VOLUME 23

NUMBER 01

March 2019

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 one new document project, and a new primary source set, "The Women's History Movement in the United States, 1950-2000," consisting of 28 oral history interviews and an interpretive introduction. We also launch the serial publication of our Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States.

The new document project, co-authored by Julie Myers-Mushkin and Diane Pecknold, is titled, "How Did the United Tailoresses Society Contribute a Working-Class Conceptualization of Equality to Early Women's Rights Activism?" This project explores one of the earliest strikes by working women, led by the 1831 United Tailoresses Society, which was also a struggle for women's rights and anticipated the emergence of labor and industrial feminisms in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Our new primary source set, "The Woman's History Movement in the United States, 1950-2000," consists of transcripts of oral history interviews of 28 historians of American women who helped build the field of U.S. Women's History. These oral histories are accompanied by an interpretive introduction written by Jennifer Tomás.

We have been working on parts of the Online Biographical Dictionary for about ten years and we are pleased to launch here the first installment that includes all three groups of its suffrage activists: Black Women Suffragists, Militant Suffragists, and mainstream suffragists associated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Earlier issues of WASM included 160 biographical sketches of Black Women Suffragists and more than 300 biographical sketches of Militant Suffragists.

Here we add biographical sketches of more than 460 NAWSA woman suffragists, 20 Black Women Suffragists and 4 Militant Suffragists. And we present these biographies in the new format of the Online Biographical Dictionary. We will continue to publish sketches of women in all three groups through 2021 as our contribution to the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. When complete this collection will include biographical sketches of some 3,300 grassroots activists.

When we began the suffrage project a decade ago, we gathered The Writings of Black Women Suffragists. That project continues as a primary source set, complementing the Online Biographical Dictionary. In this issue we publish another 7 writings by or about Black Women Suffragists; that collection has now grown to almost 2,000 items.

We continue to commission biographical sketches for all three groups of suffrage activists. If you would like to prepare a biographical sketch or are aware of women activists we still might include in the collection, please contact tdublin@binghamton.edu.

We round out this issue with five book reviews and News from the Archives. We thank our retiring book review editors, Kathleen Laughlin and Megan Threlkeld, who have ably selected works, secured reviewers, and copyedited the completed reviews during the past few years. Brava!

If you are interested in reviewing books or have titles to recommend for review, please email our incoming book review editors, Katherine Marino (kmarino@history.ucla.edu) and Donna Schuele (dcsclv@pacbell.net) 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 (zanisht@wfu.edu). Tanya has edited this section of WASM for 14 years now and as she moves on we thank her for this tremendous contribution.

 

The New Platform

 

In the summer of 2016, Alexander Street launched a new platform for Women and Social Movements International, known by the acronym LAZR. Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires employs the same platform and interface. This past June, Alexander Street moved WASM in the U.S. to this new platform as well. The new platform will enable for the first time joint searching of all three WASM databases. If your library subscribes to all the WASM databases, you can search comprehensively in the 400,000 pages of women's history documents we've assembled over twenty years.

 

Editorial Transition

 

 Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin have been editing Women and Social Movements for twenty-one years now and this is our final issue. As we depart we want to take a moment to thank the wonderful staff in the Library and Computer Center at Binghamton University who have made our work possible These include Elise Thornley, Nancy Abashian, Rachelle Moore, Helen Insinger, and John Hagan. We are passing the editorial baton to Judy Tzu-Chun Wu of UC Irvine and Rebecca J. Plant of UC San Diego, who are beginning 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 Rebecca and Judy and thank them for the contributions they are already making to a smooth transition. We have enjoyed the WASM work and thank the community of women's historians that has supported WASM over the past two decades. It has taken a village and we take a moment to say, "Thanks."

If you would like to submit work for publication in WASM, please contact the new editors to discuss your ideas and the submission process. They can be reached at j.wu@uci.edu or rjplant@ucsd.edu.

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