VOLUME 17

NUMBER 02

September 2013

 

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

With the current issue we complete 2013 and mark ten years of publishing as an online journal and website. In this issue we include a new Document Project and a Document Archive, complemented by our regular array of Book Reviews, Full-Text Sources, and News from the Archives. In the Scholars' Edition, to improve searchability we are also continuing to transcribe and rekey documents related to state Commissions on the Status of Women.

A notable affirmative action legal case at the University of Michigan in the early 1970s provides the focus for a document project prepared by the journalist Sara Fitzgerald, "What Factors Led to the Success of the Historic 1970 Sex Discrimination Complaint Filed against the University of Michigan?" Fitzgerald, a student reporter as the case unfolded, explores the tactics and strategies adopted by campus feminists that led the Health, Education and Welfare Department to charge the university with sex discrimination and to require university officials to prepare an affirmative action plan to address shortcomings in the hiring and treatment of women employees. She tells a remarkable story that should remind us, forty years later, that the changing status of women in higher education did not just happen in recent decades, but emerged within a contested struggle in which women faculty, staff and students have challenged university administrations, largely white and male, to end decades of discriminatory practices.

Melanie Gustafson is the author and editor of a document archive, "Maud Wood Park Archive: The Power of Organization," part 1 of which we publish in this issue. The second half of the archive will be published in Spring 2014. Together the two parts include more than 140 documents, principally from the Schlesinger Library and the Library of Congress. Park was a key player in the winning strategy of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in securing passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and served as the first president of the League of Women Voters after 1920. The documents brought together here illuminate the history of the organized women's movement in the United States between 1910 and 1950, and are particularly valuable to understanding the founding of the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, organized originally around the Women's Rights Collection, that consisted principally at first of the papers of NAWSA and Maud Wood Park.

With this issue, in our full-text sources we post online an array of published works generated by the temperance, women's club and suffrage movements between 1890 and 1950. These works bring the total of full-text sources published on the website since 2004 to more than 62,000 pages. With our March 2014 issue we plan to begin a new initiative in which we expect to publish more than 10,000 pages of the writings of Black Women Suffragists over the next two years. We will have more to say about that undertaking in our next issue, which will include an introduction by the noted African American scholar, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn.

We round out this issue with other valuable resources, including nine book reviews and News from the Archives. If you are interested in reviewing books or have titles to recommend for review, please email our book review editor, Mary Henold, with your suggestions.

Please note as well the announcements in the News from the Archives section, assembled by its hard-working editor, Tanya Zanish-Belcher. If you would like to make an archives-related announcement in a future issue, she can now be reached at Clemson University at zanisht@wfu.edu.

Meanwhile, we want to remind readers of the continuing publication of our second, major online digital archive, "Women and Social Movements, International—1840 to Present." This month we are posting our final installment of this new archive, which totals 150,000 pages of primary documents. It includes both published and manuscript materials generated by women's participation in international conferences and organizations over a period of 170 years, from missionary and abolitionist activities in the first half of the nineteenth century to women's NGO activism in the early twenty-first century. We have also posted on the site 25 secondary articles by scholars working in fields related to the archive, which 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 marketing this transnational archive to libraries, offering both subscriptions or purchase plans. Your acquisitions librarian might be interested in either of these options. Please ask her or him to contact Eileen Lawrence at Alexander Street Press for subscription information and/or to request a free trial of this resource. We look forward to hearing your reactions to this major addition to Women and Social Movements.

Contents

 

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