African American Studies Commons^™

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …

Black Feminism: Switching The Script On Traditional Feminist Narratives, Monee Reis

Senior Honors Projects

MONEE REIS (Gender and Women’s Studies, Africana Studies) Black Feminism: Switching the Script on Traditional Feminist Narratives

Sponsor: Kathleen McIntyre (Gender and Women’s Studies, Honors Program)

I developed a 300-level undergraduate course aimed at exploring the history of Black feminism. This idea came to me after reading Audre Lorde’s 1984 article “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” Lorde detailed the various ways Black women’s contributions to feminism are underrepresented in the overarching historical narrative. Lorde’s 1980s activism and feminist scholarship ultimately influenced legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to coin the term intersectionality in 1989. Intersectionality, the multiple ways that …

Zoë Charlton: The Domestic, Shannon Egan

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Zoë Charlton’s grandmother, Everlena Bates, was a domestic worker in Northern Florida. Charlton pays homage not only to her grandmother in her recent body of work, but also to the long history of African-American women’s labor in white families’ homes throughout the South. Although her grandmother did not speak often or directly about the conditions of her employment, Charlton nonetheless is keenly aware of the injustices, possible abuses, and intimate labor endured by black maids, housekeepers, and nannies who worked endlessly long hours and with little pay through the twentieth century. The collages and large-scale installation in Charlton’s exhibition The …