For generations of Americans, the purse has been an essential and highly adaptable object, used to achieve a host of social, cultural, and political objectives. In the early 1800s, when the slim fit of neoclassical dresses made interior pockets impractical, upper-class women began to carry small purses called reticules, which provided them with a private place in a world where they did not have equal access to public space. Although many items of apparel have long expressed their wearer's aspirations, only the purse has offered carriers privacy, pride, and pleasure. This privacy has been particularly important for those who have faced discrimination because of their gender, class, race, citizenship, or sexuality.

The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America (Oxford University Press, 2025) reveals how bags, sacks, and purses provided the methods and materials for Americans' activism, allowing carriers to transgress critical boundaries at key moments. It explores how enslaved people used purses and bags when attempting to escape and immigrant factory workers fought to protect their purses in the workplace. It also probes the purse's nuanced functions for Black women in the civil rights movement and explores how LGBTQ people used purses to defend their bodies and make declarations about their sexuality.

Kathleen Casey closely examines a variety of sources--from vintage purses found in abandoned buildings and museum collections to advertisements, photograph albums, trade journals, newspaper columns, and trial transcripts. She finds purses in use at fraught historical moments, where they served strategic and symbolic functions for their users. The result is a thorough and surprising examination of an object that both ordinary and extraordinary Americans used to influence social, cultural, economic, and political change.

Kathleen B. Casey is Director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Professor of History at Furman University in South Carolina.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book Feminisms: A Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

This outstanding work, available later this year, takes a thematic approach to the topic of global feminist history to provide a unified vision that maintains appropriate nuance. Delap is a gender historian, writ large. Her first book, The Feminist Avant Garde (Cambridge 2007), examined the development of feminism in the Anglo-American context, tracing the ideas as developed in trans-Atlantic discourse. She then directed her gaze back to her homeland in subsequent publications, including Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford 2011) and the 2013 Palgrave release, Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Britain since 1890, Delap explore another expression of gender altogether. The breadth of her scholarship – women and men, intellectual elites and domestic servants, adults and children – prepared her to write this broad but fairly concise work of history. Enjoy our lively discussion!

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Inequality in the workplace impacts all areas of our lives, from health and self-development to economic security and family life. But, despite the world's richest countries' long-avowed commitments to gender equality, there is still so much to fix - and so much we don't see.
With perceptive and razor-sharp insight, in Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality – and Why Men Still Win at Work (W.W. Norton, 2025) award-winning author Cordelia Fine reveals how the status quo - Patriarchy Inc. - is harming us all, in our working lives and beyond. Drawing on social and cultural history, examples from hunter-forager societies to high finance and the latest thinking in evolutionary science, she dismantles the existing, inadequate visions for gender equality and charts an inspiring path towards a fairer and freer society

Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British philosopher of science, psychologist, and writer. She is a full professor in the History and Philosophy of Science programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

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 here 

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Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books.

A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2020. This is the extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, between the wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves together their stories to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-war Paris.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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In Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence (Stanford UP, 2025) Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds it not only inseverable but also fundamental to the structural predicaments facing Blackness in the present. Douglass contends that the sexual violability of slaves is often misappropriated by frameworks on sexual violence that privilege its occurrences as a question of ethics, sexual agency, and feminine orders of gendering. Rather, this book foregrounds Blackness as engendered by sexual violence, which forcefully (re)produces Blackness, corporeally and conceptually, as a condition that lacks the capacity to ontologically distinguish its suffering from what it means to be human. By employing and critically revising Black feminist theory and Afro-pessimism, Douglass reveals that engaging primarily with the sexualization of the slave forces theories of sexual violence to interrogate why this violence—one of the most prevalent under slavery—continues to lack a grammar of fundamental redress. There are no reparations struggles for the generational transfer of sexual violation and the inability of present frameworks to rectify the sexual stains of slavery lies precisely in the fact that what made this history possible continues to haunt arrangements of life today. Engendering Blackness urgently articulates the way our present understandings of Blackness and humanness are bound by this vexed sexual history.

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While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work of producing celebrity in Los Angeles, CA. Díaz’s ethnography follows reporters and paparazzi to examine their everyday practices of work and labor that bring celebrity images and stories into being on the pages of celebrity magazines. Grounded in media workers’ perspectives and everyday life, this book carefully situates Latino paparazzi and women reporters in relationship to the particular vulnerabilities that they face. For example, Díaz traces a shift in the demographic of the paparazzi from white men to Latino men, and with it a significant shift in the tone of insults levied against them. Women reporters remain vulnerable to sexual harassment and other dangers in carrying out their work. Hollywood presents itself to its audience through its carefully crafted films, images, and stories. Díaz’s work troubles this facade by centering the work and challenges of the everyday laborers who produce it.

Vanessa Díaz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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TransGenre (Cambridge UP, 2025) is a reconsideration of genre theory in long-form fiction through transgender minor literature in the US and Canada. Using four genre sites (the road novel, the mourning novel, the chosen family novel, and the archival novel), this Element considers how the minoritized becomes the minoritarian through deterritorializing generic conventions in fiction to its own ends. In so doing, TransGenre proposes narrative reading practices as strategies of the minor to subvert, transgress, and reappropriate the novel's genealogy and radical future prospects. A range of fiction published in the last decade is deployed as largely self-theorizing, generating its own epistemological, thematic, and formal innovations and possibilities, revealing cisheteronormative underpinnings of generic categories and turning them in on themselves.

Aaron Hammes holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, and was most recently the Virginia and Walter Nord Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Hammes has published on sex work, transgender literature, and prison abolition in South Atlantic Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Routledge Handbook of Transgender Literature, Journal of Feminist Scholarship, and GLQ. Their first monograph, TransGenre, (Cambridge, 2025) is an exploration of genre theory and contemporary transgender minor literature.

Atalia Israeli-Nevo is an anthropology PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin.

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It is not Egypt's 2011 revolution that opened a space for women's and feminist activism, but—as Biography of a Revolution: The Feminist Roots of Human Rights in Egypt (U of California Press, 2025) shows—the long history of women's activism that created the intellectual and political background for revolution. By centering the experiences and ideas of multiple generations of women activists and intellectuals, Lucia Sorbera traces the feminist genealogies of Egypt's nationalist, student, Marxist, labor, human rights, and democratic social movements. Biography of a Revolution gathers a series of interrelated intimate and relational stories, charting in vivid detail the entanglements between women's aspirations across a century of politics and friendships. This historical analysis innovatively deploys decolonial and indigenous feminist epistemologies, bringing women's, gender, and feminist history into the center of Egypt's political, social, and intellectual history. More than a decade after the 2013 military coup, women's intellectual and political activism remains crucial to keeping the embers of revolution aglow.

Lucia Sorbera is Associate Professor and Chair of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney.

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100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World (Indiana UP, 2024), is the result of a collaboration between two sociologists, Professor Shulamit Reinharz and Dr. Barbara Vinick. Both come from backgrounds deeply intertwined with Jewish history and feminism. Prof. Reinharz, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, became a rabbi's daughter after her father settled in the US. Her work often explores topics of Jewish tradition and women's roles. Dr. Vinick, also a sociologist, initially focused on gerontology but later collaborated with Reinharz on projects exploring Jewish women's experiences worldwide, she hopes this this book can be a respite from the troubles of the world.

The book aims to reveal the diversity and depth of traditional and emerging Jewish communities globally, that many readers might not have considered. The editors collected stories from 83 countries on six continents. Each story is either written as a mini-biography or memoir, sometimes by the brides themselves. They made a conscious effort not to reject any stories, regardless of whether they depicted positive or negative experiences. The collection thus includes stories touching on forced marriages, abusive relationships, divorces, and difficult situations.

The book is structured to highlight memorable and unique aspects of weddings, such as courtship traditions, betrothal ceremonies, conversions, and customs during wartime. There is a special focus on diversity, including emerging Jewish communities across Africa and Latin America.

Among the highlighted stories is a mail-order bride in Mexico who, upon arrival, refused to return home despite not matching her suitor's expectations, eventually resulting in decades of marriage—a testament to the unpredictability and resilience found in these stories. Daisy Aboudi's family in Sudan, a now-extinct Jewish community which found marital partners across the Egyptian border, reveals how Jewish life adapts and persists. 

The anthology covers weddings within various strands of Judaism, including a Chabad wedding in Thailand. The betrothal chapter explores customs whose significance has changed over time, including elaborate engagement ceremonies in places like Burma, Nicaragua, and India, where traditions include henna, turmeric, prayers, and communal exchanges.

Ariela Tischler’s story from Switzerland serves as a link between family heritage and Jewish law. Descended from Rabbi Moshe Isserlis, who decreed it permissible to marry on Lag BaOmer, Ariela and her husband wed on that day, echoing the family tradition established by her grandparents.

Personal favorites among the editors’ stories include Dr. Vinick's account of attending a group wedding in Madagascar following the conversion of local community members, demonstrating the intersection of ritual, adaptation, and communal joy. Professor Reinharz selected a contemporary Israeli bride, Yael Yafielli, whose feminist and renewal-minded approach prompted her to design a wedding ceremony more aligned with her beliefs and those of her secular partner, rather than conform to the Orthodox rabbinate's expectations. They hope to honor both those who have sustained Judaism in isolated regions and those rebuilding it anew, while also foregrounding Jewish women's voices and experiences.

Ultimately, the project is a celebration of Jewish diversity, women's voices, continuity, and ongoing change.

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Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard?  Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South.  Shennette Garrett-Scott's new book, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) tells the fascinating story of just such an endeavor, first the Independent Order of St. Luke, and then the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, founded in Richmond in 1903.  Along the way, she tells the tale of force-of-nature strong women, particularly Maggie Lena Walker, who wouldn't take no for an answer as she built up a culture of business and entrepreneurship against incredibly long odds and never-ending efforts by regulators and competitors to thwart her efforts. It makes for gripping reading.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

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