New Books in Women's History

In Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality (Oxford University Press, 2026), Robin Dembroff shows us that we don't just live in a patriarchal world. We live in a world that patriarchy taught us to see. Patriarchy is not simply a system where men dominate women, Dembroff argues. It is a deeper reality-shaping force that legitimizes economic exploitation, political injustice, and social cruelty by dividing all of us into the rigid categories of Man, Woman, Animal, and Child.

These categories are presented as natural truths, but Dembroff reveals them as man-made myths--ones that construct a reality in which being characterized as Woman, Animal, or Child marks moral degradation. By no coincidence, feminization, dehumanization, and infantilization are the very degradations used to make a man 'less of a man'.

But this book is more than critique; it's also a guide to transformation especially for those grappling with what it means to be a man under patriarchy. Patriarchy's myths celebrate the identity Man, but these myths are no friend to most men. Promising strength and superiority, they instead fuel isolation, emotional repression, and relentless pressure to prove oneself while propping up systems that enrich the powerful few. Rather than deliver freedom and prosperity, these myths entrap and impoverish. Real Men on Top invites readers to see through them and, in so doing, to find new possibilities for living, relating, and becoming human.

Sharp, daring, and deeply felt, Real Men on Top is a book for anyone who senses that something is deeply wrong with the way we live and wants to understand how we got here, and where we might begin the work of remaking reality.

Robin Dembroff is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale University

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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Marriage rates have fallen dramatically since the 1970s. Yet far
from devaluing marriage, people still overwhelmingly describe marriage
as the highest commitment they can imagine. Most Americans say they want
to marry eventually, and couples who do marry have a lower chance of
divorce than at any time since the 1970s. Increasingly, though, people
tell pollsters they “have no idea” if they actually will end up married. And unlike in the past, young women are more uncertain than young men.

In For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage (Viking, 2026), Stephanie Coontz—author of the “rich, provocative, and entertaining” book Marriage, A History—unravels the roots of such paradoxical trends. Examining five critical periods of historical transformation, she reveals how shifting romantic ideals, gender expectations, sexual mores, and cultural myths have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory beliefs, dysfunctional habits, and emotional earworms that make it hard to adjust our family relationships to the social and economic challenges of twenty-first-century life.

Coontz
demonstrates that today’s widespread nostalgia for a seemingly more
stable past is an understandable reaction to heightened economic
insecurity and eroding social solidarities. But trying to reproduce a
largely imaginary golden age of marriage from the past simply locks us
into a restricted future.

Current public debates about marriage
are dominated by two diametrically opposed groups. One argues that
marriage is the only sure route to personal happiness and social
stability; the other, that marriage is inherently oppressive. Coontz
puts forward a radical middle ground, pointing to surprising new
research on the personal changes and the policy innovations that can
help people create successful relationships, in or out of marriage.
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Decades before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, radical,
working-class women and men from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the
Florida Straits, made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar
industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the
Sunshine State. Located on the eastern edge of Tampa, Ybor City was a
neighborhood of cigar workers and Caribbean revolutionaries who sought
refuge against the shifting tides of international political turmoil
during the early half of the twentieth century.In Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South
(University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Historian Sarah McNamara
tells the story of immigrant and U.S.-born Latinas/os who organized
strikes, marched against fascism, and criticized U.S. foreign policy.
While many members of the immigrant generation maintained their
dedication to progressive ideals for years to come, those who came of
age in the wake of World War II distanced themselves from leftist
politics amidst the Red Scare and the wrecking ball of urban renewal.
This portrait of the political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights
the underexplored role of women’s leadership within movements for social
and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics
become who and what they are.
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Independent
historian Michael Staudenmaier joins Michael Stauch to discuss his new
book about “becoming Puerto Rican” in Chicago. Staudenmaier’s book, White, Black, Brown: Becoming Puerto Rican in Chicago (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), describes how generations of Puerto Rican organizers and activists,
facing persistent exploitation, discrimination, and marginalization in
the postwar United States, drew on competing versions of nationalism to
challenge the racial order in one of America’s most segregated cities.

Highlights include:

A description of the historical process of “becoming Puerto Rican” as a racial project;

How class differences between activists and ordinary Puerto Ricans shaped distinct experiences of “becoming Puerto Rican”;

How the gendered experience of migration led one woman to collaborate with the FBI;

The effect of the 1966 Division Street Riot on Puerto Rican identity;

The rise of “panethnic Latinidad” and its possible futures.

Michael Staudenmaier
is an independent historian and serves on the Board of Directors of Dr.
Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School in Chicago.

Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
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Revolutionary New York: 250 Years of Social Change (SUNY Press, 2026), edited by Bruce Dearstyne and published by SUNY Press, examines what the volume calls the “unfinished revolutions” of the Empire State. In sixteen essays by a varied cast of authors, the book explores efforts to achieve what the editor describes as the full promise of the revolution. Central to the book are ordinary New Yorkers who faced great challenges, such as the Oneida who tried to maintain sovereignty in the era of the American Revolution, women winning the vote, and African American soldiers who served in the United States Army in World War I. Together, Dearstyne writes, they tell a story of “the two-and-a-half century struggle to realize the Revolution’s ideals and bring increased freedom and opportunities to marginalized populations.”

Dearstyne is the editor of this volume and the author of several books, including The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History and The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era.

Robert Snyder, interviewing for the New Books Network and the Gotham Center for New York Cit History, is professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (Cornell, 2025), winner of the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Prize. rwsnyder@rutgers.edu
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