New Books in Women's History

Today we are joined by two guests: Dr. Fiona Crawford, a writer, editor, and researcher whose work engages with social, environmental, and sports. Dr. Crawford writes for a range of publications including Four Four Two and works frequently Football Australia. We are also joined by Dr. Lee McGowan, a researcher, writer and teacher working at the University of Sunshine Coast. Dr McGowan works on the intersections of sport, culture and community engagement. Together, they are the authors of Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women’s Football (University of New South Wales Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the booms and busts of women’s football in Australia, “sliding door” moments that offered alternative possibilities for women’s football, and the obstacles facing the contemporary women’s game around the world.In Never Say Die, Crawford and McGowan both trace the history of women’s football in Australia and offer a commentary on the state of the women’s game today. The first three chapters chart the development of women’s football, emerging earliest in Queensland before being hobbled by the actions of men in state federations. In this way, the rise and fall of the early Australian game mirrored history of the famous English FA ban of women’s football.An Australian women’s led football league re-emerged in the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, when creative and hardworking people such as Pat O’Connor, Elaine Watson, and Heather Reid opened the way for an Australia wide women’s competition. In 1974, female administrators and players organized the Australian Women’s Soccer Association, which under the leadership of “quiet achieving ground breakers” built the foundations for women’s football today. The following year they competed in the Asian Women’s Championship, but never with the same financial support as the men’s side. Of course, success brought new challenges and the Crawford Report (no relation) helped to subordinate women’s football again under the national federation: Football Australia.The latter chapters of Never Say Die deal with contemporary challenges to the women’s game including: the organization of the W-League, pay disputes between the women’s national team and the federation, injury issues among women’s footballers resulting from inadequate medical facilities and improper training, a dearth of female coaches, particularly at the top level, and the trajectory of the current Matildas. Crawford and McGowan’s comments in these chapters are vital for understanding the issues in women’s football today and have helped to shape public debate over issues such as pay disparities, an issue that has subsequently been addressed by Football Australia.In their work, Crawford and McGowan offer a compelling and rich account of women’s football in Australia. Their work is informed not only by a deep dive into the archival resources, especially the popular press, but also by interviews with many former women’s players, referees, coaches and administrators.Crawford and McGowan’s very readable and timely book will be of interest to people broadly interested in sport, especially those with a focus on women’s sport, but also to a public audience interested in the history of the Matildas before the 2023 Australian Women’s World Cup.Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (including essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminist, empowering levels many fans and critics observe.Building on critiques of other skeptical scholars, The Goddess Myth in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: A Feminist Critique (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) deepens how our remythologizing of the ancient past reflects a contemporary worldview and rhetoric. Structures of contemporary goddess myths often fit typical extremes as either vilified, destructive, dark, and chaotic (typical in film or television); or romanticized, positive, even utopian (typical in women’s speculative fiction). This goddess spectrum persistently essentializes gender, stereotyping women as emotional, intuitive, sexual, motherly beings (good or bad), precluded from complex potential and fuller natures. Within apparent good-over-evil, pop-culture narrative frames, these goddesses all suffer significantly.However, a few recent intersectional writers, like N. K. Jemisin, break through these dark reflections of contemporary power dynamics to offer complex characters who evince “hopepunk.” They resist typical simplified, reductionist absolutes to offer messages that resonate with potential for today’s world. Mythic narratives featuring goddesses often do, but need not, serve merely as ideological mirrors of our culture’s still problematically reductionist approach to women and all humanity.Mary J. Magoulick is professor of English at Georgia College and State University.Iqra Shagufta Cheema is a writer, researcher, and chronic procrastinator. When they do write, they write in the areas of postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies. They can be reached via email at IqraSCheema@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture (U Illinois Press, 2022) examines the role American Black women play in Black consumption in the US and worldwide, with a focus on their pivotal role in packaging Black feminine identity since the 1960s. Through an exploration of the dolls, princesses, and rags-to-riches stories that represent Black girlhood and womanhood in everything from haircare to Nicki Minaj’s hip-hop, Aria S. Halliday spotlights how the products created by Black women have furthered Black women’s position as the moral compass and arbiter of Black racial progress.Buy Black reveals what attitudes inform a contemporary Black sensibility based in representation and consumerism. It also traces the parameters of Black symbolic power, mapping the sites where intraracial ideals of blackness, womanhood, beauty, play, and sexuality meet and mix in consumer and popular culture.Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dirshuni: Contemporary Women's Midrash (Brandeis UP, 2022), is the first-ever English edition of a historic collection of midrashim composed by Israeli women, which has been long-anticipated by multiple American audiences, including synagogues, rabbinical seminaries, adult learning programs, Jewish educators, and scholars of gender and religion. Using the classical forms developed by the ancient rabbis, the contributors express their religious and moral thought and experience through innovative interpretations of scripture. The women writers, from all denominations and beyond, of all political stripes and ethnic backgrounds, contribute their Torah to fill the missing half of the sacred Jewish bookshelf. This book reflects dramatic changes in the agency of women in the world of religious writings. The volume features a comprehensive introduction to Midrash for the uninitiated reader by the distinguished scholar Tamar Kadari and extensive annotation and commentary by Tamar Biala.Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Science plays a substantial, though under-acknowledged, role in shaping popular understandings of rape. Statistical figures like “1 in 4 women have experienced completed or attempted rape” are central for raising awareness. Yet such scientific facts often become points of controversy, particularly as conservative scholars and public figures attempt to discredit feminist activists.Rape by the Numbers: Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence (Rutgers University Press, 2021) by Dr. Ethan Czuy Levine explores scientists’ approaches to studying rape over more than forty years in the United States and Canada. In addition to investigating how scientists come to know the scope, causes, and consequences of rape, this book delves into the politics of rape research. Scholars who study rape often face a range of social pressures and resource constraints, including some that are unique to feminized and politicized fields of inquiry. Collectively, these matters have far-reaching consequences. Scientific projects may determine who counts as a potential victim/survivor or aggressor in a range of contexts, shaping research agendas as well as state policy, anti-violence programming and services, and public perceptions. Social processes within the study of rape determine which knowledges count as credible science, and thus who may count as an expert in academic and public contexts.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

Empress Eugenie: A Footnote History, 1826-1920 (Grosvenor House, 2022) is the story of the glamorous French Empress who escaped from a vengeful mob in 1870 and spent the next fifty years in exile in England. With a broad brush approach to the political events, it shows her life and times from a different angle, exploring subjects often relegated to mere footnotes. Aided by the increased digitalization of sources which produced many new and interesting discoveries, the book features 53 images of important people and places.Eugenie was born in a makeshift tent during an earthquake in Southern Spain but this impetuous and beautiful young woman's life changed dramatically when she married Napoleon III in 1853. She was to become a worldwide fashion icon but was much more than a trophy wife even though she suffered from a philandering husband. An early feminist with a social conscience, her achievements were negated by many because she wasn't French, becoming the inevitable scapegoat for the ills of the Empire. Yet in November 1869 when Eugenie opened the Suez Canal she was the most famous woman in the world. Less than a year later she made a dramatic escape from those who blamed her for a disastrous war that caused the collapse of the Second Empire. Helped by her American dentist, Eugenie was smuggled out of Paris en route to England and exile. The early death of her husband was followed a few years later by that of her son whilst with the British army in South Africa.A close friend of Queen Victoria, Eugenie lived in Farnborough, a small Hampshire town for 4 decades, building an Imperial Mausoleum for her husband and son and dressing in black for the rest of her days. Condemned in her own mind to live for a hundred years she then recovered her zest for life. Always keen to move with the times she embraced new technology, traveled extensively, and maintained her links with the European royal circle whilst becoming a familiar and much-respected figure in her neighborhood. Eugenie remained remarkably loyal to France and never relinquished her sense of duty, giving up part of her home to be an army hospital during World War 1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 1800 and died 73 years before Arendt was born, in 1906. Arendt wrote her first book, a startlingly original literary biography of Varnhagen who founded one of the most celebrated yet short-lived salons in Enlightenment era Prussia. I spoke with Courtney Blair Hodrick, a doctoral candidate completing a book-long study of Arendt, and Professor Amir Eshel, both of Stanford University to discover what is at stake in Arendt’s unusual biography, why the book meant at once so much to Arendt and why she nonetheless almost neglected to publish it, and what this biography of a Jewish women in 19th century Berlin can teach us today about questions of identity, belonging, assimilation, women, Jews, anti-Semitism, freedom, politics, the private and the public, and many of the other topics that concerned Arendt throughout her lifetime.Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leah Cargin (Ph.D student, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Elizabeth Quay Hutchison (Professor, University of New Mexico) about Hutchison’s recent book, Workers Like All the Rest of Them: Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile (Duke University Press, 2021).In this episode, Leah Cargin invites Elizabeth Hutchison to consider the long-term influences that have shaped her personal and professional interests in Latin American history and gender history, and to reflect on how these commitments led to this recent book. Hutchison introduces us to a few of the cooks, nannies, gardeners, and housekeepers who mobilized for recognition as workers in twentieth-century Chile, including Doña Elba Bravo and Aída Moreno Valenzuela. Rooted in oral histories with leaders and allies of the domestic service workers’ movement, Hutchison analyzes how changing constructions of domestic service labor impacted women’s work in this underpaid and under-regulated sector over the course of the twentieth century. The ‘living archive’ of activists’ testimony, in combination with congressional and associational records, enables Hutchison to narrate large-scale social and political change in Chile, centering the perspective of women domestic workers, and showcasing the alliances they forged with leadership in the Catholic Church, left-wing political organizations, and feminist organizations. Throughout this conversation, Hutchison observes the obligations and rewards of politically- and socially-engaged scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The pirate attack on the British brig Morning Star, en route from Ceylon to London, near Ascension Island in 1828 was one of the most shocking episodes of piracy in the nineteenth century. Although the captain and many members of the crew were murdered by the pirates led by the notorious Benito de Soto, some survived, escaped and sailed the ship back to Britain.Atlantic Piracy in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Shocking Story of the Pirates and the Survivors of the Morning Star (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) by Dr. Sarah Craze is based on extensive original research in Britain, Spain and Brazil. Dr. Craze retells the story of the Morning Star, provides much new detail and corrects errors present in the many contemporary accounts of the attack. She sets the attack in the wider context of piracy in the period, and discusses many issues which the episode highlights: how pirates' careers began and developed; how they were pursued and tried, often with difficulty; what became of their treasure; how stories of the attack and of the survivors were sensationalised; how the women passengers on the ship endured their ordeal at the hands of the pirates and then, back in Britain, had to endure potential loss of their reputations.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 High-Risk Feminism in Colombia: Women's Mobilization in Violent Contexts (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Dr. Julia Zulver documents the experiences of grassroots women’s organizations that united to demand gender justice during and in the aftermath of Colombia’s armed conflict. In doing so, she illustrates a little-studied phenomenon: women whose experiences with violence catalyze them to mobilize and resist as feminists, even in the face of grave danger. Despite a well-established tradition of studying women in war, we tend to focus on their roles as mothers or carers, as peacemakers, or sometimes as revolutionaries.This book explains the gendered underpinnings of why women engage in feminist mobilization, even when this takes place in a ‘domain of losses’ that exposes them to high levels of risk. It follows four women’s organizations who break with traditional gender norms and defy armed groups’ social and territorial control, exposing them to retributive punishment. Dr. Zulver provides rich evidence to document how women are able to surmount the barriers to mobilization when they frame their actions in terms of resistance, rather than fear.High-Risk Feminism in Colombia has also been translated and released in Spanish! Dr. Zulver discusses the book in Spanish here.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