Women's History Commons^™

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 ...

«Cuida Tu Alma Y Tu Cuerpo Por Dios Y La Falange»: Women’S Education And La Sección Femenina In Franco’S Spain, Madeleine Fontenay

College Honors Program

My thesis exploration is on La Sección Femenina and its diffusion of female cultural guides and shaping of female education in the early francoist period, from 1939 to 1959. The Sección Femenina and its field offices published work in many facets of women's lives to influence and reeducate women or their values and place. The contrast of rhetoric and reality gives insight into the values and upbringings of generations of Spaniards. By setting the female figure as the foundation of their francoist society, the Sección Femenina held immense cultural power. I am approaching the topic from an educational perspective ...

De La Esclavitud A La Libertad: La Historia De Una Esclava Afromexicana, Margaree G. Jackson

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Resumen: “De la esclavitud a la libertad: La historia de una esclava afromexicana,” es una colección de poemas descolonizados contados desde la perspectiva de una mujer afromexicana ficticia del siglo XVII. La protagonista, Maricela Rivas, es una esclava que nació en la plantación azucarera Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, una plantación verdadera ubicada en Veracruz, México. Su historia se basa en las pocas historias que existen sobre la vida de la mujer afromexicana que formaba parte esencial de la sociedad y cultura mexicana pero que le falta representación y una voz. Estos poemas le dan una voz y perspectiva al ...

The Jurisprudence Of The First Woman Judge, Florence Allen: Challenging The Myth Of Women Judging Differently, Tracy A. Thomas

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Article delves into the life and work of Judge [Florence] Allen to provide insight to the contributions and jurisprudence of the first woman judge. For history questions what difference putting a woman on the bench might have made. Part I explores Allen’s early influences on her intellectual development grounded in her progressive and politically active family, and her close network of female professional friends. Part II discusses her pivotal work with the women’s suffrage movement, working with the national organizations in New York and leading the legal and political efforts in Ohio. This proactive commitment to gender ...

Mary Todd Lincoln: Duty And Depression, Bella Biancone

Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Symposium

First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln was perceived by Victorian America as materialistic and unbalanced. Behind the closed doors of the Executive Mansion, however, lie a grief-stricken mother struggling to manage an undiagnosed and untreated mental illness. Her fragile condition was exacerbated with each death of her beloved family. Yet, this First Lady played an integral role in the White House, acting as hostess, advisor to the President, and activist in her own right. She was not a passive bystander as her husband worked tirelessly to preserve the Union, but an active participant in the war effort. Following Abraham Lincoln’s ...

"The Unhappy Class Of Females": An Examination Of Non-Elite White Women In The Civil War-Era South, Reagan Elizabeth Whittington

Honors Theses

This thesis focuses on the perceptions and realities of non-elite white women in the South and how their lives and expectations changed from the antebellum years to the end of Reconstruction. There were many secondary sources consulted both before and during the research process for this thesis, and these sources are listed, alongside their significance, in the introduction. Most of the primary sources referenced for this thesis were newspapers printed in the South between 1850 and 1877, but United States census data and public records were also consulted. This thesis investigates how non-elite white women were expected to behave by ...

Diaries And Journals Of Pioneer Women And Their Significance, Haley Fury

Senior Honors Theses

Pioneer women who took the trails west and carved homes out of the wilderness often kept diaries or journals. In them, they recorded their everyday activities and their adventures. These diaries were often among the dearest possessions of the women who owned them. They are also some of the best primary sources that historians have and are used to reconstruct a picture of the lives of these women and their families. Furthermore, they hold great value for the ordinary Americans of today. This thesis will be examining how and why these diaries and journals hold such great significance.

We, Too, Have Deeds Of Heroism To Tell Our Children: The Role Of The United Daughters Of The Confederacy In The Perpetuation Of The Confederate Lost Cause In Fayetteville, Arkansas, Madison Whipple

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

The conversation surrounding Confederate memorialization has become increasingly relevant, especially as it relates to public monuments. One of the groups that perpetuated Confederate memorialization was the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In the early twentieth century, this organization was prolific in not only memorializing the Old South, but also in seeking to vindicate the Confederacy. While this topic has been discussed and analyzed by scholars on the national level, and even regionally, the conversation skips over Fayetteville. Fayetteville’s history is considered more progressive due to the presence of the University, but there is little coverage of Fayetteville’s memorialization ...

The Infinite Crisis: How The American Comic Book Has Been Shaped By War, Winston Andrus

War and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis project argues that war has been the greatest catalyst for the American comic book medium to become a socio-political change agent within western society. Comic books have become one of the most pervasive influences to global popular culture, with superheroes dominating nearly every popular art form. Yet, the academic world has often ignored the comic book medium as a niche market instead of integrated into the broader discussions on cultural production and conflict studies. This paper intends to bridge the gap between what has been classified as comic book studies and the greater academic world to demonstrate the ...

Space-Praxis: Towards A Feminist Politics Of Design, Mary C. Overholt

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Outside of the academy and professionalized practice, design has long been central to the production of feminist, political projects. Taking what I have termed space-praxis as its central analytic, this project explores a suite of feminist interventions into the built environment—ranging from the late 1960s to present day.

Formulated in response to Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices, space-praxis collapses formerly bifurcated definitions of ‘tactic’/‘strategy’ and ‘theory’/‘practice.’ It gestures towards those unruly, situated undertakings that are embedded in an ever-evolving, liberative politics. In turning outwards, away from the so-called masters of architecture, this thesis orients ...

The Emergence Of Lesbianism From Women's Penal Institutions: Incarcerated Women-Loving Women, Interracial Coupling, And Women's Blues Music, 1895-1935, Sidney Wegener

Women's History Theses

This thesis explores the early-twentieth-century emergence of lesbianism as an identity label, an understanding of relationships between women-loving women, and a set of subcultures in the United States. Penal and medical professionals’ influence on the development of language surrounding and contributing to social and scientific meanings of lesbianism is analyzed as a response to the hypervisibility of women-loving women confined in women’s penal institutions. In this context, relationships between incarcerated white women and Black women received the most attention and condemnation from observers, such as reformatory administrators and research psychologists. A focus on interracial relationships between incarcerated women, especially ...

The Good, The Bad, And The Bloody: Images Of Menstruation In Television And In Menstrual Activism, Elizabeth Tripp

Women's History Theses

My thesis investigates the origins and tactics of the menstrual health movement; examines contemporary representations of menarche (the onset of menstruation) in TV programs; and postulates how these two streams of discourse could and should form a more symbiotic relationship. My first chapter defines menstrual activism, which seeks to destigmatize menstruation, using two different frameworks. Menstrual humor is frequently utilized across efforts of destigmatizing menstruation. I argue that menstrual humor can advance the menstrual activism movement depending on the punchline.

Chapter Two assesses the menstrual status quo according to television. I analyze thirteen media portrayals of menarche that aired from ...

“The History Of Every Life … Is Important”: Lydia Olsson, Growing Up Swedish American, And Midwestern Girlhood At The Turn Of The Century, Rebecca Hopman

Women's History Theses

Our knowledge of American girls at the turn of the twentieth century is incomplete. Scholarship on Victorian American girlhood most frequently draws evidence from the papers of privileged young white women from native-born Northeastern families. But their lives only tell part of the story. We must expand our scope to truly understand the options and opportunities for girls as they came of age in this period. This thesis explores the life of Lydia Olsson, a Swedish- American girl born to immigrant parents and living in a Midwestern city. She was one of a growing number of young women participating in ...

A Voice From The Convent: Arcangela Tarabotti In Tridentine Venice, Zoe Connell

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In 1617, at the tender age of 13, Arcangela Tarabotti was forced by her family to leave their home and enter the Venetian convent of Sant’Anna. As an advocate not only of gender equality, but female superiority, Tarabotti fought on behalf of women who suffered under Venice’s patriarchal institutions that robbed them of their liberty. This study aims to examine the intersection between the time and space in which Tarabotti lived and her experiences as expressed through her writings. In this thesis, I will examine the manner in which the contents of her writings — emotions, tone, self-image, and ...

The Female Kirk: Women's Participation In The Early Scottish Presbyterian Church, Lydia Mackey

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Presbyterianism’s founder, John Knox, wrote his infamous The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in 1558 arguing against female monarchs. Despite early modern Presbyterianism’s restriction of women’s formal religious roles, women used often conflicting rhetoric from the pulpit to negotiate a degree of power and autonomy. Rather than only being passive members of the Presbyterian Church, women often played an active role in the development and expansion of Presbyterianism between 1550 and 1690. This thesis will demonstrate how a study of women’s interactions with the Presbyterian Church outside of the kirk ...