Browses
Current Issue - Volume 24, Number 1; March 2020
This image, Liberty’s Pride, is by Mignonette Chiu (see her artist statement here). In Chiu’s words, it “is intended to be a part of a series of Liberty prints. . . . 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. If not now, then never.”
Transgender in the Heartland: Transitioning and Seeking Community in Middle America
This new document project, created by Jamie Wagman for the March 2020 issue, 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. 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.
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.
Online Biographical Dictionary
As of March 2020 the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States (OBD) includes more than 2,140 biographical sketches and eventually it will include crowdsourced biographical sketches of more than 3,500 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
