New Books in Women's History

About New Books in Women's History

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

Publisher

New Books Network

Category

arts · history · science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

3 Mar 2008

Latest episode

20 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

1,819 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   20 Oct 2026

   Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block with Talitha LeFlouria (Beacon Press, 2022)

   In Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block (Beacon Press, 2022), historian Talitha L. LeFlouria centers Black women at the core of a fresh argument: that the system of mass incarceration was established as protection for the institution of slavery and the profits of enslavers and that this legacy continues today. For centuries, Black women in America have experienced extreme rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration in the nation’s jails and prisons, yet their experiences have often been overlooked in favor of Black men’s. Arguing that the merger between profit and punishment continues to keep Black people bound, LeFlouria traces the connection between enslavement and incarceration, revealing how they have always been intertwined—from the domestic slave trade of 1810-1865, when an estimated one million people were incarcerated in privately owned slave jails, to the post-Civil War era when Black people were enslaved through new systems of state-sponsored mass incarceration, and through to today. Talitha L. LeFlouria is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the history of Black women, mass incarceration, and the legacies of American slavery. She is an associate professor of history, and the Mastin Gentry White Fellow in Southern History at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the multi-award-winning book, Chained in Silence. Dr. LeFlouria has received numerous awards for her research, including an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, and her work has been featured in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, The Root, and Vox. You can find her on her website. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

2. 

   17 Oct 2026

   Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women with Eleanor Johnson (Princeton UP, 2026)

   For as long as human societies have been telling stories, the patriarchy has felt threatened by women. In this book, Eleanor Johnson provides an engaging cultural history of a figure she calls the “monstrous bitch,” the notorious female who has haunted the patriarchal imagination for centuries, feared for her sexual promiscuity, her exercise of reproductive agency and control, and her outspoken way of contesting patriarchal power. In a narrative brimming with insight, Johnson traces the origins of female monstrosity to the demoness Lamashtu of ancient Mesopotamia, showing how this infanticidal, hypersexual, loudmouthed monster appears in different guises throughout history. In classical Greece, she reemerges as the sorceress Medea, the child-devouring monster Lamia, and the vengeful Furies. In the medieval and early modern periods, she is an oversexed, baby-slaying, spellcasting witch; in the Romantic and Victorian eras, a vampiress; and in the modern age of psychoanalysis, a mental patient. After this longue durée history, Johnson shows how monstrous bitchery has been challenged and reinterpreted in contemporary cinematic popular culture, becoming an expression of heroism and resistance in films like Ginger Snaps, Jennifer’s Body, and The Witch. She demonstrates how deeply embedded the roots of misogyny have become, and why it is more critical today than ever that we expose and address them. An irreverent look at a pervasive trope that runs through four thousand years of Western culture, Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women (Princeton UP, 2026) reveals that while representations of the powerful woman have evolved over time, the fear and demonization of her remains the same. Eleanor Johnson is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Her books include Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968–1980); Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England; Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama; and Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

3. 

   17 Oct 2026

   An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America with Keri Leigh Merritt (St. Martin's Press, 2026)

   Born in Florida to a religious family, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: She lived with her lover, Paula, first running a summer camp in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and then a magazine devoted to creating a new vision of the South, one that passionately championed equality and integration. Smith published Black and white writers, a rare feat in those days, and herself wrote articles instructing white Southerners on why they shouldn’t support segregation—Smith firmly believed racism hurt white Americans, too. In 1944 she published a bestselling novel, Strange Fruit, which became a national sensation and was banned in Boston and Detroit. The FBI began a file on her, she received death threats, and her house caught fire three times, twice intentionally, resulting in the loss of all her works-in-progress and her correspondence. Undaunted, she continued her ardent fight against segregation, maintaining correspondence with some of the great leaders of her day, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, W. E. B. Dubois, Paul Robeson, and Pauli Murray. She continued to fight for both civil and human rights throughout the 1960s, helping nurture many of the activists in SNCC and CORE, only to succumb to cancer in 1966. Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, and with a modern appreciation of Smith’s complex identity, An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America (St. Martin's Press, 2026) is the definitive account of a woman who defied all expectations and dedicated her life to racial equality. Guest: Keri Leigh Merritt, Ph.D. is a historian and writer. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, won both the Bennett Wall Award from the Southern Historical Association as well as the President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association. She has co-edited several other books, including After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America, and her articles have appeared in outlets from Smithsonian and Aeon to The Hill and CNN. Host: Raymond Williams, PhD, is a political scientist, blogger, and book club administrator with an interest in American history, biographies, and politics.

Who has been a guest on New Books in Women's History

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Kirstie Macleod
• Margaret Cook Andersen
• Angela Katrina Lewis-Maddox
• Sarah Gold McBride
• Wendy Doniger

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

243

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.7 / 5

14 ratings

Spotify

4.7 / 5

7 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 82 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

99

Social presence

0

YouTube

72

Engagement

90

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Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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