In 1986, Janet Jackson’s hit song “Nasty” topped music billboard charts with the catchy yet controversial lyrics, “Oh, you nasty boys.” Thirty years later, in 2016, this song made a comeback after former President Donald Trump’s “nasty woman” reference to Hillary Clinton during a presidential debate. Headlines blew up worldwide and the phrase went viral, spiraling into the Nasty Woman feminist movement.
In 2021, Virginia Tech students from Marian Mollin’s spring 2020 section of HIST 4914 (History Capstone Research Seminar) published the book “Nasty Women: Transgressive Womanhood in American History” as their primary assignment of the course. This rigorous and demanding class requires students to engage in original historical research and write on a topic of their choice. The students chose “Nasty Women in American History” as their topic, looking at the long view of American women and examining their behavior of protesting societal norms and breaking boundaries through the decades.
Students in the class — Alicia Aucoin, Gillian Barth, Grace Barth, Helen Hickman, Savannah Lawhorne, Kat McGowan, Caroline McLean, Madison Sheehan, Elizabeth Sholtis, Trenton Spillman, Bethany Stewart, Alyssa Thompson, Liv Wisnewski, and Olivia Wood — all had a hand in writing the book.
In the book’s 14 chapters, the student authors recount stories of strong historical women, some enslaved, a few engineers, and even early celebrities. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate how there is no such thing as an average woman, as even those ordinary women are found doing extraordinary things.
Led by Mollin, an associate professor of history, in collaboration with Robert Browder, publishing coordinator of Virginia Tech Publishing housed in University Libraries, each student produced a chapter or article-length essay that resembled the kinds of scholarly papers historians regularly deliver at professional meetings or submit for publication. Then each of these works were combined and published into a book.
“Compiling the essays into a published volume adds a level of seriousness and excitement to the class,” said Mollin. “Students universally love that their work will appear in an actual book rather than just submitted as a class assignment that no one except their professor sees. And knowing that their work will be published and available for public consumption pushes students to do their very best work.”
“This project is unique because each student gets to write about whatever she wants to under the subject matter,” said McLean, a student in the course and a double major in history and international studies with a minor in Spanish. “That means that each author wrote about what she was most interested in and passionate about.”
The now successful project encountered some challenges along the way. During the first months of the pandemic in spring 2020, the class shifted to remote learning. This almost derailed the entire book project.
“The students had really just started their research,” said Mollin. “Some of their research was with online databases, but more were print library resources that suddenly were inaccessible. The lack of face-to-face contact was difficult as well. The work in this capstone research seminar is intense, and peer support is essential to the students’ successful completion of their projects.”
The classmates were scattered geographically and met through Zoom, challenging their ability to maintain a sense of connection required to complete the high-level project.
“All of my sources for my chapter were back in my dorm room in Blacksburg,” said Liv Wisnewski, one of the class project authors. “I hadn’t brought them home with me over spring break, figuring I would only be gone for a week and not intending to work on the paper in that time anyway. I was away from them for a month and had to get special permission to return to campus early to get my things so I could finish my chapter.”
The students did not give up., and as a result, they are now proud published authors. The book is available both as a freely downloadable eBook and as an affordable paperback edition.
