New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Aya Gruber, "The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration" (U California Press, 2020) Jul 31, 2020

Show notes

Aya Gruber, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, has written a history of how the women’s movement in America has shaped the law on domestic violence and sexual assault.

In The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration (University of California Press, 2020), Professor Gruber contends that the legal reform movement on sexual assault began with feminists in the 19th century, who argued in favor of temperance reform, partly in the hope that it would lead to less violence against women. She also argues that the social context in which sexual assault allegations were made in the 19th century, especially regarding African-American males and white women, influenced the outcomes in legal cases and divided the feminists of the 19th century. Professor Gruber also addresses the fissures created in the women’s movement from the 1960s through today regarding how sexual assault should be treated under the law has worked against justice for both victims and their assailants. Professor Gruber argues that sexual assault law is premised upon erroneous beliefs about how men and women interact, the norms of nonverbal conduct, and the efficacy of punitive solutions. In addition to covering the history of sexual assault law she addresses how the criminal law might be reformed to meet the “convergent interests” of men and women.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

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Sunny Stalter-Pace, "Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffman’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance" (Northwestern UP, 2020) Jul 31, 2020

Show notes

Gertrude Hoffman is one of many entertainers who were big stars in vaudeville before World War I, but whose celebrity faded as the American public was seduced by radio and film after the Great War.

Sunny Stalter-Pace recounts Hoffmann’s groundbreaking career and contextualizes her work as a dancer, comedienne, producer, and choreographer in the American cultural landscape in Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffman’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance(Northwestern University Press, 2020).

Hoffman brought European modern dance to a mass American audience through her imitations, vaudeville revues, and touring show recreating some of the Ballet Russes’s iconic dances. She served as a conduit between the avant-garde and commercial theater through a deft combination of highbrow and lowbrow in each of her projects.

More than a simply a stage performer, Hoffman was also the first woman stage manager and choreographer on Broadway, and a prolific producer both during and after her stage career was over. Intersecting with figures such as Florence Ziegfeld, George M. Cohan, and Oscar Hammerstein I, Hoffman was part of the network of impresarios and performers who created popular entertainment in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Sunny Stalter-Pace is the Hargis Associate Professor of American Literature at Auburn University. She is interested in the intersection of modernist performance and literature in urban spaces. A prolific scholar, Imitation Artist is Stalter-Pace’s second book.

Kristen Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Olivia Weisser, "ll Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England" (Yale UP, 2015) Jul 31, 2020

Show notes

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Olivia Weisser, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts – Boston, to talk about her 2015 Yale University Press release, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England. Olivia Weisser can be described as an historian of Early Modern England, an historian of medicine, and as a gender historian. This book sits right at the intersection of all three of these subfields and contributes to our understanding of the lived experience of religion, the lived experience of gender, ideas about ‘nature,’ and, of course, the history of medicine. Through its investigation of the gender-specific ways women and men talk about their illnesses, Weisser argues that illness is a construction, ongoing, that is specific to space and time, age, class, country of origin, race, and, specifically in this discussion: gender.

Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective.

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Sarah B. Rodriguez, "The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation" (Rutgers UP, 2020) Jul 30, 2020

Show notes

Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into “a horny little house mouse.” Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years, mutilating hundreds of women in the process.

It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Burt as a monstrous aberration, a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. Yet as medical historian Sarah Rodriguez reveals, that’s not the whole story. The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation(Rutgers University Press, 2020) asks tough questions about Burt’s heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment: How was he able to perform an untested surgical procedure? Why wasn’t he obliged to get informed consent from his patients? And why did it take his peers so long to take action?

The Love Surgeon is both a medical horror story and a cautionary tale about the limits of professional self-regulation.

Sarah B. Rodriguez is a medical historian at Northwestern University in the Global Health Studies Program, the Department of Medical Education, and the Graduate Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. Her teaching and research focuses on the history of reproduction, clinical practice, and research ethics. Her publications include the book Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Practice.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Vanita Reddy, "Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity and South Asian American Culture" (Duke UP, 2016) Jul 30, 2020

Show notes

Vanita Reddy, in her book Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity and South Asian American Culture(Duke University Press, 2016), locates diasporic transnationality, affiliations and intimacies through the analytic of beauty.

Through her analysis of Asian American literary fiction and performance artwork and installations, Reddy lingers on moments, objects and subjective positions that reveal the potentiality of beauty. Not just a site for neoliberal complicity, beauty, in its presence as well as absence, also emerges as something subversive.

The re-articulation of the bindi and the saree, objects that are otherwise imbued with upper-caste, Hindu hetero-reproductive symbolisms, in the works of performance artists, offer queer queer subversion of power structures. Beauty also becomes the site of not just physical but also social (im)mobility as Reddy presents the complicated ways in which beauty relates to aspiration.

Central to her project is upending the male-centric understanding of the relationship between the diaspora and the “nation”. Focussing not only on female narratives of movement and mobility but also interrogating the vulnerability and queer-ness of male subject positions, Reddy provides a nuanced interrogation of how “frivolous” beauty becomes the site of transformative transnational journeys.

In the first three chapters, she looks at the literary fiction that either centrally or marginally deploys beauty as the site of narrating stories about the diaspora. Chapter 4 and 5 look at feminist performances and cyber representations of objects like the bindi and saree that deliberately challenge the essentialization of these objects and destabilizes them not just to narrate stories of movement but emphasize potential for mobilization through seemingly non-serious, beautiful artifacts.

Vanita Reddy is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University.

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.

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Paulo Drinot, "The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s" (Cambridge UP, 2020) Jul 29, 2020

Show notes

Paulo Drinot’s The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s (Cambridge University Press, 2020), studies the interplay of sexuality, society, and the state in Peru in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drinot analyzes the rules and norms that governed prostitution and venereal disease in this period, and tracks how regulation of prostitution was implemented in the early twentieth century, and then seemingly abandoned in the 1950s. Drinot’s story foregrounds the many agents that intervened in this process: prostitutes––or sex workers as we may call them today––but also government officials, physicians, journalists, feminists, among others.

Set in a global and comparative framework, this book centers on Peru, a country that came “late” to the regulation of prostitution, and did so under arguments that combined concerns about public health and ideas about proper female and male sexuality. The Sexual Question goes beyond the history of prostitution for it also sheds light on broader processes such as the medicalization of society and the construction of the nation-state in Latin American societies. Race figures prominently in this story: throughout this period, the regulation of prostitution was accompanied by the racialization of disease, and the policing of certain groups deemed especially dangerous or in need of protection (Afro-Peruvians and indigenous groups for example). This is a timely book, not only for those listeners concerned with Latin American history, but also for those who are interested in sexuality, the state, race, and medical history more generally. A must for our listeners!

Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron

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Theresa Kaminski, "Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War: One Woman's Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women's Rights" (Lyons Press, 2020) Jul 28, 2020

Show notes

Among the tens of thousands of Americans who volunteered their services during the Civil War was Mary Walker, a daring young woman who was one of the handful of female doctors in the nation at that time. Yet despite the often desperate need for medical professionals she spent much of the war struggling to earn the respect she felt she deserved. In Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War: One Woman's Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women's Rights (Lyons Press, 2020), Theresa Kaminski describes this struggle and how it reflected her lifelong struggle to have the world accept her on her own terms. The daughter of free-thinking farmers, the young Mary enjoyed a level of education unusual for her era. Even before the war began she defined her identity with their radical choices in clothing and her decision to divorce her philandering husband. When the war began Dr. Walker sought a commission as a doctor, only to face opposition from every authority figure she met. Over time, however, her persistent efforts gradually won her a degree of acceptance and a role in the war. While her goal to earn a commission remained unfulfilled, at the end of the war her brave sacrifices on behalf of the Union earned for herself a Medal of Honor – one that a century and a half later remains the only Medal of Honor ever awarded to a woman.

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Kathleen Bachynski, "No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis" (UNC Press, 2019) Jul 27, 2020

Show notes

Today we are joined by Kathleen Bachynski, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Muhlenberg College, and author of No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the intersection of public health and American football, the difficulty in assessing and quantifying sports injuries, and the way that football organizers were able to mete out responsibility for broken bones, torn ligaments, and brain trauma to a wide range of participants. At its core, Bachynski’s work addresses the issue of whether or not football is safe for children.

