New Books in Women's History

From gender expert and professional facilitator Kate Mangino comes Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home (St. Martin’s Press, 2022), an informed guide about how we can all collectively work to undo harmful gender norms and create greater household equity.As American society shut down due to Covid, millions of women had to leave their jobs to take on full-time childcare. As the country opens back up, women continue to struggle to balance the demands of work and home life. Kate Mangino, a professional facilitator for twenty years, has written a comprehensive, practical guide for readers and their partners about gender norms and household balance. Yes, part of our gender problem is structural, and that requires policy change. But much of our gender problem is social, and that requires us to change.Quickly moving from diagnosis to solution, Equal Partners focuses on what we can do, everyday people living busy lives, to rewrite gender norms to support a balanced homelife so both partners have equal time for work, family, and self. Mangino adopts an interactive model, posing questions, and asking readers to assess their situations through guided lists and talking points. Equal Partners is broad in its definition of gender and gender roles. This is a book for all: straight, gay, trans, and non-binary, parents and grandparents, and friends, with the goal to help foster gender equality in readers' homes, with their partners, family and wider community.Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was only two decades ago, but, for the women of country music, 1999 seems like an entirely different universe. With Shania Twain, country's biggest award winner and star, and The Chicks topping every chart, country music was a woman's world: specifically, country radio and Nashville's Music Row.Cut to 2021, when women are only played on country radio 16% of the time, on a good day, and when only men have won Entertainer of the Year at the CMA Awards for a decade. To a world where artists like Kacey Musgraves sell out arenas but barely score a single second of airplay. But also to a world where these women are infinitely bigger live draws than most male counterparts, having massive pop crossover hits like Maren Morris's "The Middle," pushing the industry to confront its deeply embedded racial biases with Mickey Guyton's "Black Like Me," winning heaps of Grammy nominations, banding up in supergroups like The Highwomen and taking complete control of their own careers, on their own terms. When the rules stopped working for the women of country music, they threw them out and made their own: and changed the genre forever, and for better.Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be (Henry Holt, 2022) is veteran Nashville journalist Marissa R. Moss's story of how in the past two decades, country's women fought back against systems designed to keep them down, armed with their art and never willing to just shut up and sing: how women like Kacey, Mickey, Maren, The Chicks, Miranda Lambert, Rissi Palmer, Brandy Clark, LeAnn Rimes, Brandi Carlile, Margo Price and many more have reinvented the rules to find their place in an industry stacked against them, how they've ruled the century when it comes to artistic output--and about how women can and do belong in the mainstream of country music, even if their voices aren't being heard as loudly.Marissa R. Moss is an award-winning journalist who has written about the topic of gender inequality on the country airwaves for outlets like Rolling Stone, NPR, Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, and many more. Moss was the 2018 recipient of the Rolling Stone Chet Flippo Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism, and the 2019 Nashville Scene Best of Nashville Best Music Reporter. She has been a guest on The TODAY Show, Entertainment Tonight, CBS Morning Show, NPR's Weekend Edition, WPLN, the Pop Literacy Podcast, and more.Marissa R. Moss on Twitter.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2022), Aria Halliday negotiates the line between "sell out" and "for us, by us," exploring how Black women cultural producers' further Black women's historical position as the moral compass and arbiter of Black racial progress in the United States. Black women cultural producers' aesthetic choices communicate that even though capitalist discourses dictate that anything is sellable in our society, there are some symbols of beauty, femininity, and sexuality that sell better than others because of how they occupy the set of already recognizable and, at times, relatable representations of blackness. While they compete in the consumer market for the attention and loyalty of Black consumer dollars, their capitulation to white corporate interests and audiences requires propagating historical tensions regarding Black consumer citizenship and multicultural inclusion. Each chapter contextualizes the role that Black women in the United States play in the global project of Black consumption, questioning which dolls, which princesses, which rags-to-riches narratives, and which characteristics represent the repertoire of Black girlhood. Through themes of self-making and objectification in dolls, princesses, and hip-hop, Buy Black maps the imagined space of "America" and the cultural attitudes that produced a twenty-first-century Black American sensibility based in representation and consumerism. Buy Black teaches all of us the parameters of Black symbolic power by mapping the confluence of intraracial ideals of blackness, womanhood, beauty, play, and sexuality in popular culture."Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wartime military service is held up as a marker of civic duty and patriotism, yet the rewards of veteran status have never been equally distributed. Certain groups of military veterans--women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and former service members with stigmatizing conditions, "bad paper" discharges, or criminal records--have been left out of official histories, excised from national consciousness, and denied state recognition and military benefits. Chronicling the untold stories of marginalized veterans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) uncovers the generational divides, cultural stigmas, and discriminatory policies that affected veterans during and after their military service. Together, the chapters in this collection recast veterans beyond the archetype, inspiring an innovative model for veterans studies that encourages an intersectional and interdisciplinary analysis of veterans history. In addition to contributions from the volume editors, this collection features scholarship by Barbara Gannon, Robert Jefferson, Evan P. Sullivan, Steven Rosales, Heather Marie Stur, Juan Coronado, Kara Dixon Vuic, John Worsencroft, and David Kieran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this timely collection, gender, sex, and technology are explored through an intersectional and interdisciplinary lens. Gender, Sex, and Tech!: An Intersectional Feminist Guide (Canadian Scholars, 2022) provides insight into the ways that technology affects, and is affected by, cultural perceptions of gender and sex. Through an examination of a range of past and present issues, the text highlights our relationships to technology and illustrates how gendered relations are shaped and transformed through social and technological innovations. Contributors bring to the fore feminist, decolonizing, and anti-racist methods to examine our everyday uses of technology, from the mundane to the surreal to the playful to the devastating. Original research and scholarship is skillfully grounded in real-world scenarios like revenge pornography, gender bias in artificial intelligence, menstrual tracking, online dating, and the COVID-19 pandemic, inviting students to take a closer look at technological transformations and their impact on gendered lived experience and to consider how the benefits of technology are inequitably shared within society. Centring Canadian scholars and Canadian perspectives without losing sight of the broader global connection, Gender, Sex, and Tech! is bursting with timely and of-the-moment content, making this collection a must-read for courses focused on gender and technology.Dr. Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches about transnational feminisms, Global South #MeToos, postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, and global cinema. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment was commemorated in 2020, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were often the focus of museum exhibits, teach-outs, and scholarly works. Highlighting the queerness of the movement was rarely the narrative. But Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement (NYU Press, 2022) insists that a narrow focus on cisgender heterosexual woman erases the existence and importance of queer suffragists – and how their transgressive notions of gender and sexuality impacted the suffrage movement. Hiding queerness reinforced a “patriarchal, cisheteronormative standard of ideal womanhood and manhood in order to make suffragists and women’s suffrage more palatable to voters.” Yet queerness was central to the history of the suffrage movement. Dr. Wendy L. Rouse not only recovers the lives of individual queer suffragists, she queers the history of the women’s suffrage movement as a whole. Her work emphasizes the complex ways in which suffragists balanced their principled beliefs in wider social reforms with a form of strategic, respectability politics. In order to contribute to a process of recovery, her book forcefully examines the manner in which historical processes have led to the erasure of queerness in the history of the suffrage movement and the consequences of that erasure.Dr. Wendy L. Rouse is a historian whose research focuses on the history of gender and sexuality in the Progressive Era. She is presently Professor of History at San Jose State University where she is the program coordinator for the History/Social Science Teacher Preparation Program.Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frankenstein is a name we all know, even for those who haven’t read Mary Shelley’s novel. But the monster you might imagine is quite different from the one Shelley wrote about in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In fact, Shelley’s writing has much more to say about ethics, philosophy, and modern scientific advancement than many ghost story enthusiasts would guess. In this episode, Professor Deidre Lynch discusses the wisdom and warnings found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Deidre Lynch teaches in the English department at Harvard University. Some of her works include Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees and The Economy of Character : Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before 1973's landmark Roe v. Wade decision, abortion in California was illegal for both doctors performing and women seeking the procedure. In From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969 (U Nebraska Press, 2020), Dr. Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, an associate professor of history at La Sierra University, examines the experiences of doctors and patients in southern California during the mid-twentieth century. For doctors, performing abortions carried a good deal of risk, including extensive sentences of jail time. For women, the procedure was often safe, but not always, and carried risk of infection and even death. Women could use resources like the Pacific Coast Abortion Ring, a network of doctors willing to perform abortions, or even cross the border into Mexico, but every aspect of illegal reproductive medicine carried risks, moreso if patient or doctor were Black or poor. This is a relevant book and Gutierrez provides a window not just into the past, but into a post-Dobbs American future.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beginning in the 1970s Chicana and Chicano organizers turned to community radio broadcasting to educate, entertain, and uplift Mexican American listeners across the United States. In rural areas, radio emerged as the most effective medium for reaching relatively isolated communities such as migrant farmworkers. And in Washington’s Yakima Valley, where the media landscape was dominated by perspectives favorable to agribusiness, community radio for and about farmworkers became a life-sustaining tool. Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley (U Washington Press, 2022) unearths the remarkable history of one of the United States’ first full-time Spanish-language community radio stations, Radio KDNA, which began broadcasting in the Yakima Valley in 1979. Extensive interviews reveal the work of Chicana and Chicano producers, on-air announcers, station managers, technical directors, and listeners who contributed to the station’s success. Monica De La Torre weaves these oral histories together with a range of visual and audio artifacts, including radio programs, program guides, and photographs to situate KDNA within the larger network of Chicano community-based broadcasting and social movement activism. Feminista Frequencies highlights the development of a public broadcasting model that centered Chicana radio producers and documents the central role of women in developing this infrastructure in the Yakima Valley. De La Torre shows how KDNA revolutionized community radio programming, adding new depth to the history of the Chicano movement, women’s activism, and media histories.Brad Wright is a historian of Latin America specializing in postrevolutionary Mexico. He teach world history at Kennesaw State University currently. PhD in Public History with specialization in oral history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Nash's book Clare Boothe Luce: American Renaissance Woman (Routledge, 2022) is a concise and highly readable political biography that examines the life of one of the most accomplished American women of the 20th century.Wife and mother, author, editor, playwright, political activist, war journalist, Congresswoman, ambassador, pundit, and feminist—Luce did it all. Carefully placing Luce in a series of shifting historical contexts, this book offers the reader an insight into mid-century American political, cultural, gender, and foreign relations history. Eleven primary sources follow the text, including excerpts from Luce’s diary, letters, speeches, and published works, as well as a TV talk-show appearance and a critic’s diary entry describing an evening with her, helping readers to understand her fascinating life. Together, the narrative and documents afford readers a brief yet in-depth look at Luce with all her complications: glamorous intellectual, acid-tongued diplomat, and feminist conservative, she was a deeply flawed high-achiever who repeatedly challenged the entrenched sexism of her age to become a significant actor in the rise of the “American Century.”Addressing the neglect suffered by women in foreign relations history, this will be of interest to students and scholars of US foreign relations, 20th-century US history, and US women’s history.Victoria Phillips is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in the Department of International History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices