New Books in Women's History

Beatriz Nascimento (1942-1995) was a poet, historian, artist, and political leader in Brazil's Black movement, an innovative and creative thinker whose work offers a radical reimagining of gender, space, politics, and spirituality around the Atlantic and across the Black diaspora. Her powerful voice still resonates today, reflecting a deep commitment to political organizing, revisionist historiography, and the lived experience of Black women. The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (Princeton UP, 2023) is the first English-language collection of writings by this vitally important figure in the global tradition of Black radical thought.The Dialectic Is in the Sea traces the development of Nascimento's thought across the decades of her activism and writing, covering topics such as the Black woman, race and Brazilian society, Black freedom, and Black aesthetics and spirituality. Incisive introductory and analytical essays provide key insights into the political and historical context of Nascimento's work. This engaging collection includes an essay by Bethânia Gomes, Nascimento's only daughter, who shares illuminating and uniquely personal insights into her mother's life and career.This is an interview with Christen A. Smith, Bethânia Gomes and Archie Davies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Æthelflæd (c. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study. This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England (Medieval Institute Publications, 2021)argues for a reassessment of women’s political, military, literary, and domestic agency. It invites deeper reflection on the female kinships, networks, and communities that give meaning to Æthelflæd’s life, and through this shows how medieval history can invite new engagements with the past.Rebecca Hardie is a postdoctoral researcher at Freie Universität, Berlin, and the Managing Editor of the Living Handbook of Temporal Communities in the Excellence Cluster 2020 “Temporal Communities.”Becky Straple-Sovers is a medievalist and freelance editor who earned her Ph.D. in English at Western Michigan University in 2021. Her research interests include bodies, movement, gender, and sexuality in literature, as well as poetry of the First World War and the public humanities. She can be found on Twitter @restraple. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“I can do one of two things, I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”—Theodore RooseveltDuring Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency—from 1901 to 1909, when Mark Twain called him the most popular man in America—his daughter Alice Roosevelt mesmerized the world with her antics and beauty.Alice was known for carrying a gun, a copy of the Constitution, and a green snake in her purse. When her father told her she couldn’t smoke under his roof, she climbed to the top of the White House and smoked on the roof. She became the most famous woman in America—and even the world—predating Princess Diana and Jackie Kennedy as an object of public obsession.As her celebrity grew, she continued to buck tradition, push against social norms, and pull political sway behind the curtain of privilege and access. She was known for her acerbic wit and outspoken tendencies which hypnotized both the social and political world.In White House Wild Child: How Alice Roosevelt Broke All the Rules and Won the Heart of America (Imagine, 2023), Shelley Fraser Mickle places the reader in the time and place of Alice and asks what would it have been like to be a strong-willed powerful woman of that day. Drawn from primary and secondary sources, Alice’s life comes into focus in this historical celebration of an extraordinary woman ahead of her time.Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you don’t know Tina Turner’s spirituality, you don’t know Tina.When Tina Turner reclaimed her throne as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1980s, she attributed her comeback to one thing: the wisdom and power she found in Buddhism. Her spiritual transformation is often overshadowed by the rags-to-riches arc of her life story. But in this groundbreaking biography, Ralph H. Craig III traces Tina’s journey from the Black Baptist church to Buddhism and situates her at the vanguard of large-scale movements in religion and pop culture.Paying special attention to the diverse metaphysical beliefs that shaped her spiritual life, Craig untangles Tina’s Soka Gakkai Buddhist foundation; her incorporation of New Age ideas popularized in ’60s counterculture; and her upbringing in a Black Baptist congregation, alongside the influences of her grandmothers’ disciplinary and mystical sensibilities. Through critical engagement with Tina’s personal life and public brand, Craig sheds light on how popular culture has been used as a vehicle for authentic religious teaching. Scholars and fans alike will find Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner (Eerdmans, 2023) as enlightening as the iconic singer herself.For those of you interested in the stories and poems of the first Buddhist nuns mentioned in the interview yet not included in the book's footnotes (hey, it's a trade book, so space for footnotes is limited), collected in Therīgāthā, you can find the stories here: Kisāgotamī; Ambapālī; Isidāsī. You can also find a modern recreation of Ambapālī's song here.For a trustworthy, philologically solid, yet still readable translation of Therīgāthā, see here. I also find this translation most useful because of its high-quality but manageable footnotes.Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vanessa R. Sasson's book The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women (Equinox, 2023) is a retelling of the story of the first Buddhist women's request for ordination. Inspired by the Therigatha and building on years of research and experience in the field, Sasson follows Vimala, Patachara, Bhadda Kundalakesa, and many others as they walk through the forest to request full access to the tradition. The Buddha's response to this request is famously complicated; he eventually accepts women into the Order, but specific and controversial conditions are attached. Sasson invites us to think about who these first Buddhist women might have been, what they might have hoped to achieve, and what these conditions might have meant to them thereafter. By shaping her research into a story, Sasson invites readers to imagine a world that continues to inspire and complicate Buddhist narrative to this day.Dr. Victoria Montrose is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Furman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Feminist theory has enhanced and expanded the agency, influence, status and contributions of women throughout the globe. However, feminist critical analysis has not yet examined how the assumption that religion is natural, timeless, universal and omnipresent supports sexist and race-based oppression. Kathleen Mcphillips and Naomi Goldenberg edited volume The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State (Routledge, 2020) proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better