New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Emily Callaci, "Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor" (Seal Press, 2025) Nov 20, 2025

Show notes

Across the globe in the 1970s, a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand: Wages for Housework! Today, it remains a provocative idea, and an unfulfilled promise.

In Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise (Penguin/Seal Press 2025), historian Emily Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators – Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod - tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades. Drawing on new archival research and extensive interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it, imagining potential futures under capitalism – and beyond. Then as now, Wages for Housework poses profound questions. What would it be like to live in a society that prioritizes care rather than production? How would this change our relationship with the natural world? And what would women do with their lives if they had more time?

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Can Feminism be African?: A Conversation with Minna Salami Nov 20, 2025

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Transcript of the interview

Minna Salami is a writer, social critic, and thought leader on feminism, knowledge production, and the aesthetics and structures of power. She formerly served as Programme Chair and Senior Fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE, where she led the Black Feminism and the Polycrisis programme. Her work sits at the intersection of ideas, culture, and systems thinking, with a commitment to making complex theories accessible through books, essays, public speaking, and creative projects.

She is the author of Can Feminism Be African? (Harper Collins, 2025) and Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Bloomsbury, 2020), which has been translated into multiple languages. Her writing also appears in numerous anthologies and educational publications exploring feminism, African philosophy, media, and cultural criticism.

Her work has featured in The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Ideas Letter, Project Syndicate, and The Philosopher, and she has delivered talks at global institutions including TEDx, the Institute of Arts and Ideas, the European Commission, the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, Yale, and Singularity University at NASA.

Salami was the creative director of the short film Black Feminism and the Polycrisis, which won the Silver Award for Public Service and Activism at the 2024 Lovie Awards.

From 2019 to 2022, she co-directed Activate, an intersectional feminist movement that supported minoritised women in politics and community organising through visibility campaigns, mentoring, and fundraising. The initiative played a key role in shifting narratives and resources toward a more inclusive political landscape in the UK.

She has also worked as a Research Associate and Editor at Perspectiva, advised governments on gender equality, developed national school curricula, and curated cultural events at institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Her blog, MsAfropolitan, launched in 2010, has reached over a million readers and remains a platform for exploring feminist and African-centred approaches to contemporary life.

Salami is a Full Member of the Club of Rome, a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader, and serves on the advisory boards of the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State University and Public Humanities at Cambridge University Press, as well as the council of the British Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Links to References:
Apart Together – essay on Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire’s radical vision for the world

Africa’s Populist Trap for The Ideas Letter

The Niger River and the Dearth of History: Deconstructing the Myths of Mungo Park by Ezenwa E. Olumba

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Emily Winderman, "Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History (JHU Press, 2025) Nov 19, 2025

Show notes

How did three words come to carry the weight of America's abortion debates? In Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History (JHU Press, 2025), Dr. Emily Winderman examines how this phrase shaped American reproductive politics and health care standards across generations. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book traces the unexpected origins of this rhetoric in urban reform movements, showing how early associations of alleys with sanitation, morality, and criminality created lasting impressions that would later influence abortion discourse.

Dr. Winderman demonstrates how "back-alley abortion" was always more than just descriptive language—it has shaped perceptions of medical legitimacy and clinical spaces. The book reveals how this phrase emerged from racialized and gendered intersections of urban planning, public health, and social reform movements before becoming a rhetoric that anticipated pre–Roe v. Wade criminalized medical encounters. After Roe, back-alley abortion molded public memory through high-profile cases and later became a weaponized tool of anti-abortion activists to restrict access under the guise of sanitary clinical care.

From nineteenth-century urban reformers to contemporary Supreme Court decisions, this study illuminates how three words came to carry the weight of America's most contentious health care debate. In our post-Dobbs era, as states grapple with new restrictions on reproductive rights, understanding the complex history and rhetorical power of "back-alley abortion" has never been more crucial. Drawing on rhetorical theory, reproductive justice theory, and the history of medicine, Back-Alley Abortion offers vital insights into how rhetoric shapes our understanding of medical legitimacy, clinical standards, and health care justice in the United States.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Nayma Qayum, "Village Ties: Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh" (Rutgers UP, 2021) Nov 16, 2025

Show notes

Across the global South, poor women’s lives are embedded in their social relationships and governed not just by formal institutions – rules that exist on paper – but by informal norms and practices.Village Ties: Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh(Rutgers UP, 2021) takes the reader to Bangladesh, a country that has risen from the ashes of war, natural disaster, and decades of resource drain to become a development miracle. The book argues that grassroots women’s mobilization programs can empower women to challenge informal institutions when such programs are anti-oppression, deliberative, and embedded in their communities. Qayum dives into the work of Polli Shomaj (PS), a program of the development organization BRAC to show how the women of PS negotiate with state and society to alter the rules of the game, changing how poor people access resources including safety nets, the law, and governing spaces. These women create a complex and rapidly transforming world where multiple overlapping institutions exist – formal and informal, old and new, desirable and undesirable. In actively challenging power structures around them, these women defy stereotypes of poor Muslim women as backward, subservient, oppressed, and in need of saving.

Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018).

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Páraic Kerrigan, "LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland" (Routledge, 2020) Nov 16, 2025

Show notes

“We know what we want, and one day, our prince will come,” says Toby, the bicycle-shorts-wearing, double ententre-making, unacknowledgely-gay neighbor in RTE’s Upwardly Mobile. Though the first queer characters in Irish entertainment television were tropes and stereotypes, they represented an important shift in LGBTQ visibility in Irish media. The road to early representations in entertainment media was a hard road paved by gay rights activists, AIDS stigma, and production teams looking for sensationalism. In LGBTQ Visibility, Media, and Sexuality in Ireland, Páraic Kerrigan explores the dynamics of queer visibility and sexuality in Ireland through televised media between 1974 and 2008. Tune in for our chat about Gay Byrne and the Late Late Show, queer soap stars, the AIDS crisis and globalization of Ireland, and the LGBTQ rights tug-of-war that played out in turn-of-the-century television.

Avrill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at Mercyhurst University.

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Jessica Catherine Reuther, "The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey: Portraits of West African Girlhood, 1720–1940" (Indiana UP, 2025) Nov 15, 2025

Show notes

From the 1720s to the 1940s, parents in the kingdom and later colony of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) developed and sustained the common practice of girl fostering, or "entrusting." Transferring their daughters at a young age into foster homes, Dahomeans created complex relationships of mutual obligation, kinship, and caregiving that also exploited girls' labor for the economic benefit of the women who acted as their social mothers. Drawing upon oral tradition, historic images, and collective memories, Jessica Reuther pieces together the fragmentary glimpses of girls' lives contained in colonial archives within the framework of traditional understandings about entrustment. Placing these girls and their social mothers at the center of history brings to light their core contributions to local and global political economies, even as the Dahomean monarchy, global trade, and colonial courts reshaped girlhood norms and fostering practices.

In The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey: Portraits of West African Girlhood, 1720–1940 (Indiana UP, 2025) Reuther reveals that the social, economic, and political changes wrought by the expansion of Dahomey in the eighteenth century, the shift to "legitimate" trade in agricultural products in the nineteenth century, and the imposition of French colonialism in the twentieth all fundamentally altered—and were altered by—the intimate practice of entrusting female children between households. Dahomeans also valorized this process as a crucial component of being "well-raised"—a sentiment that continues into the present, despite widespread Beninese opposition to modern-day forms of child labor.

Dr. Jessica Reuther is an associate professor of African and world history at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, USA. She came to Ball State after earning her PhD in African History from Emory University in Atlanta, GA, in 2016. Dr. Reuther is a historian of Africa, specializing in Atlantic West Africa and French West Africa from the 16th century to the present. She has conducted archival and oral history research in Benin, Senegal, France, Switzerland, and the United States.

You can learn more about her work here.

Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana.

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Michelle Christine Smith, "Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age" (Southern Illinois UP, 2021) Nov 09, 2025

Show notes

Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age (Southern Illinois UP, 2021) focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community—who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women’s work. Author Michelle C. Smith seeks in the communities’ rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members.

This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women’s bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities. The attention to each community’s material practices reveals a gendered ecology, which in many ways squared unevenly with utopian claims. Nevertheless, this volume argues that this utopian moment inaugurated many of the norms and practices of labor that continue to structure women’s lives and opportunities today: the rise of the factory, the shift of labor from home spaces to workplaces, the invention of housework, the role of birth control and childcare, the question of wages, and the feminization of particular kinds of labor.

An impressive and diverse array of archival and material research grounds each chapter’s examination of women’s professional, domestic, or reproductive labor in a particular community. Fleeting though they may seem, the practices and lives of those intentional women, Smith argues, pattern contemporary divisions of work along the vibrant and contentious lines of gender, race, and class and stage the continued search for what is possible.

Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University.

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Nerina Rustomji, "The Beauty of the Houri: Heavenly Virgins and Feminine Ideals" (Oxford UP, 2021) Nov 09, 2025

Show notes

In her scintillating new book, The Beauty of the Houri: Heavenly Virgins, Feminine Ideals(Oxford UP, 2021), Nerina Rustomji presents a fascinating and multilayered intellectual and cultural history of the category of the “Houri” and the multiple ideological projects in which it has been inserted over time and space. Nimbly moving between a vast range of discursive theaters including Western Islamophobic representations of the Houri in the post 9/11 context, early modern and modern French and English Literature, premodern Muslim intellectual traditions, and popular preachers on the internet, Rustomji shows the complexity of this category and its unavailability for a canonical definition. The Beauty of the Houri is intellectual history at its best that combines philological rigor with astute theoretical reflection. And all this Rustomji accomplishes in prose the delightfulness of which competes fiercely with its lucidity.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Julie Fette, "Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature" (Routledge, 2025) Nov 07, 2025

Show notes

Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature (Routledge, 2025) investigates the gender representations that French children's literature transmits to readers today. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, this book grounds its literary analysis in a sociohistorical examination of three key institutions – libraries, book clubs, and subscription magazines – that circulate reading material to children. It shows how French policies, cultural beliefs, and market forces influence the content of children's literature, including tensions between State support for unprofitable artistic endeavors and a belief in children’s right to high-quality products on the one hand, and suspicion of activism as anathema to creativity and fear of losing boy readers on the other. In addition, the notion of universalism, which asserts that equality is best achieved when society is blind to differences, thwarts a diverse and equitable array of literary representations. Nevertheless, conditions are favorable for 21st-century French children's publishers to offer a robust body of richly entertaining egalitarian literature for children.

Guest Julie Fette, author of Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature published in October 2024 by Routledge. Dr. Fette is Associate Professor of French Studies at Rice University where she is also Rice Faculty Scholar at the Center for the Middle East, Baker Institute and a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also the author of Exclusions: Practicing Prejudice in French Law and Medicine, 1920-1945 from Cornell University Press in 2012 and the co-author of the textbook Les Français from Hackett in 2021, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on subjects from gender and professional life in France to teaching French studies in the classroom and online.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean.

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Fang Yu Hu, "Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls Under Japanese Rule" (U Washington Press, 2024) Nov 06, 2025

Show notes

In Good Wife, Wise Mother: Educating Han Taiwanese Girls Under Japanese Rule (U Washington Press, 2024), female education and citizenship serve as a lens through which to examine Taiwan’s uniqueness as a colonial crossroads between Chinese and Japanese ideas and practices. A latecomer to the age of imperialism, Japan used modernization efforts in Taiwan to cast itself as a benevolent force among its colonial subjects and imperial competitors. In contrast to most European colonies, where only elites received an education, in Taiwan Japan built elementary schools intended for the entire population, including girls. In 1897 it developed a program known as “Good Wife, Wise Mother” that sought to transform Han Taiwanese girls into modern Japanese female citizens. Drawing on Japanese and Chinese newspapers, textbooks, oral interviews, and fiction, Fang Yu Hu illustrates how this seemingly progressive project advanced a particular Japanese vision of modernity, womanhood, and citizenship, to which the colonized Han Taiwanese people responded with varying degrees of collaboration, resistance, adaptation, and adoption. Hu also assesses the program’s impact on Taiwan’s class structure, male-female interactions, and political identity both during and after the end of Japanese occupation in 1945. Good Wife, Wise Mother expands the study of Taiwanese history by contributing important gendered and nonelite perspectives. It will be of interest to any historian concerned with questions of modernity, hybridity, and colonial nostalgia.

Fang Yu Hu is assistant professor of History at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona who specializes in modern East Asian history, with a focus on Taiwan, gender, colonialism, and cross-border flows. She has published in the journals ERAS of Monash University and Twentieth-Century China. Her current research focuses on Taiwanese migrants to mainland China and Southeast Asia in the first half of the 20th century.

Li-Ping Chen is a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

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