Women's History Commons^™

Barbara Johns: A Lasting Legacy In National Statuary, Hannah Knight

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

“The Great Dissenter”: Ruth Bader Ginsburg And The Fight For Equality, Celeste Nunez, Jacqulyne R. Anton

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

To The Beat Of Brilliance: The Life And Legacy Of Viola Smith, Sarah Shumate

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

Sexual Violence Against Women During The Holocaust: Inside And Outside Of Extermination Camps, Jessie Williams

History in the Making

The article will explore women’s sexual experiences during the Holocaust, specifically the experience of those who were targeted by the Nazi regime for being “inferior” to the Aryan race. During this period, Jewish women, women categorized as “asocial” despite their German citizenship, women who identified as Romani, and Soviet or Ukrainian women were targets of sexual violence mostly at the hands of members of the Nazi Party.1 However, these women were also assaulted by the partisans who helped hide them, liberating soldiers, and male prisoners because of the vulnerable situations many women found themselves in. This article focuses ...

The Evolution Of The “We Can Do It” Poster And American Feminist Movements, Reina Aguirre

McNair Research Journal SJSU

World War II created mass destruction and economic distress but was also responsible for creating new opportunities for women. The war had torn families apart and had altered family dynamics. The high demands of the wartime economy called for a reevaluation of American women’s roles in society. In 1942, Pittsburgh artist J. Howard Miller was hired by the Westinghouse Company’s War Production Coordinating Committee to create a range of propaganda posters to encourage women to join the war effort.^[1] The most iconic was christened “Rosie the Riveter” and further popularized by Norman Rockwell. These images exemplified how ...

A Just And True Return: A Dataset Of Pennsylvania's Surviving County Slave Registries, Cory James Young

The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD)

This dataset contains information on more than 6,000 Black people and their enslavers compiled from extant registries in twelve Pennsylvania counties: Adams, Allegheny, Bedford, Bucks, Centre, Chester, Cumberland, Dauphin, Fayette, Lancaster, Washington, and Westmoreland. Pennsylvania's 1780 gradual abolition law required enslavers to register with their county clerk any people they wished to continue holding in lifetime slavery. A 1788 law required that they do the same for any children they wished to hold in twenty-eight-year term slavery. Complete registries provide the name, place of residence, and occupation of enslavers; the date they filed their registration; and the name ...

The 1848 Declarations Of Sentiments: Usurpations And Incantations, Leah Shafer

The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal

Three video recordings of participants reciting the "1848 Declaration of Sentiments" at the Seneca Falls Dialogues conferences. In the first video titled "Sentiments and Usurpations", an excerpt is repeated over and over until it begins to sound like an incantation. In the second video, "Declaration of Sentiments 2014", still images accompany an audio track featuring the voices of the participants. The third video, "Declaration of Sentiments Wesleyan Chapel" uses the 2014 audio track for an avant-garde exploration of the interior of the Wesleyan Chapel.

Confronting Student Resistance To Ecofeminism: Three Perspectives, Jennifer Browdy De Hernandez, Holly Kent, Colleen Martell

The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal

Teaching ecofeminism is a dynamic, vital practice, demanding a great deal of both educators and students. At the heart of this essay is the question: how can we teach ecofeminism effectively? In this work, we reflect on our successes and failures teaching ecofeminism within various topics and in different settings. While each co-author of this piece brings ecofeminism into our classrooms, we do so in very different ways and have diverse approaches to making ecofeminist theories and ideas feel vital, necessary, and relevant for our students. In our essay, we aim to offer some productive and provocative suggestions and ideas ...

Beyond "Viuda De": Practical Approaches To Promoting Mexican Books Printed At Women-Owned Businesses, Taylor Leigh, Colleen W. Barrett

Library Presentations

Women print shop owners have existed for much longer than most people realize, including those in Latin America, where they have been active since at least the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, these texts are not always clearly cataloged or described in a way that is easy to locate beyond searching “viuda de,” in the publisher field. Though many title-pages describe their businesses in terms of being a widow of their husband, these female business owners deserve credit for their efforts and should be findable in their own right. This poster would highlight the strategies and steps taken by a Hispanic studies ...

Hospital Sketches, Louisa May Alcott

Zea E-Books in American Studies

In November 1862, Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) signed up as a volunteer nurse for the Sanitary Commission charged with caring for the Civil War’s mounting casualties. From 13 December 1862 until 21 January 1863, Miss Alcott served at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown in the District of Columbia, where she ultimately contracted typhoid and pneumonia and very nearly died. This book is her account of her journey south from Concord and her six weeks in the nation’s wartime capital. Styling herself by the fanciful name “Tribulation Periwinkle,” she brought humor as well as pathos to her ...

Escaped And Captured Slave Datasets From Newspapers In Jamaica, 1718-1795, Anthony Wood, Billy G. Smith

The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD)

We created two datasets about fugitives and captives in eighteenth-century Jamaica, one of the most violent systems of racial bondage in the Atlantic World. To produce the first dataset as an Excel file, we organized and recorded information contained in hundreds of newspaper advertisements offering rewards for the return of escaped slaves in Jamaica between 1718 and 1795. While there are some gaps in the records because of missing newspapers, there are still a considerable number of advertisements included. One feature of the ads is that many identify the African ethnicity of runaway and captured slaves. The second dataset also ...

Medieval Infertility: Treatments, Cures, And Consequences, Zia Simpson

The Forum: Journal of History

Since the first civilizations emerged, reproductive ability has been one of the most prominent elements in assessing a woman’s value to society. Other characteristics such as beauty, intelligence, and wealth may have been granted comparable consequence, but those are arbitrary and improvable. Fertility is genetic, and for centuries it was beyond human control. Among the medieval European nobility, fertility held even greater power. The absence of an heir could, either directly or indirectly, bring about war, economic depression, and social disorder. Catholicism provided a refuge by allowing barren women to retain their hopes, while simultaneously enriching Rome’s coffers ...

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

The Association Of Algerian Muslim Ulama And Women, Djamila Hanafi

Dirassat

The Algerian women’s situation has witnessed, over decades, great transformations and improvements in many fields; such as education, economy and politics. However women remain in the eyes of the Algerian society as a sex of a secondary position. This wrongheaded view is strongly rooted into the Algerian mind, and undoubtedly the inherited traditions and customs are its essential source. I would like to argue in this essay that this traditional background has been deeply-rooted into people's minds many decades ago by the Association of Algerian Muslim "Ulama", the most distinctive and prominent school in Algeria's intellectual landscape ...

Protective Labor Legislation: How Oregon Attached Motherhood To Working Women, Chloe Miller

Student Theses, Papers and Projects (History)

Increased focus on working conditions with the rise of women adrift leaving home to look for work at the turn of the 20th century led to a massive wave of reform in the Progressive Era called protective labor legislation. This legislation would aim to aid women workers in securing shorter hours, higher wages and better working environments, but ultimately was met with contention. To achieve the goal of protecting women, women’s organizations like the Consumers’ League of Oregon adopted the idea of difference theory which stated that men and women are fundamentally different, and took to the courts. This ...

Pierce And Pine: Diane Di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte, And The Meeting Of Matter And Spirit, Iris Cushing

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Diane di Prima (1934-2020) and Mary Norbert Korte (b. 1934) are two poets whose contributions to postwar American poetry are vitally important, and yet their status on the margins of mainstream literary culture has left their work largely unstudied. Di Prima, the granddaughter of Italian Anarchist Domenico Mallozzi (with whom she shared a close relationship) grew up in an Italian-American community in Brooklyn and bore witness to the cultural schizophrenia of WWII as a child. Korte was raised in an affluent Bay Area family, and encountered hardships (including the death of her father when she was 12) that affected her ...

Ladies First: The Ways Women And Girls Affected Change In The Civil Rights Movement In New Orleans, Terri R. Rushing

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

New Orleans Historical is a project of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies in the History Department of the University of New Orleans. This thesis and tour presents and discusses the “Ladies First” tour which contains seven tour stops on New Orleans Historical. The tour chronicles seven women and girls who have advanced the cause of equal rights and justice in the metropolitan region of New Orleans, Louisiana between 1950 and 1975. This thesis examines the work of seven key figures: Rosa Keller, Doratha “Dodie” Simmons, Marie Ortiz, Sybil Morial, and Dorothy Mae Taylor; and participants in the Civil ...

Agent Eve: A Look Into Women In Espionage, Léla Calixte

Symposium of Student Scholars

Agent Eve: A look into women in espionage

Known as the eyes of the Pharaoh by the ancient Egyptians, the ancient craft of espionage was historically a job held by male civil servants. Nevertheless, I wanted to focus on the women who paved the way for others in secret intelligence and selected individuals from differing backgrounds and political allegiances in a project to curate a learning module suitable for K-12 and university students. During my research period at the Museum of the Holocaust and History Education and Kennesaw State University, I was drawn to two women’s stories: Josephine Baker ...

Battling Over Bargain-Hunting: Defining The American Consumer Through Mass-Consumption Shopping Practices, 1909- 1915, Angela Xiao

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

This essay examines the debate and backlash against bargain-hunting in the first two decades of the 20th century across the United States. Using newspaper coverage and advertisements, congressional testimony, and the writings and speeches of businessman Ed Filene, it provides an account of the social and political discussion surrounding the practice of bargain-hunting, which include tensions at various levels. It concludes that the debate surrounding bargain-hunting and bargain-hunters, the women who most often engaged in such practices, reflected the challenges of imagining the concept of the American consumer and grappling with the role and relationship of the consumer as a ...

The Suffrage Postcard Project: Feminist Digital Archiving And Transatlantic Suffrage History, Ana Stevenson, Kristin Allukian

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article introduces The Suffrage Postcard Project (SPP), a feminist digital humanities project that utilizes digital tools to explore how transatlantic suffrage postcards and feminist digital humanities practices engender new historical narratives of the suffrage movement, especially in the United States and Britain. This article uses our Omeka-based digital archive of suffrage postcards to discuss the history of the postcard, the significance of a postcard archive to digital archival studies, and the significance of the digital postcard archive to digital history.

Our project uses feminist DH methodology in coding, tagging, and data visualization to better understand how gender, and intersecting ...