Women and Social Movements in the United States Since 1600

In this document project, Karen Pastorello reintroduces us to one of the most important theorists of labor and gender that "you've never heard of": Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon (1890-1979). Pidgeon's long and productive career at the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor was foundational to workplace policy, notably the minimum wage. Pidgeon's work exposed the urgent need for minimum wages for women and helped lead to the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act as well as for the state laws that followed.

This essay by historians Mary Klann and Brianna Theobald introduces a roundtable of documents and scholarly commentary on the important topic of Indigenous women’s activism.  Their essay offers a sensitive overview of the intellectual and activist traditions among Indigenous women in the Americas that the academy organizes under “feminism” but that exist in tension with that category. The roundtable contains a dozen contributions organized around two themes: Political Interventions and Rematriation. The first theme focuses on activity that addresses the state, government, or the military and accents material found in established archives. The second theme’s authors cast a wider lens on cultural, creative, and restorative practices which are nourished by women within families and communities and that have their own potent anticolonial ramifications. Together these materials shine light on robust and female-centered decolonizing, resistant, and recuperative activities among Indigenous women in historical perspective.

This document project, by Brandy Thomas Wells, highlights connections across the Atlantic, as Wells describes the anti-colonial activism of Sibusisiwe Makhanya (1894-1971) of South Africa, one of the first Zulu women to reach English speaking audiences in the 1920s. This project reminds us of the foundational if ambivalent power of missionary discourses. Mkahanya's parents were early converts to Protestantism after the pacification of the Zulu by the British in the late 19th century. Yet Thomas Wells demonstrates through Mkahanya's work that Christian conversion entailed important elements of cultural resistance and continuity for the Zulu. A graduate of Inanda Seminary in 1908 Mkahanya was something of a marriage resister and she pursued teacher training that took her all the way to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Schauffler College in Ohio, and Columbia University in New York. Back in Africa, she founded important organizations that fed nationalism and anti-colonialism, notably the Bantu Purity League, traveling widely to establish branches to serve young people and secure for them resources to survive and resist domination in a changing world. Thomas Wells helps us to consider this bi-cultural figure who might be seen as "conservative" today as a pioneer in both anti-racism and anti-colonial politics in her long and unjustly neglected career. 

This document project, by Jill Jensen, traces lines of intellectual and political development for "indigenous women's feminism" from a hemispheric perspective. Two critical nodes for articulation were the world wars and the "status of women" discourses that emerged among the western colonial powers viz their colonial or postcolonial relations. In the 1920s the League of Nations and the International labor organization provided settings for points of intellectual connection and exchange on issues of specific concern to indigenous women, like human trafficking. World War II and decolonization eventually ushered in another, more sustained set of spaces and institutional relations for women to connect across lines of empire. Most conspicuous among these touch points were the UN Conferences for Women: 1975 in Mexico City and 1985 in Nairobi, Kenya, and 1995 in Beijing China. Throughout, Jensen highlights the tensions between "development" discourses favored by the west and resistance traditions among indigenous women, notably "guardians of knowledge" and the long struggle to painstakingly forge common ground for mutual understanding and cooperative projects.

This document project, by Alison M. Parker, explores how Mary Church Terrell's international experiences and perspectives were reflected in her analysis of race relations and her call for racial justice in the United States. Terrell returned from her European visits with anti-colonial insights and fresh ammunition in her struggle against American racial prejudice. Her international experiences and perspectives allowed Terrell to approach the fight for civil rights as a broader, linked struggle for all women and people of color around the world.

#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.

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.