New Books in Gender

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Mia E. Bay, et al., “Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women” (UNC Press, 2015) Jul 26, 2015

Show notes

Mia Bay is a professor of history at Rutgers University, and Director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity. She is co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina, 2015). Bay and her co-authors have brought together a strikingly good collection of fifteen essays that presents us with a sampling of a neglected field of thought. All focus on black women of the diaspora in North America, the Caribbean and Africa as subjects of critical thought and articulators of ideas on a wide variety of subjects. The authors demonstrate how black women lived and thought at the intersection of both race and gender. As a distinct field, the growth of black women’s intellectual history has suffered from several handicaps including resistance within the field of intellectual history. As Black men are often the focus as defenders of their race, black women are often portrayed as activists; doers rather than thinkers. The informal nature of much of black women’s thought, the lack of formal education and the use of religious language makes them appear as inarticulate in matters of racial and gender politics. The scarcity of written texts, particularly for the eighteen-century and much of the nineteenth, renders constructing a history of black women’s thought a project akin to archeology; a limitation the writers readily take up as a challenge. The authors appeal to social history influencing the wider acceptance of non-elite thought, and feminist scholarship as bringing attention to the field as worthy of study. The fifteen essays cover a range of topics including religion, challenges to race science, the meaning of black women’s bodies, respectability, political theory, and feminism. The entire collection is an excellent source and a promising movement toward constructing a transnational history of black women’s thought.

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Megan Threlkeld, “Pan-American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) Jul 21, 2015

Show notes

Megan Threlkeld is an associate professor of history at Denison University. Her book Pan-American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) provides a rich transnational examination of the years following World War I and American women activists who saw themselves global leaders in promoting women’s rights and international peace. U.S. internationalists such as Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Doris Stevens sought to build friendships with Mexican women, including educator Margarita Robles de Mendoza and feminist Elena Torres. They established new organizations, sponsored conferences and rallied for peaceful relations between the two countries at a time of tense or broken diplomatic ties. The efforts at an apolitical “human internationalism” were complicated by differences in ideologies, and cross-cultural misunderstanding that took for granted that Mexican women wanted the same political rights as U.S. women. To U.S. women, Mexican nationalism appeared as an obstacle while the revolutionary spirit of Mexico inspired its female citizens to focused on wide-ranging social reform and international economic justice. Despite failures internationalism endured through women’s political involvement in the Peace with Mexico campaign, and the establishment of the Inter-American Commission on Women. Pan American Women exposes the ideological and racist views that brought failure to building an inter-American movement for peace and equality and illuminates the role of U.S. feminism and women’s activism in forwarding imperialism abroad.

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Meredith K. Ray, “Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy” (Harvard UP, 2015) Jul 08, 2015

Show notes

According to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Exploring the work of Fonte and that of many other incredible women, Meredith K. Ray‘s new book explores women’s contributions to the landscape of scientific culture in early modern Italy from about 1500 to 1623. Women in this period were engaging with science in the home, at court, in vernacular literature, in academies, in salons, and in letters, and Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2015) looks both at women’s practical engagements with science and with their literary engagements with natural philosophy.

Ch. 1 brings us to the Romagna, and to the formidable Caterina Sforza’s experiments with alchemical recipes as compiled in a manuscript that exists today in only a single manuscript copy. Both recipes and secrets were forms of currency in this context, and Ch. 2 looks at the vogue for printed “books of secrets” in sixteenth century Italy. This chapter pays special attention to the influential Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont (1555) and the Secrets of Signora Isabella Cortese, while also exploring the influence of books of secrets on other early modern literary genres including vernacular treatises, dialogues, and letter collections. Ch. 3 look at the literature of debate over women, or querelle des femmes that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, looking particularly closely at the intertwining discourses about women and science in Moderata Fonte’s writing of chivalric romance and dialogue, and in Lucrezia Marinella’s epic poetry and pastoral writing. Ch. 4 moves us to Padua and Rome, where women had begun, by the early seventeenth century, to participate in scientific discourse in more formal ways. Here, Ray looks closely at Camilla Erculiani’s letters on natural philosophy (1584) that defended women’s aptitude for science, and at her networking with scientific communities in Poland and her eventual questioning by the Inquisition. The chapter then turns to Margherita Sarrocchi’s work, her epic poem Scanderbeide, and her fascinating relationship with Galileo. It is a fascinating book that will be of interest to readers eager to learn more about the history of science, literature, and/or women in early modernity. If you listen closely to the interview, you’ll also hear me comparing Caterina Sforza to Doritos. Enjoy!

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Jonathan Eig, “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution” (Norton, 2014) Jul 03, 2015

Show notes

Jonathan Eig is a New York Times best-selling author of four books and former journalist for the Wall Street Journal. His book The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2014) gives us a lively narrative history of the development and marketing of the birth control pill. He presents us with four risk-taking outsiders whose path became intertwined in the pursuit of a reliable and simple contraceptive. The feminist Margaret Sanger, in her campaign for the rights of women, sought a reliable birth control method as a means to sexual and social liberation. The genius scientist Gregory Pincus’s research stretched the boundaries of law and ethics and tied him to the business interest of Searle pharmaceuticals. The wealthy socialite Katharine McCormick’s singular focus and funding kept the research going. The handsome promoter John Rock, a Catholic infertility doctor, was willing to go against his church’s teaching and provide untested drugs to desperate patients. The story begins in the radical and sexually freewheeling Greenwich Village of the early twentieth century. Eig follows Sanger’s crusade for birth control information, cultural change, scientific victories and defeats, and the marketing of what became the first FDA-approved contraceptive pill in 1960. This is a well-researched and riveting story of four exceptional people and a revolution in the intimate lives of women and men. The birth control pill forever changed how we think about marriage, sexuality, and parenting.

