VOLUME 14

NUMBER 02

September 2010

 

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

This last issue of 2010 contains the full range of resources that we publish—-two new document projects, a document archive, book reviews, full-text sources, and News from the Archives. And for those accessing the Scholar's Edition, we have a new secondary essay relating to our database of publications of State and Local Commissions on the Status of Women.

The first document project explores the contributions of African American women to the civil rights movement in the twentieth century. Professor Gail Murray shows how women worked within national organizations and in local communities to broaden opportunities--organizing and participating in mass demonstrations, as well as feeding, housing, and nurturing movement supporters. The last documents in the project explore women's theoretical contributions in more recent decades as the movement shifted out of the South and operated on new terms.

Jeanne Petit offers a compelling view of the work of Catholic laywomen during and just after World War I to provide social services for immigrants in East St. Louis, Illinois. She shows how these committed Catholic reformers had to negotiate a complex political and social landscape while doing their work. In the process, they opened up new dimensions of urban social welfare as they sought to prove that they should be taken seriously as American reformers and good Catholic women.

In a document archive presented here, Marcia Gallo offers a selection of issues from The Ladder , published by the Daughters of Bilitis between 1956 and 1972. In her introductory essay, Gallo discusses the founding and the evolution of the magazine and its place in the emerging lesbian and second-wave feminist movements in these years. The archive itself includes more than a thousand pages chosen to illuminate the changing approaches taken by the journal's editors over time.

For readers who access the web site through libraries that subscribe to the Scholar's Edition, we offer an essay by Keisha Blain and Kathryn Kish Sklar, "How Did the President's Commission on the Status of Women and Subsequent State and Local Commissions Address Issues Related to Race, 1963-1980?" Drawing on a close analysis of the work of federal and state commissions, Blain and Sklar explore how racial considerations played in the policy work of these bodies through 1980.

We publish as well a full array of resources complementing this original scholarship, including eight reviews, our News from the Archives, and a diverse assortment of full-text sources. These include Catherine Birney's 1885 biography of Sarah and Angelina Grimke and a series of ten articles, "Famous Women of the Negro Race," published by The Colored American Magazine in 1901. Complementing WASM's strong array of biographical dictionaries focused on women, we publish in this issue Woman's Who's Who of America for 1914. Finally, two studies from the 1920s round out our full-text sources: Inez Haynes Irwin s work, The Story of the Woman's Party , and the Record of the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission .

Meanwhile, we are building a second, major online digital archive, "Women and Social Movements, International-—1840 to Present." We will publish the first portion of this new archive in November 2010. It should reach its completed size of 150,000 pages by early 2013. It will include both published and manuscript materials generated by women's participation in international conferences and organizations over a period of 170 years, from missionary and abolition activities in the first half of the nineteenth century to women's NGO activism in the twenty-first century. We have also commissioned about thirty secondary articles by scholars working in fields related to the archive that will place the primary materials within a broader interpretive context and offer suggestions on how best to make use of these online resources.

Alexander Street Press is offering discounts to libraries that subscribe or purchase the digital archive in advance of publication. Your acquisitions librarian might be interested in this option. We look forward to learning about your reactions to this next major addition to Women and Social Movements.

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