New Books in Women's History

Maria Theresa (1717–1780) was once the most powerful woman in Europe. At the age of twenty-three, she ascended to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, a far-flung realm composed of diverse ethnicities and languages, beset on all sides by enemies and rivals. Master historian, Professor Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger provides the definitive biography of Maria Theresa, in her outstanding biography, Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in her Time (Princeton University Press, 2022). Situating this exceptional empress within her time while dispelling the myths surrounding her.Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Professor Stollberg-Rilinger examines all facets of eighteenth-century society, from piety and patronage to sexuality and childcare, ceremonial life at court, diplomacy, and the everyday indignities of warfare. She challenges the idealized image of Maria Theresa as an enlightened reformer and mother of her lands who embodied both feminine beauty and virile bellicosity, showing how she despised the ideas of the Enlightenment, treated her children with relentless austerity, and mercilessly persecuted Protestants and Jews. Work, consistent physical and mental discipline, and fear of God were the principles Maria Theresa lived by, and she demanded the same from her family, her court, and her subjects.A panoramic work of scholarship that brings Europe’s age of empire spectacularly to life, Maria Theresa paints an unforgettable portrait of the uncompromising yet singularly charismatic woman who left her enduring mark on the era in which she lived and reigned. In the words of John Adamson in the Literary Review, Professor Stollberg-Rilinger’s treatment of the Habsburg ruler will stand "as the basic reference point for studies of Maria Theresa for decades to come".Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yi’s eyes soften as he watches Jiazhi sing a Chinese folk song with subtle, feminine movements in the film, Lust, Caution. The room fills with laughter when Ali Wong unabashedly enacts her vulgar, bodily desires. What is the affect created through these performances? At different localities and temporalities, an actress and a comedian Tang Wei and Ali Wong embody ever-failing meaning of Chineseness, offering themselves for consumption and survival.In Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke UP, 2022), Mila Zuo re-evaluates beauty to understand how it creates a feeling Chineseness, engendering a messy world of relationalities that challenge a stable binary of national identity. Using weidao, which escapes meaning in English as flavor and style of a person, object, or environment, Zuo challenges the Cartesian epistemology dividing mind/body and vision/hearing. Through in-depth analysis of films and shows, Zuo asks how five flavors of Chinese medicine, “bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour” become “modalities of vulgar beauty” (33). Vulgar, often tied to the non-western and working-class bodies, becomes a means to complicate the relations between objecthood and subjecthood embodied in Chinese beauty.This beautifully written and theoretically rich book will be helpful resource for any scholars and public interested in film and media studies, Asian American studies, object studies, and gender studies. Mila Zuo is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC. Her first book Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke University Press, 2022) focuses on the affective racialization of Chinese women film stars, demonstrating the ways which vulgar, flavourful beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty. In addition to scholarship, Zuo directs and writes narrative films, visual essays, documentaries and music videos. Her short films have screened in international film festivals and universities, including Carnal Orient (2016) which premiered at Slamdance Film Festival, and her short narrative film Kin (2021), which was the recipient of the 2019 Oregon Media Arts Fellowship, and screened at HollyShorts Film Festival.Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence (UP of Mississippi, 2021) explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls’ book. On the one hand, early novels for adolescent girls rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy. On the other, they provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. The early girls’ book frames female adolescence as an opportunity for productive investment in the self. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity.These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—from another perspective, one in which fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self are celebrated. They provide alternatives to cultural beliefs about what it was like to be a white, middle-class girl in the nineteenth century and challenge the assumption that the evolution of the girls’ book is always a movement towards less sexist, less restrictive images of girls.Drawing on forgotten bestsellers in the United States and Germany (where this genre is referred to as Backfischliteratur), Transforming Girls offers insightful readings that call scholars to reexamine the history of the girls’ book. It also outlines an alternate model for imagining adolescence and supporting adolescent girls. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.Julie Pfeiffer is a professor of English at Hollins University. She is editor of Children’s Literature, the annual of Children’s Literature Association.Renee Garris is a professor of Humanities in Virginia. She teaches the Humanities as a discipline as well as hosts authors on this network as well as the Performing Arts channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why has the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in elected office proved so persistent in American politics? In Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections (Oxford UP, 2021), Dr. Christian Dyogi Phillips argues that any analysis must contend with multiple dimensions of identity, context, and the simultaneous dynamism of opportunity and constraint. Complementing previous studies with her original datasets and rich interviews, Phillips demonstrates how two simultaneous and interactive processes shape electoral opportunity across groups. At the national level, majority-white districts sharply limit realistic opportunities for Latinx and Asian Americans of either gender to get on the ballot – and partisan politics further narrows prospects for women from these groups. At the local and group level, within districts and among Asian American and Latinx political elites and activists, the scarcity of viable opportunities exacerbates informal processes and institutions that tend to push Latinas and Asian American women further from the pipeline. Phillips’s integration of national and local-level processes reveals that the pathways to getting on the ballot are few and far between for Latinx and Asian Americans – and especially fraught with prospects for exclusion of Latinas and Asian American women. Race and gender simultaneously constrain and facilitate electoral opportunities for Asian American women and men, Latinas, and Latinos. These sharp differences in opportunities across groups help explain persistent underrepresentation among elected officials.Dr. Christian Dyogi Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California. Her research addresses political behavior, electoral institutions, and political incorporation, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, gender and immigrant communities in American politics.Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.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

In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women.Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship's hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi.Drawing on an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record, Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast (Basic, 2022) introduces us to the Gulf South's Founding Mothers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus (MIT Press, 2022) follows Mildred Dresselhaus (or Millie, as everyone calls her) from her childhood in New York City to her final years in Cambridge. It focuses on her scientific achievements, but also rightfully presents her as a multi-hyphenate: being a resilient student, an adaptive researcher, a professor, an administrator, an advocate, a fundraiser, a patent owner, a book author. The accolades are plentiful and her involvement in science seemingly boundless.Maia Weinstock masterfully blends anecdotes and scientific explanations into the life story of a truly phenomenal scientist.In this episode of the podcast, we discuss Millie’s multifaceted career, as well as the process of putting the book together, and Maia’s history course on women in science.Ana Georgescu studied astrophysics and physics at Harvard University and is now a science consultant and writer based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mid-century America had a problem talking about sex. Dr. Mary Calderone first diagnosed this condition and, in 1964, led the uphill battle to de-stigmatize sex education. Supporters hailed her as the “grandmother of modern sex education” while her detractors painted her as an “aging libertine,” but both could agree that she was quickly shaping the way sex was discussed in the classroom.Part biography, part social history, The Transformation of American Sex Education: Mary Calderone and the Fight for Sexual Health (NYU Press, 2022) for the first time situates Dr. Mary Calderone at the center of decades of political, cultural, and religious conflict in the fight for comprehensive sex education. Ellen S. More examines Americans’ attempts to come to terms with the vexed subject of sex education in schools from the late 1940s to the early twenty-first century. Using Mary Calderone’s life and career as a touchstone, she traces the origins of modern sex education in the United States from the work of a group of reformers who coalesced around Calderone to create the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in 1964, to the development and use of the competing approaches known as “abstinence-based” and “comprehensive” sex education from the 1980s into the twenty-first century.A fascinating and timely read, The Transformation of American Sex Education provides a substantial contribution to the history of one of America’s most intense and protracted culture wars, and the first account of the woman who fought those battles.Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Wives of Western Philosophy: Gender Politics in Intellectual Labor (Routledge, 2020) fills in a rather large hole in the understanding and the substance of the generation of knowledge. This edited volume provides an exploration of the thinking around the role of the wife, helpmeet, or intimate companion, and how political theory is created, written, and moved into the public sphere. This book also pays particular attention to what we understand to be intellectual labor, and how we have come to think about the genesis of ideas and theories as the work of a solitary individual—usually male—when others are often quite intimately involved in the generation of this labor.The contributing authors all focus on three themes: how are intellectual work, knowledge, and theory produced or created across disciplines and topic areas—who is actually involved in this process as a contributor