New Books in Women's History25 Sep 2025

Debra Michals, "She's the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

In the years after World War II, as women were being pushed from wartime jobs for returning soldiers, government and business leaders—and women themselves—saw small business ownership as a viable economic solution. In just five years, US women owned nearly a million of the nation’s businesses. In the decades since, women have moved increasingly into business ownership, often outpacing male start-ups so that today, they own more than fourteen million businesses, 40 percent of all US companies.

She's the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II (Rutgers UP, 2025) by Dr. Debra Michals chronicles the forces that made entrepreneurship attractive to women. In rich detail, Dr. Michals shares the stories of the countless women of all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities who contributed to this important history. The book also explores the intersection of women’s personal choices within changing social, political, and economic factors, such as the rising divorce rates of the 1960s and 1970s, ongoing workplace and credit discrimination, civil and women’s rights activism and activist entrepreneurs, the 1970s recession and 1980s “Reagan Revolution,” and more recently, the internet, crowd-funding, and social entrepreneurship.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Episoder(600)

Christina E. Firpo, "Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam" (Columbia UP, 2025)

During the interwar years, Vietnamese society witnessed a rapid change in the way women looked. Rejecting the model of a sequestered maiden with blackened teeth and long hair, they embraced a vivid pa...

16 Sep 53min

Erin Maglaquel "Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body" (Astra House, 2026)

Erin Maglaque's new book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body (Astra House, 2026), is a work of early modern history and an account of what it is like to study the past as an embodied person....

8 Sep 59min

Sara McDougall, "Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor" (Princeton UP, 2026)

In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbor...

7 Sep 1h 12min

Autumn Lorimer Linford, "Extra! Extra! A History of America's Girl Newsies" (U Nebraska Press, 2026)

American pop culture loves newsies. The children who bawled out headlines and sold newspapers on city streets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been depicted countless times in...

5 Sep 34min

Catherine Reyes-Housholder, "How Women Win Presidential Elections in Latin America" (Temple UP, 2026)

Between 1990 and 2020, women candidates won only 6% of the world’s presidential races. How Women Win Presidential Elections in Latin America (Temple University Press, 2026) explains the factors, strat...

28 Aug 55min

Shelly Lundberg "How Economics Discovered Women: Bringing Gender Economics into the Twenty-First Century" (U California Press, 2026)

In the 1970s, as women started to enter the labor force in unprecedented numbers, economists began to examine their roles as economic actors. The result was the rise of gender economics, now a major s...

25 Aug 45min

Jane Draycott, "Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome" (Yale UP, 2025)

Fulvia was born into wealth, privilege, and prestige around the year 80 BCE, yet there was nothing inherently special about her—she was not a saint, an empress, or a queen. But during the years leadin...

22 Aug 1h 1min

Rick Ramseyer, "Girl Without a Country: The Untold Story of a Landmark Fight for U.S. Citizenship" (Purdue UP, 2026)

Should willingness to kill be a requirement for U.S. citizenship? Girl Without a Country: The Untold Story of a Landmark Fight for U.S. Citizenship (Purdue University Press, 2026) by Rick Ramseyer tel...

15 Aug 24min