Purchase Battling Bella from the link below, or to book the author for an event you can reach Dr. Zarnow through the contact page linked above!
Purchase Battling Bella from the link below, or to book the author for an event you can reach Dr. Zarnow through the contact page linked above!
“The Heterodites: Six Women and the Secret Society that Shaped American Feminism,” with Liveright of W.W. Norton & Co.
I am at work on a collective biography of members of Heterodoxy that encourage readers to rediscover this long forgotten feminist group who left a clear mark on American feminism and American political thought.
Heterodoxy—a women-only club defined by the unorthodoxy views and spirit encapsulated in its name—boldly broadcast their plans to reshape a man’s world, but their meetings were shrouded in secrecy. As a result, Heterodoxy was the most important feminist supper club about which, today, no one knows. In the first decades of the twentieth century, trailblazing women on the move took time to be a part of this “little band of willful women” who met every other Saturday at a hopping restaurant in a corner of Greenwich Village. This group emerged as a leading incubator of American feminism, a place where the ideas, energy, and impulses of American feminism came to form.
“The Heterodites” will focus on lawyer Crystal Eastman, journalist Elizabeth Mary “Bessie” Beatty, civil rights advocate Grace Nail Johnson, cartoonist Annie Lucasta “Lou” Rogers, labor organizer Rose Pastor Stokes, and anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons. Together, this subset of Heterodites, largely forgotten, reflect Heterodites’ range, dynamism, and sweep of influence. Collectively, these women played a part, in no small measure, in founding the ACLU, pioneering foreign correspondence, setting the NAACP on course, inspiring the illustrator of Wonder Woman, launching the Communist Party USA, and establishing the New School in New York City.
Eastman, Beatty, Johnson, Rogers, Stokes, and Parsons defined what has come to be known as intersectional feminism, their perspectives shaped by their distinct mélange of race, sexuality, religion, regional, and class identities. They fused causes—labor and feminism, birth control and suffrage, racial civil rights and women’s rights, peace and free speech—as they juggled the balance of work, family, and politics. They defied convention in their personal lives, advocating for trial marriage and living under two roofs, loving women and men alike, having bountiful families or no kids at all, marrying moguls and divorcing husbands. They worked to create a space for women in law, in politics, in Hollywood, in the academy, in theater, in print, and in talk radio. They were adventurers and globe trotters, witnessing critical junctures in U.S. and world history as it was made.
Heterodites set the agenda for a feminist revolution that remains unfinished. They tenaciously aimed to expose and uproot patriarchy embedded in the very fabric of the U.S. democratic capitalist system. Returning to Heterodoxy gives us one more reason to broaden the story of women in politics and portrait of political women beyond suffrage. To do so brings focus to American women’s wider, totalizing pursuit of human rights and social justice.
“Becoming Bella: Bella Abzug, Cold War Dissent, and the Roots of Postwar Feminism.”
I am also near done with a second volume dealing with Bella Abzug’s early years, touched on only briefly in my first book. Detailing the 1920s to 1950s, I will explore how personal ties fired the political engagement of progressives in the U.S. as they faced the Great Depression, wartime conditions during World War II, and political repression during the early Cold War. These years, no longer seen as dormant for U.S. feminism, offer especially rich ground to explore the roots of the 1960s and 1970s mass feminist movement. Abzug’s story reveals how women addressed institutional barriers they faced in education, business, and electoral politics before there were broad legal protections that she and others close to her helped draft in legislatures and fight for in the courts. More so, this story highlights how personal ties, hidden and acknowledged, shape the arch of U.S. politics. Most centrally for Abzug, the bonds of friendship buoyed her early activism in the women-centered universe of Hunter College, a working-class university overshadowed by the Seven Sisters. Focusing on the gendering of space, this environment is contrasted with Columbia Law School and the legal profession during and immediately after World War II. This book closes with attention to Abzug during the early Cold War, when she and other lawyers challenged McCarthyism in the courts.
“In Defense of Citizenship: Women’s Advocacy of Human Rights and the Development of Feminist Jurisprudence.”
In this book I am beginning to research, I will uncover the lengthy and broad origins of feminist jurisprudence that coalesced in the 1970s. Using collective biography and case microhistories, my study will trace a fresh genealogy of women’s legal practice at the periphery of the profession before the formal establishment of “women and law” as a field. I am inspired by the women lawyers I worked with in Washington and struck by how little there has been written about women lawyers activity in the twentieth century. Most centrally, I am finding that women lawyers drew on their gender when approaching areas of the law not obviously gendered. Women’s outsider status led them to be clustered in rights-focused areas of the law such as civil rights, civil liberties, labor, and immigration. In turn, their legal arguments presented in cases dealing with immigration, welfare, immigration, civil liberties, and criminal justice challenged the legal articulation of belonging, public burden, disloyalty, and deviance. Organizations I plan to look at in this project include the National Association of Women Lawyers, American Civil Liberties Union, Commission on Law and Social Action of the American Jewish Congress, Civil Rights Congress, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born.
“A Past of Our Own: Writing Women into History.”
Katherine Turk of University of North Carolina and I have also begun research on a book that will be the first comprehensive intellectual history of the field of women’s history. Analyzing the work of genealogists and folklorists during U.S. Reconstruction, we will explore the competing narratives of emancipation and white supremacy in first women’s histories. In the early twentieth century, we plan to highlight the work of educators such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Beard and their efforts to establish women’s history archives. At mid-decade, we seek to explain why the U.S. Popular Front was a seedbed for intellectual production in U.S. women’s history. Next, we will explore how the professionalization of women’s history came out of ethnic nationalist and social liberationist political projects of the 1960s and 1970s. Tracing the field forward, we will assess the impact of paradigm shifts—gender, sexuality, transnational, digital—on this still evolving specialization. We also seek to explain why it has been difficult for women’s historians to maintain their foothold in the academy during the early twenty-first century despite growing public interest in women’s history.