New Books in Women's History New Books Network

How do unequal societies function? In Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net (Portfolio, 2024), Jesscia Calarco, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, examines how America’s DIY society depends on the labour of mothers and excludes the sorts of social supports present in other countries. This dependence has hugely negative social and individual consequences, as demonstrated by the rich qualitiative and quantitative data examined in the book. Alongside the analysis of the problems and consequences of women’s role in the US, the book also thinks through solutions, demonstrating how much political discourse is far from the collective action that is likely to be effective for social change. An outstanding contribution to social science and contemporary politics, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary social inequalities.
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In Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers (Headpress, 2024), Jared Stearns tells the untold story of the world's most famous X-rated star, who rose to fame as the face of Ivory Snow and the star of Behind the Green Door but struggled to find her true self in a world of sex, scandal, and shattered dreams. Marilyn Chambers was the embodiment of the free-spirited Seventies, the world's most famous X-rated star, and an unappreciated talent whose work in adult films hindered her dreams of becoming a serious actress. Raised in an affluent Connecticut suburb, Marilyn catapulted to fame when it was learned that not only had she starred in the groundbreaking X-rated film, Behind the Green Door but was also the model on the box of Ivory Snow laundry detergent (product tagline: "99 44/100% Pure.") Marilyn was the first woman known primarily for her work in adult films to cross over to mainstream entertainment. She sustained a versatile three-decade career in entertainment, including roles in dramatic plays, a Broadway musical revue, her own television show, and the lead role in David Cronenberg's film Rabid. 
But her success in adult films also proved to be her undoing. Marred by a violent relationship with her abusive husband-manager, Chuck Traynor, she developed the persona of a twenty-four-hour-a-day sex star. In the process, she lost her sense of self and spent much of her life searching for her true identity. With recollections from family and friends, many of whom have never spoken publicly, along with Marilyn's own words, and never-before-published photos, Jared Stearns vividly captures the revolutionary career of one of the twentieth century's most misunderstood icons.
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Amidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism.
In Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press, 2024), Dr. Gale L. Kenny examines this Christian imperial feminism from the women’s missionary movement to create a Christian world order. She shows that this Christian imperial feminism marked a break from an earlier Protestant worldview that focused on moral and racial purity and in which interactions among races were inconceivable. This new approach actually prioritised issues like civil rights and racial integration, as well as the uplift of women, though the racially diverse world Christianity it aspired to was still to be rigidly hierarchically ordered, with white women retaining a privileged place as guardians.
In exposing these dynamics, this book departs from recent scholarship on white evangelical nationalism to focus on the racial politics of white religious liberalism. Christian Imperial Feminism adds a necessary layer to our understanding of religion, gender, and empire.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
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In the eighteenth century, women’s contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives. Their traces were recorded in material ways, through the ink they applied to paper or the artefacts they created with muslin, silk threads, feathers, and shells. Handiwork, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes, and it was deeply connected to colonialism.
In Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Chloe Wigston Smith follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America—in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read—and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. A range of artefacts made by women, including makers of colour, brought the global into conversation with domestic crafts and consequently placed images of empire and colonialism within arm’s reach. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women’s material contributions to the home’s place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
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Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530-1700: Suppression, Migration and Reintegration (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) by Dr. Bronagh Ann McShane investigates the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries on women religious and examines their survival in the following decades, showing how, despite the state's official proscription of vocation living, religious vocation options for women continued in less formal ways.
Dr. McShane explores the experiences of Irish women who travelled to the Continent in pursuit of formal religious vocational formation, covering both those accommodated in English and European continental convents' and those in the Irish convents established in Spanish Flanders and the Iberian Peninsula. Further, this book discusses the revival of religious establishments for women in Ireland from 1629 and outlines the links between these new convents and the Irish foundations abroad.
Overall, this study provides a rich picture of Irish women religious during a period of unprecedented change and upheaval.
 This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
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Selling French Sex: Prostitution, Trafficking, and Global Migrations (Cambridge UP, 2024) is an illuminating account of the cultural, social, and economic history of the sale of 'French sex'. It explores the discourses and experiences surrounding the early twentieth century debate on sex trafficking, which mobilized various international reform movements to combat the coerced prostitution of young women abroad. According to popular legend and empirical studies, French women were present in brothels all over the world, where they were the most desired and best paid in the business. But were they trafficking victims or willing migrants? In this timely book, Elisa Camiscioli reconstructs the networks and mechanisms of cross-border migrations for sexual labor; elucidates women's motives for leaving and staying; and explains why French migrant sexual labor occupied such a prominent place in the underworld of prostitution, as well as in the imaginaries of anti-trafficking campaigners, immigration officials, and ordinary consumers of vice.
Elisa Camiscioli is a professor of history at Binghamton University. She specializes in immigration to and from France, sex trafficking, and race and sexual politics in modern France and its empire. She completed a B.A., cum laude, at University of Pennsylvania and earned a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. In addition to a number of peer-reviewed articles, she is the author of Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Duke University Press. 2009). Dr. Camiscioli was co-editor of the Journal of Women's History from 2015 to 2020.
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