New Books in Women's History

In December of 2011, Oprah Winfrey appeared on The Dr. Oz Show to talk about her new big plans and her inspirations for the future. Oprah replied, “For me at this particular time in my life I recognize that everything is about moving closer to that which is God. And without a full, spiritual center — and I’m not talking about religion — I’m talking about without understanding the fullness from which you’ve come, you can’t really fulfill your supreme moment of destiny. And I think everybody has a supreme moment of destiny.” Oprah has been providing the path to achieve this (Aha!) moment for decades now through the rituals of contemporary consumer culture and spirituality that enable individuals to live their best life. Kathryn Lofton, Professor of Religion at Yale University, cleverly unravels Oprah’s story within the broader context of American religiosity and the academic study of religion in her book Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (University of California Press, 2011). In this excellent work, Lofton contends that modern religion is not something distinct that we can analyze but should be conceived of as the interaction of various modalities, which are often bracketed off as “Spirituality,” “Commodity,” and “Corporatism.” In our interview we explore various topics, weaving in and out of the content of the book, covering politics, public policy, ritual, capitalism, 9/11, among many others. We also had time to discuss freq.uenci.es, a co-curated project funded by the Social Science Research Council, as well as the various reactions to the project from critics on The Immanent Frame. Lofton was a delight to talk to as you can tell from her engaging presence but for those who have not yet read the book be reassured that her personality and sharp insight shines throughout the text. It was a joy to read and there should be no wonder why she has received such a wide response by commentators. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Much ink has been spilled in telling the story of the making of Gone With the Wind– be it the book, the movie, or the subsequent musicals and merchandise. So it’s not only refreshing but downright commendable that in their biography, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2011), Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr. managed to stumble upon a story that has been almost entirely ignored until now. Rather than focusing the biography on an individual involved with Gone With the Wind, the authors explore the life of the novel itself, from its inception through to its future. What emerges from their narrative is a fascinating perspective on the life of a tremendously successful book– a story that’s equal parts legal thriller and manners drama, and peopled by a cast of colorful characters. We’ve flapper Peggy Mitchell, her stern husband, and her lawyer brother, whose Southern affability is put to the test by the slew of glitzy publishing people they encounter in New York, all of whom seem to bungle the novel’s publication in one way or another. Thanks to that bungling, the case of Gone With the Wind provides a crash course in the history of United States copyright law and that may be the enduring legacy of Brown and Wiley’s book. It leaves one with a renewed appreciation for the grit and determination of Miss. Mitchell- an oftimes undervalued literary figure, who fought viciously to retain her authorial rights around the world, during war-time and in an age long before email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The birth of the American republic produced immense and existential challenges to Native people in proximity to the fledgling nation. Perhaps none faced a greater predicament than the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (popularly known as the Iroquois). Divided by the U.S.-English conflict, their landbase ransacked by American soldiers and speculators, their once considerable political power reduced, and their culture threatened by an influx of zealous missionaries — such is what historian Matthew Dennis in his powerful new book, Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), has termed “the colonial crucible.” Yet, Dennis persuades us, “the Seneca story is not mere prologue.” One of the Six Nations residing in what became western New York State, the Seneca adapted to the invasion of their homeland, building upon elements of their culture and selectively embracing change to survive the economic and political transformations of the post-Revolutionary period. The revelations of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, blended with elements of Christianity, yielded a new and powerful religion that rejected white degradation. But in the process, the prophet challenged the powerful position of women in Seneca society, as accusations of witchcraft – newly focused on women – led to violence. As western New York continues its decades long process of deindustrialization, losing population with every closed down factory, the Seneca Nation remains, vibrant as ever. Matthew Dennis’ fascinating new book helps us see just how they did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re all familiar with the film cliche of the little band of soldiers who in ordinary life never would have had met, but who learn to appreciate each other in the battles of World War II. All white, of course: African Americans would have to wait till the