New Books in Women's History

Caroline Dunn joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Ladies-in-Waiting in Medieval England (Cambridge UP, 2025), which examines female attendants who served queens and aristocratic women during the late medieval period. Using a unique set of primary source–based statistics, Caroline Dunn reveals that the lady-in-waiting was far more than a pretty girl sewing in the queen’s chamber while seeking to catch the eye of an eligible bachelor. Ladies-in-waiting witnessed major historical events of the era and were sophisticated players who earned significant rewards. They had both family and personal interests to advance – through employment they linked kin and court, and through marriage they built bridges between families. Whether royal or aristocratic, ladies-in-waiting worked within gendered spaces, building female-dominated social networks, while also operating within a masculine milieu that offered courtiers of both sexes access to power. Working from a range of sources wider than the subjective anecdote, Dunn presents the first scholarly treatment of medieval English ladies-in-waiting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can we write women’s authorial roles into the history of industrial cinema in South Asia? How can we understand women’s creative authority and access to the film business infrastructure in this postcolonial region? In Women’s Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Esha Niyogi De draws on rare archival and oral sources to explore these questions from a uniquely comparative perspective, delving into examples of women holding influential positions as stars, directors, and producers across the film industries in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.Author Esha Niyogi De is a senior lecturer in the Writings Programs division at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-editor of South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters (2020) and author of Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought (2011).The episode is hosted by Ailin Zhou, PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California - Santa Cruz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Medieval women ruled over kingdoms, abbeys, and households; produced stunning works of art and craft; and did the hard work that kept ordinary families fed and clothed. Though women’s contributions were often diminished or completely ignored in written accounts, art tells a different story: women appear everywhere, from the margins of illuminated manuscripts to grand tapestries. In Women in the Middle Ages: Illuminating the World of Peasants, Nuns, and Queens (Abbeville Press, 2024), historian Gemma Hollman uses the visual as well as the written record to uncover the real lives of medieval European women.Hollman traces the lives of women across society, dedicating chapters to nuns like Hildegard of Bingen, abbess, mystic, and polymath; courtiers like Christine de Pisan, author of pioneering works on women’s role in society; warriors like Joan of Arc; and the everyday women whose names are lost to history. Illustrated with nearly 200 varied and fascinating works of medieval art, Women in the Middle Ages offers a new perspective on the lives and contributions of medieval women and how they were portrayed. This book is a treasure for anyone interested in the Middle Ages or women’s history.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

Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) unfolds and analyzes the work of Moroccan director, producer, and scriptwriter Farida Benlyazid, whose career extends from the beginning of cinema in independent Morocco to the present. This study of her work and career provides a unique perspective on an under-represented cinema, the gender politics of cinema in Morocco, and the contribution of Arab women directors to global cinema and to a gendered understanding of Muslim ethics and aesthetics in film.A pioneer in Moroccan cinema, Farida Benlyazid has been successful at negotiating the sometimes abrupt turns of Morocco's rocky 20th century history: from Morocco under French occupation to the advent of Moroccan independence in 1956; the end of the international status of Tangier, her native city, in 1959; the "years of lead" under the reign of Hassan II; and finally Mohamed VI's current reign since 1999. As a result, she has a long view of Morocco's politics of self-representation as well as of the representation of Moroccan women on screen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Raised in the Judería or Jewish quarter of Tetouan, Morocco, at the turn of the 20th-century, sixteen-year-old Mazaltob finds herself betrothed to José, an uncouth man from her own community who has returned from Argentina to take a wife. Mazaltob, however, is in love with Jean, who is French, half-Jewish, and a free spirit. In this classic of North African Jewish fiction, Blanche Bendahan evokes the two compelling forces tearing Mazaltob apart in her body and soul: her loyalty to the Judería and her powerful desire to follow her own voice and find true love. Bendahan’s nuanced and moving novel is a masterly exploration of the language, religion, and quotidian customs constraining North African Jewish women on the cusp of emancipation and decolonization.Yaëlle Azagury and Frances Malino provide the first English translation of this modern coming-of-age tale, awarded a prize by the Académie Française in 1930, and analyze the ways in which Mazaltob, with its disconcerting blend of ethnographic details and modernist experimentation, is the first of its genre—that of the feminist Sephardi novel. A historical introduction, a literary analysis, and annotations elucidate historical and cultural terms for readers, supplementing the author’s original notes.Blanche Bendahan was born in Oran, Algeria on November 26, 1893, to a Jewish family of Moroccan-Spanish origin. Bendahan published her first collection of poetry, La voile sur l’eau, in 1926 and then her first novel, Mazaltob, in 1930.Yaëlle Azagury is a writer, literary scholar, and critic. She was Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Barnard College, and Lecturer in Discipline in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University. She is a native of Tangier, Morocco.Frances Malino is the Sophia Moses Robison Professor of Jewish Studies and History Emerita at Wellesley College. Her current project is titled Teaching Freedom: Jewish Sisters in Muslim Lands. In 2012 she was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Ministry of Education.Azagury and Malino were finalists of the 74th Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards in the category of Sephardic Culture.Mentioned in the podcast:• Blanche Bendahan,“Visages de Tétouan,” Les Cahiers de L’Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paix et Droit), no. 093 (November 1955): 5.