New Books in Women's History

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Felicity M. Turner's Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press, 2022) documents how women—Black and white, enslaved and free—gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, community-based female knowledge played a crucial role in prosecutions for infanticide: midwives, neighbors, healers, and relatives were better acquainted with an accused woman's intimate life, the circumstances of her pregnancy, and possible motives for infanticide than any man. As the century progressed, women accused of the crime were increasingly subject to the scrutiny of white male legal and medical experts educated in institutions that reinforced prevailing ideas about the inferior mental and physical capacities of women and Black people. As Reconstruction ended, the reach of the carceral state expanded, while law and medicine simultaneously privileged federal and state regulatory power over that of local institutions. These transformations placed all women's bodies at the mercy of male doctors, judges, and juries in ways they had not been before.Reframing knowledge of the body as property, Felicity M. Turner shows how, at the very moment when the federal government expanded formal civil and political rights to formerly enslaved people, the medical profession instituted new legal regulations across the nation that restricted access to knowledge of the female body to white men.Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first century The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton UP, 2021) provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian's craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries. Zachary Schrag begins by explaining how to ask good questions and then guides readers step-by-step through all phases of historical research, from narrowing a topic and locating sources to taking notes, crafting a narrative, and connecting one's work to existing scholarship. He shows how researchers extract knowledge from the widest range of sources, such as government documents, newspapers, unpublished manuscripts, images, interviews, and datasets. He demonstrates how to use archives and libraries, read sources critically, present claims supported by evidence, tell compelling stories, and much more. Featuring a wealth of examples that illustrate the methods used by seasoned experts, The Princeton Guide to Historical Research reveals that, however varied the subject matter and sources, historians share basic tools in the quest to understand people and the choices they made. Zachary M. Schrag is professor of history at George Mason University and the author of Ethical Imperialism and The Great Society Subway. His teaching website is historyprofessor.org. He lives in Arlington, Virginia. Twitter @zacharyschragCaleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A bonus episode in honor of Womens History Month! Learn all about Samsi, one of the queens of the ancient Arabs, and what her story can tell us about gender and the status of women among nomadic peoples and empires in the ancient Near East.Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License. Wretched Destroyer by Kevin MacLeod. License. Crusade Heavy Industry by Kevin MacLeod. License. All other sounds courtesy of the BBC Sound Effects Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jayne Mansfield (1933-1967) was driven not just to be an actress but to be a star. One of the most influential sex symbols of her time, she was known for her platinum blonde hair, hourglass figure, outrageously low necklines, and flamboyant lifestyle. Hardworking and ambitious, Mansfield proved early in her career that she was adept in both comic and dramatic roles, but her tenacious search for the spotlight and her risqué promotional stunts caused her to be increasingly snubbed in Hollywood.In Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn't Help It (UP of Kentucky, 2021), Eve Golden offers a joyful account of the star Andy Warhol called "the poet of publicity," revealing the smart, determined woman behind the persona. While she always had her sights set on the silver screen, Mansfield got her start as Rita Marlowe in the Broadway show Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. She made her film debut in the low-budget drama Female Jungle (1955) before landing the starring role in The Girl Can't Help It (1956). Mansfield followed this success with a dramatic role in The Wayward Bus (1957), winning a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year, and starred alongside Cary Grant in Kiss Them for Me (1957). Despite her popularity, her appearance as the first celebrity in Playboy and her nude scene in Promises! Promises! (1963) cemented her reputation as an outsider.By the 1960s, Mansfield's film career had declined, but she remained very popular with the public. She capitalized on that popularity through in-person and TV appearances, nightclub appearances, and stage productions. Her larger-than-life life ended sadly when she passed away at age thirty-four in a car accident.Golden looks beyond Mansfield's flashy public image and tragic death to fully explore her life and legacy. She discusses Mansfield's childhood, her many loves—including her famous on-again, off-again relationship with Miklós "Mickey" Hargitay—her struggles with alcohol, and her sometimes tumultuous family relationships. She also considers Mansfield's enduring contributions to American popular culture and celebrity culture. This funny, engaging biography offers a nuanced portrait of a fascinating woman who loved every minute of life and lived each one to the fullest.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

Lauren N. Haumesser's The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856-1861 (UNC Press, 2022) offers a fresh examination of antebellum politics comprehensively examines the ways that gender issues and gendered discourse exacerbated fissures within the Democratic Party in the critical years between 1856 and 1861. Whereas the cultural politics of gender had bolstered Democratic unity through the 1850s, the Lecompton crisis and John Brown's raid revealed that white manhood and its association with familial and national protection meant disparate--and ultimately incompatible--things in free and slave society. In fierce debates over the extension of slavery, gendered rhetoric hardened conflicts that ultimately led to the outbreak of the Civil War.Lauren Haumesser here traces how northern and southern Democrats and their partisan media organs used gender to make powerful arguments about slavery as the sectional crisis grew, from the emergence of the Republican Party to secession. Gendered charges and countercharges turned slavery into an intractable cultural debate, raising the stakes of every dispute and making compromise ever more elusive.Lauren N. Haumesser holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia.Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Dancer's Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke UP, 2022) Rumya Sree Putcha theorizes how the Indian classical dancer performs the complex dynamics of transnational Indian womanhood. Putcha argues that the public persona of the Indian dancer has come to represent India in the global imagination—a representation that supports caste hierarchies and Hindu ethnonationalism, as well as white supremacist model minority narratives. Generations of Indian women have been encouraged to embody the archetype of the dancer, popularized through film cultures from the 1930s to the present. Through analyses of films, immigration and marriage laws, histories of caste and race, advertising campaigns, and her own family’s heirlooms, photographs, and memories, Putcha reveals how women’s citizenship is based on separating their voices from their bodies. In listening closely to and for the dancer’s voice, she offers a new way to understand the intersections of body, voice, performance, caste, race, gender, and nation.Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Black women continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From grammar and high schools to corporate boardrooms and military squadrons, Black and Afro Latina natural hair continues to confound, transfix, and enrage members of White American society. Why, in 2022, is this still the case? Why have we not moved beyond that perennial racist emblem? And why are women so disproportionately affected?Why does our hair become most palatable when it capitulates, and has been subjugated, to resemble Caucasian features as closely as possible? Who or what is responsible for the web of supervision and surveillance of our hair? Who in our society gets to author the prevailing constitution of professional appearance?Particularly relevant during this time of emboldened White supremacy, racism, and provocative othering, Lyzette Wanzer's Trauma, Tresses, and Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives (Chicago Review Press, 2022) explores how writing about one of the still-remaining systemic biases in schools, academia, and corporate America might lead to greater understanding and respect.Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of digital cultures, postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their latest book: The Other #MeToos. Follow them on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism in Divided Berlin, 1968-2002 (Oxford University Press, 2022), Jane Freeland traces the development of the shelter movement in East and West Germany. In the 1970s, feminist activists exposed the harmful gender norms and lack of legal protections that left women vulnerable to abuse in the home. Their efforts led to the founding of the first women’s shelter in West Berlin in 1976 and a broadly successful campaign that changed legal and social attitudes toward domestic abuse. Situating domestic violence activism within a broader history of feminism in post-war Germany, the book traces the evolution of this movement both across political division and reunification and from grassroots campaign to established, professionalized social service. It links histories of feminism in East and West Germany and challenges historiographies of reunification that focus on feminist failures. Feminist Transformations reflects on the tensions between the activists who founded the shelter movement and the media and bureaucratic institutions that helped build popular and political support, with important consequences for the trajectory of German feminism up to today.Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership (UP of Florida, 2022) examines a life of remarkable achievements and leadership in the desegregated South. Sonya Ramsey modernizes the nineteenth-century term "race woman" to describe how Maxwell-Roddey and her peers turned hard-won civil rights and feminist milestones into tangible accomplishments in North Carolina and nationwide from the late 1960s to the 1990s.Born in 1930, Maxwell-Roddey became one of Charlotte's first Black women principals of a white elementary school; she was the founding director of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte's Africana Studies Department; and she cofounded the Afro-American Cultural and Service Center, now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art + Culture. Maxwell-Roddey founded the National Council for Black Studies, helping institutionalize the field with what is still its premier professional organization, and served as the 20th National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., one of the most influential Black women's organizations in the United States.Using oral histories and primary sources that include private records from numerous Black women's home archives, Ramsey illuminates the intersectional leadership strategies used by Maxwell-Roddey and other modern race women to dismantle discriminatory barriers in the classroom and the boardroom. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey offers new insights into desegregation, urban renewal, and the rise of the Black middle class through the lens of a powerful leader's life story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Time magazine called her "the Dancer of the Century." Her technique, used by dance companies throughout the world, became the first long-lasting alternative to the idiom of classical ballet. Her pioneering movements--powerful, dynamic, jagged, edgy, forthright--combined with her distinctive system of training, were the epitome of American modernism, performance as art. Her work continued to astonish and inspire for more than sixty years as she choreographed more than 180 works.At the heart of Graham's work: movement that could express inner feeling.In Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern (Knopf, 2022), Neil Baldwin, author of admired biographies of Man Ray and Thomas Edison, gives us the artist and performer, the dance monument who led a cult of dance worshippers as well as the woman herself in all of her complexity.Here is Graham, from her nineteenth-century (born in 1894) Allegheny, Pennsylvania, childhood, to becoming the star of the Denishawn exotic ballets, and in 1926, at age thirty-two, founding her own company (now the longest-running dance company in America).Baldwin writes of how the company flourished during the artistic explosion of New York City's midcentury cultural scene; of Erick Hawkins, in 1936, fresh from Balanchine's School of American Ballet, a handsome Midwesterner fourteen years her junior, becoming Graham's muse, lover, and eventual spouse. Graham, inspiring the next generation of dancers, choreographers, and teachers, among them: Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor.Baldwin tells the story of this large, fiercely lived life, a life beset by conflict, competition, and loneliness--filled with fire and inspiration, drive, passion, dedication, and sacrifice in work and in dance creation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices