VOLUME 10

NUMBER 02

June 2006

Editors : Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin
Published by Alexander Street Press and the
Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender, SUNY Binghamton

In This Issue

The two document projects in this issue explore the dynamics of cooperation among women across class and race in New York City in the first four decades of the twentieth century. These projects contain documents that permit us to analyze the strategies reformers used to achieve their goals and the extent to which those strategies were successful. They shed important new light on the history of progressive reform in one of its most productive venues.

In "How Did Settlement Workers at Greenwich House Promote the Arts as Integral to a Shared Social Life?" Kirsten Swinth shows how music, dancing, theater, and crafts—the arts—took up precious energy and resources of these busy reformers at Greenwich House. These activities expressed some of the deepest reform impulses of the settlement movement. Through them, settlement activists sought to empower citizens and broaden the meaning of citizenship beyond basic political rights to include access to culture and self-expression. They also hoped to foster the collective life of the nation and broaden the public sphere through the shared experience of making or watching works of art.

On February 1, 1930, Margaret Sanger opened a branch office of her New York City birth control clinic in the center of Harlem, at 2352 7th Avenue near 138th Street. Carole McCann, in "What Perspectives Did African American Advocates Bring to the Birth Control Movement and How Did Those Perspectives Shape the History of the Harlem Branch Birth Control Clinic?" offers a window on the views and actions of African American birth control advocates on the clinic's Advisory Council. Intertwined, and sometimes conflicting, elements of women's rights, economic security, and racial progress laid the ground for cooperation and conflict between the Advisory Council and Sanger and the white clinic staff. The Advisory Council's efforts reflected their commitment to racial justice based in equal opportunity through full integration.

News from the Archives has become a regular feature of the Women and Social Movements website. This section provides news about collections and projects of interest from archives and repositories. If you are affiliated with an archive or repository and would like to submit an announcement that you feel would be of interest to our readers, please contact the editor of the new section, Tanya Zanish-Belcher , Associate Professor and Head of the Special Collections Department and University Archives at Iowa State University.

The full-text sources in this issue mark a new departure for the website as we are beginning the online publication of twenty-five years of the minutes and reports of the annual meetings of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the largest women's social movement in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We expect that this run of reports will amount to 6,000 pages in all and will be spread out in five issues over a fifteen-month period. We are also giving thought to other possible major runs of primary documents beginning sometime in 2007.

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