womens history

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• 6/12/2022
  

  "Our Best Memorial to the Dead Would be Our Service to the Living"

  by Allison S. Finkelstein

  An overlooked cohort of American women who served in the first world war worked to establish service, instead of statuary, as a mode of memorialization. Their example offers a path out of the heated politics of commemoration. 

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• 6/5/2022
  

  Discarding Legal Precedent to Control Women's Reproductive Rights is Rooted in Colonial Slavery

  by Clyde W. Ford

  The colonial Virginia lawsuit of Elizabeth Key, who won freedom in 1656, pushed colonial authorities to reverse precedent to ensure that the law would be a tool for maintaining hierarchies of race, gender, and class, and Black women's bodies would be the battleground of those conflicts.

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  6/1/2022
  

  Shirley Temple Black's Second Act as a Diplomat

  An unpublished memoir of her late life, recently released to the Smithsonian, shows how Shirley Temple Black worked to thwart pervasive sexism in the diplomatic arena while advocating for a global environmental awareness.

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  5/23/2022
  

  When the Constitution Was Written, Abortion was a Choice Left to Women

  by Lara Friedenfelds

  "Before the 19th century, civil society regarded abortion as a private medical matter for married women, and a problem in need of occasional discipline when it was a sign of extramarital sex."

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/19/2022
  

  What Parents Did Before Baby Formula

  by Carla Cevasco

  "The formula shortage is not a victory for breastfeeding. It is a calamity for families who, like families throughout history, just want to feed their children."

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  5/23/2022
  

  Law Prof: Securing Abortion Rights Means Finalizing the ERA

  by Kate Kelly

  The ERA would anchor a constitutional right to gender equality that could support a legal defense of abortion rights, and has already met the technical requirements for ratification. 

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• How We Told the Ongoing Story of Title IX

  by Laura Mogulescu

  A curator and her team chose to center the work of activists who pushed to determine the scope and meaning of Title IX's prohibition on sex discrimination in education throughout the law's 50-year history. Their exhibit is now open at the New-York Historical Society.

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  5/18/2022
  

  Women Know You Can't Just Replace Formula with Breastfeeding

  by Laura Earls

  Breastfeeding advocacy is historically tied as much to a prescriptive and sentimental image of motherhood and maternal attachment as to concern for babies' health, and has long ignored physical and social obstacles to nursing. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/13/2022
  

  Margaret Atwood: I Created Gilead, but the Supreme Court Might Make it Real

  "Women were nonpersons in U.S. law for a lot longer than they have been persons. If we start overthrowing settled law using Justice Samuel Alito’s justifications, why not repeal votes for women?"

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/16/2022
  

  Nursing Clio Project Connects Health, Gender and History

  “The personal is historical,” the blog’s authors declare — and its lineup of historians and authors proves that point again and again.

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• SOURCE: NPR
  5/13/2022
  

  Historian Leslie Reagan on the History of Abortion and Abortion Rights

  Leslie Reagan explains that there's more to the history of abortion rights than the laws cited by Samuel Alito criminalizing the procedure. 

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• SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
  5/4/2022
  

  The Laundry Workers' Uprising and the Fight for Democratic Unionism

  by Jenny Carson

  African American and Black Caribbean immigrant women were key organizers of New York laundry workers who pushed for a union movement that rejected divisions of occupation, race and nationality in favor of workplace democracy. 

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• SOURCE: WBUR
  4/26/2022
  

  Women's Rights are a Casualty of Democratic Backsliding

  Historian Anne Wingenter and law professor Erica Chenoweth discuss the relationship between fascism and patriarchy and the way that women's rights are a signal of the health of democracy. 

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• SOURCE: Dissent
  4/27/2022
  

  The Fatal Siloing of Abortion Advocacy

  by Meaghan Winter

  It was a strategic mistake for abortion rights advocates to emphasize the right to individual choice instead of the vast issues of economic justice, workforce quality, educational equity and personal safety that are impacted by whether women can control their own reproduction. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  4/22/2022
  

  Racist Policing Has Roots in Controlling Sex Work

  by Sarah A. Seo

  Anne Gray Fischer's book shows that police policy toward sexuality in public space changed in ways that made Black women's public lives subject to increased control and that entrenched the discretion of police to stop people for suspected minor offenses that is associated with "broken windows" policing today. 

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• SOURCE: Atlas Obscura
  4/22/2022
  

  The 19th Century Woman's Secret Guides to Birth Control

  Women have always tried to share information enabling them to control their reproductive health, and others have always tried to stop them. Secrecy, coded language and misdirection are historical puzzles to untangle, say Andrea Tone, Naomi Rendina, Lauren Thompson and Donna Drucker. 

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• SOURCE: LitHub
  4/20/2022
  

  Historical Novelist Dolen Perkins-Valdez Shares Her Reading List for the History of Medical Racism

  "I wrote my newest novel Take My Hand because I believed there were too many people who did not know about the history of forced sterilizations among poor women of color."

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• SOURCE: CommonPlace
  4/12/2022
  

  Bicycles and Women's Liberation in Victorian America

  by Anya Jabour

  The cycling craze of the 1890s was embraced with particular fervor by affluent white women, who seized opportunities for mobility and public sociability presented by the new technology of the "safety" bicycle.

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• SOURCE: New York Historical Society
  4/7/2022
  

  "Title IX: Activism On and Off the Field" Coming to NYHS in May

  The exhibition features images, objects, and documents drawn from New-York Historical’s Women’s Sports Foundation and Billie Jean King’s archives.

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• SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
  4/1/2022
  

  Mill Mother's Lament: The Legacy of Ella May Wiggins

  by Karen Sieber

  The city of Gastonia has struggled to agree on the commemoration of the bloody 1929 Loray Mill strike, including how to account for the murder of pregnant union activist Ella May Wiggins.