As a historian of race and gender in European women’s history, “misbehaving” women confound me! I am rendered speechless when women negate their own humanity in the drive toward the same power structures that subjugate them. Vulnerable women who were often in the clutches of those same women–and yet are unrelenting in their determination to survive within systems to which others have relegated them–inspire me. These books and their stories take women’s lives–their oft-horrible choices, their scandalous mistakes, and their demands for autonomy–seriously. I hope you find their stories as compelling as I do!
Once I settled in to read the life story of the scandalous 19th-century French femme fatale Marguerite (Meg) Steinheil, I didn’t get back up until I finished. What a ride! Then, I immediately went back to the beginning and read it again.
Meg became notorious in 1899 for literally being in the bed (and the clutches) of the French president when he suddenly died. But wait, there’s more! That’s not even the most incredible moment in her life story. At one point, I started yelling at the book: "Meg, what, no!"
This book has everything you want in a story: murder, sex, scandal, and an unlikely heroine’s pluck and poignancy. History that reads like a novel. What more could you want?
Sex, corruption, and power: the rise and fall of the Red Widow of Paris
Paris, 1889:Margeurite Steinheil is a woman with ambition. But having been born into a middle-class family and trapped in a marriage to a failed artist twenty years her senior, she knows her options are limited.
Determined to fashion herself into a new woman, Meg orchestrates a scandalous plan with her most powerful resource: her body. Amid the dazzling glamor, art, and romance of bourgeois Paris, she takes elite men as her lovers, charming her way into the good graces of the rich and powerful. Her ambitions,…
So many books about slavery and slaveholders focus on men. They either ignore white women or relegate them to passive observers in the world’s most “peculiar institution.” This book shatters that argument, detailing in often excruciating details how white women in the American South not only had a stake in enslavement but were enthusiastic participants.
From its very opening, recalling a little white girl splitting up her Black enslaved mammy’s family in a fit of anger, these stories made me seethe with rage. You will never look at the institution of slavery–and the role of white women at its center–in the same way again.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History: a bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy
"Stunning."-Rebecca Onion, Slate
"Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present."-Parul Sehgal, New York Times
"Bracingly revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective."-Nicholas Guyatt, New York Review of Books
Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning…
This book astonishes me every time I open its pages, and I return to these stories again and again. Taking the 18th-century urban city of Bridgetown, Barbados, as its canvas, Fuentes uncovers, often using fragmentary sources, the lives of Black enslaved and free women of color, narrating their violent stories of survival in ways that broke my heart.
Equally important, the power of Fuentes’ writing forces me to interrogate how histories of vulnerable women are produced while they are alive and how to reckon with how archives produce and reinscribe violence on their disfigured bodies after death. It is impossible not to feel the full weight of my responsibility as a scholar after reading this book.
It is the first book I hand to students who want to write about Black women, regardless of their geographic interests.
In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Fuentes takes us through the streets of Bridgetown with an enslaved runaway; inside a brothel run by a freed woman of color; in the midst of a white urban household in sexual chaos; to the gallows where enslaved people were executed; and within violent scenes of enslaved women's punishments. In the process, Fuentes interrogates the archive and…
This isn’t a recent book, but it remains one of my favorite dives into the underworld! Who doesn’t like a salacious rag sheet or a grisly murder? It focuses on sexual danger in Victorian London and has everything: tabloid journalism, child prostitution, and narratives about Jack the Ripper and the “bad women” he killed!
All these stories uncover the ways that the general masses made sense of new sexual categories and illuminate how legislators and politicians used those categories to both challenge and push women out of public spaces and back into so-called traditional gender roles.
I remain fascinated by how the story of a serial killer could be subverted to instead denigrate white women (racialized as Other because of class) who were in public spaces where they didn’t belong. Or how often those same working-class white women used the ideas of sexual danger to show that it was, in fact, men and their debased sexual proclivities who were the actual problem.
From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction. Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In…
In Central Park, there used to be a statue of J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology.” Mercifully, it was removed in 2018, but the memory of his and other white doctor’s butchery on the bodies of several enslaved women isn’t so easily erased.
This book uncovers how Sims performed experimental (and anesthetized) cesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on powerless Black women and scores of poor Irish women. In turn, those medical “breakthroughs,” which were medical experimentations, were used to benefit middle–and upper-class white women’s reproductive lives. While properly eviscerating Sims, Owens also highlights the medical skills of the same enslaved women disregarded by doctors.
I was infuriated at the mental hopscotch needed to render these women both skilled practitioners and nameless bodies to be cut up at will. You won’t feel good when you finish reading this essential book, but you will remember Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsy long after you finish reading because those women and others with no names recorded are the only ones that matter.
The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistulae repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as ""medical superbodies"" highly suited for medical experimentation.
In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as…
My book shows how these literary and visual depictions of Black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution.
Sarah Baartmann, known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination and showed how her display embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl who was purchased as a house pet and brought to France, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and examines how the French appropriated Black female identity through these representations. Finally, the demonization of Jeanne Duval, a longtime lover of poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of Black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated.
I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…
Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation
Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.
First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…
