New Books in Women's History

Period Matters is a groundbreaking anthology edited by Farah Ahamed that explores the cultural, social, and political dimensions of menstruation in South Asia. Through a diverse collection of essays, personal narratives, poetry, and artwork, the book sheds light on the stigma, myths, and challenges surrounding periods. Featuring contributions from writers, activists, academics, and artists, it examines issues such as menstrual health, period poverty, gender inequality, and sustainable solutions. By amplifying voices that are oft excluded mainstream discussions, Period Matters challenges taboos and calls for greater awareness, education, and policy change in the region.Farah Ahamed is the editor of Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia, published by Pan Macmillan India in 2022 (periodmattersbook.com). The book has been described as ‘an essential book about the female body that dispels misconceptions,’ by Book Riot. In 2022, Farah was selected as the Financial Times's Woman of the Year for her work in breaking the stigma around menstruation.Farah and her sisters run a charity in Kenya called Panties with Purpose, which is helping to raise awareness of period poverty, menstrual health, and also supports underprivileged schoolgirls. Since 2011 they have distributed over 70,000 pairs of underpants to more than 16,000 girls across Kenya.Farah is a Kenyan lawyer with a background in human rights. She lives in London.This interview was hosted by Zana Mody, an English DPhil student at the University of Oxford, who works on postcolonial Indian literature and art. X: @mody_zana Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the decades preceding World War II, professional architecture schools enrolled increasing numbers of women, but career success did not come easily. Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Dr. Mary Anne Hunting and Dr. Kevin D. Murphy tells the stories of the resilient and resourceful women who surmounted barriers of sexism, racism, and classism to take on crucial roles in the establishment and growth of Modernism across the United States.Dr. Hunting and Dr. Murphy describe how the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Massachusetts evolved for the professional education of women between 1916 and 1942. While alumnae such as Eleanor Agnes Raymond, Victorine du Pont Homsey, and Sarah Pillsbury Harkness achieved some notoriety, others like Elizabeth-Ann Campbell Knapp and Louisa Vaughan Conrad have been largely absent from histories of Modernism. Dr. Hunting and Dr. Murphy describe how these innovative practitioners capitalized on social, educational, and professional ties to achieve success and used architecture to address social concerns, including how modernist ideas could engage with community and the environment. Some joined women-led architectural firms while others partnered with men or contributed to Modernism as retailers of household furnishings, writers and educators, photographers and designers, or fine artists.With stunning illustrations, Women Architects at Work offers new histories of recognized figures while recovering the stories of previously unsung women, all of whom contributed to the modernization of American architecture and design.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Afterthought: A Family Story (Indiana University Bloomington Libraries Publishing, 2025) by Dr. Heather Akou focuses on the life of her grandmother, Lila Slaback, who grew up in a dysfunctional, working-class family in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the 1930s. In her short adult life, she gave birth to seven children with at least four different men and died in 1958 at age thirty-six. She was a real person, but her family was not proud of her story. This book is my best attempt to recover it.This work of historical fiction can be read like a memoir. With extensive notes and resources, it can also be read as inspiration for researching and writing historical fiction, especially in the United States. As an educational text, it would be appropriate for courses on fashion history, American history, gender roles, family, poverty, healthcare, and generational trauma.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the late 1940s to the mid 1960s, Peru’s rapid industrialization and anti-communist authoritarianism coincided with the rise of mass-produced cookbooks, the first televised cooking shows, glossy lifestyle magazines, and imported domestic appliances and foodstuffs. Amy Cox Hall’s The Taste of Nostalgia (U Texas Press, 2025) uses taste as a thematic and analytic thread to examine the ways that women, race, and the kitchen were foundational to Peruvian longings for modernity, both during the Cold War and today.Drawing on interviews, personal stories, media images, and archival and ethnographic research, Cox Hall considers how elite, European-descended women and the urban home were central to Peru’s modernizing project and finds that all women who labored within the deeply racialized and gendered world of food helped set the stage for a Peruvian food nationalism that is now global in the twenty-first century. Cox Hall skillfully connects how the sometimes-unsavory tastes of the past are served again in today’s profitable and pervasive gastronostalgia that helps sell Peru and its cuisine both at home and abroad.Dr. Amy Cox Hall is Associate Dean of the Bard Prison Initiative at Bard College, and a writer and cultural anthropologist who specializes in Peru and the U.S. with research focused on science, race, photography, national heritage, and most recently, food. She is the author of Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography and the Making of Machu Picchu (published by University of Texas Press in 2017),editor of The Camera as Actor: Photography and the Embodiment of Technology (published by Routledge in 2020), and A Taste of Nostalgia: Women, Race, and Culinary Longing in Peru (published by UT Press in 2024).Dr. Scott Catey is CEO of The Catey Group, LLC. and Executive Publisher of Rising Justice Publishing, a full-service multimedia publishing enterprise. Visit https://scottcatey.com/ for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Questions about the meaning of womanhood and femininity loomed large in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French culture. In Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France (LSU Press, 2024), Dr. Holly Grout uses the theater—specifically, Parisian stage performances of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra by Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, and Josephine Baker—to explore these cultural and political debates. How and why did portrayals of Cleopatra influence French attitudes regarding race, sexuality, and gender? To what extent did Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker manipulate the image of Cleopatra to challenge social norms and to generate new models of womanhood? Why was Cleopatra—an ancient, mythologized queen—the chosen vehicle for these spectacular expressions of modern womanhood?In the context of late nineteenth-century Egyptomania, Cleopatra’s eroticized image—as well as her controversial legacy of female empowerment—resonated in new ways with a French public engaged in reassessing feminine sexuality, racialized beauty, and national identity. By playing Cleopatra, Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker did more than personify a character; they embodied the myriad ways in which celebrity was racialized, gendered, and commoditized, and they generated a model of female stardom that set the stage for twentieth-century celebrity long before the Hollywood machine’s mass manufacture of “stars.” At the same time, these women engaged with broader debates regarding the meaning of womanhood, celebrity, and Frenchness in the tumultuous decades before World War II.Drawing on plays, periodicals, autobiographies, personal letters, memoirs, novels, works of art, and legislation, Playing Cleopatra contributes to a growing body of literature that examines how individuals subverted the prevailing gender norms that governed relations between the sexes in liberal democratic regimes. By offering employment, visibility, and notoriety, the theater provided an especially empowering world for women, in which the roles they played both reflected and challenged contemporary cultural currents. Through the various iterations in which Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker played Cleopatra, they not only resurrected an ancient queen but also appropriated her mystique to construct new narratives of womanhood.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2024) introduces the work and legacy of philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet. As the Enlightenment gained momentum throughout Europe, Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Due to her proclamation that a true philosopher must remain an independent thinker rather than a disciple of some supposedly great man like Isaac Newton or René Descartes, Châtelet posed a threat to an emerging consensus in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman highlights the exclusion of women from colleges and academies in Europe and the fear of rupturing the gender-based order.Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and Bass Fellow at Duke University.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Exploring twentieth- and twenty-first century texts that wrestle with the Irish domestic interior as a sexualized and commodified space, Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction: The Literary Legacy of 'Mother Ireland' (Bloomsbury, 2025) provides readings of the power and authority of the feminized body in Ireland.Scheible dissects the ways that 'the woman-as-symbol' remains consistent in Irish literary representations of national experience in Irish fiction and shows how this problematizes the role of women in Ireland by underscoring the oppression of sexuality and gender that characterized Irish culture during the twentieth century.Examining works by Elizabeth Bowen, Pamela Hinkson, Emma Donoghue, Tana French, Sally Rooney and James Joyce, this book demonstrates that the definition of Irish nationhood in our contemporary experience of capitalism and biopolitics is dependent on the intertwining and paradoxical tropes of a traditional, yet equally sexual, feminine identity which has been quelled by violence and reproduction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) uncovers a tradition of women’s utopianism that extends back to medieval women’s monasticism, overturning accounts of utopia that trace its origins solely to Thomas More. As enclosed spaces in which women wielded authority that was unavailable to them in the outside world, medieval and early modern convents were self-consciously engaged in reworking pre-existing cultural heritage to project desired proto-feminist futures. The utopianism developed within the English convent percolated outwards to unenclosed women's spiritual communities such as Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin and the Ferrar family at Little Gidding. Convent-based utopianism further acted as an unrecognized influence on the first English women’s literary utopias by authors such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. Collectively, these female communities forged a mode of utopia that drew on the past to imagine new possibilities for themselves as well as for their larger religious and political communities. Tracking utopianism from the convent to the literary page over a period of 300 years, New Kingdoms writes a new history of medieval and early modern women’s intellectual work and expands the concept of utopia itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Becoming couture: The Italian fashion industry after the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Chiara Faggella is the first book to examine the history of the Italian fashion industry during the global transition brought about by the Second World War. It draws on a wide range of primary sources, some of them newly unearthed, to demonstrate that the Italian fashion industry in the Republican era continued to rely on business practices and professionals established during Fascism. Analysing changes in promotional discourses and press coverage, the book traces the shift that occurred when manufacturers were encouraged to expand their exports of accessories to include sportswear, knitwear and moda boutique. This ultimately led to the legitimisation of Italian dressmaking as creatively independent of French influences and therefore worthy of the label 'couture'.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why have dynamic and shifting hairstyles, from Katniss Everdeen’s Power Plait to JoJo Siwa’s outsize bows, become such a significant part of how girlhood is articulated in contemporary visual cultures? What do they tell us about how girlhood combines the qualities of resilience and sparkle needed to survive and thrive in turbulent post-recessionary times?Drawing together analysis of popular film franchises, Disney animation, ground-breaking TV shows, music videos, girl celebrity personas and global art cinema, Girls' Hairstories: Sparkle and Resilience in Contemporary Screen Cultures (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) by Dr. Fiona Handyside shows how across different cultural levels and aimed at different audiences, girls’ hairstyles provide a complex dynamic site of interpretation and interaction.It documents the careful craft of hair-dressers and software engineers working in the screen industries to style and animate hair, bringing their work to a new visibility. It is in the very everydayness of hairstyling that we come to understand girls as the most resilient and the most sparkly of citizens.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices