The Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection at Cornell University includes more than 10,000 titles collected by May to document the abolitionist struggle. The pamphlets and other materials included in the May Collection are rare because of their generally ephemeral nature. The collection can be browsed by title, author, or date. A full-text search is also available.

For historians of women abolitionists, the collection includes important works documenting the experience of British and American women abolitionists. For example, the collection includes British Quaker abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick’s Immediate Not Gradual Abolition; the proceedings for the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women (1837, 1838, and 1839); Angelina Grimke’s Appeal to the Christian Women of the South; and reports from the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, the Ladies’ New-York City Anti-Slavery Society, and the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. The collection also includes Civil War and post-war era materials. Of particular note are reports from Civil War era women’s associations such as the Ladies Aid Society of Philadelphia and the Ladies' Union Relief Association.

Roundtable: Teaching the History of Women and Gender with Legal Sources

The most recent issue of the Journal of Women's History includes nine articles on the use of legal sources in teaching women's history. A variety of countries and topics are covered: Islam, gender, and the law; sources for teaching Chinese and Korean women's history; women's crimes in early Colonial India; African American marriages in slavery and freedom; the use of desertion notices in early American newspapers; and Roe v. Wade as U. S. constitutional history.

For additional guidance on the use of legal sources, see the Law Library of Congress section of American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States.

In the News: "The image that changed the course of South Africa's history"

The image that changed the course of South Africa's history (CNN)

This clip from CNN begins with the iconic image of South Africa's liberation struggle: a student carrying Hector Pieterson's limp body, with Pieterson's sister, Antoinette, at his side.

Antoinette Sithole recalls the day in 1976 when her brother and at least 22 other students were  killed while protesting the apartheid education system. She also speaks of the significance of that day and of her work as a guide at the Hector Pieterson Memorial in Soweto.

Sithole provides a more detailed account of that tragic day in a YouTube video from  Winston-Salem State University: Antoinette Sithole: the Soweto Uprising (4 min 51 sec).

 

Presentation: The Millers' Suffrage Scrapbooks

Catch the Suffragists' Spirit: The Millers' Suffrage Scrapbooks
(21 min.) Presented by Rosemary Fry Plakas
 
In this Library of Congress webcast, Plakas discusses the seven suffrage scrapbooks that Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller compiled between 1897 and 1911. Plakas uses numerous examples (photos, clippings, etc.) from the collection to highlight the efforts of women and men working for women's suffrage in New York State, as well as at the national and international levels. After watching this overview, researchers will be in a better position to discover the rich resources in the Miller NAWSA Suffrage Scrapbooks digital collection.

 Image caption: Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller at Lochland, photograph (Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C.)

Silent Films Coming Home (National Public Radio)

Image caption: Mabel Normand directed and starred in the 1914 film, Won in a Closet (National Film Preservation Foundation).

A Happy Homecoming for Long-lost Silent Films (4 min 27 sec) This short NPR segment answers some intriguing questions. How did 75 American silent films end up in New Zealand? What formerly lost Clara Bow film is in the collection? Why does film historian Shelley Stamp consider the first reel of director Lois Weber's Idle Wives the gem of the collection?

For additional background information, see the "Women and the Silent Screen" theme issue of Film History (edited by Stamp and Amelie Hastie), and Karen Ward Mahar's Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

La Mujer Nueva: Chile

La Mujer Nueva was a Chilean feminist newspaper published between 1935 and 1941 by MEMCH (Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de las Mujeres de Chile), a group of self-proclaimed feminists, composed of about 30 women who represented different social classes with varying political affiliations, from leftist to independent. All of the newspaper's 27 issues concern working-class Chilean women, have been reproduced electronically, and are available online as part of the Memoria Chilena project.

Digital Exhibition: Loose Women in Tights

Loose Women in Tights: Images of Femininity in Early Burlesque Performance is an online exhibition which draws from the Charles H. McCaghy Collection of Exotic Dance from Burlesque to Clubs, part of the holdings of the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at The Ohio State University's Thompson Library. It provides a sampling of some of the earlier materials in the collection, contextualized within the historical and theoretical discourses surrounding burlesque, and provides a bibliography and list of recommended readings.

New at The Women's Library London

Hello!

This is the first post from The Women's Library in the UK. If you want to search our collections follow the links for our Printed Collections and our Archive and Museum Collections If you don't know where to start, read our Source Notes for insights as to what we hold for different subjects

Check out our newly catalogued page which gives details of catalogues hot off the press! Recent additions range from suffrage and the Papers of Mary Leigh Browne (7MLB) through to Women into Computing (6WIC) and the Jacky Fleming Cartoons Collection (TWL.2009.07).
And if you're in the area drop in to see our current exhibition 'Out of the Archives' on until 2nd October 2010

Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts

Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts is the result of a three-year joint project by the University of Oxford and King’s College London and funded by the AHRC. The project brings together, for the first time since 1845, all known surviving fiction manuscripts handwritten by Austen. Originally held in a single collection by her sister Cassandra, the collection was subsequently dispersed to family members, public institutions and private collections. The manuscripts range from early writings by an 11 or 12 year old Austen to manuscripts from the year of her death in 1817. The project contains not only the digitized manuscripts but also full transcription, commentary on provenance and other aspects of the work and description of their physical condition. The site also allows for systematic comparison between manuscripts. While no complete holograph manuscripts of her famous six novels are known to exist, the materials contained in this collection offer insight into her writing practices over an even broader time span than the years in which her novels were published.

The Smithsonian: African American Women's Fashion

The Black Fashion Museum Collection, collected by Lois Alexander Lane, the founder of the Black Fashion Museum, is now housed at the the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. The collection was donated by Lane's daughter, Joyce Bailey, in 2007. The collection includes garments created and worn by African American women from the nineteenth through twentieth centuries--slaves as well as famed designers, such as Ann Lowe. For more information, and to view the photo gallery, here's the article from The Washington Post.