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U.S. Empire and American Women Missionaries in Japan: Lizzie Poorbaugh and Japanese School Girls
Women were the dominant force in U.S. Protestant overseas missions in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the Asia-Pacific world was the main theater for their operation. This project explores the missionary tenure of Elizabeth Poorbaugh in Japan from 1886 to 1893. Although she successfully established a girls’ school in Sendai relying on the conventional belief in American superiority, Poorbaugh was seriously challenged not only by Japanese male pastors and leaders but also by her assertive students in the social climate of rising nationalism in the 1890s.
Progressive Reformers, the Russian Revolution, and the Politics of Friendship: American Women's Ties to Revolutionary Catherine Breshkovsky
Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution in late 1917, the Russian revolutionary movement enjoyed broad support among American progressives in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The arrival of Catherine Breshkovsky, a well-educated, noble-blooded revolutionary, further solidified these ties between Russian and American reform in 1904. While in America, she befriended many American women, especially suffragists and settlement house workers, who were united by their universalist ideas of human progress. These connections, however, were severely undermined by the realities of war and nationalism.
Artist Statement for the painting: “Fragility”
This painting is for those who have been forced to flee from their birthplace to a new land by sea. Surviving the physical and emotional journey of displacement, trauma, war, and political repression reveals the fragility of life and death. While ocean waves can be seductively soothing, they are also deceptively destructive and deadly.
If you, your parents, your ancestors, or your loved ones have had to escape from your homeland, you are invited to take a circle magnet and place it on the lower portion of the canvas. Take caution though since the tenuous bond of the circle magnet and the canvas surface varies in strength. If you fail to find a strong connection, you may be swept out into the open waters by the powerful storm. However, if you are tenacious, you may survive the harsh conditions to make it to a new land. For more about Ann Phong, see her artist statement here.
Online Biographical Dictionary
With this issue of WASM we publish the first installment of the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States (OBD), It will eventually include crowdsourced biographical sketches of more than 3,000 women suffrage activists, primarily concentrated in the period 1890-1920. We are aiming for an inclusive collection, including white and black suffragists, mainstream and militant suffragists. The sketches will place women’s suffrage activism within the frame of women’s broader social agenda, before and after the final approval of the 19th Amendment in August 1920. The OBD can also be viewed at a freely accessible site at https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/VOTESforWOMEN.