• Susan Gilson Miller, “Gender and the Poetics and Emancipation: The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Northern Morocco (1890-1912).” In Franco-Arab Encounters, edited by L. Carl Brown and Matthew Gordon (1996)• Susan Gilson Miller, “Moïse Nahon and the Invention of the Modern Maghribi Jew.” In French Mediterraneans, edited by P. Lorcin and T. Shepard (2016)• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu published in seven volumes, previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past) (1913–1927)• Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th anniversary edition (1994)• Female teachers of the Alliance israélite universelle• Jewish figures in the literature of The Tharaud Brothers• Archives of the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery (UNC Press, 2024) is a dramatic transatlantic story about five women who birthed children by the same prominent Barbados politician and enslaver. Two of the women were his wives, two he enslaved, and one was a servant in his household. All were determined to make their way in a world that vastly and differentially circumscribed their life choices. From a Barbados plantation to the center of England’s empire in London, Hester Tomkyns, Frances Knights, Susannah Mingo, Elizabeth Ashcroft, and Dorothy Spendlove built remarkable lives for themselves and their children in spite of, not because of, the man who linked them together.Mining seventeenth- and eighteenth-century court records, deeds, wills, church registers, and estate inventories, Jenny Shaw centers the experiences of the women and their children, intertwining the microlevel relationships of family and the macrolevel political machinations of empire to show how white supremacy and racism developed in England and the colonies. Shaw also explores England’s first slave society in North America, provides a glimpse into Black Britain long before the Windrush generation of the twentieth century, and demonstrates that England itself was a society with slaves in the early modern era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Women from the Ricasoli and Spinelli families formed a wide variety of social networks within and beyond Florence through their letters as they negotiated interpersonal relationships and lineage concerns to actively contribute to their families in early modern Italy. Women were located at the center of social networks through their work in bridging their natal and marital families, cultivating commercial contacts, negotiating family obligations and the demands of religious institutions, facilitating introductions for family and friends, and forming political patronage ties. Gender and Family Networks in Early Modern Italy (Amsterdam UP, 2025) argues that a network model offers a framework of analysis in which to deconstruct patriarchy as a single system of institutionalized dominance in early modern Italy. Networks account for female agency as an interactive force that shaped the kinships ties, affective relationships, material connections, and political positions of these elite families as women constructed their own narratives and negotiated their own positions in family life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1931, Hazel Ying Lee, a nineteen-year-old American daughter of Chinese immigrants, sat in on a friend’s flight lesson. It changed her life. In less than a year, a girl with a wicked sense of humor, a newfound love of flying, and a tough can-do attitude earned her pilot’s license and headed for China to help against invading Japanese forces. In time, Hazel would become the first Asian American to fly with the Women Airforce Service Pilots. As thrilling as it may have been, it wasn’t easy.In America, Hazel felt the oppression and discrimination of the Chinese Exclusion Act. In China’s field of male-dominated aviation she was dismissed for being a woman, and for being an American. But in service to her country, Hazel refused to be limited by gender, race, and impossible dreams. Frustrated but undeterred she forged ahead, married Clifford Louie, a devoted and unconventional husband who cheered his wife on, and gave her all for the cause achieving more in her short remarkable life than even she imagined possible.American Flygirl (Citadel Press, 2024) is the untold account of a spirited fighter and an indomitable hidden figure in American history. She broke every common belief about women. She challenged every social restriction to endure and to succeed. And against seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Hazel Ying Lee reached for the skies and made her mark as a universal and unsung hero whose time has come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gendered Memories: An Imaginary Museum for Ding Ling and Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyrs (U Michigan Press, 2025) takes readers on a journey through the lives and legacies of Chinese female revolutionary martyrs, revealing how their sacrifices have been remembered, commemorated, and manipulated throughout history. This innovative book blends historical narratives with personal narratives, creating an “imaginary museum” where the stories of these women are brought to life. Author Xian Wang employs this imaginary museum to create a conceptual space mirroring an actual museum that juxtaposes historical narratives with countermemories of Chinese female revolutionaries, such as the prominent writer Ding Ling. Exploring Ding’s experiences with martyrdom and the commemoration of female revolutionary martyrs associated with her, the book provides a compelling argument that female revolutionary martyrdom reinforces, rather than rejects, the traditional concept of female chastity martyrdom. Narratives that challenge established gender norms, particularly those surrounding female chastity, have often been silenced or overlooked in the collective memory of these female revolutionary martyrs. By delving into these countermemories, Wang provides fresh insights into gendered violence, memories, and politics in modern Chinese literature and culture.Dr. Xian Wang is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Notre Dame.Dr. Linshan Jiang is a Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian history and culture at Colby College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered Black Panther Party member, as well as a mother, widow, educator, poet, and former political prisoner. In 1969, the police arrested Ericka Huggins along with Bobby Seale and fellow Black Panther Party members, who were accused of murdering Alex Rackley. This marked the beginning of her ordeal, as she became the subject of political persecution and a well-planned FBI COINTELPRO plot.Drawing on never-before-seen archival sources, including prison records, unpublished letters, photographs, FBI records, and oral histories, Phillips foregrounds the paramount role of self-care and community care in Huggins's political journey, shedding light on Ericka's use of spiritual wellness practices she developed during her incarceration. In prison, Huggins was able to survive the repression and terror she faced while navigating motherhood through her unwavering commitment to spiritual practices. In showcasing this history, Phillips reveals the significance of spiritual wellness in the Black Panther Party and Black Power movement.Transcending the traditional male-centric study of the Black Panther Party, Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins (NYU Press, 2025) offers an innovative analysis of Black political life at the intersections of gender, motherhood, and mass incarceration. This book serves as an invaluable toolkit for contemporary activists, underscoring the power of radical acts of care as well as vital strategies to thrive in the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices