Top Picks for the Season
Landing Uphill: Seven Years at San Luis
Eleanor Herz Swent (MA ’47)
As a young bride in 1947, Eleanor Herz Swent travels to the San Luis mine in Mexico to join her husband Langan, known locally as “el niño Americano”—the American boy. Swent is both an insider and a newcomer. She has BA and MA degrees but has never ridden a mule, seen a cockroach or cooked on a wood stove.
She visits remote ranches where a priest comes to perform marriages and baptisms. She earns the confidence of women and teaches family planning. Seven years and three children later, she and Langan leave the Mexico they love and return to the United States with mixed feelings.
The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs and the Monsters They Taught Us to Love
Rachel Feder, associate professor, Department of English and Literary Arts
What if we’ve been reading Jane Austen and romantic classics all wrong? Literature scholar Rachel Feder offers an eye-opening take on how contemporary love stories are actually terrifying. Mr. Darcy is the brooding, rude, standoffish romantic hero of “Pride and Prejudice” who eventually succumbs to Elizabeth Bennet’s charms. It’s a classic enemies-to-lovers plot, one that has influenced our cultural ideas about courtship. But what if this classic isn’t just a grand romance, but a horror novel about how scary love and marriage can be for women?
In Her Own Name: The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage
Sara Chatfield, assistant professor, Department of Political Sciencex
In the early 19th century, a married woman had hardly any legal existence apart from her husband. By the 20th century, state-level statutes, constitutional provisions and court rulings had granted married women a host of protections relating to ownership and control of property. “In Her Own Name” explores the origins and consequences of laws guaranteeing married women’s property rights, focusing on the people and institutions that shaped them. Sara Chatfield demonstrates that the motives of male elites included personal interests, benefits to the larger economy and bolstering state power, and that married women’s property rights could serve varied political goals across regions and eras—from temperance to debt relief to settlement of the West.
Good Tension
Carrie Jennings (BM ’14)
Vocalist Carrie Jennings teams up with fellow Lamont grads Kevin Matthews and Thomas Jennings on her debut EP, “Good Tension.” Four songs explore a different representation of “good tension,” whether that is embracing the pain of transformation (“Bothered”); honoring the love we deserve, even after being forgotten (“Adored”); holding both profound love and fear of loss in our hearts (“Maybe”); or recognizing the weight of our own agency (“Funny”). “The process of recording my original music with musicians I love and trust, folks I have been playing withfor over a decade, was an absolute joy,” said Jennings.
Juris Ex Machina
John W. Maly (JD ’08)
In a future where AI has replaced judge and juror, the justice system has become airtight in this sci-fi legal thriller. Yet somehow a well-intentioned young kleptomaniac named Rainville falls through the cracks and is wrongfully convicted of mass murder. He’s exiled to Wychwood Prison, where the dead outnumber the living, and where the inmates are also the guards. He soon becomes a marked man. In a race against time, Rainville must escape and save not only himself, but the city that cast him out.
Q&A with Trisha Teig
“Rooted and Radiant: Women’s Narratives of Leadership,” co-authored by Trisha Teig, former faculty director of the Colorado Women’s College Leadership Scholars Program, shares narratives of 39 women exploring their own stories of leadership and gender.
Why share these narratives?
There are not enough voices shared from historically marginalized identities in our society. We know that women of color make less money, have less access to educational spaces where networks can be formed, and face more challenges in discrimination and bias once they move up the ladder of leadership. All of these data inform the fact that we do not have a current structure that supports women’s access to leadership, but it also offers a clear indication that we are defining leadership in a narrow and outdated way. This book was written to address the latter issue.
What challenges do women in leadership face?
The traditional understanding of who a leader is—what they look like, how they act—does not align with stereotypical gender expectations for women. This creates a double standard where women and men in leader roles are treated differently. Adding to the complexity, women of color face compounded gendered and racialized biases. These underlying biases built on our gendered socialization creates an environment where a woman cannot catch a break; she is always too much or not enough.
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