Women's History Sources

New Exhibit: Wendy Wasserstein

2012-01-17T22:00:00.000-06:00

The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein is a new exhibit on view at Mount Holyoke College until April 15, 2012. The American playwright Wendy Wasserstein graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1971.

The exhibit overview includes a video interview with Julie Salamon, author of Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein (Penguin Press, 2011). Salamon highlights the importance of Wasserstein's notebooks, and expresses a deep appreciation for the work of the Mount Holyoke College Archives.

A number of women from the Mount Holyoke College class of 1971 share their memories of Wasserstein in these YouTube videos.

Related Sources
CUNY TV offers Linda Winer's Women in Theatre interview with Wasserstein (28 min) from 2003, and Sheryl McCarthy's interview with Salamon (25 min).

Women Inventors

2012-01-05T22:21:00.000-06:00


Drawing for a Game Board, 01/05/1904 (ARC Identifier: 595519); Series: Patented Case Files, 1836-1956; Records of the Patent and Trademark Office; Record Group 241; National Archives.

Drawing for a Game Board, 01/05/1904, the patent drawing for a game invented by Lizzie J. Magie, is "Today's Document" from the National Archives. A variation of this game would later become the board game "Monopoly."

Related Sources
Early Female Inventor (C-SPAN Video Library) features Margaret Knight and her invention of a paper bag maker, part of the Great American Hall of Wonders exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

B. Zorina Khan's The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2005) includes chapters on "Women Inventors in America" and "Patentees and Married Women's Property Rights."

New Exhibition: I Love Lucy

2011-12-31T19:47:00.001-06:00

I Love Lucy, an American Legend is being held at the Library of Congress from August 4, 2011 to January 28, 2012. This site provides an overview of the themes of the exhibition (e.g., "The Cast, Crew, and Set," "Theme Songs") and a gallery of exhibition items. We Still Love Lucy (Information Bulletin, September/October 2011) provides additional information about the exhibition.

New Book: Understanding Medieval Primary Sources

2011-12-30T22:00:00.000-06:00

Rosenthal, Joel Thomas, ed. Understanding Medieval Primary Sources: Using Historical Sources to Discover Medieval Europe. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012. WorldCat record

See in particular Katherine L. French's chapter, "Medieval Women's History: Sources and Issues." French covers both descriptive documents (notarial registers, manor records, charters, witness depositions, and coroners' rolls, Episcopal visitation records, financial records of institutions, and household accounts) and prescriptive sources (the Bible, civic codes, guild regulations, monastic rules, sermons, and advice literature). Additional chapters provide different perspectives on relevant sources: wills as primary sources; letters and letter collections; sources for manorial and rural history; medieval urban history; public health in the medieval city; images and objects as sources; and medieval archaeology.

In the News: Children of Cuba Remember Operation Pedro Pan

2011-12-05T21:00:00.000-06:00

Operation Pedro Pan was a U.S. government program that brought more than 14,000 Cuban children to the United States from 1960 to 1962.

Children of Cuba Remember Their Flight to America (NPR, Nov. 19, 2011)
In this audio segment, Carmen Valdivia, Jose Azel, and Carlos Eire relate how the experience shaped their lives. The web page for the story includes a photo of Valdivia and other girls at a camp for displaced children in Florida City, and a recent photo of Valdivia holding the visa waiver that she received in 1962.

The Legacy of Pedro Pan (C-SPAN) was a panel discussion at the National Museum of American History (August 14, 2011). Panelists included Jackie Bhabha (Human Rights Program at Harvard) and Pedro Pan participants Emilio Cueto, Eloiza Echazabel, and Maria de los Angeles Torres. Torres is also the author of The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the U. S., and the Promise of a Better Future (Beacon Press, 2003).

Related Sources
The Miami Herald maintains a site that features articles and videos about Operation Pedro Pan.
The Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami provides access to primary and secondary sources that relate to Cuba and the Cuban diaspora from colonial times to he present. One of the digital collections on the site includes a video interview with Albertina O'Farrill, who used her diplomatic connections as a Cuban ambassador's wife to get children out of Cuba during Operation Pedro Pan.

Conde, Yvonne M. Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children. New York: Routledge, 1999. WorldCat Record with Preview

Stoner, K. Lynn, and Luís Hipólito Serrano Pérez. Cuban and Cuban-American Women: An Annotated Bibliography. Wilmington, Del: Scholarly Resources, 2000. WorldCat Record with Preview

Triay, Victor Andres. Fleeing Castro Operation Pedro Pan and the Cuban Children's Program. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. WorldCat Record with Preview

American History Online

2011-11-30T16:25:00.000-06:00

American History Online is a site for searching across 362 digital collections of primary sources at libraries and archives in the United States, as well as selected related sources (e.g., the America: History & Life database). Direct links to some of the "women's history" digital collections that are searched at the site are provided here:

American Jewess (Jewish Women's Archive)
Catt Collection of Suffrage Photographs (Bryn Mawr College)
Charlotta Bass (USC Digital Library)
A Celebration of Women Writers (University of Pennsylvania)
Documenting the American South (UNC-Chapel Hill)
Folkstreams
Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection (Library of Congress)
Freedom House Project (Northeastern University Library)
George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers (Purdue University Libraries)
Home Economics Archive (Cornell University Libraries)
Peace Collection Ephemera (Swarthmore College Peace Collection)
Peace Collection Photographs (Swarthmore College Peace Collection)
Sharlot M. Hall: Arizona's Curator (Sharlot Hall Museum)
Studies in Scarlet: Marriage and Sexuality in the U.S. and U.K., 1815-1914 (Harvard Univ. Library)
Women Working, 1800-1930 (Harvard University Library)
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Staff and Officers (Swarthmore College Peace Collection)

Deena Stryker Photographs of Cuba

2011-11-27T12:05:00.000-06:00

Deena Stryker Photographs of Cuba, 1963-1964 and undated
This digital collection from Duke University Libraries includes more than 1800 photographs. The journalist, then known as Deena Boyer, interviewed and photographed Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, and other major figures in the Cuban Revolution (e.g., Celia Sánchez Manduley) during her second visit to Cuba. Although "Women" is not a subject heading in the records for these photographs, searches for the following terms will retrieve relevant records: Ana Betancourt students, Carnaval, cousins, mother, teachers, woman, and women. Researchers can also find photographs of specific women: Edith Gombos, Celia Sánchez Manduley, and Palma Soriano.

Karen Glynn, Visual Materials Archivist at Duke University, provides an overview of the collection in the latest edition of VIEWS: The Newsletter of the Visual Materials Section of the Society of American Archivists.

Women in Science, Medicine, and Technology

2011-11-27T08:19:00.000-06:00

The International Symposium of the Commission on the History of Women in Science, Technology and Medicine was held in Paris, September 14-17, 2011. Slides and texts from symposium presentations are now available. Three of the presentations are featured below:

Jessica Sedgwick's overview of the Archives for Women in Medicine (Harvard) covered three primary goals of the Archives: building a collection of enduring value; improving access (e.g., oral histories, digitization); and outreach (promoting collections and celebrating women leaders). SlideShare includes Sedgwick's slides as well as the presentation text).
Highlights from The Archives for Women in Medicine site include Women in Medicine Oral Histories, digitized items from manuscript collections, finding aids, and information about current events at the Archives.

Philippa Hardman's presentation highlighted the hidden world of women and science in Charles Darwin’s private correspondence. See the Darwin and Gender site for more information about this initiative.

Margaret Rossiter's slides list the archival collections that she used in researching her new book, Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World Since 1972 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Earlier volumes from this series include Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972, and Women Scientists in America, Struggles and Strategies to 1940.

New on Europeana: Weddings in Eastern Europe

2011-11-22T00:01:00.000-06:00

Weddings in Eastern Europe (Europeana)
This virtual exhibition features sound and photographs from Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovenia. The site is organized into 10 themes (e.g., "The evening before the wedding," "The ceremonial blessing," and "The capping ceremony").

Related Sources

Monger, George. Marriage Customs of the World: From Henna to Honeymoons. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO, 2004.
WorldCat record with preview

Katrina Thomas Ethnic Wedding Collection features more than 800 of Thomas' photographs of ethnic weddings in the United States. Ethnic and religious traditions that are represented in the collection include Afghan (Muslim); African American; Akan (Ghana); Albanian (Catholic and Muslim); American Kalmyk-Mongolian Buddhist; Anglo-American; Armenian; Asante (Ghana); Assyrian; Bukharan Jewish; Cajun; Cambodian; Carpatho-Rusyn; Chaldean; Chinese; Creole; Croatian; Dominican; Eritrean; Ethiopian; Filipino; Greek; Guyanese (Hindu); Hmong; Igbo (Nigeria); Japanese; Jewish; Korean; Kurdish; Laotian; Latvian; Lithuanian; Mexican; Mien; Norwegian; Pakistani; Palestinian; Persian; Polish Gorale (Highlander); Puerto Rican; Roman Catholic; Russian Old Believer; Salvadoran/Honduran; Serbian; Sikh; Slovak; Swedish; Thai; Tibetan; Ukrainian; Vietnamese; Yemeni; Yoruba (Nigeria); and Zoroastrian Irani.

Audre Lorde: Newly-discovered Recording

2011-10-31T22:03:00.001-05:00

From the Vault: Audre Lorde (Pacific Archives)
In this audio recording (57 min, 21 sec) from 1980, Lorde reads from her poetry (e.g., A Song for Many Movements) and from her book The Cancer Journals.

Readers who are unfamiliar with Lorde's work may want to check out The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (Norton, 1997), or I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde (Oxford University Press, 2009). Lorde's papers are at Spelman College.

New Exhibition: Circus Posters

2011-10-31T20:55:00.001-05:00

The Amazing American Circus Poster: The Strobridge Lithographing Company
The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art
September 17, 2011 - January 29, 2012

The exhibition catalog includes numerous images of women circus performers: "Evetta the Only Lady Clown," "Madam Yucca: The Champion American Female Hercules," and "Polly Lee." The essays in the catalog cover a wide range of topics, including "Bearded Ladies, Dainty Amazons, Hindoo Fakirs, and Lady Savages: Circus Representations of Gender and Race in Victorian America," by Janet M. Davis.

Related Sources

Davis is also the author of The Circus Age: Culture & Society Under the American Big Top (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Under the Big Top profiles her work on this book.

A search for circus posters in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog retrieves more than 200 images. The Wisconsin Historical Society's Let's Go to the Circus includes more than 200 photos (e.g., trapeze artist Jennie Rooney). The Harrison Sayre Circus Collection (Florida State University) offers posters and photographs. Archives Hub provides a gateway for Fairs and Circus History collections in the UK.

Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers Enormous Shows Combined. Strobridge Lith. Co. 1896. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZC4-930.

New Digital Collection: Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive

2011-10-17T20:14:00.000-05:00

Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive
Dance companies have performed at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival since 1932. Highlights from this collection of video clips include performances by Alexandra Danilova, Carola Goya, Tanaquil LeClercq, Ruth St. Denis, Pearl Primus, Maria Tallchief, and Twyla Tharp. Browse options for genre and era are also available. A recent Washington Post article by Sarah Kaufman provides further information about the collection: In Jacob's Pillow Archives, Moving History.

Related Sources
I See America Dancing (University of Illinois Press, 2002), edited by Maureen Needham, is a collection of primary source documents and articles. Discovering American Women's History Online provides links to more than 20 digital collections that include significant primary source materials about women dancers.

New Digital Collection: Jennie Wilde's Float Designs

2011-09-30T20:51:00.001-05:00

Jennie Wilde (1865-1913) designed floats for many New Orleans Mardi Gras parades. Mistick Krewe of Comus 1910 float designs features 20 of Wilde's colorful and detailed designs. Google Books Preview includes the chapter on Jennie Wilde in Henri Schindler's Mardi Gras Treasures: Float Designs of the Golden Age (Pelican Pub. Co., 2001).

New Exhibit: Civil War Fashions and Domestic Life

2011-09-29T14:39:00.000-05:00

On the Home Front: Civil War Fashions and Domestic Life
Kent State University Museum
September 30, 2011 - August 26, 2012
In addition to displays of women's and children's costumes, this exhibit includes photographs, decorative arts, and women's magazines. See Kent State University Museum's blog for details about the preparation of the exhibit: choosing pieces for the exhibit; photographing the pieces; and dressing mannequins.

Don't miss overviews of the Museum's past exhibits, such as Fashion on the Ohio Frontier to "Raiment for Receptions: A Japanese Bride's Last Furisode.

New Digital Collection: Nell Shipman Collection

2011-09-26T16:10:00.001-05:00

Nell Shipman Collection (Albertsons Library, Boise State University)

Nell Shipman (1892-1970) starred in, directed, or produced more than 20 films between 1916 and 1924. This digital collection offers more than 130 images that document Shipman's life and career as a pioneering filmmaker. Boise State has also published Shipman's autobiography, The Silent Screen & My Talking Heart (1987) and Letters from God's Country: Nell Shipman, Selected Correspondence and Writings, 1912-1970 (2003).

Nell Shipman, 1922 (Boise State University Library, Special Collections)

Albertsons Library offers additional digital collections that highlight the life stories of other women. The Bethine Church Collection documents Church's student days at Boise Junior College, her years in Washington, and her contributions to civic and public affairs. Online exhibits highlight the life stories of three women: Gracie Pfost, the first female member of Congress from Idaho; Ruth McBirney, an American librarian in postwar France; and philanthropist Velma Morrison.

New Exhibition: Foundling Voices

2011-08-29T00:01:00.001-05:00

Foundling Voices, The Foundling Museum, London, April 14 - October 30, 2011

The Foundling Voices exhibition uses audio interviews, photographs and film to chronicle the personal stories of children who were brought up in the care of the Foundling Hospital. The interviews with more than 70 former foundlings cover a range of topics: family separation, the stigma of illegitimacy, the spartan educational environment, wartime heroism, and the search for birth mothers.

Alice Hatter and Pearl Martley

Foundling Voices Online, like the exhibit, is organized into the following themes: Early Life; School Life; Into the World; Search for Birth Families; and Reflections. The Films section combines excerpts from the interviews with photographs to document "Music at Foundling" and the relationships between the children and their birth mothers. For additional images from the exhibition, see the Foundling Voices Facebook page.

Many thanks to Gemma Colgan, Marketing and Communications Manager at the Foundling Museum, for passing along information about this major exhibition.

New Digital Collection: Outdoor Advertising

2011-08-22T22:15:00.000-05:00

ROAD 2.0 (Duke University Libraries) provides more than 27,000images of billboards, wall paintings, electric “spectaculars” (such as the neonsigns New York’s Times Square), bus shelters, taxi displays, andbehind-the-scenes shots of outdoor ads under construction and sign painters atwork. The site offers multipleoptions for searching and browsing (company, product, date, medium, etc.) thecollection. Researchers may need to be creative in finding relevant images because subject-based access is limited; although "women" is not used as a subject heading in this collection, try keyword searches for terms such as woman, women, girl, lady, mother, etc. However, this approach will still miss numerous billboards that depict women or that target women as consumers.

Related Sources
Don't miss Duke's other Advertising Collections, such as Ad*Access, AdViews, and the Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920. Women and Advertising Pathfinder is an annotated guide to archival collections at Duke's Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History.

Basten, Fred E. Great American Billboards. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2007. WorldCat Record
This work includes images of 260 posters, signs, and billboards.

Gudis, Catherine. Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape. New York: Routledge, 2004. WorldCat Record
This history of billboards in the United States includes a good selection of images, such as a set of Atlantic Gasoline advertisements that feature sportswomen. Chapter 10, "When Separate Spheres Collide," covers the efforts of women to stop the proliferation of billboards across the American landscape.

Hill, Daniel Delis. Advertising to the American Woman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. WorldCat Record

New Digital Collection and Webcast: Sikkim Photos

2011-08-14T14:58:00.003-05:00

Sikkim Photos (Library of Congress)
Sikkim, now part of India,borders on Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. This site includes more than 300 images from the Dr.Alice S. Kandell Collection of Sikkim Photographs. Kandell’s photographs,taken during visits between 1965 and 1979, document the daily lives of women, men, and children of the region. The collection also includes numerous photographs of the last king, Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal, his American wife Queen Hope Cooke, and their family. Kandell's books, Mountaintop Kingdom: Sikkim (with text by Charlotte Salisbury) and Sikkim: The Hidden Kingdom, also feature photographs from this collection. In 2010, both Kandell and Cooke gave presentations at the Library of Congress about their experiences in Sikkim; see the webcast, A Tour of the Lost Kingdom: Sikkim (100 min.).

[Nepalese woman wearing purple headscarf and nose ring, holding baby, Sikkim]
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.
Dr. Alice S. Kandell Collection of Sikkim Photographs.
Kandell has dedicated her rights to the public domain.

[Nepalese woman working with blue dyed wool, Sikkim]
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.
Dr. Alice S. Kandell Collection of Sikkim Photographs.
Kandell has dedicated her rights to the public domain.

20th Century African-American Women: Ebony Magazine Archive

2011-07-29T13:29:00.005-05:00

Ebony magazine partnered with Google to digitize 65 years of their journal. Each issue is scanned with all pages, including advertisements, and has a search function making every page searchable by key word. There is also a zoom function and quick link to each issue's table of contents. There are many articles featuring the work and contributions of African-American women. In addition, there are numerous advertisements geared towards women and articles discussing beauty and family life. Throughout the issues, there are also stories from and about the African diaspora. Truly a remarkable resource for anyone interested in 20th century African-American history and culture.
The complete archive is available here:
http://www.ebony.com/Archive.aspx

New Book Set: Relaunching The Image of the Black in Western Art

2011-07-20T10:45:00.000-05:00

Harvard University Press is relaunching and expanding The Image of the Black in Western Art. The original books are being reproduced with larger images and full color throughout, and an additional five volumes will be published over the next several years. The website for the collection offers additional background about the series, an introduction to the series by Henry Louis Gates, and links to reviews. Finally, the Image Gallery features several images from the series that depict women.

New Exhibit/Book: War Correspondent

2011-06-23T23:36:00.001-05:00

War Correspondent: Reporting Under Fire Since 1850
Imperial War Museum North, May 28, 2011 - January 2, 2012

This is the UK's first major exhibition about British war correspondents. The slideshow of photographs from the exhibition includes images of Kate Adie, Martha Gellhorn, and Clare Hollingworth. The book that accompanies the exhibition includes more than 200 illustrations.

Related Sources
See Kate Adie's autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers (Headline, 2002), and Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (New York: H. Holt, 2006). Hollingworth recalls the Scoop of the Century (BBC) on the MyCentury site, and is featured in Women War Correspondents, The Telegraph, July 12, 2010.

New Database - British women's struggle for suffrage

2011-06-15T13:08:00.003-05:00

The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) opened a new database about British women's struggle for suffrage. The Women's Library Suffrage Collection, housed at London Metropolitan University, is available in digitized form here: http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/WLS. The collection includes posters, postcards, photographs, and images of material objects from the Women's Library. There is a separate collection of suffrage banners and associated artwork available here: http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/FSB. The vast holdings of the Women's Library are not all available digitally, but these online collections are substantial and offer excellent and varied visual materials.

Digital Archives about French Feminism

2011-06-10T17:58:00.002-05:00

Just a couple of hours outside of Paris researchers looking for material about French feminism will find an excellent collection of materials at the Centre des Archives du Féminisme, housed at the University of Angers. For those who cannot make it to Angers but would like to access digital sources, the website offers a collection of online exhibits and digital documents, as well as a searchable guide to sources: http://www.archivesdufeminisme.fr/

The website is in French.

Clio in the Classroom

2011-05-31T23:52:00.001-05:00

Clio in the Classroom: A Guide for Teaching U.S. Women's History Edited by Carol Berkin, Margaret S. Crocco, and Barbara Winslow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. See in particular chapters on teaching women's history with visual images, three-dimensional objects, and oral histories.

Related Site
Making Sense of History presents two approaches that will help students and teachers make effective use of primary sources. "Making Sense of Documents" includes sections on specific types of primary sources, such as oral history, maps, letters and diaries, advertisements, and documentary photography; historians offer tips for analyzing online primary sources and provide a guide to online and print sources. "Scholars in Action" allows students to interpret a specific primary source (e.g., letters of labor activist Sarah Bagley) before listening to a historian discuss the document.

Black Gospel Music and the Civil Rights Movement

2011-05-30T08:50:00.003-05:00

More than 75% of the gospel vinyl released between 1940 and 1970, the “Golden Age of Gospel Music,” is unavailable in any format. The Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, seeks to preserve the remaining African American gospel recordings from this period and to create the definitive online encyclopedia of gospel music. Many of the recordings preserved by the BGMRP were either recorded live at local radio stations, or were produced by small, obscure producers now out of business or bought up by larger recording labels. Working with other universities and private collectors, the BGMRP has digitized, scanned, and cataloged more than 2500 previously unavailable 78s, 45s, and LPs, making the BGMRP the largest single repository of black gospel music.

The BGMRP grew out of the research of Baylor University professor Robert Darden, author of People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music (Continum 2004). In working on People Get Ready, Darden learned that much of the music from gospel’s golden age was missing. Darden, a lifelong gospel music enthusiast, was writing about music he had never heard. In 2005, Darden wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times, “Gospel’s Got the Blues” (February 15, 2005). New York businessman Charles Royce read Darden’s editorial and offered to fund a digitization project. The BGMRP is physically housed in the Ray I. Riley Digitization Center at Moody Memorial Library on the Baylor University campus in Waco. Because of copyright restrictions, off-campus online access to the collection is currently limited to 30-second samples of the music. A select group of music clips are also available through Baylor University’s iTunes U.

The BGMRP preserves the music of an era when gospel music and civil rights were, as Darden notes, “indelibly linked.” Gospel music provided an important accompaniment to the sit-ins, marches, and voter registration drives of the Civil Rights Movement. The movement’s most significant song “We Shall Overcome” was reworked in part from an old Baptist hymn. The album Freedom Highway recorded by the Staple Singers, featuring Mavis Staples, was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and dedicated to the freedom marchers.

Other resources:
Goodrich, Terry. "Researcher Finds Civil Rights Songs on Flip Side of Gospel Records." Associated Baptist Press, February 3, 2011.

"Gospel Music Historian Robert Darden." Fresh Air, National Public Radio (air date: December 20, 2007).

Norris, Michelle. "A History of Gospel Music." All Things Considered, National Public Radio (air date: December 17, 2004).

New Digital Collection: Iron Hill School

2011-05-29T22:32:00.000-05:00

Iron Hill Museum oral history recordings and transcripts (University of Delaware Library)
Iron Hill School was one of more than 80 schools for African-American children built between 1919 and 1928 as part of philanthropist Pierre Samuel du Pont's "Delaware experiment." The 37 interviews in this collection document community and school life, relationships between schools, civil rights, transportation to and from school, employment, and churches.

Related Site:
Iron Hill School
This lesson plan, part of the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places site, offers additional information about the history of the school, photographs and the school's floor plan, and activities (e.g., collecting oral histories) for students to learn the history of their own school.

In the News: Conservationist Ellen Stern Harris

2011-05-28T15:02:00.000-05:00

Martha Groves, UCLA Will Catalog Noted Conservationist's Collection, Los Angeles Times, May 2, 2011.
Ellen Stern Harris, known as the mother of the California Coastal Zone Conservation Act of 1972, left a vast but unorganized collection of letters, photographs, publications, and research files. This article highlights the challenges of processing Harris' papers, the value of the collection for researchers, and plans for digitizing the collection.

Archiving the Mother of the California Coastal Zone Conservation Act of 1972 (Moving Image Archive News, May 11, 2011) This blog post covers the audio-visual materials in the collection and what they reveal about Harris.

Related Sources
See the following digital collections that document the work of women conservationists and environmentalists:

Rachel Carson Papers (Yale) This collection includes photographs of Carson as a child and adult; images from draft manuscripts for the books Under the Sea Wind, Silent Spring, and The Sense of Wonder; and an early article by Carson in Nature Magazine.

A Tale of Two Women: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Marjorie Harris Carr (Everglades Digital Library)
Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998), author of landmark book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), helped found Friends of the Everglades in 1969. Marjorie Carr helped stop a construction project that threatened central Florida's ecosystem. This collection includes interviews with Douglas and Carr, as well as a lecture by Douglas about a variety of environmental issues.

National Jukebox and Other Women in Music Sources

2011-05-26T20:49:00.005-05:00

National Jukebox, a new digital collection from the Library of Congress, includes more than 10,000 historical audio recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. New recordings will be added to the Jukebox every month. Highlights include recordings by Nora Bayes (1880-1928), Geraldine Farrar (1882-1967), Alma Gluck (1884-1938), and Louise Homer (1871-1947), Maud Powell (1868-1920), and Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936).

Related Sources
American National Biography includes biographical profiles of each of these women. Willa Cather's 1913 article on Louise Homer, Geraldine Farrar, and Olive Fremstad includes photographs and is supplemented with links to online sound recordings.

Geraldine Farrar

The Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Catalog includes a good selection of photographs of Farrar, Gluck, and Holmes. American Women, a gateway to Library of Congress resources, describes collections about Farrar, Gluck, Powell, and other women in music (e.g., Mary Cardwell Dawson, founder of the National Negro Opera Company).

Images of singers often appeared on sheet music covers. Researchers can use the Sheet Music Consortium's database to search across sheet music collections at UC-Los Angeles, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University. A search for Nora Bayes retrieved 82 records, including Ladies First (at left) from Johns Hopkins.

Chronicling America provides access to more than 3.7 million newspaper pages from more than 500 newspaper titles published in 22 states and the District of Columbia between 1860 and 1922. Try searching for notable women singers from the first quarter of the 20th century. For instance, a search for Alma Gluck retrieves images and stories about Gluck, as well as advertisements such as the one at right from the New York Tribune (July 8, 1916).

RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage

2011-05-05T10:59:00.000-05:00

RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage
Current and back issues of RBM are now freely available. A number of articles that cover women's history sources have appeared in this journal:

Musical Migrations: A Case Study of the Teresa Carreño Papers, by Ronald D. Patkus (2005)

Now What Should We Do With Them?: Artists' Books in the Curriculum, by Suzy Taraba (2003)

Preserving the History of Diversity: One University's Efforts to Make Boston's History More Inclusive, by Joan Krizack (2007)

Patents Expose History

2011-05-01T14:41:00.000-05:00

While perfoming historical research on her-story don't forget to look at US Federal Patents. There is a world of wonder inside those unassuming pages.

ACCESS VIA:
uspto.gov
google patents
visit your local federal depository

Did you know that Hedy Lamarr filed a patent which is the foundation for our GPS navigation, wi-fi, cellphone, and a myriad of technology we take for granted today? Patent #2,292,387.

She gave this patent over to the War Dept. in order to assist with the war effort in WWII. They accepted it but brushed her away.

I would be more than glad to share this presentation with you and am always open to giving the presentation in person. Just contact me.

Dust Bowl Oklahoma: Oral Histories and Letters

2011-04-30T23:06:00.000-05:00

Dust, Drought, and Dreams Gone Dry: Oklahoma Women and the Dust Bowl

This oral history collection from Oklahoma State University Library includes interviews with women who lived through the Dust Bowl, primarily in the seven western-most counties of Oklahoma where the Dust Bowl hit the hardest. Some of the topics covered include the WPA, President Roosevelt, the challenges of domestic life, experiencing dust storms as a child, rabbit drives, gypsies, and Saturday evenings in town. The site also offers an excellent Bibliography of the Dust Bowl Era.

Henderson, Caroline A., and Alvin O. Turner. Letters from the Dust Bowl. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. This collection of Henderson’s letters and articles published from 1908 to1966 also includes photographs of Henderson, her family, and of dust storms in the 1930s.

New Book: The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer

2011-04-19T00:44:00.000-05:00

The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, edited by Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
Although Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) was a powerful speaker and tireless advocate for civil rights during the 1960s and 1970s, this is the first volume to showcase her most important speeches and testimonies.

Related Sites
Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches (American Radio Works) features Hamer's Testimony Before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention. The Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive includes a transcript of an oral history interview with Hamer.

Cookbooks: The Sandy Michell Collection

2011-04-18T08:26:00.000-05:00

Aunt Mary's Cookery Book

Cookbooks: The Sandy Michell Collection, Sir Louis Matheson Library, Monash University (March 22 - May 31, 2011)

This exhibition features cookbooks from England, France, and Australia. The announcement provides links to the exhibition catalog, descriptions of exhibition items, and online access to a selection of more than 100 items from the exhibition.

Gertrude Stein: Home Movie and Upcoming Exhibition

2011-04-12T21:55:00.003-05:00

The Beinecke Library (Yale University) recently uploaded a Gertrude Stein Home Movie to YouTube. A portion of this short movie includes scenes of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at the Hotel Pernollet in Belley, France. The Beinecke Library also offers online access to correspondence, manuscripts, and photographs in the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers.

Exhibition Catalog

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, an upcoming exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, focuses on these themes: Picturing Gertrude; Domestic Stein; the Art of Friendship; Celebrity Stein; and Legacies. The exhibition catalog is available from the University of California Press.

Another upcoming exhibition, The Steins Collect, will run at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from May 21 to September 6, 2011.

New Digital Collection: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers

2011-04-08T09:19:00.020-05:00

The Schlesinger Library is the primary repository for the papers of early 20th-century American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). To celebrate the sesquicentennial of Gilman's birth, the Schlesinger Library has digitized Gilman's papers, with the generous help of the Cynthia Green Colin Fund.

In September 2010, the Nation named Gilman among the “Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the 20th Century,” taking note of her arguments that women would be emancipated only when they were economically independent and that housekeeping and child care should be professionalized. Known around the world during her lifetime as a public intellectual, author of the best-selling Women and Economics (1898), and a major influence on the women’s movement, today Gilman is known primarily for The Yellow Wallpaper, an autobiographical short story about a woman’s nervous breakdown.

To learn more about Gilman's life and to access her diaries, letters, writings, and drawings, consult the online finding aid

American Folk Art Museum: Quilt Exhibition and More

2011-04-06T21:27:00.000-05:00

Quilts: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum is an exhibition on view through October 16, 2011. The announcement offers links to reviews and related media (e.g., a short video tour), as well as information about the exhibition catalog.

The museum's web site and publications highlight other forms of folk art. The Image Gallery includes early portraits, needlework and rugs, quilts and coverlets, furniture, and works by contemporary folk artists. Some of these images also appear in the exhibition catalog, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (Henry N. Abrams, 2001).

American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum (Henry N. Abrams, 2001). Four chapters in this exhibition catalog by Stacy C. Hollander are particularly noteworthy: "Singular Faces" includes more than 60 portraits (e.g., "Young Woman of the Folsom Family," at right); "Girls at School, Women at Home" features paintings by students, samplers, and a bedcover; "Pennsylvania and Beyond: Fraktur" showcases folk art drawings that document births, baptisms, and other special events among German Americans; and "Simple Gifts: The Shakers" offers images of three "gift drawings" by women. For additional information about gift drawings, see Sally L. Kitch, "'As a Sign That All May Understand': Shaker Gift Drawings and Female Spritiual Power," Winterthur Portfolio 24, no. 1 (1989): 1-28.

New Digital Collection: Civil War Photographs

2011-03-31T23:14:00.001-05:00

The Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs
The Liljenquist family donated this collection of ambrotype and tintype photographs to the Library of Congress in 2010. Although there is an emphasis on enlisted men, the images below provide only a sample of the photographs retrieved using such search terms as mourning, families, women, and girls.

[Unidentified girl in mourning dress holding framed photograph
of her father as a cavalryman with sword and Hardee hat]

[Unidentified woman wearing mourning brooch and
displaying framed image of unidentified soldier]

[Unidentified young women in dresses in front of American flag]]

[Unidentified African American soldier in Union
uniform with wife and two daughters]

Interview with Aviator Janet Harmon Bragg

2011-03-31T09:19:00.000-05:00

Janet Harmon Bragg (1907-1993) was the first African American women to receive a commercial pilot's license.

Bragg described an earlier attempt to obtain a pilot's license in an interview that is featured on the Smithsonian blog The Bigger Picture. After being told that she did very well on her flight test, Bragg was denied the license because she was a black women.

Learn more about this pioneering aviator by reading Soaring Above Setbacks: The Autobiography of Janet Harmon Bragg, African American Aviator (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). The book includes photographs of Bragg and group portraits of members of the Challenger Air Pilots Association.

Digital Collection: Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers

2011-03-27T02:32:00.000-05:00

The Archives of American Art blog is highlighting women who have contributed to the development and understanding of contemporary and modernist art in the United States. The first entry features Betty Parsons (1900-1982), who opened the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City in 1946. A photograph of Parsons and a letter from Peggy Guggenheim provide just a hint of the 61,000 images that are available online in the Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers. See More About the Collection for a biographical profile of Parsons. The Archives of American Art site also includes the transcript of an oral history interview with Parsons (1981). Access additional digital collections, oral history interviews, and collections by topic (e.g., Women) on the Research Collections page.

On This Day: Triangle Factory Fire

2011-03-25T02:01:00.000-05:00

On March 25, 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City killed 146 people. Most of the victims were immigrant women. The tragedy paved the way for sweeping workplace safety laws.

The following web sites, articles, books and documentaries offer a wealth of information about the Triangle Fire.

The Triangle Factory Fire (Cornell) This recently redesigned site provides a variety of sources that document the fire and its aftermath: survivor interviews; photos and illustrations; newspaper and magazine articles; the transcript of the criminal trial; reports; audio of a lecture by Frances Perkins from 1964; and other sources.

Josephine Cammarata

The Cornell site also includes factual information about each of the victims. Josephine Cammarata, one of the final six victims identified, was only 17 and engaged to be married on Easter Sunday. Michael Hirsch's use of newspapers, census records, death and burial certificates, and marriage licenses to identify the six victims is chronicled in 100 Years Later, The Roll of the Dead in a Factory Fire is Complete (New York Times, February 20, 2011).

Chronicling America offers search strategies, key dates, and links to sample newspaper articles about the Triangle Factory Fire. The impact of the photographs in many of these articles is explored in Factory Fire: A Frontier in Photojournalism (New York Times, March 23, 2011).

Preview Dave Von Drehle's Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). Von Drehle discussed the book on Booknotes (August 21, 2003; 58 min.). A number of children's books about the tragedy are also available.

Two documentaries offer additional opportunities for understanding the Triangle Fire from multiple perspectives. One can watch Triangle Fire (PBS) online, and HBO's Triangle: Remembering the Fire will air on CNN on March 26, 2011.

Celebrating Research

2011-03-24T02:11:00.002-05:00

Celebrating Research (Association of Research Libraries, 2007) profiles rare and special collections at research libraries in North America. Many of these collections document women's history:

University of Alabama
David Walker Lupton African American Cookbook Collection

University of Arizona Library
The Fred Harvey Hotels Collection

Brigham Young University Library
19th Century Western and Mormon Collection
Features an image of a journal page by Emmeline B. Wells

University of California - San Diego Libraries
Southworth Spanish Civil War Collection
Features a drawing by a girl and the photograph, "Spanish Refugees in France."

University of Connecticut Libraries
Alternative Press Collection
Features covers from Off Our Backs and other publications.

Cornell University Libraries
Human Sexuality Collection

Duke University Libraries
The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture

Emory University Libraries
The Carter G. Woodson Library

University of Florida Libraries
Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature
Features "Paper doll with extra outfit included with The History of Little Fanny (1810).

Georgia Tech Library
The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Collection

Harvard University Library
Emily Dickinson Collection

University of Hawaii at Manoa Library
Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association Plantation Archives

Howard University Libraries
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center
Features deed of sale from 1844: Caroline, a slave for life.

Louisiana State University Libraries
Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections
Features photo, "Mother and Child," 1890.

University of Miami Libraries
Marjory Stoneman Douglas Collection

National Library of Medicine
Public Health Films Collection

University of Nebraska, Lincoln Libraries
Willa Cather Collection

New York State Library
Van Rensselaer Manor Papers

Northwestern University Library
The Winterton Collection of East African Photographs

Ohio State University Libraries
The Curtiss Show Print Collection

Oklahoma State University Library
Angie Debo Papers

Rutgers University Libraries
Jazz Oral History Project Collection
Features photograph of Mary Lou Williams

University of Southern California Libraries
Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive

Southern Illinois University Carbondale Library
Katherine M. Dunham Papers

University of Texas Libraries
The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection
Features photograph, “Elisa García López,” and “Ordaz Mendoza and María Magiscatzin Genealogy.”

Virginia Tech Libraries
International Archive of Women in Architecture

University of Washington Libraries
Japanese American Evacuation and Internment Collections

Wayne State University Libraries
Digital Dress: 200 Years of Urban Style

Flickr and Other Digital Collections from the Center for Jewish History

2011-03-21T01:27:00.000-05:00

Louise Waterman Wise and Justine Wise

The Center for Jewish History recently created a Flickr collection in honor of Women's History Month. Although this is a small collection, images of women appear in most of the Center's 25 Flickr sets. In addition, be sure to explore some of the 25,000 digital objects in the CJH Digital Collections; highlights include Emma Lazarus's Notebook, photos and films from the Hadassah Archives, scrapbooks and posters from the Molly Picon Papers, letters written by Abigail Franks in the 1700s, and oral histories from the Sephardic American Voices collection.

New Exhibit: Taxing Visions

2011-03-08T23:52:00.001-06:00

Taxing Visions Exhibition Catalog

Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth Century American Art
Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, January 29 - May 30, 2011

This exhibition features 34 works that reflect the economic hardships that women, African Americans, children and artists faced from Reconstruction to the end of the nineteenth century. Curators Jessica Todd Smith and Kevin Murphy discuss four of these works (e.g., "Tattered and Torn," at right) in the National Public Radio segment, Portraits of the Poor: Dignity in Times of Despair (6 min 28 sec).

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the "Frankfurt Kitchen"

2011-03-07T00:20:00.001-06:00

A new journal and a recent exhibition feature work by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000), the Austrian architect who designed the "Frankfurt Kitchen" in 1926.


West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, 
Design History, and Material Culture

This inaugural issue includes a translation of passages from Schütte-Lihotzky's Warum ich Architektin wurde (Why I Became an Architect). The extracts provide the rationale for the "work-only" design of the Frankfurt Kitchen, the eight basic elements of the kitchen (e.g., proper positioning of artificial lighting), and Schütte-Lihotzky's thoughts on design and the status of women.

The Frankfurt Kitchen is featured in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition, Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen (Sept. 15, 2010 - May 2, 2011). National Public Radio provides an overview of the exhibition in A Kitchen Revolution Aimed at Freeing Women (5 min 48 sec).

Karen Melching covers conservation efforts at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the article, Frankfurt Kitchen: Patina Follows Function. For additional background information, see Susan Henderson's chapter, "A Revolution in the Woman's Sphere: Grete Lihotzky and the Frankfurt Kitchen," in Architecture and Feminism (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).

Women Scientists on Flickr Commons

2011-03-03T23:48:00.000-06:00

Libbie Henrietta Hyman

The Smithsonian Institution Archives has added additional photos of women scientists to Flickr Commons, and will be highlighting specific women on the Bigger Picture blog during Women's History Month. Additional information about some of these scientists is available online. For instance, zoologist Libbie Henrietta Hyman (pictured at left) is profiled in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, a short autobiography appears in Biographical Memoirs (from the National Academy of Sciences), and an issue of American Museum Novitates includes papers presented at a symposium on Hyman's life and work.

New Book: The Letters of Sylvia Beach

2011-03-02T23:56:00.001-06:00

The Letters of Sylvia Beach. Edited by Keri Walsh and with a foreword by Noël Riley Fitch. Columbia University Press, 2010.

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, settled in Paris in 1916, and opened the Shakespeare and Company bookshop and lending library in 1919. This collection documents Beach's day-to-day activities as a bookseller and publisher, her affair with Adrienne Monnier, and her efforts to prevent the piracy of James Joyce's Ulysses in the United States.

Columbia University Press offers a wealth of information about the book; the excerpts section includes Beach's letters to Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and others.

For additional biographical information, see Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (Norton, 1983) by Noël Riley Fitch.

Princeton University holds the Sylvia Beach Papers. See the Finding Aid for the collection, a small selection of images of Sylvia Beach, and the recent blog post from Rare Books Collection @ Princeton that covers The Dispersal of Sylvia Beach's Books.

New Digital Collection: Africa Through a Lens

2011-02-28T00:12:00.000-06:00

Africa Through a Lens (National Archives, UK) includes thousands of images taken from a collection of Foreign and Commonwealth Office photographs.

Kanuri Women of Dikwa Emirate. 1955 Report

The collection covers over 20 African countries from the 1860s to the 1980s. The site also includes podcasts (accompanied by images from the collection) that cover the origin of the collection and the aims of the digital project; focus on photos of Nigeria; and conserving the images in the collection.

New National Archives (U.S.) Video Short: Madam C.J. Walker

2011-02-27T20:22:00.000-06:00

Video Short: Madam C.J. Walker (3 min. 29 sec)

In this "Inside the Vault" video short, A'Lelia Bundles (Walker's great-great granddaughter) tells how she pieced together details of Walker's early life from National Archives records.

Preview Bundles' On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (Simon and Schuster, 2002), on Google Books. Bundles discussed the book as part of a panel on Life as We Write It at the Virginia Festival of the Book in 2002. The Madam C. J. Walker Collection [Indiana Historical Society] includes digital images of Walker, advertisements, and examples of hairstyles.

Mary Lou Williams: "Jazz for the Soul"

2011-02-26T23:33:00.000-06:00

A recent issue of Smithsonian Folkways Magazine (Fall 2010) features Mary Lou Williams: Jazz for the Soul, an article by Father Peter O'Brien, S. J. The article includes photographs of Williams and audio samples of her music.

Jazz Profiles from NPR: Mary Lou Williams 1910-1981 includes excerpts from interviews with Williams and others. NPR also offers Mary Lou Williams: A Centennial Celebration (6 min 54 sec). For additional biographical information, see Linda Dahl's Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (Pantheon Books, 1999) and Tammy Kernodle's Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Northeastern University Press, 2004).

New Exhibition: Dorothea Lange’s "Three Mormon Towns"

2011-02-24T21:07:00.000-06:00

Dorothea Lange's "Three Mormon Towns," Brigham Young University Museum of Art, January 20 - April 30, 2011

In 1953, Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams spent three weeks taking photographs in three southern Utah communities: Gunlock, St. George, and Toquerville. About 35 of these photographs were published in the Life magazine article, Three Mormon Towns (available online in Google Books).

Curator Diana Turnbow selected 62 photographs for "Dorothea Lange’s ‘Three Mormon Towns.'" The website for the exhibit includes Turnbow's essay, "From Guggenheim Fellowship to Life Magazine: Dorothea Lange's Lasting Impression of Southern Utah;" Lange's initial layout for the article; the original Life article; a brief video interview with Lange's son, Dan Dixon; and the photographs from the exhibit (see "Exhibition Checklist").

Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Norton, 2009) offers additional background about "Three Mormon Towns" (pages 367-369), including how the project strained the relationship between Lange and Adams. Gordon discusses Lange's life and photographs in a National Public Radio interview: Dorothea Lange: Drawing Beauty Out of Isolation (7 min, 48 sec).

Women's History in Visual Arts Journals

2011-02-22T11:44:00.004-06:00

Taylor & Francis is offering free access to its visual arts journals until the end of February. Several of these journals regularly include articles that feature primary sources. For instance, see these recent articles from History of Photography: "Splendid Calotypes" and "Hideous Men": Photography in the Diaries of Lady Pauline Trevelya, by Larry J. Schaaf; Impreciseness in Julia Margaret Cameron's Portrait Photographs, by Mirjam Brusius; and Exposing the Zenana: Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II's Photographs of Women in Purdah, by Laura Weinstein.

Searching the collection will also bring up numerous relevant articles from Visual Anthropology, such as 'The Eyes of Our Ancestors Have a Message": Studio Photographs of Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1866, by Maureen T. Schwarz; Men, Women, and "Japanese" as Outsiders: A Case Study of Postcards with Ainu Images, by Sidney C. H. Cheung; and Picturing Women, Class and Community in Arab Detroit: The Strange Case of Eva Habib, by Sally Howell.

ARTstor Subject Guide :: Women's Studies

2011-02-18T08:30:00.009-06:00

ARTstor, a non-profit digital library of more than one million images for education and scholarship, provides subject guides on a range of topics. Its Women’s Studies handout highlights content related to the history and depiction of women across world cultures and includes search tips, suggested search terms, and featured collections.

A search for “feminist” in ARTstor turns up 295 results ranging from photographs of the Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S. to stills from Chantal Ackerman’s 1976 film Jeanne Dielman.

ARTstor also works directly with women artists and their estates to present extensive documentation of artists’ oeuvre. Its partnership with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has resulted in a collection of approximately 1,200 images of works by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986). The images in the collection present the entire range of O’Keeffe’s oeuvre, from the artist’s iconic flowers and bleached desert skulls to nudes, landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, as well as her highly innovative abstractions.

Collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art has resulted in approximately 5,800 images of American and European costumes and accessories which were formerly in the Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn Museum Costume collection was established in 1902 and is the world’s most comprehensive collection of American fashion from the late 19th to mid-20th century. Highlights of the collection include the definitive collected works of costumes and patterns by Charles James, the British-born designer who was a major force in New York fashion in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as many examples of Belle Époque fashion.

ARTstor is currently collaborating with Judy Chicago to share a collection that will consist of images depicting The Dinner Party (1974-1979), along with individual works and other collaborative projects from throughout Chicago’s career, such as the Birth Project (1980-1985), Powerplay (1982-1987), and recent works in glass. Chicago (b.1939), an artist, author, feminist, and educator whose career spans four decades, helped to initiate a worldwide feminist art movement. Her most well-known work, The Dinner Party, is an icon of feminist art and was executed with the participation of hundreds of volunteers.

Now Available: Vera Glaser papers

2011-02-15T15:04:00.005-06:00

The American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming has recently processed and digitized select folders from the Vera Glaser papers. Glaser was a long-time Washington D.C. reporter and an advocate for women’s rights. During President Richard Nixon’s second press conference, Glaser helped spark a remarkable chain of events when she asked Nixon, “Mr. President, since you’ve been inaugurated, you have made approximately two-hundred presidential appointments, and only three of them have gone to women. Can we expect some more equitable recognition of women’s abilities, or are we going to remain the lost sex?”

The question helped lead to the first systemic program to recruit women into federal positions, as well as the creation of the President's Task Force on Women's Rights and Responsibilities, a task force that Glaser proudly served on. The task force produced a report that consisted of twenty suggestions for improving the status of women in America. After the White House initially refused to release the report, Glaser passed on the task force findings to a fellow journalist for publication. Ultimately, nineteen of the twenty report recommendations became law, with only the Equal Rights Amendment failing to be adopted by the government.

The majority of the Vera Glaser papers consist of materials relating to her career as a journalist, including research files and published articles on American politics and women’s issues from the 1940s through the 1990s. Additionally there are a number of significant professional files, including files related to her work for Sen. Charles Potter and Sen. Kenneth Keating, the Republican National Committee, presidential committees, and various women's and journalistic organizations. The current digital collection consists of a file on the President's Task Force on Women's Rights and Responsibilities, speeches, photographs, and an oral history.

New Exhibit: Katharine Hepburn: Dressed for Stage and Screen

2011-01-30T00:03:00.000-06:00

Katharine Hepburn: Dressed for Stage and Screen
Kent State University Museum, October 2, 2010 - September 4, 2011

This exhibit features stage costumes from The Philadelphia Story, Without Love and Coco; screen costumes from such classic films as Stage Door, Adam's Rib and Long Day's Journey Into Night; and many of her television movies, such as Love Among the Ruins. Vintage posters, playbills, photos and other Hepburn-related artifacts round out the exhibit.

Be sure to see Jean L. Druesedow's very informative overview of the exhibit (video; 21 min., 28 sec.).

On This Day: First Woman Governor in America

2011-01-05T09:50:00.004-06:00

On January 5, 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross, a democrat, was sworn-in as Governor of Wyoming, becoming the first woman in American history to serve as a state governor. Mrs. Ross was elected through a special election on November 4th, 1924 to fill the remainder of the term for the previous governor, and her husband, William B. Ross, who died unexpectedly in office.

During the brief campaign, and subsequent election, many critics denounced the idea of a woman becoming the state’s highest elected official. As the state’s chief executive, Governor Ross fought for farm aid, tax and banking reforms, increased educational funding, and worker protection laws. Despite her best efforts, the Republican controlled state legislature defeated the majority of her legislative initiatives. In an increasingly Republican leaning state, Governor Ross lost her 1926 reelection bid by less than fourteen hundred votes. After her electoral defeat, Mrs. Ross remained active at the national level for the Democratic Party, including serving as the Democratic National Committee vice-chair and director of the DNC Women's Division. In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed her as the first female director of the U.S. Mint, a position she would hold until her retirement in 1953.

Papers relating to the political career and personal life of Nellie Tayloe Ross can be found at the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming and the Wyoming State Archives. The AHC is currently in the process of digitizing the correspondence, political papers, and photograph series of the Nellie Tayloe Ross papers, which represent approximately five and a half cubic feet of primary documents. Additionally, Ms. Ross was recently featured in the traveling exhibit In Pursuit of Equality, which is currently being displayed at the Weston County Library in Newcastle, Wyoming.

Images taken from the Nellie Tayloe Ross papers, Collection 948, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

50 Great Voices Update

2010-12-31T21:50:00.000-06:00

50 Great Voices, a series from National Public Radio, profiles "singers who've made their mark internationally and across recorded history." The following singers have been profiled since the previous Women's History Sources post about the series.

Chavela Vargas: The Voice of Triumph

Billie Holiday: Emotional Power Through Song

Buika: The Voice Of Freedom

Celia Cruz: The Voice From Havana

Irma Thomas: The Soul Queen Of New Orleans

Twinkie Clark: Riffing On Gospel

Bjork: A Celestial Voice

Amalia Rodrigues: The Voice Of Extreme Expression

New Book: Women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

2010-12-27T19:09:00.000-06:00

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Edited by Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. WorldCat record with Google Preview

Founded in 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played a pivotal role in many of the key events of the American civil rights movement.

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, 52 women offer their personal stories of working for SNCC. In addition to coverage of the founding of the SNCC and work in the national SNCC office, the volume provides new perspectives on a variety of topics: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and Freedom Rides; the 1963 March on Washington; the Mississippi Freedom Summer; the movements in Georgia, Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power.

Editors and contributors have recently appeared on two forums to discuss the book and their personal experiences in SNCC:

Hands on the Freedom Plow (BookTV; video; 1 hr, 20 min) Importance of music in the movement;

Sisters in the Struggle: Women in the Civil Rights Movement (Forum Network; video, 54 min.)

For additional sources that document the history of SNCC, see the Civil Rights Digital Libary.

Faith Beamer Cooke Digital Collection

2010-12-14T17:46:00.007-06:00

Washington State University has recently digitized fifty-three items from the Francis Beamer Cooke Digital Collection. Items include published and unpublished poetry, correspondence, and photographs. All the digitized items are a part of the larger Francis Beamer Cooke papers, which was acquired by Washington State University in 2008. The Washington Women's History Consortium assisted in providing funding for the digitized items.

Cooke was a twentieth century poet and a native of Oregon. Everywhere she lived, Cooke was an active member of the local community, with a special interest in developing cultural programs. By 1945, she had founded the Writer's Workshop (later Mid-Columbia Writers League and the Mid-Columbia Writers Association) and a Unitarian Fellowship. She continued throughout her life to develop her skills as a poet by participating in writer's organizations and seminars throughout the Pacific Northwest and often around the world. As the Tri-Cities grew Cooke expanded her efforts to develop regional and statewide poetry and community organizations. She was a key participant in the Benton-Franklin County Fair, the creation of the Columbia Arts Center, the Washington Poets Association, the 1976 USA Bicentennial Project, the Washington State Centennial Project, and other similar events. The Washington Poets Association established a poetry award as a memorial to Cooke, their founder, in 1999.

Coins of Passage: Faith Beamer Cooke papers, 1928-1999, (Cage 729, Box 5, Folder 259, Item 1)

A Culinary Chronicle of Mount Holyoke College

2010-12-07T23:16:00.001-06:00

“Everything Is Wholesome and Abundant”: A Culinary Chronicle of Mount Holyoke College, 1837- Today, A Library Exhibition in Williston Library Court (November 1 – December 15, 2010)

This announcement includes a wealth of information about culinary history at Mount Holyoke College. In Celebrating an MHC Thanksgiving in the 1800s (video; 5 min, 30 sec), archives librarian Patricia Albright showcases diaries, letters, and photographs from the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections. The site also offers sample images from the exhibition and information about such topics as kitchen layout, strategies for preserving foods before the days of refrigeration, and victory gardens.

Making Bread, 1894-95 (Image Provided Courtesy of the
Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

Three Exhibits Explore Colonial Sewing

2010-12-06T00:15:00.000-06:00

Eve M. Kahn, Revising Our Ideas of Colonial Sewing, New York Times (September 30, 2010). Kahn highlights exhibitions at the Connecticut Historical Society, the Florence Griswold Museum, and the Winterthur Museum that offer new insights into Colonial women’s sewing habits.

Connecticut Needlework: Women, Art, and Family, 1740-1840
Connecticut Historical Society, October 5, 2010 - March 26, 2011
This exhibition features more than seventy examples of needlework art. An illustrated catalog by Susan P. Schoelwer (pictured at left) accompanies the exhibition. Online information about the book includes images of five samplers from the exhibition.

With Needle and Brush: Schoolgirl Embroidery from the Connecticut River Valley
Florence Griswold Museum, October 2, 2010- January 30, 2011
Many of the 70 embroideries, watercolor sketches, and portraits in this exhibition are from private collections.

Betsy Ross: The Life Behind the Legend
Winterthur Museum, October 2, 2010 - January 2, 2011
Marla Miller, who co-curated the exhibition with Winterthur's Linda Eaton and Katie Knowles, is the author of the new scholarly biography, Betsy Ross and the Making of America (Henry Holt, 2010).

On This Day: Rosa Parks

2010-12-01T18:10:00.000-06:00

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her arrest sparked a boycott of the city's bus system.

See Today's Document from the U.S. National Archives:
Illustration of bus where Rosa Parks sat, December 1, 1955

Diagram of the Bus Showing Where Rosa Parks Was Seated (ARC Identifier: 596069); File Unit: Aurelia S. Browder et al. v. W. A. Gayle et al., No. 1147; U.S. District Court for the Northern (Montgomery) Division of the Middle District of Alabama. (1839 - ); Records of District Courts of the United States, 1685 - 1991; Record Group 21; National Archives.

Explore further with Teaching With Documents: The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks, also from the National Archives. Parks recalled her role in Montgomery Bus Boycott in a brief interview (Teachers' Domain; 2 min., 13 sec).

In the News: Restoration of WPA Murals

2010-11-29T00:21:00.002-06:00

Admiration of New Deal Works of Art Florishing (USA Today, November 22, 2010) Judy Keen highlights efforts to discover and restore Works Progress Administration murals in schools and post offices. The article includes an image of Horses in Children's Literature, a 1940 frieze by Ethel Spears that inspires kindergarten students in a Chicago school.

Heather Becker, who highlights Chicago's WPA murals in a video that accompanies the online article, is the author of
Art for the People: The Rediscovery and Preservation of Progressive- and WPA-era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904-1943 (Chronicle Books, 2002). Mary Gray's A Guide to Chicago's Murals (University of Chicago Press, 2001) includes full-color illustrations of nearly two hundred Chicago murals, biographies of more than 150 artists, and a glossary of key terms.

Digital Collections of WPA Art
Women Artists of the WPA (Case Western Reserve University Library) offers biographical profiles and images of works by Jolan Gross-Bettelheim, Dorothy Rutka, and Gladys Carambell.

New Deal Registry is a guide to surviving public art that was created under the New Deal programs, 1934-1943. Browse by state, then city.

Works Projects Administration Murals in California (San Diego State University) For background information about this database, see Laurel Bliss and Melissa Lamont, "Documenting WPA Murals in California," Art Documentation 29 (Spring 2010): 4-10.


WPA women painters, Federal Art Gallery

By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943 (Library of Congress) includes works by Katherine Milhous, Mildred Waltrip, and other women artists.

Harlem Hospitals WPA Murals (Columbia University) includes a biographical profile of Georgette Seabrooke and a slideshow of Seabrooke's Recreation in Harlem.

Oral History Interviews
Oral history interview with Helen Lundeberg, 1980 July 19-Aug. 29 (Archives of American Art) Among other topics, Lundeberg discusses painting murals for the WPA Federal Art Project.

Oral History Interview with Ruth Gikow, 1964 (Archives of American Art) Gikow recalls mural painting at the Bronx Hospital for the Federal Art Project.

Explore Further

New Deal Arts / Culture (U.S. National Archives) This guide covers books, National Archives and Records Administration resources, related collections in the Washington, D.C. area, and related web sites.

Esther Bubley, Photojournalist

2010-11-22T18:36:00.009-06:00

Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,which is open through March 21, 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art, features the work of outstanding female photographers including Diane Arbus, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, and Esther Bubley among many others.

Born in 1921 to Jewish immigrants, Bubley became one of the best-known photographers of her time. Her evocative photographs of mid-twentieth century America captured our national identity and influenced popular culture. Movie scholar Paula Rabinowitz claims Bubley’s photographs of women working in factories and offices during World War II contributed to a staple character of the film noir genre, the strong-willed independent woman.

Bubley’s subjects ranged from the ordinary — bus riders, hospital patients, teenagers, boardinghouse residents — to the extraordinary including renowned individuals like Albert Einstein and Marianne Moore. Bubley’s work appeared in Look, Life, and Ladies’ Home Journal. She also worked for the Office of War Information, ultimately spending six weeks on a cross-country tour documenting the American nation at war. In the late 1940s, she photographed Texas oil towns for Standard Oil. Bubley was the first woman to win Photography magazine’s competition for international work.

Since her death in 1998, Bubley’s popularity has continued to grow. Her niece Jean Bubley maintains a website about the photographer. The site features a slide show of Bubley’s work, a video biography, and a calendar of current and upcoming museum exhibitions which include Bubley’s work. For researchers, the site also provides important information about copyright and the use of Bubley’s work in publication.

For more information about Bubley and her work, see Beverly W. Brannan, “Private Eye,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 2004; Amy Pastan, Fields of Vision: The Photographs of Esther Bubley (D. Giles, 2010); Bonnie Yochelson, Esther Bubley: On Assignment (Aperture, 2005). The Library of Congress featured Bubley’s work on its website about female photojournalists.

Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations

2010-11-14T23:06:00.000-06:00

Miranda Booker Perry, "No Pensions for Ex-Slaves: How Federal Agencies Suppressed Movement To Aid Freedpeople," Prologue 42 (Summer 2010).

Callie House was a national leader in the movement to grant pensions to ex-slaves. In 1898, the former slave was elected assistant secretary of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty & Pension Association of the United States of America (MRB&PA). In this article, Perry describes how the Bureau of Pensions, the Post Office Department, and the Justice Department undermined the efforts of House, Isaiah Dickerson, and the MRB&PA.

The article includes a broadside with photos of House and Dickerson (below), a Certificate of Membership in the MRB&PA, and an ex-slave pension bill that proposed a pension payment scale based upon the age of beneficiaries.

This broadside features both Isaiah Dickerson and Callie House (Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, RG 15)

For more information about House and her role in the MRB&PA, see Mary Frances Berry's My Face is Black is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

New Book - The Undaunted Women of Nanking: The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang

2010-11-09T00:37:00.000-06:00

The Undaunted Women of Nanking: The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang. Edited and Translated by Huey-ling Hu and Zhang Lian-hong. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.
Link: WorldCat record (with Google Books Preview)

The Rape of Nanking refers to the Japanese invasion and occupation of Nanking, China, from December of 1937 to February 1938. Historians estimate that Japanese soldiers killed between 200,000 and 300,000 Chinese and raped between 20,000 and 80,000 women.

Minnie Vautrin (1886-1941) and Tsen Shui-fang (1875-1969) turned Ginling College into a refugee camp that protected thousands of women and children during the Rape of Nanking. Their diaries, juxtaposed in this new edited collection, provide detailed accounts of life in the refugee camp.

This is the first English translation of Tsen Shui-fang’s diary. Although Vautrin's diary is also available online (pdf) as part of Yale's Nanking Massacre Project, it lacks the editorial notes in The Undaunted Women of Nanking. For additional information about Vautrin, see Hua-ling Hu's American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and American National Biography.

In the News: Eulalia Garcia Maturey becomes a U.S. citizen with help of 69-year-old document

2010-10-25T01:45:00.000-05:00

The following articles tell the story of Eulalia Garcia Maturey, who became a U.S. citizen 101 years after arriving in Brownsville, Texas in her mother's arms.

Woman, 101, to become U.S. citizen with help of 69-year-old document (CNN, October 12, 2010) This article includes a photograph of Maturey with the "Legal Entry" document that she received in 1941. Government officials used information from this document to locate her Legal Permanent Resident documents.

101-year-old woman takes oath to become American (Brownsville Herald, October 13, 2010) This article includes Maturey's reaction to becoming a U.S. citizen.

Exhibit: From the Absence of Many to the Presence of All -- The Unfinished Business of Women's Equality

2010-10-20T14:31:00.008-05:00

The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has recently opened the exhibit From the Absence of Many to the Presence of All -- The Unfinished Business of Women's Equality. The exhibit, which is on display until January 7, 2011, not only documents past struggles for gender equality, but also asks the viewer to imagine how equality can be achieved by the year 2020, the 100th anniversary of women earning the right to vote.

The Unfinished Business of Women's Equality exhibit was developed as a part of Vision 2020, a national project focused on advancing gender equality by energizing the dialogue about women and leadership, and was commissioned by Drexel University College of Medicine's Institute for Women's Health and Leadership.

Vision 2020 Anthem - What is Equality?

Scrapbooks: Examples from digital collections, books, and a presentation

2010-09-29T18:55:00.000-05:00

Gladys Ewing Debutante Scrapbook (University of Houston Digital Library) is a new digital collection that includes invitations, notes, dance cards, and other items from 1911. Discovering American Women's History Online provides links to 19 additional digital collections with scrapbooks.

Two recent books provide historical overviews and specific examples of American scrapbooks:

Tucker, Susan, Katherine Ott, and Patricia Buckler. The Scrapbook in American Life. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006. Link: WorldCat record with Google Books preview
In addition to an introduction to the history of scrapbooks, the 15 chapters in this book cover such topics as Willa Cather's childhood scrapbook and "Daily Life on South Carolina Plantation: A Scrapbook Memory of Three Generations of Women."

Helfand, Jessica. Scrapbooks: An American History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Link: WorldCat record
This volume includes color photographs of the pages from more than 200 scrapbooks.

Helfand and Rebecca Johnson Melvin discuss Scrapbooks and Self Works in a presentation at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (YouTube, 1 hour, 38 min). Helfand includes examples from her book to illustrate the different ways in which women (and men) have used scrapbooks. After noting that scrapbooks are often overlooked as a research source, manuscripts librarian Rebecca Johnson Melvin describes numerous scrapbooks in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library. Some of these scrapbooks are also featured in the Self Works exhibit that she curated.

Traveling Exhibit: In Pursuit of Equality

2010-09-15T17:01:00.000-05:00

In Pursuit of Equality is a traveling exhibit curated from collections at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. The exhibit tells the story of three women who through their actions as elected office holders, challenged and changed the conventional understanding of equality in Wyoming during the 20th century. Featured in the exhibit are Nellie Tayloe Ross, the first woman governor in the United States; Thyra Thomson,Wyoming's longest serving state official and an impassioned advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment; and Elizabeth Byrd, Wyoming's first African-American woman legislator and lead proponent for Wyoming's recognition of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

In Pursuit of Equality is currently located at the LCCC Ludden Library in Cheyenne, Wyoming where it will be displayed through December of 2010. An on-line version of the exhibit contains the original text from the traveling exhibit, as well as a limited number of images.

Image Caption: Secretary of State Thyra Thomson admiring the statue of Wyoming suffragist, Esther Hobart Morris, circa 1960s.
(Thyra Thomson papers, Collection Number 9418, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming)

Pioneering Woman Directors (National Film Preservation Foundation)

2010-09-13T00:55:00.001-05:00

Pioneering Woman Directors
This web exhibition from NFPF's Treasures from American Film Archives DVD showcases work by five women filmmakers:

Falling Leaves (1912) Preserved by the Library of Congress
The Hazards of Helen: Episode 13 (1915) Preserved by the Library of Congress
Peyote Queen (1965) Preserved by Anthology Film Archives
Rural Life in Maine (ca. 1930) Preserved by Northeast Historic Film
Where Are My Children? (1916) Preserved by the Library of Congress

The Hazards of Helen: Episode 13 (1915), directed by Helen Holmes and Leo Maloney.

Snapshot: Favorite Objects from the Winterthur Museum

2010-09-08T08:44:00.003-05:00

Snapshot: Favorite Objects (Connecticut Humanities Council)
Linda Eaton, Director of Collections and Senior Curator of Textiles at Winterthur Museum, selects three of her favorite items in Winterthur's collections: an 1815 quilt made by Mary Remington, an indigo-resist printed whole cloth quilt, and needlework pieces from the 19th century. Eaton devotes an entire chapter to Mary Remington and her quilt in Quilts in a Material World: Selections from the Winterthur Collection (New York : Abrams, 2007). Additional chapters in this illustrated volume cover the role of quilts in women's lives, quilts and American textile production, quilts and international trade, quilts and politics, and decorating with quilts in the early twentieth century.

A recent issue of Collector's Weekly features a lengthy interview with Linda Eaton.

Quakers and Slavery

2010-09-05T18:01:00.011-05:00

The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) led and sustained the abolitionist movement in Britain and North America, particularly after the Quaker reformation of the eighteenth century. Quaker women provided vital leadership in many of the female anti-slavery societies established in the nineteenth century. For example, Hicksite Quakers Lucretia Mott, Esther Moore, and Lydia White were among the founding members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Historians cite the PFASS as being in the vanguard of the abolitionist movement both for its activism and for its integrated membership.

In November 2010, Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges will join with the McNeil Center of Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania to host an international conference on Quakers and Slavery. To support the conference, the Quaker repositories at Swarthmore and Haverford have digitized numerous primary source materials, which are available through Triptych, a searchable online database of special collections from Swarthmore and Haverford as well as Bryn Mawr. Project staff have also developed Quakers and Slavery an online exhibit featuring links to the primary source materials in Triptych as well as commentary by established scholars, Quaker researchers, and project staff. Divided into three helpful categories — Themes, People, and Organizations — the commentary enhances users’ understanding of the primary source materials available through the project.

Several sections focus on the history of Quaker women in the anti-slavery movement:

Radical Quaker Women and the Early Women’s Rights Movement
Learn about radical Quaker women by exploring their role abolition in Pennsylvania and the early Women’s rights movement. Topics discussed include the American Anti-Slavery Society, rural Quaker women, and the first Women’s Rights Convention held at Seneca Falls, New York, 1848.

Rescue of Jane Johnson
In 1855, the slave Jane Johnson and her two children travelled through Philadelphia with their master, John Hill Wheeler. Johnson sent a message to the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society that she wished to escape, and on July 18, Passmore Williamson, William Still, and five other free blacks confronted Wheeler and escorted Johnson and her children to freedom. The event was one of the first challenges to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Passmore Williamson, William Still and the other free blacks were charged for their role in Johnson's 'abduction;' Lucretia and James Mott sheltered Johnson during the trial so that she could testify on her rescuers' behalf.

Biographical entries include a relationship map, which traces relationships among various Quaker supporters of abolitionism including:

Ruth Dugdale and Sarah B. Dugdale
Ruth Dugdale (1801-1896) rivaled her husband, Joseph, in her zeal for reform causes. She was a respected Quaker minister, and participated actively in anti-slavery, temperance, women's rights, and other movements in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Iowa.

Sarah B. Dugdale (1787-1880) was the mother of Joseph A. Dugdale and the progenitor of his liberal ideals. She was involved in the American Anti-Slavery Society nearly from its founding, continued to participate in Progressive Friends societies and other reform movements until her death in 1880.

Lucretia Mott
Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880)was a prominent Philadelphia Quaker minister and a leader in reform movements, especially antislavery, education, peace, and women's rights.

The site also includes important resources such as a glossary of Quaker terminology (many with links to primary sources explaining those terms), an interactive map, and a timeline of the anti-slavery movement.

Images from Quakers and Slavery.

On This Day: Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment

2010-08-18T02:00:00.000-05:00

On August 18, 1920 the Tennessee General Assembly approved the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution by a one vote margin, making Tennessee the thirty-sixth and last state necessary to ratify the enactment. The amendment which stated “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” finally granted full suffrage to women across the United States.

For more information on the women’s suffragist movement and the nineteenth amendment, visit the Charters of Freedom website from the National Archives and Records Administration. NARA also created a lesson plan based on primary documents from the American suffragist movement, that can be viewed at Teaching with Documents: Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment. To see documents related to the women's suffrage movement in Tennessee, including the passing of the 19th amendment, visit the Calvin M. McClung Digital Collection at the Knox County Public Library.

Image Caption: Suffragist with "Kaiser Wilson" poster (Record Group 165, Records of the War Department General and Special Staff, National Archives and Records Administration)

Preserving Historic Films

2010-08-11T02:10:00.002-05:00

The National Film Preservation Foundation site offers online access to examples of its preservation work. Three of these films document the history of women:

Wohelo Camp (ca. 1919) (Northeast Historic Film), a promotional film about the pioneering all-girls summer camp in Maine, includes footage of the girls involved in a variety of activities: jewelry making, pottery, canoeing, cooking, gardening, and horseback riding.

Manhattan Trade School for Girls (1911) (George Eastman House) This promotional documentary film (16 min., 10 sec) includes footage of students playing basketball, dancing, cooking, sewing, and making hats. Jennifer M. Bean's commentary provides historical context throughout the film.

A Trip through Japan with the YWCA (ca. 1919) includes footage of women in traditional occupations, fleeting images of workers outside a textile factory, and scenes with Ainu women (pictured at left). For background on the Ainu, see Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People (Smithsonian Institution in Association with University of Washington Press, 1999).

2010-08-09T09:56:00.006-05:00

Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America's Women Physicians is an online exhibition developed by the National Library of Medicine. The website accompanies a traveling exhibition currently touring public libraries and universities around the United States. The site spans 150 years of history and includes biographies of more than 350 women, and features photographs, video interviews, and short films.

The exhibition explores major themes in the history of women in medicine, from the nineteenth-century campaign to gain access to medical schools to ongoing efforts to reform education and diversify the profession at all levels.

There are resources for educators, activities for schoolchildren, and bibliographies and career resources for scholars and students. Visitors are also invited to share their own stories of women physicians they admire.

New Digital Collection: Gottlieb Jazz Photos

2010-08-04T08:32:00.009-05:00

Gottlieb Jazz Photos
This Library of Congress collection of 200 photographs (now in the public domain) on Flickr documents the jazz scene in New York City and Washington, D.C. from 1938 to 1948. More photos will be added each month until all 1,600 in the collection are in Flickr. Browse the collection for photos of Mildred Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, and Mary Lou Williams.

William P. Gottlieb's photos of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams.

For additional context, listen to Gottlieb's comments on the Billie Holiday photograph and on the Ella Fitzgerald photograph. Also, the National Public Radio's segment on Women in Jazz includes an audio clip of a 1973 interview with Mary Lou Williams.

Book: Contesting Archives

2010-08-01T12:20:00.009-05:00

Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources is a set of essays on innovative methodologies for the study of women's history from the sixteenth-century to the present. The contributors have developed and shared ways of approaching archives and documents "against the grain." The Table of Contents gives proof of the book's broad geographic and thematic reach. Edited by Nupur Chaudhri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry, the book was published by the University of Illinois Press.

"Contesting Archives makes vivid and concrete the way historians must proceed when faced with partial or contradictory sources. Historians and anyone interested in how historians work will appreciate the authors' strategies for, and cautions about, unearthing information about women from documents inside and outside the archive."--Margaret Strobel, coeditor of Expanding the Borders of Women's History

Catt Collection of Suffrage Photographs

2010-07-29T19:46:00.011-05:00

Suffragist, feminist, and political activist, Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947) served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1902 and the League of Women Voters in 1920. During World War II, Catt supported Allied Forces and worked against Nazi persecution of the Jews.

Six photograph albums from the Carrie Chapman Catt Papers have been digitized and made available online through through Triptych Tri-College Digital Library, a digital initiative of Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and Haverford Colleges. The albums are housed with the rest of the Catt Papers in Special Collections at Bryn Mawr College Library. The albums were most likely assembled by Catt's assistant Alda Wilson. The 815 photographs included in the albums cover the period from c. 1840 through 1940 and document the international suffrage movement. Photographic subjects include parades and other events as well as individuals involved in the American and international suffrage movements.

(Images are from the Catt Collection, Bryn Mawr College Library.)

Traveling Exhibit: Women & Spirit

2010-07-26T23:11:00.005-05:00

Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America is a traveling exhibit (2009-2012) sponsored by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The exhibit documents the sisters’ contributions to America’s educational, healthcare and social justice institutions. Explore this site for exhibit photos, a downloadable brochure, education materials, and a tour schedule.

Six Sisters of Mary of the Presentation (pictured) took part in a great European migration, arriving from France to North Dakota in 1902, to offer aid to immigrants. (Photo courtesy of Sisters of Mary of the Presentation.)

New Commercial Digital Collection: Feminism in Cuba, 1898-1958

2010-07-22T10:40:00.000-05:00

Feminism in Cuba, 1898-1958 includes more than 14,000 pages from the personal collection of Dr. K. Lynn Stoner. The documents in this collection, 95% of which are in Spanish, fall into three categories:

Works by feminists (memoirs of feminist congresses, collections of essays by feminists, journals published by feminist organizations, and published speeches and radio broadcasts)
Works by men on the status of women
Literary works by feminist writers that illustrate or discuss the condition of women.

Stoner used many of the sources in the collection for her book, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Women's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898-1940 (Duke University Press, 1991).
WorldCat Record (with Google Preview)

50 Great Voices (from Brazil, Egypt, Great Britain, India, Turkey, U.S., ...)

2010-07-20T10:00:00.001-05:00

50 Great Voices, a new series from National Public Radio, profiles "singers who've made their mark internationally and across recorded history." Each of the profiles features audio recordings of songs and interview clips. Women are well-represented in the singers profiled so far:

Book Series: Women Writing Africa

2010-07-14T00:04:00.005-05:00

Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region, ed. by Fatima Sadiqi, Amira Nowaira, Azza El Kholy & Moha Ennaji. Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2009. See WorldCat Record.

This fourth volume in the Women Writing Africa series includes more than 100 texts (letters, poems, essays, speeches, fiction, and folktales, all translated into English) from Algeria, Egypt, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia. See the online review from the Association for Women's Rights in Development.

The other three volumes in the series offer equally impressive collections of documents from other regions:

Women Writing Africa: The Eastern Region, ed. by Amandina Lihamba, et al. Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2007. WorldCat Record
Includes texts from Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.

Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel, ed. by Esi Sutherland-Addy and Aminata Diaw. Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2005. WorldCat Record
Includes texts from Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Conakry, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone.

Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region, ed. by M.J. Daymond et al. Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2003. WorldCat Record
Includes texts from Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe.

Museum Exhibition: American Woman

2010-07-02T11:50:00.008-05:00

New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art currently has an exhibition that traces the particularly influential archetypes of moneyed women's dressing in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity journeys from 1890 to 1940 through highly idealized feminine images of "the Heiress," "the Gibson Girl," "the Bohemian," "the Patriot and the Suffragist," "the Flapper," and "the Screen Siren." It may be of particular interest to 20th-century U.S. fashion historians. Most of the clothes were originally designed in the United States and France.

This Special Exhibition will run through August 15, 2010.

2010-06-30T15:25:00.005-05:00

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

2010-06-25T08:59:00.003-05:00

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"

2010-06-22T08:28:00.001-05:00

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

2010-06-14T13:35:00.010-05:00

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)

2010-06-09T20:49:00.001-05:00

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

2010-06-07T12:21:00.001-05:00

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

2010-06-04T14:30:00.000-05:00

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

2010-06-04T08:49:00.000-05:00

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

2010-06-03T14:14:00.000-05:00

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

2010-06-01T10:06:00.002-05:00

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.

National Library of Australia: Hilda Rix Nicholas Collection

2010-05-30T00:04:00.000-05:00

The cover of the latest issue of The National Library Magazine features Hilda Rix Nicholas' Portrait of a Young Girl. In An Exceptional Woman Among Others, Gwen Rankin explores the research treasures within the Hilda Rix Nicholas Collection. Rankin describes how letters from other artists bring to life the newspaper clippings and art-related materials in the collection. For more information about Rix Nicholas, see John Pigot's Hilda Rix Nicholas: Her Life and Art (Carlton South, Vic. : Miegunyah Press, 2000).

Image Caption: Hilda Rix Nicholas (1884–1961) Portrait of a young girl, from the sketchbook ‘In the Latin Quarter’(detail) between 1907 and 1909. Papers of Hilda Rix Nicholas Manuscripts Collection (MS9817/18/2)

Norway on Flickr Commons: County Archives in Sogn og Fjordane

2010-05-27T14:25:00.000-05:00

The County Archives in Sogn og Fjordane is the most recent addition to the Flickr Commons. The collection offers more than 300 photos, including numerous group and individual portraits of women. In some cases, such as with this photo, the names of individuals in the photographs are not known. Fortunately, Flickr not only reaches a wide audience, but also lets users comment about specific images.

Image Caption: Three women. Photograph by Paul Stang.

Digital Collection: Jewish Women's Archive: History Makers

2010-05-25T10:09:00.000-05:00

The Jewish Women's Archive History Maker s collection features about a dozen women famous and should be famous women for their significant contributions "to creating a more just & equitable world." Photos, audio & video clips, writings and other primary sources are brought together in essays to tell each woman's story. Women featured include Bella Abzug, Emma Goldman, Anna Sokolow and more.

On This Day: Homestead Act

2010-05-20T15:21:00.000-05:00

Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862.

See Adeline Hornbek and the Homestead Act: A Colorado Success Story from the National Park Service. This lesson plan includes maps, images, and contextual essays. Image caption: Adeline Hornbek (Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument)

The Homestead Act is one NARA's 100 Milestone Documents.

Digital Collection: Djuna Barnes Artwork

2010-05-15T00:10:00.000-05:00

Artwork by journalist and author Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) is now available via the University of Maryland Libraries’ Digital Collections.

Image caption: Djuna Barnes, Self-portrait in earrings from Pearson’s Magazine, 1919

On This Day: The Women's Auxiliary Army Corps was established.

2010-05-14T14:56:00.000-05:00

The Women's Auxiliary Army Corps was established on May 14, 1942.

The Women Veterans Historical Collection includes a wealth of primary sources. See the Army section (WAAC, WAC, Nurse Corps) for an excellent selection of diaries, letters, papers, photographs, published materials, posters, uniforms, artifacts, and oral histories.

Image caption/link: World War II era recruiting poster for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC).

Caption: First of WAACS Arriving: Young Women of 48 States Begin Training

The Iowa Digital Library's World War II Press Clippings collection includes more than 1700 clippings about the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps.

On This Day: Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) Award to Virginia Hall, 05/12/1945

2010-05-12T15:35:00.000-05:00

Document for May 12th from the National Archives: Memorandum for the President from William J. Donovan Regarding Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) Award to Virginia Hall, 05/12/1945

For additional information about Hall, listen to the NPR segment, British, French Honor U.S. Spy Virginia Hall (4:32).