New Books in Women's History

From The Lady Eve, to The Big Valley, Barbara Stanwyck played parts that showcased her multidimensional talents but also illustrated the limits imposed on women in film and television. Catherine Russell’s A to Z consideration of the iconic actress analyzes twenty-six facets of Stanwyck and the America of her times. Russell examines Stanwyck’s work onscreen against the backdrop of costuming and other aspects of filmmaking. But she also views the actress’s off-screen performance within the Hollywood networks that made her an industry favorite and longtime cornerstone of the entertainment community. Russell’s montage approach coalesces into an engrossing portrait of a singular artist whose intelligence and savvy placed her center-stage in the production of her films and in the debates around women, femininity, and motherhood that roiled mid-century America. Original and rich, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: Twenty-Six Short Essays on a Working Star (U Illinois Press, 2023) is an essential and entertaining reexamination of an enduring Hollywood star.Catherine Russell is Distinguished University Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. She goes by Katie, she sings in a choir, and she has two cats. In the summer she lives in Georgian Bay, Ontario.Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Child abandonment, theft, kidnapping, prostitution, bigamy, and murder! Bad Bridget is a must-read examination of crime and Irish emigrant women in the U.S. and Canada, written by Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, and out now with Sandycove.Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a very good place to be a woman. Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America were many, many young women who travelled on their own, hoping for a better life. Some lived lives of quiet industry and piety. Others quickly found themselves in trouble - bad trouble, and on an astonishing scale. Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women (Sandycove, 2023) is a book about these women and the various kinds of trouble they got into. Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick have unearthed a world in which Irish women actually outnumbered Irish men in prison, in which you could get locked up for 'stubbornness', and in which an Irish serial killer called Lizzie Halliday was described by the New York Times as 'the worst woman on earth'. They reveal the social forces that bred this mayhem and dysfunction, through a succession of stories that are brilliantly strange, sometimes very funny, and often deeply moving. From sex workers and thieves to kidnappers and killers, their Bridgets are young women who have gone from the frying pan of their impoverished and ridden homeland to the fire of vast North American cities. Bad Bridget is a masterpiece of social history and true crime, showing us a fascinating and previously unexplored world.Whether you’re a fan of true crime or looking for painstakingly reconstructed and incredible (true) stories of emigrant women’s lives, look no further for your summer read. Join us on the podcast today as we chat about crime as agency, a rowdy bunch of drunken Toronto women, and serial killer Lizzie Halliday. Then tune into season 1 of the Bad Bridget podcast - and stay tuned for season 2, coming soon!Averill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is it right that, despite the promises of feminism, women’s bodies remain at the mercy of state, society and religion? Should a scantily clad woman, or a promiscuous one, be worth less than a fully covered woman, or a chaste one? Are being sexy and being smart really mutually exclusive? Can a woman be both body and brain? Dr. Victoria Bateman has confronted these questions with actions as well as words. She has appeared naked on national television, on stage, in art and at protests – using her body, as well as her brain, to deliver her message.In Naked Feminism: Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty (Polity/Wiley, 2023), Dr. Bateman makes a compelling case for women’s bodily freedom, and explains why the current puritanical revival is so dangerous for women. Illustrating the swinging pendulum of bodily modesty through the ages, she takes us on a journey from the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Babylon, through the birth of Christianity and Islam, to the lax morals of the medieval period and the bawdiness of Chaucer and Shakespeare; to the clampdowns of the Puritans and later the Victorians and, more recently, to the re-veiling of the Middle East and the purity pledges of modern-day America. She ends with a plea: feminists must unite to challenge the repression of the female body, as only then can women be truly free.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Scientists once thought of an individual's period as useless, and some doctors still believe it's unsafe for a menstruating person to swim in the ocean wearing a tampon. Period: The Real Story of Menstruation (Princeton UP, 2023) counters the false theories that have long defined the study of the uterus, exposing the eugenic history of gynecology while providing an intersectional feminist perspective on menstruation science.Blending interviews and personal experience with engaging stories from her own pioneering research, Kate Clancy challenges a host of myths and false assumptions. There is no such a thing as a "normal" menstrual cycle. In fact, menstrual cycles are incredibly variable and highly responsive to environmental and psychological stressors. Clancy takes up a host of timely issues surrounding menstruation, from bodily autonomy, menstrual hygiene, and the COVID-19 vaccine to the ways racism, sexism, and medical betrayal warp public perceptions of menstruation and erase it from public life.Offering a revelatory new perspective on one of the most captivating biological processes in the human body, Period will change the way you think about the past, present, and future of periods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anna Ott died in the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane in 1893. She had enjoyed status and financial success first as a physician's wife and then as the only female doctor in Madison. Throughout her first marriage, attempts to divorce her abusive second husband, and twenty years of institutionalization, Ott determinedly shaped her own life.Kim E. Nielsen explores a life at once irregular and unexceptional. Historical and institutional structures, like her whiteness and laws that liberalized divorce and women's ability to control their property, opened up uncommon possibilities for Ott. Other structures, from domestic violence in the home to rampant sexism and ableism outside of it, remained a part of even affluent women's lives. Money, Marriage, and Madness: The Life of Anna Ott (U Illinois Press, 2020) tells a forgotten story of how the legal and medical cultures of the time shaped one woman--and what her life tells us about power and society in nineteenth century America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood (Beacon, 2020) by Naomi McDougall Jones is a brutally honest look at the systemic exclusion of women in film—an industry