New Books in Women's History

Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell UP, 2024) gives an historical account of the evolution of the matchmaking business during the Second Empire in France. The book explores how the matchmaking industry at the Postrevolutionary France was shaped by commodified stories of hope and fantasy, including democratization of the matchmaking business, which aroused the interest of democratized French audience, including lower-middle-class individuals, through exaggerated advertisements in the media productions. The book also gives an exposition on the period of French Revolution and how it significantly altered family legislation and marriage practices, leading to increased freedom in spouse selection and the rise of professional matchmakers like Claude Viome. The book highlights how the revolutionary reforms impact on marriage of the French populace, including the age reduction policy for the majority and lifting of parental consent for marriage, as well as introducing divorce by mutual consent in 1792.

According to Andrea Mansker, the changes in age and divorce policy, combined with increased mobility and changing social patterns in Paris, encouraged young people across classes to demand more freedom in spouse selection, leading Claude Viome to market his services as a way to bypass traditional family negotiations in courtship. The book relates the1804 Civil Code, explaining how it preserved revolutionary reforms like equality before the law but restored traditional family structures by treating married women and children as legal minors under their husband's authority. It exposes how divorce became less common and eventually outlawed in 1816, and detailed the French Supreme Court's 1855 ruling against matchmaker contracts, which viewed marriage as a sacred agreement distinct from commercial transactions. 

Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ | LinkedIn here | ORCID here | Meta here |
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Meet the Nichols sisters-Clara, Alice, and Cornelia "Nell"-and discover the thoughts and sentiments of three commonplace, working-class women through their never-before-published correspondence. Clara, the eldest and most responsible sister, whose ambitions are thwarted by her gender; Alice, the middle sister, dependable and independent minded, who finds herself living far from Michigan on the Kansas frontier; and Nell, the youngest and most headstrong of the three, whom we come to know the best. Her letters from 1858 to 1898 show her evolution from an opinionated eighteen-year-old young woman to middle-aged wife and mother, determined despite legal and cultural obstacles to maintain her dignity in a troubled marriage and difficult family.

In Dearest Clara: The Correspondence of the Nichols Sisters, 1858-1898 (Palmetto, 2025) through their letters, we witness how the sisters navigate personal struggles, family responsibilities, and economic hardships. We are privy to the depth of their affection for one another, their shared confidences, and the dynamics of their sometimes complicated relationship. The sisters give us a glimpse into a time when clothing was handmade, when childhood diseases were rampant, when women rarely had autonomy or agency, when distances were measured not in hours but in days, and when family was paramount.

Family letters are an enormous, untapped resource for historians and genealogists alike. In Dearest Clara, independent researcher Gail D. Zona analyzes the Nichols sisters' correspondence individually and as a whole. Women have been overlooked by history, and ordinary women have been overlooked to an even greater extent. While the Nichols sisters' writings reveal their characters and individuality, their letters also shed light on the common values and norms by which their generation lived. The very ordinariness of the Nichols sisters makes their letters remarkable.
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My guest today is Carla Kaplan, the author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford (Harper, 2025). In Troublemaker, Kaplan tells the wild and unlikely story of Jessica Mitford, fifth of the six famous Mitford Girls, a British aristocrat-turned-American Communist, famous for exposés like The American Way of Death. This biography brings her astonishing self-transformation to life with a riveting, often hilarious account of trading wealth and status for a life of radical activism. Jessica Mitford, always known as Decca, was brought up by an eccentric English family to marry well and reproduce her wealth and privilege, not to advocate for the rights of others. Decca ran away to America to forge a rebel’s life. As this richly researched book details, Decca broke the Mitford mold. Instead of settling for life as a professional Beauty, she fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War, became an American Communist and pioneered witty, hugely popular journalism, including her 1963 blockbuster The American Way of Death. Decca dedicated her life to social justice and proved herself an immensely effective ally, but she also injected laughter into all her political work, annoying some activists with her relentless antics but encouraging many others to find joy in the struggle. Mining extensive, untapped sources, and with nearly fifty new interviews, Kaplan’s passionate biography beautifully illuminates how Decca’s hard-won and self-taught social empathy offers a powerful example of female freedom, the dramatic, novelistic story of an extraordinary woman of her time who is remarkably relevant and resonant today.