comprehend and confront the systematic disempowerment of women and marginalized groups. Utilising feminist and post-colonial analysis of access, equity and violence, contributors draw on recent critical theory to collapse accepted boundaries between religion and secularity with the aim of understanding that religion is a technology of governance in its function, meaning and history. The volume includes case studies focusing on how the category of religion is deployed to perpetuate male hegemony and racist inequities in Australia, Mexico, the United States, Britain and Canada. This trenchant feminist critique and academic analysis will be of key interest to scholars and students of Religion, Sociology, Political Science and Gender Studies.Naomi Goldenberg is professor of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her publications include Resurrecting the Body (Crossroad Publishing, 1993), The End of God (University of Ottawa Press, 1981), and Changing the Gods (Beacon Press, 1979).This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shannon McKenna Schmidt's The First Lady of World War II: Eleanor Roosevelt's Daring Journey to the Frontlines and Back (Sourcebooks, 2023) is the first book to tell the full story of Eleanor Roosevelt's unprecedented and courageous trip to the Pacific Theater during World War II.On August 27, 1943, news broke in the United States that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was on the other side of the world. A closely guarded secret, she had left San Francisco aboard a military transport plane headed for the South Pacific to support and report the troops on WW2's front lines. Americans had believed she was secluded at home. As Allied forces battled the Japanese for control of the region, Eleanor was there on the frontlines, spending five weeks traveling, on a mission as First Lady of the United States to experience what our servicemen were experiencing... and report back home.Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Belisarius and Antonina were titans in the Roman world some 1,500 years ago. Belisarius was the most well-known general of his age, victor over the Persians, conqueror of the Vandals and the Goths, and as if this were not enough, wealthy beyond imagination. His wife, Antonina, was an impressive person in her own right. She made a name for herself by traveling with Belisarius on his military campaigns, deposing a pope, and scheming to disgrace important Roman officials. Together, the pair were extremely influential, and arguably wielded more power in the late Roman world than anyone except the emperor Justinian and empress Theodora themselves. This unadulterated power and wealth did not mean that Belisarius and Antonina were universally successful in all that they undertook. They occasionally stumbled militarily, politically, and personally - in their marriage and with their children. These failures knock them from their lofty perch, humanize them, and make them even more relatable and intriguing to us today.Belisarius & Antonina: Love and War in the Age of Justinian (Oxford UP, 2023) is the first modern portrait of this unique partnership. They were not merely husband and wife but also partners in power. This is a paradigm which might seem strange to us, as we reflexively imagine that marriages in the ancient world were staunchly traditional, relegating wives to the domestic sphere only. But Antonina was not a reserved housewife, and Belisarius showed no desire for Antonina to remain in the home. Their private and public lives blended as they traveled together, sometimes bringing their children, and worked side-by-side. Theirs was without a doubt the most important nonroyal marriage of the late Roman world, and one of the very few from all of antiquity that speaks directly to contemporary readers.Dr. David Alan Parnell is an Associate Professor of History at Indiana University Northwest. He is the author of Justinian’s Men (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and has worked on numerous articles about the military and social life of the sixth-century Roman Empire. He is also a consultant, recently working on Epic History TV’s documentary series on Belisarius.Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did humans, a species that evolved to be cooperative and egalitarian, develop societies of enforced inequality? Why did our ancestors create patriarchal power and warfare? Did it have to be this way? These are some of the key questions that Dr. Nancy Lindisfarne and Dr. Jonathan Neale grapple with in Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality (Hurst, 2023).Elites have always called hierarchy and violence unavoidable facts of human nature. Evolution, they claim, has caused men to fight, and people—starting with men and women—to have separate, unequal roles. But that is bad science.Why Men? tells a smarter story of humanity, from early behaviours to contemporary cultures. From bonobo sex and prehistoric childcare to human sacrifice, Joan of Arc, Darwinism and Abu Ghraib, this fascinating, fun and important book reveals that humans adapted to live equally, yet the earliest class societies suppressed this with invented ideas of difference. Ever since, these distortions have caused female, queer and minority suffering. But our deeply human instincts towards equality have endured.This book is not about what men and women are or do. It’s about the privileges humans claim, how they rationalise them, and how we unpick those ideas about our roots. It will change how you see injustice, violence and even yourself.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

In this episode, I am happy to be interviewing historian and author Dr. Jacqueline R. Braitman about her very engaging biography, She Damn Near Ran the Studio: The Extraordinary Lives of Ida R. Koverman (University Press of Mississippi, 2020).This very detailed and comprehensively researched book tells the story of Ida Koverman, whose life was almost accidentally remarkable. She was not only Louis B. Mayer’s gatekeeper at MGM for over two decades but also a major mover and shaker in the conservative wing of the California Republican party throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Coming from humble beginnings in Ohio, when Ulysses S. Grant was president, Koverman worked tirelessly to elect Herbert Hoover to the White House. In addition, she made a remarkable contribution to American culture, scouting and nurturing the iconic stars of the future at MGM, while also acting as a spokesperson for the studio and its relationship to the politicians of the day.In this interview, Dr. Braitman describes how she came to admire Ida Koverman, whose politics are far to the right of the author’s views, and how she was met with surprises throughout the years-long process of writing She Damn Near Ran the Studio.I hope you’ll join me for this engaging and informative conversation with Dr. Jacqueline R. Braitman.Bruce Shapiro is a recently retired professor of theater at several universities, primarily in the areas of drama, directing and acting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices