New Books in Women's History

Feb 03 2025 1578 ep. 55 mins 59
New Books in Women's History Podcast artwork

Discussions with scholars of women's history about their new books

  Arts  History  Science
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Alexis Wolf, "Transnational Women Writers in the Wilmot Coterie, 1798-1840" (Boydell Press, 2024)

Feb 03 2025 38 mins  
What were two Irish sisters doing in Russia during the early years of the nineteenth century, editing the French-language memoirs of a princess who had been a close confidante of Catherine the Great? Author Alexis Wolf is in conversation with Duncan McCargo about a remarkable transnational story she has unearthed through meticulous archival research. Transnational Women Writers in

Blessin Adams, "Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain" (HarperCollins, 2025)

Feb 02 2025 32 mins  
Early Modern Britain was awash with pamphlets, ballads, woodcuts broadcasting bloodthirsty tales of traitorous wives, greedy mistresses, cunning female poisoning lacing the supper with deadly substances; of child killers and spiteful witches, stories of women wholly and unnaturally wicked. These were printed or sung, tacked the walls of alehouses, sold in the streets for pennies an

About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Jan 30 2025 66 mins  
Today I talked to Ben Baer and Smaran Dayal about About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Pioneering Indian Muslim feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote speculative fiction, manifestoes, radical reportage, and incisive essays that transformed her experience of enforced segregation into unique interventions against gender oppression everywhere. He

Monica A. Hershberger, "Women in American Operas of The 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes" (U Rochester Press, 2023)

Jan 20 2025 67 mins  
The 1950s looks placid from the outside, but underneath that calm post-war exterior roiled the intellectual and activist beginnings of the political movements that tore through the 1960s and 1970s. In Women in American Operas of the 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes (University of Rochester Press, 2023), Monica A. Hershberger considers the main female characters in four operas wri

Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin. "Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum" (NYU Press, 2024)

Jan 20 2025 41 mins  
How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence. Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum in the United States because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members, Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum (NYU Press,

Katharine E. McGregor, "Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

Jan 19 2025 48 mins  
The system of prostitution imposed and enforced by the Japanese military during its wartime occupation of several countries in East and Southeast Asia is today well-known and uniformly condemned. Transnational activist movements have sought to recognize and redress survivors of this World War II-era system, euphemistically known as "comfort women," for decades, with a major wave be

Amrita Narayanan, "Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Jan 18 2025 55 mins  
Amrita Narayanan is a practicing Clinical Psychologist (Psy.D. 2007) and Psychoanalyst (Indian Psychoanalytic Society, 2019). She is the author of Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (Oxford University Press, 2023). She was the Editor of and essayist in The Parrots of Desire: 3000 years of Erotica in India (Aleph Books, 2018) a collection of poems, short pr

Valentina N. Glajar, "The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller: A "File Story" of Cold War Surveillance" (Camden House, 2023)

Jan 17 2025 100 mins  
"Herta Müller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Müller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in Müller's work, though an undesired and dreaded

Elizabeth L. Block, "Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing" (MIT Press, 2024)

Jan 17 2025 38 mins  
In the nineteenth century, the complex cultural meaning of hair was not only significant—it could affect one’s place in society. After the Civil War, hairdressing was a growing profession and the hair industry a mainstay of local, national, and international commerce. In Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing (MIT Press, 2024), Elizabeth L. Block expands the nasce

Emily Murdoch Perkins, "Regina: The Queens Who Could Have Been" (The History Press, 2024)

Jan 14 2025 54 mins  
What queens would England have had if firstborn daughters, not firstborn sons, had inherited the throne? In Regina: The Queens Who Could Have Been (The History Press, 2024), Emily Murdoch Perkins investigates. We may think of princesses as dutiful and elegant, wearing long flowing dresses, but the eldest daughters of England’s kings have been very different. Political intriguers.