Sarah A. Bendall, "Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This very structured form, created using garments called bodies and farthingales, existed in various ex...
28 Apr 202451min
Leigh Gilmore, "The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women" (Columbia UP, 2023)
The #MeToo movement inspired millions to testify to the widespread experience of sexual violence. More broadly, it shifted the deeply ingrained response to women’s accounts of sexual violence from dou...
27 Apr 202448min
Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration
Today’s book is: Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration (Common Threads Press, 2024), by Dr. Isabella Rosner, which considers how for centuries, people have stitched in good times and in bad,...
25 Apr 202446min
Julie Peakman, "Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis" (Reaktion, 2024)
Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Julie Peakman investigates the sex lives of women from 1680 to 1830, the period known as the long eighteenth century....
22 Apr 202438min
Diana Chapman Walsh, "The Claims of Life: A Memoir" (MIT Press, 2023)
The engaging memoir of a legendary president of Wellesley College known for authentic and open-hearted leadership, who drove innovation with power and love. The Claims of Life: A Memoir (The MIT Press...
21 Apr 20241h 12min
Jessica Cox, "Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain" (The History Press, 2023)
Covering a fascinating period of population growth, high infant mortality and deep social inequality, rapid medical advances and pseudoscientific quackery, Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal ...
21 Apr 202437min
Tanisha Ford, "Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement" (Amistad Press, 2024)
An engrossing social history of the unsinkable Mollie Moon, the stylish founder of the National Urban League Guild and fundraiser extraordinaire who reigned over the glittering "Beaux Arts Ball,” the ...
19 Apr 202434min
Philip Freeman, "Two Lives of Saint Brigid" (Four Courts Press, 2024)
St. Brigid is the earliest and best-known of the female saints of Ireland. In the generation after St. Patrick, she established a monastery for men and women at Kildare which became one of the most po...
17 Apr 202424min
