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New Books in Women's History

New Books in Women's History

By: New Books Network
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 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: @newbooksnetworkNew Books Network Art Literary History & Criticism Science Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Vanda Krefft, "Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women" (Algonquin Books, 2026)

    Vanda Krefft, "Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women" (Algonquin Books, 2026)
    Apr 24 2026
    It’s a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic institution was in its heyday in the 1950 and '60s synonymous with supplying secretaries—always properly attired in heels, ladylike hats, and white gloves—to male executives. In Expect Great Things! Vanda Krefft turns the notion of a “Gibbs girl” on its head, showing us that while the school was getting women who could type 90 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool to assume positions of power on the other side of the desk. And Gibbs graduates did just that, tackling the sexism of the era and paving the way for 21st-century women to succeed in any profession.Katharine Gibbs was one her own success stories. She started her school when, as a 46-year-old widow, she was left near-broke with two young sons. The school taught typing and stenography but Gibbs also hired accomplished professors from elite colleges to teach academic subjects—it was a well-rounded education that produced early feminists ready to tackle the sexism of their era. "Expect great things!" was her motto and her philosophy. Within a decade she’d opened schools in three elegant locations. With nostalgic period photographs throughout, Expect Great Things! takes us back to Katie Gibbs’s life and tells the stories of the women she influenced. We meet Gibbs graduates who worked for the Walt Disney, Marilyn Monroe, and Robert F. Kennedy. Others forged pathfinding roles as an Emmy-winning television star, a women’s rights advisor to four U.S. presidents, a writer of Wonder Woman comic books, the head of the Women’s Marines, a best-selling young adult author, and a U.S. Ambassador.For readers of The Barbizon and Come Fly the World, Expect Great Things! reveals the seismic impact the Katharine Gibbs school had on the American workplace—and on women’s opportunities today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    47 mins
  • Aurore Spiers, "Archiving the Past: Women's Film History in France, 1927–1978" (U California Press, 2026)

    Aurore Spiers, "Archiving the Past: Women's Film History in France, 1927–1978" (U California Press, 2026)
    Apr 20 2026
    What happens when we assume women’s presence in film history instead of their absence? This is the question at the heart of Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978, the newest addition to the Feminist Media Histories book series at the University of California Press. The first book by Aurore Spiers, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Texas A&M University, Archiving the Past is a fascinating account of some of the many women in France whose labor had a decisive role in the formation of cinema history across the twentieth century. Aurore shows that the film-historical archive has always been a site of feminist agency and power, even if women’s work in and around the archive has been diminished, interrupted, erased, or ignored. In this conversation with fellow feminist film scholar Alix Beeston, Aurore shares about the historical, methodological, and political stakes of her work, from the archive to the classroom. She describes her process for discerning the traces of women’s archival labor, however fleeting, contingent, or speculative they may be. She reflects on how gendered ideas and norms have defined—and limited—our sense of what counts as film-historical labor. And she ruminates on what it means for feminist scholars, in and beyond film and media studies, to collect and recollect the past—for the sake of the feminist present and its still-possible futures. Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University. She's the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford UP, 2018) and the co-editor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Eileen G'Sell, "Lipstick" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

    Eileen G'Sell, "Lipstick" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
    Apr 20 2026
    From Revlon to Glossier, from Marilyn to Gaga, lipstick is as shape-shifting and unwieldy as femininity itself.Who wears lipstick today – as a matter of routine? And for those who do, is it out of obligation to a strict feminine standard, or some other reason entirely? Lipstick reconsiders the beauty world's most conspicuous – and contentious – tool of artifice. Tossing expired ideas about femininity like so many tubes of melting wax, Lipstick (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Eileen G’Sell, part of the Object Lessons series, explores how self-adornment can be a source of play, pleasure, and transformation, as well as how lipstick can knock gender norms off balance. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    42 mins
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