New Books in Gender

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Victoria Hesford, “Feeling Women’s Liberation” (Duke University Press, 2013). Mar 06, 2015

Show notes

Victoria Hesford is an associated professor of Women and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. Her book Feeling Women’s Liberation (Duke University Press, 2013) examines the pivotal year of 1970 as defining the meaning of “women’s liberation.” Applying a theory of emotions to the rhetoric of mass media and the response of movement participants, Hesford demonstrates how our memory of the movement has been formed by either feelings of attachment, or dis-identification that hide its complexity and heterogeneity. The movement came to represent a radical form of feminism standing against the more staid liberal feminism of Betty Friedan. Instead of ideologically driven, Hesford argues that women’s liberation engaged in the “politics of emotion.” She demonstrates how the visceral media coverage and participant’s experience were mutual constituted in the “feminist-as-lesbian.” The language and multiple images of the feminist as a guerilla fighter, subversive and pathological, evoked the lavender menace and the “woman-identified-woman” within the movement. The lesbian became a defining figure used as a psychic weapon against women, or to denote sexual autonomy and political defiance. Central to her provocative analysis is the often-neglected figure of Kate Millet and her 1970 book Sexual Politics. The media’s outing of Millet, hounding by movement insiders to declare her lesbianism, and the spectacle of a self-fashioning response in the autobiography Flying offers a window into the feelings of betrayal, anger and depression that propelled the movement and evidence of its attachment to definitions of socially acceptable femininity. Instead of focusing on “what really happened,” the political triumphs and failures, Hesford looks to how emotions, both personal and social, shaped the movement and our memories.

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Norma Jones, Maja-Bajac-Carter, Bob Batchelor, “Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014) Feb 25, 2015

Show notes

While there are a number of studies of how women are represented in popular culture, Norma Jones, Maja Bajac-Carter, Bob Batchelor’s collection of essays Heroines of Film and Television: Portrayals in Popular Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)looks at the heroine. From discussions of traditional characters such as Wonder Woman and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, to more unusual heroic women in Kill Bill and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, these essays show the strength of characters presented as champions. Co-editor Norma Jones reviews how the book was compiled, as well as her own contribution to the collection. These three also edited a companion collection, Heroines of Comic Books and Literature: Portrayals in Popular Culture, that grew out of the project behind the first book.

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Kimberly A. Hamlin, “From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America” (U Chicago Press, 2014) Feb 23, 2015

Show notes

Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a history of how a group of women’s rights advocates turned to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to answer the eternal “woman question.” Hamlin’s fascinating intellectual history uncovers how the new evolutionary science provided multiple arguments by which to advance the cause of women’s rights in the home and society. Many scholars are familiar with the Enlightenment, religious, and socialist origins of feminist thought. Hamlin suggests another significant strand of thought offered by the science of human origins. She argues that Darwinism, often with unorthodox interpretations, was effective in overturning a central ideological obstacle to women’s equality–the biblical story of Eve. Charles Darwin’s theory, against his own conservative views, turned upside down traditional ideas about women. Freethinkers, socialist, sexologist seized on evolutionary science to build arguments against recalcitrant traditional views. They asserted that their contemporary culture was a construct of erroneous ideas calling for change, in order to live in accordance to the evolutionary laws of nature. As “reform Darwinists,” Hamlin’s subjects stood against social Darwinism, religious teaching, and custom. Yet, evolutionary science under male control was deployed to reassert women’s subordination. Sex difference as interpreted by many male scientists pointed to female intellectual inferiority. Women, mostly outside the science establishment, called on the evidence of “woman’s experience” against claims of scientific men.Hamlin offers a lucid narrative of how a group of women intervened in a period between the demise of Eve, as the metanarrative for the meaning of womanhood, and the masculinist consolidation of evolutionary science.

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Alina Garcia-Lapuerta, “La Belle Creole” (Chicago Review Press, 2014) Feb 18, 2015

Show notes

One of the fundamental functions of biography is the preservation of stories. But it also acts to resurrect the stories that may have fallen from view, reinvigorating the tales of people who, with the passage of time, have become merely names on plaques. In La Belle Creole:The Cuban Countess Who Captivated Havana, Madrid, and Paris (Chicago Review Press, 2014), Alina Garcia-Lapuerta aims to do just that: vividly drawing the story of Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, a woman who was tremendously famous during her lifetime but who has since fallen into relative obscurity, especially in America. Many Cubans and Cuban Americans will be familiar with her name, but many others will never have heard of her, a misfortune thatGarcia-Lapuerta’s work will hopefully correct.

Just on the surface, there’s a compelling plot: a Cuban girl leaves home and meets with social triumph in Europe, where she is hostess of one of the most famous salons of her day. But its the theme of ex-patriotism, whichGarcia-Lapuerta (an ex-pat herself) elegantly weaves throughout, that is most striking. The longing to return to Cuba and, ultimately, to write about it. Anyone who’s ever lived abroad will recognize the tensions described when Mercedes visits her homeland only to leave it again, but this is a theme that doesn’t always make it into biographies- at least not biographies of people who didn’t live in Paris in the 1920s. It’s even less visible in books about the lives of 19th century figures and, therefore, all the more welcome and provocative here.

Garcia-Lapuerta has done a tricky thing. She’s written a book about someone a lot of people will not have heard of, from a place to which a lot of Americans, at least, will not have been. And yet she makes both the Cuba of old and her heroine feel hauntingly familiar, breathtakingly real.

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Deana A. Rohlinger, “Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America” (Cambridge UP, 2015) Feb 16, 2015

Show notes

Deana A. Rohlinger has just written Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Rohlinger is associate professor of sociology at Florida State University.

In the last several weeks, the podcast has featured a variety of political scientists who study interest groups and social movements. This week, Deana Rohlinger brings her perspective as a sociologist to the subject. She examines the way four policy organizations with an interest in abortion policy (National Right to Life Committee, National Organization of Women, Planned Parenthood Federation, and Concerned Women for America) interact with the media. Rohlinger finds quite different strategies for how to court the media, but also in how each organization responds to crises. She uses interviews with organizational leaders to deepen what we know about how social movements and interest groups employ a media strategy.

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Lisa Tetrault, “The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898” (UNC Press, 2014) Feb 12, 2015

Show notes

Lisa Tetrault received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. Tetrault’s book The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) uncovers the politics behind the creation of an origins myth for women’s rights. Typically, the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the United States is dated to 1848, at the meeting in Seneca Falls, NY. This origins story, however, did not become commonplace until much later, a story not told during the antebellum period, but a story created in response to Reconstruction-era politics with broad-reaching implications for the direction of the movement. The myth also was effective for women’s rights leaders to deal with division within the movement and an attempt to unify a very diverse understanding of women’s rights. The Myth of Seneca Falls, poses a corrective to the narrative of Seneca Falls as the origin of women’s rights. Tetrault’s work brings attention to conflicts in a narrative that often jumps from 1848 to the final triumph–a woman’s right to vote–in 1920. Our author examines the creation of the myth, the lessons it provided, and the ways in which it transformed the women’s movement. Myths, she argues, are not false; rather they serve as shorthand for larger stories. They also neatly obscure conflict and contingency. While scholars have written alternative histories, Tetrault sees Seneca Falls as having undue influence and seeks to decenter the narrative by illuminating its contested nature.

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Stephanie Coontz, “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s” (Basic Books, 2014) Feb 06, 2015

Show notes

Stephanie Coontz is an award-winning social historian, the director of Research and Public Education at the Council for Contemporary Families and teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. In A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (Basic Books, 2014), Coontz reveals why so many women in the early 1960s found Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique (1963) speaking to them personally. Freidan identified an unnamed problem allowing women to see the self-doubt and depression they suffered as no longer a personal issue, but a social one. Coontz’s work is both a social history of women at mid-century and a reception history of Friedan’s book: A book regarded as one of the most influential in the twentieth century and a catalyst for the 1960s women’s movement. Coontz’s narrative provides a vivid picture of the realities and the contraction in the post-war lives of many women. She also critically examines Friedan and responds to the charge that the Feminine Mystique was too white and middle class. Including the voices of minority and working class women’s response to the book, Coontz provides a fresh way for understand Friedan’s legacy. This is not a story only trying to make sense of the past, but shows how the feminine mystique in new guises continues to reproduce itself in contemporary society. Consumerism, the search for meaningful work, and equity between men and women both a home and at work, are enduring issues we all continue to contend with.

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Donald P. Haider-Markel and Jami K. Taylor, “Transgender Rights and Politics” (University of Michigan UP, 2014) Feb 02, 2015

Show notes

Donald P. Haider-Markel and Jami K. Taylor are the editors of Transgender Rights and Politics: Groups, Issue Framing and Policy Adoption (University of Michigan UP, 2014). Haider-Markel is professor of political science and chair at the University of Kansas, Taylor is associate professor of political science and public administration at the University of Toledo.

Last week, Frank Baumgartner came on the podcast to talk about his newest book on policy process theory at the national level of US government. Haider-Markel and Taylor’s new edited volume draws on similar literature, but applies it to state and local politics. They also have collected up an array of excellent research on an understudied issue: transgender politics. Chapters by Anthony Nownes on transgender interest groups and Mitchell Sellers and Rod Colvin on how local governments have adopted transgender policies are particularly noteworthy.

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Jenny Kaminer, “Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture” (Northwestern UP, 2014) Jan 20, 2015

Show notes

Jenny Kaminer‘s new book, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2014) analyzes Russian myths of motherhood over time and in particular, the evolving myths of the figure of the “bad mother.” Her study examines how political, religious, economic, social, and cultural factors affect Russians’ conception of motherhood throughout history: what motherhood is, and what it should be. Kaminer focuses on three critical periods of transformation and consolidation: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. She investigates how good and bad mothers are depicted in various works of literature and culture, from Anna Karenina to media depictions of Chechen female suicide bombers in 2002. Winner of the 2014 Prize for Best Book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women’s Studies from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

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Stephen L. Harp, “Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France” (LSU Press, 2014) Jan 05, 2015

Show notes

In the decades after the Second World War, France became the foremost nudist site in Europe. Stephen L. Harp‘s new book, Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France (Louisiana State University Press, 2014) explains how this came to be. A study of nudist ideas, activity, and sites from the interwar years to the mid-1970s, the book is a fascinating history of the people (the Durville brothers, Kienne de Mongeot, and Albert Lecocq) and places (the Ile du Levant, Montalivet, and Cap d’Agde) that made nude tourism and leisure a major phenomenon in France.

Building on previous scholarship that has explored nudism in different national contexts, Au Naturel is a transnational history that illuminates the movement of bodies, beliefs, and practices across political borders, and the emergence of a postwar European community from a unique perspective. Drawing on a rich archive of materials from the local to the international, Harp reveals that nudism was both cultural and political in its meanings and effects in and beyond France. A history of the body and sexuality, Au Naturel is a story of shifting landscapes and values that will be of tremendous interest to readers across multiple fields.

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