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

#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.

This document project, by David Dawson and Rebecca Jo Plant, considers the debate during World War II over whether women should be conscripted to fill civilian jobs in order to meet the nation’s severe labor shortage. Although business leaders, some mainstream women's organizations, and progressive women like Eleanor Roosevelt supported legislation to this effect, the bill ultimately failed in the face of angry condemnation from across the political spectrum. The project features documents that reveal the views of both proponents and detractors of the bill, with a particular focus on a women’s coalition of self-proclaimed patriots that denounced conscripting members of their sex as a subversive attack on the American home. In this video, David Dawson introduces the project.

This document project, created by Jamie Wagman, 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.

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.