In This Issue

In this issue we publish two new document projects; we add to the "Biographical Database of Militant Woman Suffragists, 1913-1920;" and we add to the Black Woman Suffragists collection; and add a second installment to our primary source set--the feminist journal, Equal Rights, 1923-1954.

The first document project, is authored by Harriet Feinberg, "How Did Eight Translations of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's WOMEN AND ECONOMICS Transmit Feminist Thought across National Boundaries in the Years before World War I?" This remarkable project reprints and explores the introductions to eight translations of Gilman's classic work that appeared in the decade after its initial publication in 1898. Feinberg discusses the international appeal of Gilman's analysis and shows how her ideas were transmitted beyond their original American context into Dutch, German, Italian, Russian (twice), Hungarian, Polish, and Japanese.

Natalia Shevin is the author of this issue's second document project, "How Did Mary Church Terrell Address Issues of Race at Oberlin College, 1911-1948?" When Terrell attended Oberlin College in the early 1880's she had an integrated experience in an institution that still reflected the college's multi-racial, antislavery heritage. As an alumna, however, she witnessed the college's retreat from its earlier commitments. Oberlin decided not to accept Terrell's offer to lecture on the centennial of Harriet Beecher Stowe's birth, decided not to confer an honorary degree on Terrell on the occasion of the College's centennial, and placed her daughters in segregated housing.

In this issue we continue to expand the document project, "Biographical Database of Militant Woman Suffragists, 1913-1920," first posted in March 2015. To that project we add 40 biographical sketches of women activists who picketed the White House in 1917-1919 or otherwise supported the National Woman's Party. We expect to publish the remaining 80 biographical sketches for this project on the website in the coming year or two.

With this issue we continue to update our collection of Writings by and about Black Women Suffragists, which began with our March 2014 issue. We now add 59 new biographical sketches and 58 new documents to the collection. Building on the pioneering scholarship of Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, this collection now includes more than 1,900 writings by or about around 160 activists, totaling more than 16,000 pages. Tom Dublin and a team of scholars and students have assembled these published and unpublished writings of Black woman suffragists, including both notable national figures and lesser-known local activists. When complete, we anticipate that this group will include 280 women. We are now commissioning biographical sketches for the latest additions to the group. If you would like to prepare a biographical sketch or are aware of women activists we still need to include in the collection, please contact [email protected].

This issue also includes an essay by Jill D. Zahniser to accompany our expanding archive of Equal Rights, the official journal of the National Woman's Party (NWP). This essay, Reflection on Documents: Equal Rights, 1923-1954, provides an analytic overview of the journal's history and places it within the broader history of the NWP. It is complemented by six additional years of Equal Rights, for the period 1929-1934. We expect to complete publication of an almost complete run of Equal Rights in September 2019.

We round out this issue with eight book reviews and News from the Archives. If you are interested in reviewing books or have titles to recommend for review, please email our incoming book review editors, Katherine Marino ([email protected]) and Donna Schuele ([email protected]) 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 [email protected].

In the summer of 2016, Alexander Street launched Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires on and moved Women and Social Movements International to a new software platform, known by the acronym LAZR. This June, Alexander Street also moved WASM in the U.S. to LAZR. This platform will enable for the first time joint searching of all three databases. If your library subscribes to all three databases, you can search comprehensively in the more than 400,000 pages of women's history documents we have assembled over twenty years. We hope this expanded search capability will make the databases even more valuable resources for teaching and research.

Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin have been editing the WASM database/journal for twenty-one years now and beginning with January 2019 we will pass the baton to Judy Tzu-Chun Wu of UC Irvine and Rebecca Jo Plant of UC San Diego, who will begin a 4 1/2 year term as WASM co-editors. Their respective universities are supporting the editorial work, as SUNY Binghamton did in the past. We are grateful to Judy and Rebecca and thank them for making this transition such a smooth experience for all of us. We have enjoyed the work and are grateful to the community of historians of women that supported WASM during these two decades. It has taken a village to cultivate U.S. women's history online. And it has taken two more villages to create the International and Empires databases. As we return to writing books, we pause for a moment to say, "Thank you."

If you are interested in submitting future work for consideration for publication in WASM, please contact our new editors to discuss your ideas and the submission process. They can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].