Announcing our new issue. Women and Social Movements in the United States
In this issue we publish two new document projects, two scholarly essays and individual activist pages as part of our Black Woman Suffragists collection, and a fifth installment of documents in that collection.
Our first document project by Susan Goodier, “How Did Women Anti-Suffragists in New York Try to Reconcile the Contradictions between Their Strategies and Arguments?” explores the anti-suffrage counter-movement that emerged in New York state in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. She shows how anti-suffragists went from mainstream to marginal over five decades, as the suffrage movement gained strength, and then found a place for themselves on the political spectrum that took shape after the passage of the nineteenth amendment.
Cindy Ingold is the author of our second document project in this issue, “How Did Women’s Groups in the American Library Association Promote Activism around Women’s Issues in Librarianship during the 1970s?” Her project examines the influence of second-wave feminism on the leading professional organization among librarians and traces the strategies adopted by feminist librarians to advance the position of women in the profession.
Based on the pioneering scholarship of Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, the Black Women Suffragists full-text source collection adds valuable new resources with this issue. It will eventually include more than 1,800 items, totaling more than 17,000 pages. Tom Dublin and a team of students have assembled these published and unpublished writings of more than 100 Black woman suffragists first identified by Professor Terborg-Penn. In this issue we are publishing the fifth installment of these writings, with a final segment anticipated for our September 2016 issue. We also include two essays written by scholars that provide entry points into the collection: Audrey T. McCluskey on Mary McLeod Bethune; and Dorothy Salem on Hallie Quinn Brown.
In this issue of the journal/database we are publishing an Introduction to the Black Woman Suffragists collection by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar that describes the work process involved in constructing this collection of writings and supportive materials. From the introduction, you can also access a new resource in this collection–individual pages for each of these suffrage supporters. These pages link to biographical sketches of the activists and to the writings in WASM by or about the women. We are linking to existing biographical sketches where they exist but for those not in existing reference sources we have also launched a crowdsourcing initiative that is commissioning about 50 new biographical sketches. We will publish these new sketches over the next two or three issues. Finally, these individual pages link to letters to and from these activists found in the Online Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois. More than 50 of these activists had correspondence with Du Bois, amounting to more than 1,100 individual items. Links on the individual activist pages enable WASM users to access search results lists for this correspondence on the Du Bois website and thus to the individual letters found on that site.
Alexander Street Press is working on a new platform for Women and Social Movements International, known by the acronym LAZR. We expect within a year also to move WASM in the U.S. to this new platform. Users of our databases need not concern themselves with the platform’s inner workings but it will enable for the first time joint searching of our two databases. If your library subscribes to both databases, you can search comprehensively the more than 300,000 pages of women’s history documents we have assembled on the two sites. This expanded search capability will make the databases even more useful for teaching and research.
We are sponsoring a new crowdsourcing initiative to expand our coverage of woman suffrage activists by including suffrage leaders enumerated in state reports in volume 6 of the History of Woman Suffrage. If you are interested in writing biographical sketches yourself or of facilitating your students writing such sketches, please email tdublin@binghamton.edu. We expect this project to identify 1200-1500 suffrage activists and plan to publish online biographical sketches of all of them in an Online Encyclopedia of Women Suffragists in the United States in time for the centennial of the 19th amendment in 2020.
Meanwhile, work has gone on apace with a new supplement for our international database. Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires, is an online collection being constructed by more than 50 collaborating editors, assembling 75,000 pages of documents pertaining to women in the global history of empires and post-colonial societies since 1800. Included are women in the Spanish Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Japanese Empire, the Russian Empire and the American Empire. Locations included in the American Empire are India, China, Cuba, the Philippines, Hawai’i, the Panama Canal Zone, Guatemala, and South Africa. There is also a substantial section on Native American in North America. The collection will be co-published online by the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and Alexander Street Press. We expect a first release, with about 25,000 pages of primary documents to be available by the early summer.
Alexander Street Press is marketing Women and Social Movements in Modern Empires to libraries, offering both subscriptions or purchase plans. Your acquisitions librarian might be interested in either of these options. She or he can contact Eileen Lawrence at Alexander Street Press for subscription information and/or to request a free trial of this resource. We look forward to hearing your reactions to this major addition to Women and Social Movements.
IN FUTURE ISSUES: Future document projects in our pipeline include:
- Portraits of Abolitionist Women
- Feminism in the Society of Women Engineers
- The Defense of Minimum-Wage Legislation, 1923-1938
- Women’s abortion counseling
Our other news is the launching of a search for new editors and a new editorial team for Women and Social Movements in the United States. Tom Dublin and Kitty Sklar plan to retire as editors at the end of 1918. A search committee is in place and we are taking applications through July 1. We expect to announce our new editors in September or October. If you might be interested in applying, please email tdublin@binghamton.edu and we will share more details about our expectations for proposals.
Interested in preparing a Document Project?
We welcome new proposals for Document Projects or Document Archives. If you are interested in preparing a document project based on your research, we would be glad to talk with you about it and about the submission process. Please contact Tom Dublin at tdublin@binghamton.edu or Kitty Sklar at kksklar@binghamton.edu.
