Women and Social Movements in the United States,1600-2000

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.

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.

#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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.