Departments

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womens history

  • SOURCE: Smithsonian
    3/1/2021

    Part of Being a Domestic Goddess in 17th-Century Europe Was Making Medicines

    Historians Sharon Strocchia, Stephanie Koscak, and Elaine Leong offer insight into the roles of women in producing and administering medicine in the early modern period, both in domestic and public settings. The subject may receive increased attention through a digitization project of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    2/26/2021

    Fifty Years Later, ‘Tapestry’s’ Hope And Optimism Still Resonates

    by Tanya Pearson

    "Sincere, earnest and personal, 'Tapestry' embodied the emerging political argument ‘the personal is political.’ This phrase became a defining characteristic of second wave feminism at a time when women and others challenged the institutions of marriage, the nuclear family and its values and state control of women’s reproductive rights."

  • SOURCE: Folklife
    3/1/2021

    “Making a Living by the Sweat of Her Brow”: Hazel Dickens and a Life of Work

    by Emily Hilliard

    "Hazel’s song catalog is often divided into separate categories of personal songs, women’s songs, and labor songs. But in her view and experience, these issues all bled together; her songs address struggle against any form of domination and oppression, whether of women, workers, or herself."

  • SOURCE: JStor Daily
    2/21/2021

    Black Women Have Written History for over a Century

    Pero Gaglo Dagbovie examines the work of Black women scholar-activists like Anna Julia Cooper whose work integrated the writing of African American history with political organizing, despite exclusion from the academy.

  • SOURCE: CNN
    2/12/2021

    The Fantasy that Changed Female Friendship Forever

    by Nicole Hemmer

    If the 1980s phenomenon of the male Chippendales show benefitted women's empowerment, it was not (only) by making men the objects of lust, but by normalizing rituals of female friendship. 

  • SOURCE: Black Perspectives
    2/11/2021

    Biographies of Women and Emancipation in the Americas

    by Vanessa M. Holden

    Historian Vanessa Holden reviews a new book edited by Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas and Terri L. Snyder which draws on the stories of women of African descent in the Americas to argue that such women helped bring freedom into being and defined what freedom in the world actually means. 

  • 12/20/2020

    Actually, It's Doctor....

    by Suzanne Chod

    A recent editorial asking Dr. Jill Biden to stop using the honorific is steeped in sexism and nostalgia for the unchallenged authority of white men. Ironically, her upcoming public role may help to further break down such hierarchies.

  • SOURCE: Atlas Obscura
    12/15/2020

    The Hidden History of the First Black Women to Serve in the U.S. Navy

    The first cohort of Black women to serve in the US Navy were enlisted as reservists to fill shortages in the service's clerical workforce. At the time, the nation's climate of racism forced them to keep a low profile. A researcher compiling a book about the "Golden Fourteen" mined family history to learn about their service. 

  • SOURCE: Perspectives on History
    12/15/2020

    Working With Death: The Experience of Feeling in the Archive

    by Ruth Lawlor

    A researcher of sexual assault against women by American troops in World War II confronted the problem that the archive captures only a traumatic event and leaves the human being affected in the shadows. 

  • 12/13/2020

    Senator Mike Lee Disregards History While Claiming to Support American Unity

    by Matt Chumchal

    Senator Mike Lee this week claimed proposed museums dedicated to the history of women and Latino/as in America would foster division by ethnicity and sex. A biology professor shares an experience with the new National Museum of African American History and Culture and argues that the proposed museums are in fact needed to create the understanding needed to forge unity.