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Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in Women's History
Belle La Follette’S Fight For Women’S Suffrage: Losing The Battle For Wisconsin, Winning The War For The Nation, Nancy C. Unger
Belle La Follette’S Fight For Women’S Suffrage: Losing The Battle For Wisconsin, Winning The War For The Nation, Nancy C. Unger
History
A century ago, on May 21, 1919, the US House of Representatives voted difinitively (304 to 89) in support of women’s suffrage. Two weeks later, Wisconsinite Belle La Follette sat in the visitors’ gallery of the US Senate chamber. She “shed a few tears” when it was announced that, by a vote of 56 to 25, the US Senate also approved the Nineteenth Amendment, sending it on to the states for ratification.1 For Belle La Follette, this thrilling victory was the culmination of a decades-long fight. Six days later, her happiness turned to elation when Wisconsin became the first …
Legacies Of Belle La Follette’S Big Tent Campaigns For Women’S Suffrage, Nancy Unger
Legacies Of Belle La Follette’S Big Tent Campaigns For Women’S Suffrage, Nancy Unger
History
In countless speeches and articles in La Follette’s Magazine, Belle Case La Follette urged that women needed the vote to secure “standards of cleanliness and healthfulness in the municipal home,” and because “home, society, and government are best when men and women keep together intellectually and spiritually.” This range of often mutually exclusive arguments created an inclusive big tent. However, arguing that women were qualified to vote by their roles as wives and mothers while maintaining that gender was superfluous to suffrage also contributed to an uneasy combination that would continue the conflict over women’s true nature and hinder their …
Strange Women: The Evaluation And Comparison Of Female Characters In Akira Kurosawa's Films, Alice Jiron Jang
Strange Women: The Evaluation And Comparison Of Female Characters In Akira Kurosawa's Films, Alice Jiron Jang
History
The successes of Akira Kurosawa’s films have shaped and influenced Western views on Japan after World War II. While the male characters in Kurosawa’s films have been analyzed extensively, there is a focus on the subservience of this female characters. With the growing number of independent working women in a seemingly patriarchal society, it is important to study what has caused these women to break free from their traditional roles as housewife and mother. While some of Kurosawa's female characters are designed to be powerful and independent, others are submissive and obedient. The events that occur in postwar Japan have …
Adda F. Howie: "America’S Outstanding Woman Farmer", Nancy Unger
Adda F. Howie: "America’S Outstanding Woman Farmer", Nancy Unger
History
In 1894, forty-two-year-old Milwaukee socialite Adda F. Howie seemed a very unlikely candidate to become one of the most famous women in America. And yet by 1925, Howie, the first woman to serve on the Wisconsin State Board of Agriculture, had long been “recognized universally as the most successful woman farmer in America.”1 Howie’s rise to fame came at a time when the widely accepted ideas about gender were divided into the “man’s world” of business, power, and money, and the “woman’s world” devoted to family and home. Yet Howie, rather than being vilified for succeeding in the male …
The Unexpected Belle La Follette, Nancy Unger
The Unexpected Belle La Follette, Nancy Unger
History
Although the New York Times eulogized Belle Case La Follette in 1931 as perhaps "the most influential of all American women who have had to do with public affairs in this country," she faded quickly from popular memory.1 And when she is recalled, it's usually in relation to her husband and sons. This minimization of her own accomplishments began with progressive reform giant Robert M. La Follette famously calling her "my wisest and best counselor." He openly deferred to his wife's judgment throughout his storied professional life: as a district attorney, three-term congressman (1885-1891), lawyer (1891—1900), three-term governor of Wisconsin …
Women And Gender: Useful Categories Of Analysis In Environmental History, Nancy Unger
Women And Gender: Useful Categories Of Analysis In Environmental History, Nancy Unger
History
In 1990, Carolyn Merchant proposed, in a roundtable discussion published in The Journal of American History, that gender perspective be added to the conceptual frameworks in environmental history. 1 Her proposal was expanded by Melissa Leach and Cathy Green in the British journal Environment and History in 1997. 2 The ongoing need for broader and more thoughtful and analytic investigations into the powerful relationship between gender and the environment throughout history was confirmed in 2001 by Richard White and Vera Norwood in "Environmental History, Retrospect and Prospect," a forum in the Pacific Historical Review. Both Norwood, in her provocative contribution …
Introduction: Sex, Sexuality, And Gender As Useful Categories In Environmental History, Nancy Unger
Introduction: Sex, Sexuality, And Gender As Useful Categories In Environmental History, Nancy Unger
History
This book is an effort to explain these kinds of extreme gendered divisions and to offer an enriched understanding of the powerful interplay between environment and sex, sexuality, and gender. The synergy produced by that interplay has been significant throughout American history, but it cannot be adequately understood and appreciated as long as those fields are discussed as discrete entities. The fields of gender and environment are growing, but scholars have seldom joined them together in analysis or heeded historian Carolyn Merchant's call that a gendered perspective be added to conceptual frameworks in environmental history.5 They have not offered a …
Wisconsin's League Against Nuclear Dangers: The Power Of Informed Citizenship, Nancy Unger
Wisconsin's League Against Nuclear Dangers: The Power Of Informed Citizenship, Nancy Unger
History
Wisconsin's League Against Nuclear Dangers (LAND), a loose organization active in the 1970s and 1980s, was predominantly made up of white middle-aged and middle-class homemakers with minimal formal education in the sciences. The story of LAND is a powerful lesson in what people can accomplish when they take their rights as citizens seriously and commit themselves to learning a complex subject in depth in order to be knowledgeable and persuasive.
Women For A Peaceful Christmas: Wisconsin Homemakers Seek To Remake American Culture, Nancy Unger
Women For A Peaceful Christmas: Wisconsin Homemakers Seek To Remake American Culture, Nancy Unger
History
In the autumn of 1971, sixteen Madison homemakers, including Nan Cheney and Sharon Stein, began "Women for a Peaceful Christmas" (WPC), a unique attempt to do nothing less than remake American culture. Under the slogan "No More Shopping Days 'Til Peace," WPC organized ostensibly powerless homemakers into a "quiet revolt against 'an economy which thrives on war and the destruction of our earth's resources.'' WPC urged the public (especially women, the sex that did the vast bulk of holiday shopping) to take economic, political, and environmental matters into their own hands. "If you don't want your Christmas celebrations to be …
The Role Of Gender In Environmental Justice, Nancy Unger
The Role Of Gender In Environmental Justice, Nancy Unger
History
Environmental Justice incorporates an inclusive definition of its subject matter, exploring the environmental burdens impacting all marginalized populations and communities. This expansive definition allows for the possibility that populations conventionally viewed as privileged can nevertheless be marginalized and suffer uniquely from environmental injustices. Employing such a definition can also reveal how an ostensibly powerless group can fight for environmental justice on its own terms—and win. Gender has played an important role in environmental justice (and injustice) throughout the history of the United States. Excerpts from my current book project, Beyond “Nature’s Housekeepers”: Gendered Turning Points for American Women in Environmental …
The ‘We Say What We Think’ Club: Rural Wisconsin Women And The Development Of Environmental Ethics, Nancy Unger
The ‘We Say What We Think’ Club: Rural Wisconsin Women And The Development Of Environmental Ethics, Nancy Unger
History
The “We Say What We Think” Club: This article discusses the radio program “We Say What We Think Club” which aired on WIBA radio from 1937 to 1957. Though aimed at a female audience, it did not focus on homemaking tips or relationship advice but rather featured a topic-of-the-day. These included a wide range of subjects, such as "Better Clubs for Women" or "Feeding the Family in War Time,” about which the women held a folksy discussion. The author contends that the program reflected an increasing separation of gender spheres that emerged on farms during that era. The five Dane …
Gendered Approaches To Environmental Justice: An Historical Sampling, Nancy Unger
Gendered Approaches To Environmental Justice: An Historical Sampling, Nancy Unger
History
While race and class are regularly addressed in environmental justice studies, scant attention has been paid to gender. The environmental justice movement formally recognized in the 1980s in no way, however, marks the beginning of the central role played by women in the long history of its concerns.' Abuses based in gender as well as race and class have subjected women to a variety of environmental injustices. However, women's responses to the ever-shifting responsibilities prescribed to their gender, as well as to their particular race and class, have consistently shaped their abilities to affect the environment in positive ways. Especially …
How Did Belle La Follette Resist Racial Segregation In Washington D.C., 1913-1914?, Nancy Unger
How Did Belle La Follette Resist Racial Segregation In Washington D.C., 1913-1914?, Nancy Unger
History
Beginning in 1913, progressive reformer Belle Case La Follette wrote a series of articles for the "women's page" of her family's magazine, denouncing the sudden racial segregation in several departments of the federal government. Those articles reveal progressive efforts to appeal specifically to women to combat injustice, and also demonstrate the ability of women to voice important political opinions prior to suffrage.
The Two Worlds Of Belle La Follette, Nancy Unger
The Two Worlds Of Belle La Follette, Nancy Unger
History
Case La Follette, it has been frequently noted, was deemed "my wisest and best counselor" by her husband, Wisconsin progressive great Roberi M. La Follette. She chose to fulfill that counselor's role in remarkable ways throughout their forty-three years of married life, perhaps most significantly by earning a law degree, yet never practicing law herself. This decision was one of many that allowed her to function as her husband's equal in the professional matters that affected him publicly, while reserving for herself a more private and personal role. Belle Case La FoUette's lifetime of decisions reflect her wish to fulfill …