New Books in Gender

Latest Episodes:

Helen Glew, “Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900-1955” (Manchester UP, 2016) Feb 18, 2017

Show notes

What role has gender played in government institutions? In Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council 1900-1955, Helen Glew, a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Westminster uses detailed case studies of the Post Office, London County Council, and the British Civil Service to explain this crucial question. The book explores the social, economic and cultural setting for the idea of ‘women’s work’ in British state bureaucracy, looking at the barriers confronting women and their resistance to these constraints. The book uses rich historical evidence to analyse campaigns for equal pay, along with the eventual end of the bar to married women in the Civil Service. The book offers a new gendered perspective on organisations that are crucial to understanding British society at the start of the twentieth century. Clear, engaging and well written, the book will be of interest to a general audience, as well as to academics and historians.

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Tamar Carroll, “Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty and Feminist Activism” (U. North Carolina Press, 2015) Feb 14, 2017

Show notes

Tamar Carroll is an Assistant Professor of History at Rochester Institute of Technology and the Program Director for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. Her book, Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty and Feminist Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), focuses on three intertwined case studies of grassroots activism in New York from the 1950s through 1990s. She begins by examining low-income women’s anti-poverty activism in the 1950s and 1960s, then turns to neighborhood-based working-class feminist organizing in the 1970s, and concludes by exploring AIDS and women’s health activism in the 1980s and 1990s.

By examining organizational records, newspaper articles, oral histories, films and photos, Carroll reconstructs how ordinary people created change through coalitions that crossed lines of gender, race and class. Her work profiles previously understudied organizations including Mobilization for Youth, the National Congress of Neighborhood Women, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM!). Carroll challenges previous historians who “view political movements based on difference–a core value of identity politics — as a hindrance to social movements seeking to expand social justice,” by showing the methods groups used to build coalitions that could address differences of experience and ultimately had more of an impact as a result (x). Carroll recently curated a complimentary exhibit called “Whose Streets? Our Streets!: New York City, 1980-2000” about activism in New York from 1980-2000, currently on display at the Bronx Documentary Center and digitally. Listeners will find her examination of activism during decades of conservative political power particularly relevant to current events.

Isabell Moore is a PhD Student in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on social movements in the 20th century and she is involved in activism for racial, gender, economic and queer justice.

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Nancy Weiss Malkiel, ‘Keep the Damned Women Out’: The Struggle for Coeducation” (Princeton UP, 2016) Feb 13, 2017

Show notes

Within the context of the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, elite institutions of higher education began to feel pressure to open their doors to women. In ‘Keep the Damned Women Out’: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton University Press, 2015), an expansive study in institutional decision making, Nancy Weiss Malkiel analyzes how institutions ultimately decided to approach coeducation and what their institutions would ultimately look like following this radical change. By using examples from both the United States and the United Kingdom, one gets a sense of how men at these institutions viewed coeducation, how women who ended up attending these schools reacted, and how traditionally women-only institutions handled the change. Finally, Nancy Weiss Malkiel answers the important set of questions within this move toward coeducation: what did coeducation do and what did it not do? Nancy Weiss Malkiel is emerita professor of history at Princeton University.

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Carol Hardy-Fanta and Dianne Pinderhughes, “Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in 21st Century America” (Cambridge UP, 2017) Feb 06, 2017

Show notes

This week on the podcast, I speak with Carol Hardy-Fanta and Dianne Pinderhughes, the co-authors (along with Pei-te Lien and Christine Marie Sierra) of Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in 21st Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Hardy-Fanta is Senior Fellow at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Pinderhughes is University of Notre Dame Presidential Faculty Fellow as well as Professor in the Departments of Political Science and Africana Studies, and chair of the department of Africana Studies.

Based on comprehensive data from the Gender and Multicultural Leadership (GMCL) National Database and Survey, Contested Transformations provides a baseline portrait of Black, Latino, Asian American, and American Indian elected officials at national, state, and local levels of government. The book presents a complex picture of office holders across race and gender groups and the various backgrounds, paths to public office, leadership roles, and policy positions. The authors argue that the advances in political leadership by people of color are transforming American politics, but these gains have been hard fought and struggles for equality continue.

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Robyn C. Spencer, “The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland” (Duke UP, 2016) Feb 01, 2017

Show notes

As the first substantive account of the birthplace of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Robyn C. Spencer’s The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Duke University Press, 2016) rewrites elitist accounts that narrowly defined the party by its male leaders and masculine militarism. With a panoramic and critical lens on the role that gender politics played in effecting and affecting the Revolution – an internal and external activist project of overcoming oppression – Spencer’s organisational history weaves the urban parameters of Oakland, California, into a national and international narrative of racial consciousness.

A book that Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams, has said “tears down myths and distortions,” The Revolution Has Come traverses the BPP’s uncritical embrace of heteropatriachy in self-defense tactics, the dialectic relationship of state oppression and Black Women’s leadership of the party, the role of community programs in reshaping notions of masculinity and the personal toll of sexual double-standards in unspoken dating rules. Using archival and interview research that includes artwork, wiretap transcripts, poems, trial documents and the BPP’s newsletter, Spencer provides an example of historical scholarship that forefronts the voices and mouthpieces of the BPP to creates a unique intimacy with the “coming of age” of the men and women who set the groundwork for current iterations of Black resistance. In the words of Spencer herself, “this book is right on time,” and is necessary reading for activists and scholars alike who are attempting to define the gendered assumptions and history of strength, self-care and endurance.

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Steve Tripp, “Ty Cobb, Baseball, and American Manhood” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) Jan 30, 2017

Show notes

Many scholars of baseball and American sports have focused on Ty Cobb as an integral and controversial character in the history of baseball. However, scholars have ignored the ways in which the story of Ty Cobb intersects with ideas of turn-of-the-century masculinity and honor. Steve Tripp in his new book Ty Cobb, Baseball, and American Manhood (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) explores the ways in which Cobb proved to be an interesting case study in the role that manhood played in the lives of men that found themselves in a changing American landscape. Tripp argues that the men in Cobb’s life and the values they embodied–honor, personal autonomy, nerve, and will–played an integral role in Cobb’s formation of his own masculinity. Not only does Tripp focus on Cobb, but the people that granted him fame and disdain: the fans of turn-of-the-century baseball. Steve Tripp is currently Professor of History at Grand Valley State University.

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Holly Charles, “Velvet” (AuthorHouse, 2013) Jan 25, 2017

Show notes

Have you ever wondered about your family history, and how family traditions or secrets through the years may affect you, your behavior, and major aspects of your life? Velvet (AuthorHouse, 2013) begins with Ludie, a young, unwed mother escaping reality down a dusty Southern road. Author Holly Charles also found a way to escape reality; or, rather, found a means to cope with reality years ago when she first began to write about her complicated relationship with her mother. It was through her own extensive research and many meaningful conversations with her grandmother that she identified several common themes in mother/daughter relationships particularly in (but not exclusive to) the African American community.

All mothers, regardless of race and culture, seek to protect their children from the demons and disappointments they themselves have been hindered by. Trying to spare their own daughters the pangs of womanhood and colorist ideals causes African American mothers to reproduce their own personal feelings of inferiority, fear and lack of esteem. Velvet is series of vignettes that chronicles poignant conversations and pivotal moments in the lives of four generations of women, all connected by blood, circumstance and the common tug-of-war that exists between mother and daughter.

Holly Charles was raised just north of Chicago and attended Purdue University for her undergraduate studies. She later earned a graduate degree in English from Prairie View A&M University. Writing has been a therapeutic outlet for her since childhood, whether through music, poetry or prose. Her personal journey to find herself as a woman and as a writer became her graduate thesis: Velvet: the Burden of Melanin and Motherhood, which has now been transformed into her first book, Velvet. In addition to her work as a writer, Charles teaches English to high school students through a Houston-area community college. She will debut her first stage play, In All Thy Getting, this spring at Houston’s Ensemble Theater.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Sara L. Crosby, “Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America” (U. Iowa Press, 2016) Jan 20, 2017

Show notes

In this episode of the H-Law Legal History Podcast I talk with Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University at Marion, Sara L. Crosby about her new book, Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America (University of Iowa Press, 2016). Crosby discusses how the trope of the female poisoner permeated popular literature in the mid-nineteenth century. In her analysis of the 1840 murder trial of Hannah Kinney, we see how the partisan press used the accused as a vessel through which to fight-out central political battles of the day. We then see how jury decisions may serve as a metric for determining which metaphors and cultural frames are prevailing at a point in time. Following a popular metaphor enables Crosby to track the cultural tides influencing law and politics in Jacksonian America.

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Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva, “The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise” (U. Wisconsin Press, 2013) Jan 09, 2017

Show notes

The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) by Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva casts a new look at the traditional representation of Russian women and village life in scholarship. Grounding the imagery of a Russian woman in the network of her relationship with her family and the larger community, Olson and Adonyeva show how age and gender shape village communities and traditional lifestyle. Previously, Olson and Adonyeva argue, women have been excluded from the folklore tradition mainly because their performances took place in private rather than public setting, and thus were either not accessible for, or discounted in scholarship. The private character of these performances, however, endows women with a larger agency in preserving and negotiating tradition. Through the discussions of aspects and practices of village life as marriage and courtship, death, memory, motherhood, magic, or singing over the course of three generations, the images of Russian village woman arise as very different from their habitual depiction as “victims of oppressive patriarchy.” Olson and Adonyeva employ a broad analytical framework relying on a set of tools of anthropology, folklore studies, linguistics, psychology and literature studies to recover the previously silenced female voices and tell a fascinating story which challenges our understanding of the lives and societal roles of Russian women.

Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literratura.

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Marcia Aldrich, “Waveform: 21st-Century Essays by Women” (U of Georgia Press, 2016) Jan 04, 2017

Show notes

Back in 2013, in The New York Times, essayist Christy Wampole declared that we are in a moment of “the essayification of everything.” She noted how not only the genre, but also the genres inventor, Michel de Montaigne, seemed to be popping up everywhere and she saw the essay “a talisman of our times.” Why? What about the essay struck her as so current, so important? Wampole thought that “the genre and its spirit provide an alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary America.” The essay is the opposite of the rant, the polemic, the click-bait, the crude headline, and the stupid sound-byte. The essay invites complexity, contradiction, nuance–all of those qualities that mark the real experience of our public and private lives. Essays want to reckon with the rich immensity that is in us and is us.

Now, if you’re like me and feel despair about the degree of dogmatic thinking that now dominates our social and political life in 2017, if you hate the fact that, say, a hastily composed tweet by a recently elected official can clog our public debate and prevent us from addressing issues that demand attention to complexity, contradiction, and nuance, then I encourage you to check out a new collection of essays edited by Marcia Aldrich. Its entitled Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women (University of Georgia Press, 2016) and includes many of the best essayists in America. In essays by Cheryl Strayed, Roxanne Gay, Dana Tommasino, and Aldrich herself, the essay achieves its fullest potential as Wampole described it in 2013. The essay’s spirit, she proclaimed, “resists closed-ended, hierarchical thinking and encourages both writer and reader to postpone their verdict on life. It is an invitation to maintain the elasticity of mind and to get comfortable with the worlds inherent ambivalence. And, most importantly, it is an imaginative rehearsal of what isn’t but could be.”

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