In No Game for Boys to Play, Bachynski examines American football from its origins from the perspective of a public health specialist and an historian. Her work illuminates the ways in which football came to shape and be shaped by hegemonic discourses of masculinity, frequently to the detriment of its players' health. Her work focuses on youth football – both in Pop Warner league and in high schools and considers a wide scope of medical issues rather than being limited to discussions of traumatic brain injury. She argues that an ethical response to youth football is to prohibit all dangerous contact (tackle football, cross checks in hockey, boxing) for children under age 18.

Bachynski’s combination of historical studies, epidemiological investigations, and public health research brings a new perspective to the history of football. Her engagement with a wide range of actors; including players, parents, coaches, doctors, legislators, equipment manufacturers, insurance agencies, and tort lawyers; showcases the importance of football to broader conversations about American masculinity, educational standards, and national defense. It also challenges teleological perspectives that might suggest that football safely has improved over time. While dental and traumatic spinal injuries are less severe, children are more likely to suffer traumatic brain injuries despite (or perhaps because of) increasing standardization of safety equipment including helmets.

No Game for Boys to Play is the winner of the 2020 North American Society for Sport History Monograph Book Award and so should be read by a wide audience. Her work will especially appeal to scholars interested in the overlap between histories of medicine and sport.

Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, 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.

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R. K. Jefferson and H. B. Johnson, "Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court (NYU Press, 2020) Jul 27, 2020

Show notes

Before Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in 1981, nine highly qualified women were on the shortlist. What do the stories of these women tell us about the judiciary? Gender? Feminism? Race?

In Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court(NYU Press, 2020), Renee Knake Jefferson (professor at the University of Houston Law Center) and Hannah Brenner Johnson (Vice Dean and a law professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego) demonstrate how highly (and often overly) qualified woman are shortlisted by presidents -- from Herbert Hoover to Donald Trump -- to create the appearance of diversity before a (white) man is selected to preserve the status quo. Short-listing isn’t success but symptom of a problem.

Jefferson and Johnson’s research in presidential libraries, private papers, oral histories, the Nixon tapes, and biographies reveals that presidents as early as Herbert Hoover began discussing female candidates – though presidents set aside overly qualified women for decades. The first half of this nuanced book explores the first woman considered (Florence Allen), five judges who were on the short lists of JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford, and female judges who were short-listed alongside Sandra Day O’Connor (including the first Black female judge, Amalya Lyle Kearse). The histories of each candidate map onto the waves of feminism, reflect on the role of marriage, motherhood, and sexuality, and allow the authors to identify the harms of short-listing.

The details are revealing about both past and present and the second half of the book addresses how to apply the lessons learned from these decades of paying lip-service to diversity. How can candidates transition from shortlisting to selection? Jefferson and Johnson discuss tokenism, the burdens of being a gender spokesperson, racism, ageism, and the binds of femininity and “respectability.” The authors demonstrate how the selection of women for the Supreme Court impacts other aspects of the legal system and beyond. Although the number of men and women entering law school and entry-level legal positions are equal, the rate at which men reach leadership positions is considerably faster than women. This phenomenon can be seen in many fields where there is a pursuit of professional advancement. The authors conclude with strategies such as “collaborating to compete” to reform the American legal system.

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020).

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Thomas Bishop, "Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter" (UMass Press, 2020) Jul 24, 2020

Show notes

In Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), Thomas Bishop details the remarkable cultural history and personal stories behind an iconic figure of Cold War masculinity—the fallout shelter father, who, with spade in hand and the canned goods he has amassed, sought to save his family from atomic warfare. Putting policy documents and presidential addresses into conversation with previously unmined personal letters, diaries, local media coverage, and antinuclear ephemera, Bishop demonstrates that the nuclear crisis years of 1957 to 1963 were not just pivotal for the history of international relations but were also a transitional moment in the social histories of the white middle class and American fatherhood. During this era, public concerns surrounding civil defense shaped private family conversations, and the fallout shelter emerged as a site at which ideas of nationhood, national security, and masculinity collided with the complex reality of trying to raise and protect a family in the nuclear age.

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