with massive cultural influence—and how, in response, women are making space in cinema for their voices to be heard.Generation after generation, women have faced the devastating reality that Hollywood is a system built to keep them out. The films created by that system influence everything from our worldviews to our brain chemistry. When women’s voices are excluded from the medium, the impact on society is immense. Actor, screenwriter, and award-winning independent filmmaker Naomi McDougall Jones takes us inside the cutthroat, scandal-laden film industry, where only 5% of top studio films are directed by women and less than 20% of leading characters in mainstream films are female. Jones calls on all of us to act radically to build a different kind of future for cinema—not only for the women being actively hurt inside the industry but for those outside it, whose lives, purchasing decisions, and sense of selves are shaped by the stories told.Informed by the journey of her own career; by interviews with others throughout the film industry; and by cold, hard data, Jones deconstructs the casual, commonplace sexism rampant in Hollywood that has kept women out of key roles for decades. Next, she shows us the growing women-driven revolution in filmmaking—sparked by streaming services, crumbling distribution models, direct-to-audience access via innovative online platforms, and outside advocacy groups—which has enabled women to build careers outside the traditional studio system. Finally, she makes a business case for financing and producing films by female filmmakers.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

Equality between the sexes has long been recognized as a fundamental moral and legal objective of the UN, and more recently of many governments and international financial and development institutions. Women's empowerment has long been recognized as essential to the larger development objectives of the UN and the international community. Extensive empirical data from all over the world today informs and supports the thesis that countries and regions just do better when women are educated, formally employed legally secure and politically well represented. In this episode of International Horizons, Ellen Chesler talks with Latanya Mapp Frett about the effects that investment in women led initiatives have for the world. Mapp Frett is the author of The Everyday Feminist: The Key to Sustainable Social Impact Driving Movements We Need Now More Than Ever (Wiley, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The heroic romance is one of the West's most enduring narratives, found everywhere, from religion and myth to blockbuster films and young adult literature. Within this story, adolescent girls are not, and cannot be, the heroes. They are, at best, the hero's bride, a prize he wins for slaying monsters. Crucially, although the girl's exclusion from heroic selfhood affects all girls, it does not do so equally- whiteness and able-bodiedness are taken as markers of heightened, fantasy femininity.Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction: Reframing Myths of Adolescent Girlhood (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Leah Phillips explores how the young female-heroes of mythopoeic YA, a Tolkienian-inspired genre drawing on myth's world-creating power and YA's liminal potential, disrupt the conventional heroic narrative. These heroes, such as Tamora Pierce's Alanna the Lioness, Daine the Wildmage, and Marissa Meyer's Cinder and Iko, offer a model of being-hero, an embodied way of living and being in this world that disrupts the typical hero's violent hierarchy, isolating individuality, and erasure of difference. In doing so, they push the boundaries of what it means to be a hero, a girl, and even human.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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 1943, three books appeared that changed American politics forever: Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Together, they laid the groundwork for what became the modern libertarian movement. Even more striking were the women behind these books: Paterson, a brilliant but misanthropic journalist whose weekly column made her one of the nation's most important literary critics; Lane, a restless writer who secretly coauthored the Little House on the Prairie novels with her mother; and Rand, a philosophically inclined Russian immigrant ferociously devoted to heroic individualism. Working against the backdrop of changes in literature and politics, they joined forces to rally the nation to the principles of freedom that had come under attack at home and abroad. Sometimes friends, at other times bitterly estranged, they became known as "the three furies of libertarianism." In Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Freedom in an Age of Darkness (Cato Institute, 2022), author Timothy Sandefur examines their lives, ideas, and influences in the context of their times. Not a biography, but a story about personalities and ideas--about the literary, political, and cultural influences that shaped the destiny of freedom in America--Freedom's Furies tells the dramatic story of three writers who strove to keep liberty alive in an age of darkness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Actresses and Mental Illness: Histrionic Heroines (Routledge, 2018) investigates the relationship between the work of the actress and her personal experience of mental illness, from the late nineteenth through to the end of twentieth century. Over the past two decades scholars have made great advances in our understanding of the history of the actress, unearthing the material conditions of her working life, the force of her creative agency and the politics of her reception and representation. By focusing specifically on actresses’ encounters with mental illness, Fiona Gregory builds on this earlier work and significantly supplements it.Through detailed case studies of both well-known and neglected figures in theatre and film history, including Mrs Patrick Campbell, Vivien Leigh, Frances Farmer and Diana Barrymore, it shows how mental illness – actual or supposed – has impacted on actresses’ performances, careers and celebrity. The book covers a range of topics including: representing emotion on stage; the ‘failed’ actress; actresses and addiction; and actresses and psychiatric treatment.Actresses and Mental Illness expands the field of actress studies by showing how consideration of the personal experience of the actress influences our understanding of her work and its reception. The book underscores how the actress can be perceived as a representative public woman, acting as a lens through which we can examine broader attitudes to women and mental illness.Fiona Gregory is Lecturer in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University in Melbourne. Her research on the history of the actress has appeared in leading journals including New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Survey, and Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film.Carmen Gomez-Galisteo, Ph.D. is a lecturer at Centro de Educación Superior de Enseñanza e Investigación Educativa (CEIE). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices