistic frameworks leading towards gender equality or human rights. While gender remains central to the arguments of the book Hammer uses this subject to examine various issues related to contemporary Islam, including participation, leadership, law, media, and self-representation. In our conversation, we discuss the disintegration of traditional modes of authority, “progressive” Muslims, embodied tafsir, feminism, the permissibility and validity of women lead prayer, the hijab, book covers, mosques, networks, Asra Nomani, and Amina Wadud, but are only able to scratch the surface of this wonderful book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My wife is a sports fan. Together, we have cheered from the stands at college football games and track meets, for local minor-league baseball clubs and hockey teams. We’ve spent Sunday afternoons watching the National Football League, October nights watching the World Series, and summer afternoons watching the World Cup.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For some time now I’ve been in spaces with dancers and dance scholars who lament the amount of available research on some of the black luminaries in our field. Sometimes the need for a particular project is present for so long that its absence is taken for granted and treated as the norm. One of the “missing” but “much needed” projects I’ve heard talked about over the years is a book length treatment of the work of modern dance pioneer and scholar Dr. Pearl Primus. I’m really glad that her dear friends, Peggy and Murray Schwartz decided to fill that empty space with their latest project that is as much scholarly research as it is a homage to their very dear friend.For the entirety of her 74-year lifespan, Dr. Primus worked tirelessly and diligently as a dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist bringing the value of African culture to students and audience members around the globe. Though Primus studied and honed her approach to contemporary dance right alongside well known artists like Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Hanya Holm her work, while known to some has not been celebrated in the same way for its enduring impact. Pearl’s career began in 1943 as she began sharing dance works that infused her commitment to social justice and racial commentary with her approach to concert dance. In The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus (Yale University Press, 2012), Peggy Schwartz and Murray Schwartz, examine the ways in which Pearl’s career influenced dance, education and culture, charting her life story through its beginnings in Trinidad and work with the New Dance Group up to and through her later years. Dr. Primus’s extensive travels through Africa, the Caribbean, Israel, the United States and Europe are discussed in this book and presented as an example of what the life of a committed dancer, scholar and humanitarian can look like through hard work and dedication. Peggy and Murray were longtime personal friends of Primus decided to take on the task of cementing her name in the literature by crafting a tender, thoughtful and soaring biography that focuses on not only her creative work but her lasting impact on the contemporary dance landscape. Peggy Schwartz is professor emeritus of dance and former director of the dance program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Murray Schwartz is former dean of humanities and fine arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He teaches literature at Emerson College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Julietta Hua analyzes how discourse on human trafficking creates the boundaries of victimhood and thereby restricts concepts of punishment, remedy, and citizenship. Analyzing legislation, public discourse, and interview materials, Dr. Hua traces how gender, nationality, and racial identities become inscribed into the concept of sex trafficking. The subject matter is heavy, but Dr. Hua presents a delightfully rigorous theoretical framework, careful interpretation of proffered data, and poignant illustrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does a wedding in Karbala in the year 680 have to do with South Asian Muslims today? As it turns out, this event informs contemporary ideas of personal piety and social understanding of gender roles. The battlefield wedding of Qasem and Fatimah Kubra on 7 Muharram is commemorated annually by Hyderabadi Shi’a Muslims. In Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), Karen Ruffle, Assistant Professor of History of Religions and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, explores the relationship between devotional literature and ritual practice in the formulation of social consciousness and embodied ethics. She accomplishes this task through great ethnographic detail and deep investigation into a rich literary tradition of devotional hagiographical texts. Ruffle argues that hagiography when enacted through contemporary ritual performances establishes typologies of Shi’i sainthood. Altogether, these localized models of ethics and gendered normativity reflect the realities of the religiously plural geographies Hyderabadi Shi’a Muslims inhabit. In our conversation, we discuss annual mourning assemblies, Husaini ethics, imitable sainthood, gender roles, martyrdom and kinship, the relationship between texts and performance, The Garden of the Martyrs, vernacular and cosmopolitan Islams, sectarian affiliation and religious identity, and the homogenization of Shi’ism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is exactly one strong woman in the movie “The Godfather,” and she’s not Italian. (It’s “Kay Adams,” played by the least Italian-looking actress alive, Diane Keaton.) Such is the stereotype about Italian women, at least in the U.S. They are always in the background, sometimes cooking for la famiglia, sometimes counting rosary beads, sometimes simply missing (as in the case of “The Godfather” films). Alas, it’s all wrong. In her pathbreaking book Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Smith College historian Jennifer Guglielmo dives into the archives to show that before the First World War Italian women were at the forefront of radical, predominantly socialist politics in the New York City region. They organized parties and unions; protested and marched for fairness and against injustice; they struck and stood fast on the picket line; they wrote and published newspapers, flyers and books. And, in their daily lives, they tried as best they could to “live the Revolution.” As Jennifer points out, though, Italian women had to adapt. The ways they did so involved becoming both American and “white.” It’s a fascinating story remarkably well told. I urge you to read it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley‘s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan through the prism of prostitution. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2012 ) undermines our assumptions... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cultural movements don’t exist in vacuums. Consciously or not, all movements borrow from, and sometimes reject, those that came before. In Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement (Lexington Books, 2011), the first in a trilogy of books that cast a critical eye upon hip hop as a social and cultural movement, Reiland Rabaka traces the pre-history of hip hop as a series of separate yet connected movements that dealt with inequalities of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Using Africana, feminist, and queer critical theories as tools for understanding, Rabaka follows the history of black, women’s, and LGBT resistance to heterosexual white male hegemony in U.S. culture. Rabaka’s focus is always on the roles that art and artists (literary, visual, musical) have in people’s active resistances to oppression. The Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, Black Women’s Liberation, and Feminist Art Movements are just a few of the cultural happenings that Rabaka details as precursors to today’s “conscious” rap, feminist rap, and Homo-Hop, among others. All along, Rabaka’s message is not simply academic, he is also speaking directly to contemporary hip hoppers, urging them not to forget their past and to learn from the struggles of their forbears.Reiland Rabaka is an Associate Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Humanities Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is also an Affiliate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Program and a Research Fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America (CSERA). He has published ten books, including Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement (2012) and The Hip Hop Movement: From R&B and the Civil Rights Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation (2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do social values belong in the sciences?Exploring the relationship between science, society, and politics, Philosophy of Science After Feminism (Oxford UP, 2010) provides a map for a more socially and politically engaged philosophy of science. Janet Kourany‘s book is a service to scholars and interested readers across the many fields of science studies, providing the reader with a set of models as well as offering a capsule history of the philosophy of science as a professional discipline. The book is a profoundly transdisciplinary work even as it maintains a very careful focus on the philosophy of science as a discipline. Kourany’s archive includes the work of philosophers of science, feminist theorists, sociologists, historians, and many others, with the reader consistently and sometimes explicitly invited into the dialogue. Kourany suggests a program that emerges from previous and contemporary attempts to create a more socially-engaged philosophy of science, guides us through some major potential challenges to the political approach that she advocates, and provides concrete suggestions for integrating philosophers into the construction of more thoughtful ethical codes for scientific practice. It is an engaging, thoughtful, and teachable text advocating a space of philosophers as public intellectuals, and we had a very enjoyable and spirited conversation about it. Enjoy!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices