At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Jennifer Greenburg reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams to reach households and wage war through development projects in the battle for "hearts and minds." Despite women technically being banned from ground combat units, the all-female teams were drawn into combat nonetheless. Based on ethnographic fieldwork observing military trainings, this book challenges liberal feminist narratives that justified the Afghanistan War in the name of women's rights and celebrated women's integration into combat as a victory for gender equality.

Dr. Jennifer Greenburg critically interrogates a new imperial feminism and its central role in securing US hegemony. Women's incorporation into combat through emotional labor has reinforced gender stereotypes, with counterinsurgency framing female soldiers as global ambassadors for women's rights. This book provides an analysis of US imperialism that keeps the present in tension with the past, clarifying where colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality have resurfaced and how they are changing today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.

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The early twentieth century was a particularly tumultuous time in Chinese history, complete with new conflicts, new technologies, and — as Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China: Redefining Female Identity through Modern Design and Lifestyle (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) shows — new ways to represent women. 

Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China by Sandy Ng looks at how women were portrayed in advertisements, photographs, and film in Republican China, all against the backdrop of the rise of print and visual media and debates over the role and image of “modern” women. This book argues that visual portrayals of women not only displayed women, but that such modern images of women allowed women to assert their own individual identities. Filled with images from collections in the UK, Hong Kong, and the United States, this book is sure to interest readers curious about modern Chinese history and the history of design, as well as anyone looking to be inspired by art and material culture. 

Interested listeners should also keep an eye out for Sandy's next project: The Dynamics of Modern Asian Design-Material Culture and Social Agency, co-edited with Dr.Megha Rajguru (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025): “Focusing on the 20th century onwards, this book brings to light the ways in which design as a material form has underscored cultural, social and economic changes across Asia. The Dynamics of Modern Asian Design provides a deeper and more enhanced understanding of material culture in Asia through analysis of examples of ceramics, electronic items, fashion, furniture, interior design, architecture and ornaments from across countries such as China, Hong Kong, India, Japan and South Korea. Authors explore the production of objects as agents in modern material life, moving beyond their roles as commodities and addressing their values in a range of contexts and subjectivities. Early chapters explore how ceramics and found objects are given innovative forms and meanings in their reincarnation, and how the reinvention of material is critical when design is produced and valued. Authors look at the intricate correlation between materials, design practice and social change, highlighting issues of cultural authenticity and tensions between local and global contexts. They then interrogate the significance of visual appearance in material representations of modern women and religious artefacts, exploring gender and religious representation through the analysis of magazines, statues and objects of adornment. The final section includes analysis of concrete, urban design and electrical appliances, specific to particular cultural and social contexts across modern and contemporary Asian cultures.”

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Our book is: Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts To Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Citadel Press, 2025)  by Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham, which is an inspiring new narrative of the first woman to serve in a president’s cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. In March 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Frances Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by FDR. As Hitler rose to power, thousands of German-Jewish refugees and their loved ones reached out to the INS—then part of the Department of Labor—applying for immigration to the United States, writing letters that began “Dear Miss Perkins . . .” Perkins’s early experiences working in Chicago’s famed Hull House and as a firsthand witness to the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire shaped her determination to advocate for immigrants and refugees. As Secretary of Labor, she wrestled widespread antisemitism and isolationism, finding creative ways to work around quotas and restrictive immigration laws. Diligent, resilient, empathetic, yet steadfast, she persisted on behalf of the desperate when others refused to act.

Our guest is: Dr Rebecca Brenner Graham who is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University. Previously, she taught at the Madeira School and American University. She has a PhD in history and an MA in public history from American University, and a BA in history and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College. In 2023, she was awarded a Cokie Roberts Fellowship from the National Archives Foundation and a Rubenstein Center Research Fellowship from the White House Historical Association. Her writing has been published in The Washington Post, Time, Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Dr. James Burt believed women’s bodies were broken, and only he could fix them. In the 1950s, this Ohio OB-GYN developed what he called “love surgery,” a unique procedure he maintained enhanced the sexual responses of a new mother, transforming her into “a horny little house mouse.” Burt did so without first getting the consent of his patients. Yet he was allowed to practice for over thirty years, mutilating hundreds of women in the process.

It would be easy to dismiss Dr. Burt as a monstrous aberration, a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. Yet as medical historian Sarah Rodriguez reveals, that’s not the whole story. The Love Surgeon: A Story of Trust, Harm, and the Limits of Medical Regulation (Rutgers University Press, 2020) asks tough questions about Burt’s heinous acts and what they reveal about the failures of the medical establishment: How was he able to perform an untested surgical procedure? Why wasn’t he obliged to get informed consent from his patients? And why did it take his peers so long to take action?

The Love Surgeon is both a medical horror story and a cautionary tale about the limits of professional self-regulation.

Sarah B. Rodriguez is a medical historian at Northwestern University in the Global Health Studies Program, the Department of Medical Education, and the Graduate Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. Her teaching and research focuses on the history of reproduction, clinical practice, and research ethics. Her publications include the book Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Practice.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Judith Giesberg, an expert on the history of women and gender during the Civil War, is professor and director of graduate studies in the history department at Villanova University and Editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. Two of her previous books include Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (2000), which is about the understudied roles of women in relief efforts during the war, and “Army at Home”: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (2009), which concerns the experiences of working class women in the north. She is also the principal editor of Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia (2014).

Her latest book, and the subject of our discussion, is Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of an American Morality (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Giesberg argues that the Civil War is the turning point for the influential rise of postwar anti-pornography laws and a genesis for the related network of anti-vice campaigns, which included laws against contraceptives and abortion, newly entrenched legal regulations of marriage, and ever broader social purity initiatives around sexuality.

We discuss how crucial, and yet understudied, questions of sex and desire are to the Civil War era and how silence around them has affected the ways we talk about and regulate social relations today. Much of our conversation focuses on how a small group of men created new regulations around pornography, the constitution of which was always up for debate, to hold onto the political and social power that they felt to be threatened by men of a lower class or of a different race. Prominent among this group of regulators, and a leading face of the postwar anti-vice campaigns, was Anthony Comstock. After serving in a largely inactive regiment during the war, and feeling left out of the camaraderie generated by the sharing of pornography among his fellow soldiers, Comstock fashioned for himself a largely illusory legal fraternity of moral crusaders. For pornography was hardly the main issue for those who associated themselves with his cause. Geisberg writes and talks about how other men in power negotiated the place of newly freed slaves by tightening the regulatory role that marriage played in their “free” lives. Doctors jumped at the opportunity to regulate abortion and contraception as a way to further professionalize themselves after postwar advances in medicine. Both of these groups became part of an omnibus of social reform that affects the country to this day. As you will hear over the course of our conversation, the importance of Giesberg’s account is in showing the connections between these issues and how they come together in the Civil War. Sexual abuse was at the center of social systems, including slavery. But the legal articulations of sexual crimes after the war created more easily regulated vices that distracted attention aw...

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Lisa Doggett, MD, MPH is a family and lifestyle medicine physician and an award-winning author based in Austin, Texas. In 2009, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. At that time, her daughters were 2 and 4 years old, and she was the director of a clinic for people without private health insurance.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease of the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) that often affects young adults. It can manifest with many different symptoms, and its impact varies from very mild to very severe. While there's no cure yet, medications to manage the disease and slow its progression have improved tremendously in the last three decades. There has also been a lot of research investigating the connection between lifestyle factors (like exercise and diet) and the disease's progression.

In 2023, Lisa published a memoir about her journey with MS: Up the Down Escalator: Medicine, Motherhood, and Multiple Sclerosis (Health Communications, 2023). The book (available as a paperback, e-book, and audiobook) depicts episodes from various facets of her life in the years following the diagnosis: her attempts to tackle the symptoms of MS, parenting challenges and milestones, and big personal goals, like running a marathon. Lisa also shares the stories of several patients and the everyday struggles of running a community clinic. As both a physician and patient, Lisa has a unique view of the health care system. She often contrasts her experience with the experience of her low-income patients.

Up the Down Escalator tells an impressive and often humorous story starting with an episode from Lisa's medical residency and ending with her first marathon. At the same time, the chapters can also be read as independent and thought-provoking essays. In the interview, we also hear about Lisa's journey as a writer: about her journaling habit, her op-ed pieces, and how a growing number of blog posts and articles slowly turned into this book.

A big part of our conversation discusses Lisa's recent career shift into lifestyle medicine. She has always been a "health nut", who exercises every day and follows a healthy diet. Through her MS, she has learned a lot about lifestyle's role in chronic conditions. In her work as a family physician, she often observed the complex interactions between medical, socioeconomic, and lifestyle factors.

All these interests and experiences have motivated her to explore the emerging field of lifestyle medicine. It's an evidence-based field focusing on the prevention, treatment, and reversal of chronic diseases via therapeutic lifestyle interventions. It's relatively new (the board certification was introduced in 2017), but it incorporates decades of research. Its six tenants include: a predominantly plant-based diet, regular exercise, restorative sleep, avoidance of unhealthy substances, stress management, and connection with others.

In 2023, Lisa obtained board certification in lifestyle medicine. Since then, she's been working at the Multiple Sclerosis and Neuroimmunology Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She supports MS patients in setting personal goals and adopting healthier habits. Lisa tells us how she partners with neurologists and other specialists at the center, and how medication and lifestyle factors work together to increase the chances of a better outcome and manage symptoms.

Links: 

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Amy Aronson is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Fordham University and former editor at Working Woman and Ms. magazines. Her biography Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) gives us the life of a women’s rights activist, labor lawyer, radical pacifist, writer and co-founder of what became the Civil Liberties Union. Her life was shaped by key relationships including with her mother Annis Ford Eastman and a close relationship with her brother Max Eastman, editor of the socialist magazine The Masses. Subsequently with her brother, she would launch The Liberator. Eastman spoke and wrote about a variety of social and political problems and was threatened by censorship and economic hardship. One of her chief concerns was how women could combine meaningful work with family life based on egalitarian ideals of independence and freedom. She attempted to live out her feminist ideals by redefining her marriage, motherhood and career. Chrystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life offers a vivid portrait of a modern feminist navigating the hazards of private and public life as it unfolded in the progressive era.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the cultural history of feminist thought seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Elite workspaces are notorious for being unfriendly to new actors, so what allows for aberration in certain workspaces?

Drawing from observations and interviews with more than 130 elite professionals, Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite (Princeton UP, 2021) examines how a range of underlying mechanisms-gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories-afford certain professionals egalitarian outcomes that are not available to their local and global peers. Juxtaposing findings on the legal profession with those on elite consulting firms, Swethaa Ballakrishnen reveals that parity arises not from a commitment to create feminist organizations, but from structural factors that incidentally come together to do gender differently. Simultaneously, their research offers notes of caution: while conditional convergence may create equality in ways that more targeted endeavors fail to achieve, "accidental" developments are hard to replicate, and are, in this case, buttressed by embedded inequalities. Ballakrishnen examines whether gender parity produced without institutional sanction should still be considered feminist.

In offering new ways to think about equality movements and outcomes, Accidental Feminism forces readers to critically consider the work of intention in progress narratives.

Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology.

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New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century, popular and medical voices blamed women who had emotional and mental distress after childbirth for their own suffering. By the end of the century, though, women with postpartum mental illnesses sought to take charge of this narrative. 

In Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Rachel Louise Moran explores the history of the naming and mainstreaming of postpartum depression. Coalitions of maverick psychiatrists, psychologists, and women who themselves had survived substantial postpartum distress fought to legitimize and normalize women’s experiences. They argued that postpartum depression is an objective and real illness and fought to avoid it being politicized alongside other fraught medical and political battles over women’s health.

Based on insightful oral histories and in-depth archival research, Blue reveals a secret history of American motherhood, women’s political activism, and the rise of postpartum depression advocacy amid an often-censorious conservative culture. By breaking new ground with the first book-length history of postpartum mental illness in the twentieth century, Moran brings mothers’ battles with postpartum depression out of the shadows and into the light.

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At the end of the American Revolution, Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved widow and mother living in Massachusetts. Hearing the words of the new Massachusetts state constitution which declared liberty and equality for all, she sought the help of a young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick, later Speaker of the House and one of America's leading Federalist politicians. The lawsuit that she and Sedgwick pursued would bring freedom to her and her daughter, as well as thousands of other enslaved people.

After leaving her enslaver's family to work for the family of Theodore Sedgwick, she effectively became the foster mother to his seven children when his wife Pamela became a chronic invalid, enabling Sedgwick to pursue his political career. Two of his sons would credit her with saving their lives. His daughter Catharine Maria Sedgwick, one of the most famous female novelists of the early decades of the nineteenth century, would make her the model for one of her most celebrated heroines. A Revolutionary Woman: Elizabeth Freeman and the Abolition of Slavery in the North (McFarland, 2024) details Elizabeth Freeman's life and the far-reaching influence of her battle for freedom.

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