VOLUME 19

NUMBER 02

September 2015

 

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

 

In this issue we publish two new document projects, two scholarly essays as part of our Black Woman Suffragists collection, and a fourth installment of documents in that collection.

Our first document project by Harriet Feinberg, "How Did Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs Interpret and Cope with Deep Differences among Women during Their 1911-12 Journey through Africa and Asia?" traces an around-the-world trip taken by Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs, two leaders of the transnational woman's movement in the early twentieth century. Particularly valuable are the journal entries and newspaper accounts of their activities in South Africa and China during this trip, revealing a great deal about the strengths and limitations of Euro-American feminism in pre-World War I years.

Steve Kramer is the author of our second document project in this issue, "How Did Victoria Earle Matthews's Life Reflect the Sometimes Conflicting Attitudes of Black Self-Help and Black Political Activism?" He draws principally on writings from the Black press in the 1890s and early 1900s to illuminate the writings and work of Victoria Matthews, who played a leading role in African-American settlement house work and in the founding of the National Association of Colored Women. Additional works by Matthews can be found in the new Primary Source Collection on this database, the Writings of Black Woman Suffragists.

Based on the pioneering scholarship of Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, this collection will eventually include more than 1,500 items, totaling about 16,000 pages. Tom Dublin and a team of students have assembled these published and unpublished writings of eighty Black woman suffragists first identified by Professor Terborg-Penn, In this issue we include two essays written by established scholars that provide entry points into the collection: Adrienne Lash Jones writing on Addie Hunton; and Michelle Rief on Margaret Murray Washington. We plan to publish two more installments of the Writings of Black Women Suffragists in March 2016 and September 2016.

We round out this issue with other valuable resources, including fifteen book reviews, News from the Archives, and two Teaching Tools. If you are interested in reviewing books or have titles to recommend for review, please email our book review editors, Kathleen Laughlin, of Metropolitan (MN) State University for works in U.S. Women's History and Megan Threlkeld, of Denison University, for works in International Women's History, with your suggestions. Please note as well the announcements in the News from the Archives section, assembled by Tanya Zanish-Belcher, of Wake Forest University. If you would like to make an archives-related announcement in a future issue, she can be reached at zanisht@wfu.edu.

We'd like to take a moment to remind our readers of several new initiatives we announced in our last issue. Our two new associate editors, Lisa Materson and Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor would be pleased to hear from potential authors who are thinking about writing an article based on any of the primary sources found in WASM's Primary Source Collections. Michelle Moravec, our Digital Humanities editor is open for exchanges from prospective authors interested in utilizing digitized versions of WASM documents for further analysis.

Finally, for those of you who are not subscribers to our WASM newsletter, let us announce again that we are launching a search for new editors and a new editorial home for our journal and database. Tom Dublin and Kitty Sklar will be stepping down as editors in December 2017 and have constituted a committee to review applications and select successors to work with Alexander Street Press beginning in January 2018.

Alexander Street Press is marketing WASM International to libraries, offering subscriptions or purchase plans. Your acquisitions librarian can contact Eileen Lawrence at Alexander Street Press to request a free trial. We look forward to hearing your reactions to this major addition to Women and Social Movements.

Contents

 

 

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