integration of the armed forces. But still, there’s a kind of earnest 1940s diversity in those movies: maybe a wide-eyed kid from the farm, a privileged college boy, and a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. With some subplot about a faithful girlfriend, or maybe an unfaithful one, back home. In the Red Army, the situation was a little different. There, the women were snipers, tank drivers, combat pilots, machine gunners, and the like: skilled purveyors of lethal violence, serving side by side with men (and sometimes above them, as their commanding officers). This was the first Soviet generation, educated in co-educational schools where everyone participated in paramilitary exercises and no one took home economics. When the long-awaited war with Germany came, women of this cohort took for granted that they would take up arms. Anna Krylova‘s book, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press, 2010), tells their story. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, letters, oral histories, and state records, Krylova reveals a world in which neither men nor women considered the “woman soldier” to be an oxymoron. And she reveals how this history was thoroughly marginalized after the war. Anna Krylova is associate professor of history at Duke University, and her book is the 2011 winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. It’s a great read for anyone interested in the Second World War – and it’s a thoughtful lesson in the possibilities for reimagining gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For years, biographers have been fascinated by the Mitfords, a quiet aristocratic British family with six beautiful daughters, nearly all of them famous for their controversial and stylish lives. There’s Nancy, the novelist who had a love affair with Charles de Gaulle’s Chief-of Staff; Pamela, the only sister who opted for a quiet life; Diana, the family beauty who married a Guinness then ditched him in favor of the founder of the British Union of Fascists; Unity, who had a crush on Hitler and unsuccessfully attempted to kill herself on the eve of World War II; Jessica, who eloped with a Communist at the age of 17; and Deborah, who married the Duke of Devonshire. In Leslie Brody‘s Irrepressible (Counterpoint Press, 2010), it’s Jessica Mitford–known throughout her life as Decca– who, at long last, has the chance to shine. She was a rebel almost from infancy. As Brody writes, “Soon after Jessica Mitford moved with her family to Swinbrook House in Oxfordshire, she began to plot her escape from it.” Her escape was spectacular, to be sure. As a teenager, she eloped with Winston Churchill’s nephew and ran off to the Spanish War. The couple eventually settled in America, where Mitford would remain after his death, later remarrying and becoming a journalist. Ultimately, she would be most famous for her expose of the American funeral industry, which was published in 1963 as The American Way of Death, but her work on civil rights and social justice was equally influential. Throughout Irrepressible, Brody includes direct quotes that let Mitford’s unique perspective shine through. And, as a white British woman with Communist leanings, Jessica Mitford provides a view of America- a country with an independent streak as fierce as her own- unlike that of any other. She was a “muckraker” in the truest and best sense of the word. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would a Presidential campaign be without a good dose of reproductive politics? To be sure, many of us are surprised to see contraception, and not just abortion, called into question – but maybe that’s because the intensity of abortion politics has allowed us to forget just how recently the issue of contraception was as fraught as the issue of abortion. And in any case, recent tussles over teen access to over-the-counter emergency contraception might have reminded us that debates about contraception are hardly closed. In her new book The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception in the United States(Rutgers University Press, 2011), Heather Munro Prescott helps us to understand the politics of emergency contraception. Initially a side-product from research into infertility, hormonal contraceptives – both the “regular” and the “emergency” kind – became the subject of heated battles in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist health care advocates protested that the medical establishment was pushing potentially unsafe medications on women who were not fully informed of side-effects. With conservatives’ attack on reproductive rights starting in the 1980s, however, feminist health care advocates and the medical profession became allies in the battle for continued access. This alliance bore results in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as the FDA reluctantly agreed to approve over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception (although not for minors). Heather Munro Prescott is a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University. If you care about reproductive rights, you’ll want to take a look at her book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is your gender essential to who you are? If you were a man instead of a woman, or vice versa, would you be a different person? In her new bookThe Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford University Press, 2011), Charlotte Witt found that most people