to the outcome; the political reality of what wives have done, are expected to do, actually do, and how we have come think about the wife as a political concept itself; the crafting of the biography or narrative of the thinker—who is included and excluded from this construction. These issues or themes are not necessarily indigenous to political theory—they come up in context of any intellectual production, in any field or discipline. But The Wives of Western Philosophy: Gender Politics in Intellectual Labor concentrates on some of the canonical thinkers and their intimate partners, and what we know but perhaps were unaware of in regard to these contributions, not merely fulfilling daily needs like cooking food, but the actual intellectual contributions by intimate partners that are threaded into the work of these theorists. All of the contributing authors pay attention to trying to understand how the intellectual communities are, in fact, the spaces and places where theorists live and engage—and that these communities contribute to the formation of ideas and knowledge. This is a different narrative than those that generally surround theorists, who are often cast as solitary thinkers, disembodied minds, alone, developing ideas and writings. Collaboration is often eschewed in these conceptions of the author, the thinker, and gendered collaboration between men and women is even more suspect as a means to generate important concepts and work.Forestal and Philips have assembled a fascinating, interrogating group of authors and discussions in this edited volume. Authors include Arlene Saxonhouse, Sara Brill, Boris Litvin, Emily C. Nicol, Bryan A. Banks, Jennifer M. Jones, Ross Carroll, Terrell Carver, as well as contributions by the editors themselves, Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips. This is a very important contribution to our understanding of political philosophy and the creation of knowledge.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Across the twentieth century, Earth's human population increased undeniably quickly, rising from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to 6.1 billion in 2000. As population grew, it also began to take the blame for some of the world's most serious problems, from global poverty to environmental degradation, and became an object of intervention for governments and nongovernmental organizations. But the links between population, poverty, and pollution were neither obvious nor uncontested.Building the Population Bomb (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Emily Klancher Merchant tells the story of the twentieth-century population crisis by examining how scientists, philanthropists, and governments across the globe came to define the rise of the world's human numbers as a problem. It narrates the history of demography and population control in the twentieth century, examining alliances and rivalries between natural scientists concerned about the depletion of the world's natural resources, social scientists concerned about a bifurcated global economy, philanthropists aiming to preserve American political and economic hegemony, and heads of state in the Global South seeking rapid economic development. It explains how these groups forged a consensus that promoted fertility limitation at the expense of women, people of color, the world's poor, and the Earth itself.As the world's population continues to grow—with the United Nations projecting 11 billion people by the year 2100—Building the Population Bomb steps back from the conventional population debate to demonstrate that our anxieties about future population growth are not obvious but learned. Ultimately, this critical volume shows how population growth itself is not a barrier to economic, environmental, or reproductive justice; rather, it is our anxiety over population growth that distracts us from the pursuit of these urgent goals.Nicole Bourbonnais is Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational, historical perspective. Profile here: https://www.graduateinstitute.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China's Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Harvard UP, 2020) is a history of China's Yangzi Delta silk industry during the wars, crises, and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century. Based on extensive research in Chinese archives and focused on the 1950s, the book compares two very different groups of silk workers and their experiences in the revolution. Male silk weavers in Shanghai factories enjoyed close ties to the Communist party-state and benefited greatly from socialist policies after 1949. In contrast, workers in silk thread mills, or filatures, were mostly young women who lacked powerful organizations or ties to the revolutionary regime. For many filature workers, working conditions changed little after 1949 and politicized production campaigns added a new burden within the brutal and oppressive factory regime in place since the nineteenth century. Both groups of workers and their employers had to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Their actions--protests, petitions, bribery, tax evasion--compelled the party-state to adjust its policies, producing new challenges. The results, though initially positive for many, were ultimately disastrous. By the end of the 1950s, there was widespread conflict and deprivation among silk workers and, despite its impressive recovery under Communist rule, the industry faced a crisis worse than war and revolution.Robert Cliver is Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. He has published widely on the labor history of modern China, including in Labor History and Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review.Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices