VOLUME 24
NUMBER 1
March 2020
Editorial Assistants: Jordan Mylet and Kacey Calahane
Book Review Editors: Katherine Marino and Donna Schuele
Published by Alexander Street Press
with support from the University of California, Irvine and San Diego
In This Issue:
For our current issue, centered on the theme "Sexualities and Bodies," we are thrilled to showcase the cover art of Mignonette Chiu, entitled Liberty's Pride. The work dramatically highlights the plight of immigrants and LGBTQ individuals in an age when many in power are seeking to criminalize their very existence. In Chiu's words, "This image reflects what I believe as an Asian lesbian feminist and daughter of immigrants: for all of us who have/are deemed 'illegal' and criminal, we know this is wrong, and it is all our obligation to stand up to tyranny and fight, not just for those crossing the border but for our democracy."
The centerpiece of the current issue is a very rich document project by Jamie Wagman, "Transgender in the Heartland: Transitioning and Seeking Community in Middle America." This project consists of oral history interviews, including both audio files and transcripts, of twenty transgender women and men who grew up or currently live in the Midwest, many in small towns and rural areas. Those seeking to integrate more material on transgender history into women's and gender history courses will find these interviews to be extremely valuable sources. They offer insight into the lived experiences of transgender people who chose to remain near their places of birth rather than flocking to coastal cities. But as their often very moving stories illustrate, rural and small town life should not be equated with a closeted existence. The interviewees' narratives, as Wagman writes, show that "there is no singular way of coming out or transitioning as transgender, just as there is no singular formula for finding support and community."
Further reflecting on the history of sexuality, we are also pleased to present a roundtable on "Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Archives" curated by graduate research assistants Kacey Calahane and Jordan Mylet and featuring contributions from Morna Gerrard, archivist for Women and Gender Collections at Georgia State University Library; Jeff Snapp, formerly National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Project Archivist at ONE Archive; and Liana Zhou, Director of the Kinsey Institute Library and Special Collection. These contributors were invited to reflect on new acquisitions or "hidden gems" in their collections that would be of interest to researchers in the history of sexuality. Inspired by Jamie Wagman's document project, we also asked them to think about materials that could help broaden the geographic reach of the field beyond urban areas. They have obliged by producing wonderful short essays that detail a wide range of fascinating material, from letters that lesbians in search of community sent to ONE Magazine during the 1950s and 1960s; to evidence of women's AIDS activism in Atlanta, Georgia; to materials on feminist sex research, lesbian comics, and women's publishing in the 1970s and 1980s.
Also included in this issue is a substantial addition to the previously published document project, "How Did Elisabeth Freeman's Publicity Skills Promote Woman Suffrage, Antilynching, and the Peace Movement, 1909-1919? Part 1." In February 1913, Emilie Doetsch, a recent Goucher College graduate, embedded herself in the New York-to-Washington, D.C., suffrage hike and filed daily stories that were published in the Baltimore News. These accounts provide a valuable perspective on suffrage activism connected to the March 1913 suffrage parade on the eve of Woodrow Wilson's inauguration.
A three-document addition to the previously published document project by Xiaolan Bao, "How did Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City Forge a Successful Class-Based Coalition during the 1982 Contract Dispute?" also appears in this issue. Each of the three documents further illuminates the contributions of Asian American women's campaigns for workers' rights in New York and San Francisco, as well as how they collaborated with members of other racial and ethnic groups.
This issue also includes 23 new primary documents for the Writings of Black Women Suffragists primary source set. We are also pleased to note that, since our last issue, the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States (OBD) has grown to include 2,140 biographical sketches of grassroots suffrage activists. An additional 500 sketches are slated to be added in June.
In addition, we are publishing another 58 issues of Equal Rights, the official journal of the National Woman's Party, dating mainly from the period 1935-1954. These issues complete the run of the journal provided to us by the Historic National Woman's Party. Although there are still a number of missing issues, we believe that the collection on WASM is the most complete online version of the journal. We thank the Historic National Woman's Party for supplying us with this resource and granting permission for its online publication.
Finally, this edition features six new book reviews, for which we again thank the contributors and Donna Schuele and Katherine Marino, our book review editors.
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