answered that obviously they’d be different if their gender differed – even though many feminist philosopher friends considered gender essentialism to be false. Thus a philosophical inquiry was born: what is gender essentialism, why might it be true, if it is true, and what consequences does this answer have for ourselves and societies? In this engaging volume, Witt – who is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire – argues that a certain form of gender essentialism is true. Gender is the social role that unifies us as social individuals, an ontological category distinct from both human organisms and persons. By distinguishing social individuals from persons, Witt hopes to promote the idea that the point of feminism is not giving women more choices, but about reconfiguring social roles so that they no longer oppress and exploit women. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth West has written an insightful study about the presence of African spirituality in the autobiographies, poetry, speeches and novels of African American women, ranging from Phylis Wheatley to Harriet Wilson to Zora Neale Hurston. West’s book is titled African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being (Lexington Books, 2011). It’s a powerful read! West’s two blubists, literary critics Georgene Bess Montgomery and Dana Williams, do not hold back in expressing their admiration of the work . Both detail how useful the book is to readers, students, and teachers of African American studies. Montgomery writes that “while [the authors West studies] have received much critical attention and analysis, [West’s] analysis is quite original and provocative.” And Williams adds that West’s book “is an important first step in advancing new frameworks through which to read African American literature.” This provocative examination of how Motherland spirituality inflects, influences, and sometimes challenges and often times mingles with Anglo-Christianity as a rhetorical device for black female authors is too important to miss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a whole, the genre of biography trends towards linear narratives–wherein the events of a subject’s life are tracked in the order that they occurred. This makes sense, as it’s how we live our lives, but there are advantages that come with non-linear structure. In the case of Karen Abbott‘s American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life & Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (Random House, 2012), the benefit is that the book reads like a slick, sexy film noir and it is virtually impossible to put down. The life of Gypsy Rose Lee- “this Dorothy Parker in a G-string”, famous for her “burlesque of burlesque”- is perhaps best likened to a Greek drama. The relationship between Gypsy, her controlling mother and the younger sister who stole her name offers enough material for a whole master’s thesis on Freud, and that’s just one of the many tangled relationship dynamics here worthy of analysis. And yet, Abbott exercises masterful control over her colorful cast of characters, all while guiding three separate narrative strands. We enter the narrative at three distinct points and flip between them throughout: Gypsy, post-1939; Gypsy, pre-1939; and the Minsky Brothers burlesque clubs in the 1920s. If you’re not a biographile, the transitions might even slip by unnoticed, incrementally heightening the drama with each page until, at the book’s crescendo, you find you’re almost winded. American Rose is an ambitious story told in an ambitious style and, much like modern art, it looks effortless because it is impeccably well done. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nearly twenty years after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, biographers are not only continuing to tell her story but finding provocative new ways to do so. In particular, a big bravo to William Kuhn for considering the former First Lady in a context that (a) has nothing to with her husbands, and (b) brings fresh perspective. Jackie’s post-“Camelot” years–namely, her marriage to Onassis and her publishing career–are often given short shrift, but Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books (Anchor Books, 2011) steps in to fill the later gap and it’s downright revelatory. What we read reveals much about who we are. That’s the idea behind Reading Jackie and it seems simple enough. But, in viewing Jackie Onassis’s life through the lens of the books she edited, Kuhn produces something quite sophisticated- a nuanced portrait of a thwarted artist for whom reading was a vital means of participating in the art world. As Kuhn writes: “That sense early on of what she could not do was at the nub of Jackie’s self-image as a reader. Coupled with the sense of limitation was a determination to work around it, to participate in the creative and artistic activity that gripped her imagination.” It’s a daring approach and more than a little meta –to write a biography examining a series of books with the claim that they comprise the biographical subject’s autobiography– but Kuhn more than pulls it off. He clearly delights in both his subject and her work, and one leaves Reading Jackie not only with an appreciation of Jackie Onassis’s books, but also a renewed appreciation of her- this woman “who helped put enduring statements of why art matters into print.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices