Browses
Current Issue - Volume 27, Number 1; Spring 2023
Our current issue features two new document projects that involve women asserting themselves to achieve specific ends. The first showcases letters from Northern women who petitioned the U.S. federal government during the Civil War in hopes of alleviating wartime hardships they suffered when their husbands and fathers enlisted. The second illustrates how Addie Hunton and other Black women continued to fight for access to the ballot after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, pressuring the National Woman’s Party to recognize those women who were still being denied the right to vote on the grounds of race. We also publish a new Primary Source Set marking the 50th anniversary of the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities. Our cover art, which dates from early 1863, portrays soldiers resisting temptations to spend their military pay on themselves and instead preparing to send money home to their dependent families. Completing the issue are several new book reviews.
How Did Black Women Struggle to Bring White Suffragists to Their Citizenship Cause in 1921?
Following the November 1920 elections Black women suffragists approached the National Woman’s Party and the League of Women Voters, seeking white women’s support for a call on Congress to investigate Southern denials of Black women’s right to vote. This document project, by Thomas Dublin, traces the organizing efforts of Addie Hunton of the NAACP and varied responses of white women suffragists to these appeals.
Fierce and Feminist: Patsy Takemoto Mink, the First Woman of Color in Congress
This document project, by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, explores the political vision and efforts of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color in the U.S. Congress and the namesake for Title IX. A third generation Japanese American from Hawai’i, Mink advocated for racial, gender, and environmental justice. She brought a Pacific worldview with her to Washington, D.C. as she engaged in bridge and intersectional feminism to design, advocate, and implement legislation. The featured photo is Patsy Mink with Wendy Mink, from The Women’s Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where Gwendolyn Mink was a professor and invited Patsy Mink to speak on women’s issues, ca 1993. Source: Annie Valva, photographer.
From the Margin Toward the Center: California Women and the National Women’s Conference
This document project, by Haleigh Marcello, Stephanie Narrow, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, analyzes the significance of the 1977 California International Women’s Year (IWY) Conference. The California IWY was just one of many state and territorial meetings held ahead of the 1977 National Women’s Conference (NWC), in Houston, Texas—the first and only time that the U.S. federal government funded and authorized an event focused on women’s rights. This collection focuses on the political mobilization of women of color and lesbians from California, highlighting the efforts of minoritized women to outreach to their respective communities and form coalitions with one another before and during the state meeting to make collective impacts at the NWC.
The Empire Suffrage Syllabus
#EmpireSuffrageSyllabus seeks to enrich our historical understanding and pedagogy by placing the U.S. suffrage movement in a much broader context—temporally, thematically, and geographically—than it has traditionally been conceived. Viewing the struggle for the vote as only one piece of women’s quest for greater power, the project charts the expansive scope of women's political activities, focusing in particular on their involvement in a wide range of social movements. Above all, it insists that recognition of the U.S. as an empire and an appreciation of the intertwined development of democracy and imperial power is crucial for understanding how, why, and when some women obtained the vote, while others did not.
Securing Childcare during World War II: The Case of San Diego
This document project, by Kyle Ciani, shows how one heavily war-impacted community sought to meet the demand for childcare services during World War II. Focusing on both long-time residents and new migrants who flooded into the city, Ciani highlights the childcare needs among diverse families, as well as the complexities attached to providing that care. The project’s 27 documents reveal how organizations and agencies formed a collaborative network to develop and provide a range of resources, including foster care homes, nursery schools, parent-child boarding homes, childcare centers attached to worksites, before-and-after-school programs, and a collective of state-wide day care in public schools. Parents also turned to families, friends, and neighbors, especially when seeking care for infants and toddlers. Readers will gain a vivid sense of how parents interacted with authorities to navigate the unstable times in this resource-strapped city.
Revisiting the President’s Commission on the Status of Women through the Activism of Dorothy Height, President of the National Council of Negro Women, and Her Part in the Emergence of New Forms of Women’s Activism, 1961-1966
In this document project, Kathryn Kish Sklar and Keisha Blain call attention to Height’s innovative and intersectional political leadership in the early 1960s. The project’s 22 documents reveal how Height stressed the need to combat racial discrimination while also advocating for social support for poor and working-class families. In the process, she created new political alliances and intellectual synergies between labor feminists and civil rights activists. Offering revisionist interpretations of two critical documents—the PCSW’s final report, The American Woman, and the infamous Moynihan Report—Sklar and Blain also help readers to appreciate the factors that ultimately hindered Height’s ability to convey her message.
Gendered Invisibility: Ethnic Mexican Women and the Bracero Program
This document project, by Alina R. Méndez, focuses on how this program, which brought thousands of Mexicans to the United States as contract laborers between 1942 and 1964, affected women, including the wives left behind, those who accompanied their husbands, and women already in the U.S., who interacted with the new arrivals in a variety of capacities. Drawn from both U.S. and Mexican archives, the documents presented include letters that women sent to the Mexican president, newspaper articles, a notarized statement by the widow of bracero, as well as photographs and remarkable oral histories collected by the Bracero History Archive. Together, these sources demonstrate how a rigidly gendered program produced powerfully gendered effects, shaping women’s lives in myriad and enduring ways. Click here for a short author's video about the project.
The Wife of Jane Addams
This document project by Rima Lunin Schultz and Kathryn Kish Sklar explores the forty-year relationship between the social reformer and Hull House founder Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, who as the daughter of one of Chicago’s wealthiest families became an important benefactor to the settlement house. The project focuses on how Addams and Smith creatively wove together their intimate and public lives in a manner that prioritized their mutual quest for personal meaning and social significance. Challenging prior depictions of Smith as simply a helpmate to Addams, the featured documents—including personal correspondence, poems that Addams wrote for Smith, candid photographs and formal portraits, and references to their relationship in the writings of their many friends and coworkers—offer new insight into the improvisational same-sex relationships that helped to fuel and sustain women’s activism in this period. Click here for a short author's video about the project.
2020 in Review: Reflections on Life and Politics
This is a new primary document collection that attempts to capture the personal effects of the dramatic and disruptive historical event that we have all recently lived through. We asked people to discuss how they viewed and were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter and other political movements, recent changes to the Supreme Court, and/or the historic 2020 presidential election. We hope that these submissions can serve as an important repository in the future for students and researchers who will attempt to understand and analyze these turbulent times.
Having It All: Lucy Stone, Motherhood, and the Woman's Rights Movement, 1851-1893
This document project, by Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz, offers a new perspective on woman's rights advocate Lucy Stone by highlighting her experiences of marriage and motherhood. Although she and her husband, Henry Blackwell, famously pledged to create a partnership of equals, domestic demands proved incompatible with Stone’s desired public life. Personal correspondence reveals how she reluctantly curtailed her activities and sought new ways of contributing to the movement as an editor of the Woman’s Journal, the newspaper of the American Woman Suffrage Association. The project also highlights how Stone's frustration and exhaustion led her to develop a critical analysis of women’s uncompensated domestic labor. As Laughlin-Schultz notes in this introductory video, our current moment, which has witnessed an exodus of women from the workforce to deal with the demands of caregiving during a pandemic, makes this project especially timely.
The National Organization for Women, the Equal Rights Amendment, and California NOW Chapters' Lesbian Feminist Activism
This document project, by Haleigh Marcello, demonstrates how the National Organization for Women (NOW) dealt with the question of lesbianism in the 1970s while pursuing its central goal: ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). This overriding focus led many NOW chapters to shy away from addressing discrimination against lesbianism—an issue many saw as too divisive at a time when they were focused on attracting broad-based support. But in California, which ratified the ERA in 1972—quite early on—local NOW branches proved far more willing to prioritize lesbian rights. Marcello's project, which she describes in this short introductory video, reveals how the local and state-wide branches at times diverged from, and at times reinforced, national political dynamics, revealing a complex portrayal of one of the most iconic organizations of the so-called second wave.
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.
Notable American Women
This five-volume biographical dictionary, the first large-scale scholarly work in its field, grew out of a commitment to women's history which Radcliffe College originally undertook in 1943. That year the suffrage leader Maud Wood Park, a Radcliffe graduate of 1898, gave the college her woman's rights collection, including her own papers, those of many co-workers, and material she had gathered on the whole history of the woman's rights movement. Two Harvard historians, W. K. Jordan, then president of Radcliffe, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, a member of the college Council, Radcliffe's top governing board, saw the gift as an opportunity for a women's college to make a special contribution to scholarship. Under their guidance the collection by 1950 had grown into the Women's Archives, a research library for the study not merely of the suffrage movement but of all phases of women's activity in the American past.