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Claire Virginia Eby, “Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) Jun 23, 2015

Show notes

Clare Virginia Eby is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. In Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Eby examines the origins of how we think of marriage through the theoretical and experimental reform of the institution in...

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Anita M. Harris, “Ithaca Diaries: Coming of Age in the 1960s” (Cambridge Common Press, 2014) Jun 20, 2015

Show notes

Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll. That’s the stereotypical view of the 1960s. But in her memoir, Ithaca Diaries, Coming of Age in the 1960s (Cambridge Common Press, 2014), journalist and writer Anita M. Harris tells a more nuanced story about her tumultuous undergraduate years at Cornell University.

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Julie Billaud, “Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) Jun 10, 2015

Show notes

Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) by Julie Billaud is a fascinating account of women and the state and ongoing ‘reconstruction’ projects in post-war Afghanistan. The book moves through places such as gender empowerment training programmes and women’s dormitories, and analyses such topics as the law and veiling in public. Subtle and engaging, Kabul Carnival is a rare and much needed anthropological insight into women’s lives in Afghanistan.

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Marion Holmes Katz, “Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice” Columbia University Press, 2014 Jun 02, 2015

Show notes

Recently, there have been various debates within the Muslim community over women’s mosque attendance. While contemporary questions of modern society structure current conversations, this question, ‘may a Muslim woman go to the mosque,’ is not a new one. In Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice (Columbia University Press, 2014), Marion Holmes Katz, Professor of Islamic Studies at New York University, traces the juristic debates around women’s mosque attendance. Katz outlines the various arguments, caveats, and positions of legal scholars in the major schools of law and demonstrates that despite some differing opinions there was generally a downward progression towards gendered exclusion in mosques. were engaged in at the mosque, the time of day, the permission of their husbands or guardians, attire, and the multitude of conditions that needed to be met. Later interpreters feared women’s presence in the mosque because they argued it stirred sexual temptation. Katz pairs these legal discourses with evidence of women’s social practice in the Middle East and North Africa from the earliest historical accounts through the Ottoman period. In our conversation we discuss types of mosque actdivities, Mamluk Cairo, women’s educational participation, the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the transmission of knowledge, European travelers accounts of Muslim women, night prayers, mosque construction, debates about the mosque in Mecca, and modern developments in legal discussions during the 20th century.

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Robin James, “Resistance and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism and Neo-Liberalism” (Zero Books, 2015) Jun 02, 2015

Show notes

How are contemporary pop culture ideas about resilience used by Neoliberal capitalism? Robin James addresses this question using philosophy of music (and by doing philosophy through music) in her new book Resistance and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, and Neoliberalism (Zero Books, 2015). The book opens with a discussion of Calvin Harris (& Florence Welch’s) Sweet Nothing as a way into theargument that ‘resilience discourse is what ties contemporary pop music aesthetics to neoliberal capitalism and racism/sexism’. James combines musicological analysis of specific techniques, such as soars, stutters and stops, with an exploration of the aesthetics of pop videos and a critical theoretical framework. In particular the book connects theories of biopower and biopolitics, along a critical take on gender and ethnicity, to the work of Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Rihanna. The text also offers a consideration of alternatives, whether those that have already been incorporatedinto contemporary pop, such the techniques and sounds of Atari Teenage Riot, or new strategies and new forms that might be beyond profit, beyond capital, and represent ‘bad investments’ to suck the life fromMulti-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy. The book will interest a range of humanities and social science scholars, as well as anyone keen to know more about popular music and critical theory. To learn more about Dr James work read her blog here.

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Eva Illouz, “Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best-Sellers, and Society” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) Apr 27, 2015

Show notes

Eva Illouz is professor of sociology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and president of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her book Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey , Best Sellers, and Society (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a feminist-sociological analysis of the soft pornographic novel Fifty Shades of Grey. The book, and its two sequels written by E.L. James, began as fan fiction and subsequently reached record-breaking sales as an e-book. With two central characters, a sexual ingenue and a powerful enigmatic anti-hero, the novel is poorly written and formulaic, yet managed to capture the imagination of millions of women. Illouz tells us how the novel was the perfect combination of fantasy and self-help delivered to an audience increasingly confuse and uncertain in negotiating their heterosexual relationships. With its sadomasochistic sex and images of female submission and male dominance, Fifty Shades of Grey, is a gothic romance adapted to modern sexual dilemmas and emotional confusion. Combining the romantic fantasy and self-help genres, it acts a catalyst for renegotiating heterosexual relationships. By placing the novel within the history of the commodification of the book, the dynamics of the sexual marketplace, and the sociology of sexuality, Illouz locates Fifty Shades of Grey in the contemporary context. The reader of Hard-Core Romance will find an intriguing argument for why after feminism and the sexual revolution dominance and submission, resistance and surrender, remain as enigmas of modern relationships.

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