Carla Kaplan is an award-winning professor and writer who holds the Stanton W. and Elisabeth K. Davis Distinguished Professorship in American Literature at Northeastern University. She has published seven books, including Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters and Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, both New York Times Notable Books. A recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities “Public Scholar” fellowships, Kaplan has been a fellow in residence at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute; is a fellow of the Society of American Historians; and serves on the board of Biographers International. She divides her time between Boston and Cape Cod.
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There have long been whispers, coming from the castle; from the village square; from the dark woods. The great lady-a countess, from one of Europe's oldest families-is a vicious killer. Some even say she bathes in the blood of her victims. When the king's men force their way into her manor house, she has blood on her hands, caught in the act of murdering yet another of her maids. She is walled up in a tower and never seen again, except in the uppermost barred window, where she broods over the countryside, cursing all those who dared speak up against her.

Told and retold in many languages, the legend of the Blood Countess has consumed cultural imaginations around the world. But despite claims that Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed as many as 650 girls, some have wondered if the Countess was herself a victim- of one of the most successful disinformation campaigns known to history. So, was Elizabeth Bathory a monster, a victim, or a bit of both? With the breathlessness of a whodunit, drawing upon new archival evidence and questioning old assumptions, in The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster (Bloomsbury, 2026) Shelley Puhak traces the Countess's downfall, bringing to life an assertive woman leader in a world sliding into anti-scientific, reactionary darkness-a world where nothing is ever as it seems. In this exhilarating narrative, Puhak renders a vivid portrait of history's most dangerous woman and her tumultuous time, revealing just how far we will go to destroy a woman in power.

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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This episode features a conversation with the founding members of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, also known as the Auntylectuals. We began with each of them reflecting on their pathway into Hindu Studies and how the questions of caste and gender shaped their approaches to this field. We then discussed their motivations for starting the collective and what interventions they hoped to make through it. This took us deeper into some thorny topics: caste as a form of embodied knowledge that is often accompanied by the denial of its continued social power; the politics of Hinduism in North America where Hindus are both predominantly upper caste and a racial minority; the relationship between Hinduism and Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism; the traffic in language and tactics between Hindutva and Zionism; and the efforts to push back against the movement to make caste a protected category in U.S. anti-discrimination law.

Guests:

Shreena Gandhi: Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University

Harshita Kamath: Professor of Telugu Culture, Literature, and History, Emory University

Sailaja Krishnamurti: Professor of Gender Studies, Queen’s University

Shana Sippy, Professor of Religion, Centre College

Mentioned in the episode:

Rajiv Malhotra: an ideologue of the Hindu nationalist movement in the U.S. and founder of Infinity Foundation

Harshita Kamath, Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance

Amar Chitra Katha: an Indian comic book publisher whose comics are hugely popular and widely available in India and the Indian diaspora.

Sailaja Krishnamurti, “Learning about Hindu Religion through Comics and Popular Culture,” David Yoo and Khyati Y Joshi eds. Envisioning Religion, Race and Asian Americans, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 207-226, 2020.

Babri Masjid: a 16th century mosque that became the target of Hindu nationalist mobilization and was destroyed by vigilante mobs in December 1992.

Marko Geslani, “A Model Minority Religion: The Race of Hindu Studies,” American Religion, forthcoming.

Thenmozhi Soundarajan, The Trauma of Caste

Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, “Feminist Critical Hindu Studies in formation”

Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, “Hindu fragility and the politics of mimicry in North America”

Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, “Hinduphobia is a smokescreen for Hindu nationalists”

Shana Sippy and Sailaja Krishnamurti, “Not all Hinduism is Hindutva, but Hindutva is in fact Hinduism”

Shana Sippy, “Strange and Storied Alliances: Hindus and Jews, India and Israel,” manuscript in progress

Shana Sippy, "Victimization, Supremacism, Solidarity, and the Affective and Emulative Politics of American Hindus"

Tomako Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism

Shreena Gandhi, “Framing Islam as American Religion Despite White Supremacy”

Equality Labs is a South Asian Dalit civil rights organization.
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