Women's History Commons^™

Furman, Lucy Salome, 1869-1958 (Sc 564), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 564. Chiefly letters, 1914-1938, written by Lucy Furman, author and educator, who taught and worked at Hindman Settlement School, Hindman, Knott County, Kentucky. Twenty-one of the letters, to Julia Neal, Auburn, Logan County, Kentucky, are collected in a separate subfolder. Miss Neal wrote her 1933 master’s thesis on Miss Furman. Also includes other letters and printed materials used in Miss Neal’s thesis.

Hopkinsville, Kentucky - Letter (Sc 2494), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid, scan and typescript (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2494. Letter, 15 March 1874, written from Hopkinsville, Kentucky by “Abby L.” to “Annie,” possibly her sister. In addition to various witty observations and gossip, she supplies news on her health and disposition and comments about the family members with whom she is staying.

Baker, L. Alleyne, 1858-1916 (Sc 234), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 234. Two letters written to L. Alleyne Baker, a school teacher In Auburn, Logan County, Kentucky. An 1898 letter, from a cousin, contains family news; a 1907 letter pertains to educational matters. Also includes an undated essay by a female high school student entitled, “Woman’s Sphere.”

Covington, Josephine (Wells), 1832-1872 (Sc 236), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scan (Click on "additional files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 236. Photocopies and typescript of 2 March 1862 letter written by Mrs. Josephine (Wells) Covington, Bowling Green, Kentucky, to her father, Judge Robert William Wells of Missouri. She relates happenings in Bowling Green during its occupation and later evacuation by Confederate troops (18 September 1861-14 February 1862). Also includes information about Mrs. Covington and the Covington family. The original 2 March 1862 letter is housed at the Filson Club, Louisville, Kentucky.

Unfinished Agenda, Mildred Emory Persinger

Mildred E. Persinger Papers

(excerpt) Why am I still working in the campaigns for civil rights and human rights after seventy years? The question has never come up—until now. Yet it is to be expected. Even as a child I was upset by hearing disparaging remarks about cherished black friends. In college I was stunned to learn that others had raised questions about the propriety of my invitation to a young Japanese student to spend the weekend with me. Later I was ashamed and worried for her that in Virginia she might have been rejected because she was not white enough.

Guide To The Mary Jo Moriarty Collection, 1915-1998, Caitlin Gette-King, Orson Kingsley

Archives & Special Collections Finding Aids

Brief Biographical Sketch

Mary Jo Moriarty was born in Boston and received her bachelor’s degree in history from Villa Maria College and her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Boston University School of Education. Moriarty worked as a health and physical education teacher at Hyannis State Teachers College from 1937 until the school’s closing in 1944. She moved with the college’s health and physical education program to Bridgewater State Teachers College when the two merged. She taught as a professor in the Physical Education Department, and later served as chairwoman of the Physical Education Major and the Department of Health …

She Shall Be Saved In Childbearing: Submission, Contemplation Of Conception, And Annunciation Imagery In The Books Of Hours Of Two Late Medieval Noblewomen, Dallas A. Grubbs

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

The role of the Book of Hours in female lay devotional life during the late Middle Ages has been investigated and analyzed by many scholars and art historians over the course of the past century. The general consensus has been that semi-literate medieval women valued these books greatly as instructional manuals on how to attain salvation, using the images contained within as spiritual aids meant to encourage individual contemplation and pious recitation. Prayers for mediation, protection, and guidance featured prominently within these books and many historians of both genders have come to the conclusion that Books of Hours were a …

War Gender And Dancing: Gettysburg College And The Uso During World War Ii, Erin E. Richards

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Made up of women and the men who could not join the military, the home front was more than just victory gardens and factory jobs. Although factory work was seen as a way for women both to help the war effort and at the same time gain some independence outside the home, not every woman was ready to hang up her dress and start donning pants full time. There was a middle ground where women were able to break traditional feminine roles yet still keep their dresses and serve the servicemen fighting the war between victory gardens and factory jobs; …

Questioning Appropriation: Agency And Complicity In A Transnational Feminist Location Politics, Joe Parker

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In feminist circles agency is often opposed to complicity and associated with resistance to sexism and patriarchy, yet such binary oppositions make the political stakes of their presumed boundaries difficult to interrogate. By bringing location politics into dialogue with agency theory, boundaries of same/Other and location categories may move from a naturalized ground for political work to the contested center of a politics of resistance. I follow a Foucauldian interpretation of agency to reconsider the ethico-politics of established divisions of self and Other both individually and in terms of social movements. By following Gayatri Spivak, Meyda Yeğenoğlu, and Chandra Mohanty's …

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.

Gender Concerns: Monks, Nuns, And Patronage Of The Cistercian Order In Thirteenth-Century Flanders And Hainaut, Erin L. Jordan

History Faculty Publications

The Cistercian order, which had its origins in the late eleventh century, transformed the spiritual landscape of western Europe. The order's insistence on a return to the austerity and simplicity that had originally informed Benedictine life reenergized monasticism, spawning hundreds of new abbeys within decades. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cistercians dominated monastic life, surpassing their black-robed predecessors in terms of popularity and replacing them among patrons as favored recipients of donations. Yet, while a sizable body of historiography exists concerning the ability of men's houses to translate this appeal into spiritual and material success, questions remain …

"Spectacular Opacities": The Hyers Sisters' Performances Of Respectability And Resistance, Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

This essay analyzes the Hyers Sisters, a Reconstruction-era African American sister act, and their radical efforts to transcend social limits of gender, class, and race in their early concert careers and three major productions, Out of Bondage and Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad, two slavery-to-freedom epics, and Urlina, the African Princess, the first known African American play set in Africa. At a time when serious, realistic roles and romantic plotlines featuring black actors were nearly nonexistent due to the country’s appetite for stereotypical caricatures, the Hyers Sisters used gender passing to perform opposite one another as heterosexual lovers in …

From Periodical To Book In Her Early Career: E. D. E. N. Southworth’S Letters To Abraham Hart, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

E.D.E.N. Southworth's correspondence with Henry Peterson of the Saturday Evening Post and Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger, both of whom serialized her novels in their weekly story papers, is sometimes dramatic and emotional. In September 1849 Peterson chided Southworth for a “capital literary error” in an installment of her novel The Deserted Wife, in which the Reverend Withers uses his patriarchal authority to maneuver the young, unwilling Sophie Churchill into marriage. The incident would make readers “thro[w] down the tale in disgust,” he warns, and he omitted it from the serialization. In December 1854 he raised …

Introduction To E. D. E. N. Southworth: Recovering A Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist, Melissa J. Homestead, Pamela T. Washington

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In early 1901, Willa Cather visited Prospect Cottage in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., the longtime home of the recently deceased novelist Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevirte (E. D. E. N.) Southworth. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1819 to southern parents (her father from Virginia, her mother from Maryland), Southworth lived in Washington with her family until she married Frederick Hamilton Southworth and moved with him to Wisconsin in 1841. When he deserted her and their two children,' she returned to Washington and taught school to support herself, running to writing to supplement her income from teaching. Within a few …

A Chronological Bibliography Of E. D. E. N. Southworth's Works Privileging Periodical Publication, Melissa J. Homestead, Vicki L. Martin

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Previous attempts at a comprehensive bibliography of E. D. E. N. Southworth's fiction have organized her works alphabetically by book title or chronologically by book publication date. Serialization information--if included at all--is subordinated to book entries or listed separately. These bibliographic conventions better suit authors who published fewer novels than Southworth did and/or did \ not routinely serialize their works. As a result, earlier bibliographies have caused confusion about the size and chronology of Southworth's body of work. Adding to the confusion, her book publisher T. B. Peterson arbitrarily broke many of her novels that appeared in serial form under …

The Lasting Importance Of Ephemera: What Scrapbooks, Diaries, Newspapers, And Receipts Tell Us About Life At Hollins During The Civil War., Karen Adams

Articles about Hollins and Special Collections

The University Archives and Special Collections at Hollins University contain a rich collection of documents, from academic catalogs, newspapers, and diaries to receipts, scrapbooks, and other artifacts. Together they tell a story of life at Hollins during the Civil War.

John Rutherford Everett, Beth S. Harris

Articles about Hollins and Special Collections

Biographical article on Hollins University's fourth president, John "Jack" Everett (1950-1961).

Georgiana Duchess Of Devonshire: Spark Of The Women’S Rights Movement, Casey Seger

The Journal of Undergraduate Research

The late eighteenth century of Great Britain displayed a society influenced by outside thinkers, such as Rousseau, and dealing with the results of the American and French Revolutions. During this time a young women named Georgiana Cavendish began to break the mold that many aristocratic nobles adhered to for many years. The purpose of looking at Georgiana’s life and short career in politics is to show that women indeed could campaign in a very effective way. Though her campaigning got her friend a seat in Parliament, her exposure to the public during this time caused her and the person she …

0796: Shirley Foster Streeby Mathews Collection, 1939-2003, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

The bulk of the collection contains newspaper clippings that Mrs. Mathews collected over the years about her former students. There are also a few dozen photographs, along with wedding invitations, school pageants and programs, commencements, handwritten and typed correspondence, reunion correspondence, Greenline newsletters (a publication for Marshall University alumni), church programs, funeral/death announcements and holiday cards. Most of the photos are identified on the back.

