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

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.

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

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

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