First Step Toward Freedom: Women In Contraband Camps In And Around The District Of Columbia During The Civil War, Lauren H. Roedner

Student Publications

A white Quaker abolitionist woman from Rochester, New York was not a likely sight in occupied Alexandria, Virginia during the Civil War where violence, suffering, death and racial inequality were rampant just south of the nation’s capital. Julia Wilbur was used to a comfortable home, her loving family, an enjoyable profession as a teacher, and the familiar comfort of many, often like-minded, friends. However instead of continuing that “easy” life, Julia embarked on a great adventure as a missionary to work with “contrabands-of-war”. More commonly known as fugitive slaves, these refugees needed shelter, medicine, food, clothes, and many other necessities …

Study Guide For United In Anger: A History Of Act Up, Matt Brim

Open Educational Resources

The United in Anger Study Guide facilitates classroom and activist engagement with Jim Hubbard’s 2012 documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The Study Guide contains discussion sections, projects and exercises, and resources for further research about the activism of the New York chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The Study Guide is a free, interactive, multimedia resource for understanding the legacy of ACT UP, the film’s role in preserving that legacy, and its meaning for viewers' lives.

Book Review: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey Of American Women From 1960 To The Present, Melanie Springer Mock

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Excerpt: "This premise—that so much has changed, and that so much work still needs to be done— resides at the heart of Gail Collins’s excellent book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. Collins, a columnist for the New York Times, uses her significant authority and her accessible writing style to breathe life into a half-century of women’s history, and the result is a fascinating narrative about women’s strength, resilience, and hope for a more equitable future."

Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Leader Of The Constitutional Women's Suffrage Movement In Great Britain, Cecelia Parks

Undergraduate Research Awards

Examines Millicent Garrett Fawcett's leadership of the National Union of Women‟s Suffrage Societies and her role in the enfranchisement of British women. The PDF includes the author's entry submission essay for the 2012 Undergraduate Research Awards.

Reflections On Intellectual Hybridity, Kimala Price

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Drawing from the growing literature on interdisciplinarity and my own experiences as an intellectual hybrid, I discuss the personal and institutional challenges inherent in crossing disciplinary boundaries in the academy. I argue that boundary crossing is a natural occurrence and that the issue of (inter)disciplinarity is a matter of degree and of determining who gets to define the boundaries. Defining boundaries is not merely an intellectual enterprise, but also a political act that delineates what is, or is not, legitimate scholarship. This issue is especially salient to women's and gender studies during times of economic distress and educational budget cuts.

Caught Between A Rock And A Hard Place: The Title Ix Generation, Mathematics, And The State Of Feminist Quantitative Social Science Research, Jill R. Williams

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In this essay I reflect on the fortieth anniversary of the Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act of 1972 (Title IX), which prohibited discrimination based on sex in federally funded education programs in the United States and inspired educational programs that encourage girls to pursue math and science careers. I argue that despite the feminist underpinnings of Title IX, in recent years feminism has discouraged the advancement of women in math and science by excluding quantitative research from its publications, quantitative researchers from women's and gender studies programs, and quantitative training from its curriculum. I examine my own experience of …

From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Staying Home While Studying Abroad: Anti-Imperial Praxis For Globalizing Feminist Visions, Shireen Roshanravan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper hinges on the recognition that when study-abroad opportunities are presented and perceived as a means of access to global perspectives on women and gender, they reduce the problem of US-centrism in Women's Studies to a geographic rather than an epistemic limitation. According to this logic, physical travel away from the United States can serve as an effective method for overcoming US-centrism and attending to the "global," a curricular strategy that Chandra Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander call "the cartographic rule of the transnational as always 'elsewhere'" (Mohanty and Alexander 2010, 33). This cartographic rule reinforces hegemonic representations of …

The Problem Of Protection: Rethinking Rhetoric Of Normalizing Surgeries, Amy Falvey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay focuses on the rhetoric of protection that emerges around infants who face the prospect of normalizing surgeries. Frequently, decisions to proceed with normalizing surgeries are made by doctors and parents with "protection" of the infant as a motivating force. "Protection," in such contexts, typically refers to protection of the infant from the inhospitable world that lies in wait for an individual whose body does not conform to social, morphological, and biological norms. While this concern may be valid and important, this essay argues that there are alternative narratives or notions of protection that must also be acknowledged and …

Novas Cartas Portuguesas: The Making Of A Reputation, Ana Margarida Dias Martins

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Novas Cartas Portuguesas (New Portuguese Letters), co-authored by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa, was banned in 1972 in Portugal for exploring sensitive issues such as women's oppression under the Catholic patriarchy. Given that police action against the authors soon became the focus of an international feminist protest in 1972-73, existing discussions of the book's reception often focus almost exclusively on what may be called its political life. I propose to approach the book from a new angle, with the purpose of uncovering its theoretical dimension as a literary-critical text that may have played an …

From The Editors, Anna M. Klobucka, Jeannette E. Riley, Catherine Villanueva Gardner

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.