Ghostbelly: A Memoir. By Elizabeth Heineman. (New York: The Feminist Press, 2014. 320 pp. $16.95.) How do you grieve for […]
Big Berkshire Conference 2014 Report
By Heather Munro Prescott
Last month, I attended the 16th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (aka the Big Berks) at the University of Toronto. For those unfamiliar with this event, it is a triennial research conference held by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (aka the Little Berks). According to the Little Berks website, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians “formed in 1930 in response to women academics’ sense of professional isolation.” Women historians were allowed to join the American Historical Association (the professional organization for historians in the U.S.), but “were never invited to the ‘smokers,’ the parties, the dinners and the informal gatherings where the leading men of the profession introduced their graduate students to their colleagues and generally shepherded them into history jobs in colleges and universities.”
“Blossoms of Hope”: Our Cultural History of Pregnancy and Infant Loss and Grief
By Ginny Engholm
In a recent Adventures in the Archives post, Adam Turner recounts a moving story of grief and loss he found in Today’s Health of a woman whose daughter was born three months premature due to a hemolytic disease in the 1950’s. In the comments section after the post, blogger Historiann remarks, “I find it fascinating that she writes of her RH baby as being born ‘just three months too soon,’ and very much as a daughter rather than as a fetus or a patient. Even now, a 3-months preemie is still an extremely premature child with no guarantees–it’s interesting to know that some woman in 1950 thought about her daughter in the ways that seem familiar to [how] those of us in the post-Roe, post-ultrasound era think about pregnancy & children.” The commentator’s surprise at this mother’s conception of her fetus as a “daughter,” I think, mirrors a current trend in the feminist scholarship of pregnancy and childbirth that seems to divide cultural ideas around pregnancy, fetuses, and infants into pre- and post-Roe. Furthermore, advances in prenatal technology, particularly the development and increasing use of ultrasound technology, encourage us to imagine that women today have different, and in some ways, more personal relationships with their children still in the womb. And no doubt we do.
Sex as Construct, Rape as Reality, and Consent as Healing
By Jenna Tucker
I grew up in a culture obsessed with sexual ethics. As part of a group of Christian teenagers in the Midwest in the 1990’s, one thing we all knew, for certain, was that our religious and moral identities were directly linked to our relationships to sex. It was the culture that birthed virginity pledges and organized for abstinence-only sex education. I remember going to one of those Protestant mega-gatherings with youth groups from all over the country. The speaker gave us two messages that I carry with me to this day. The first was that we had to stop relying on our parents’ beliefs and develop our own relationship to God. The second was that we should not have sex and that anything that gave us sexual pleasure was sex. He was trying to head off our questions. Sex was bad, but what was sex? Could we have sex that didn’t risk pregnancy? Could we masturbate? What if we were engaged?
How Much to Touch You?
By Cheryl Lemus
This past May, I paid someone to let me touch them and take pictures with them while my family watched. Now before you freak out, I should clarify that my family and I traveled to the Motor City Comic Con in mid-May. I’ll be honest; I am a late comer to the comic convention world. It’s a subculture that I am only beginning to understand. While I’m there, I feel like I am looking through glass, observing the behaviors, expectations, and ideals that hang in the air as fans, writers, retailers, and celebrities converge in a generic space converted into a place of worship, commerce, and fun. As a historian and feminist, I find myself asking questions and thinking about how comic conventions sit in a larger historical context of sex, gender, class, race, and culture. Yet, at the same time, the fan in me screams, “Screw that, I’m about to take a picture with Matt Smith and Karen Gillan!” My scholarly training and fan excitement have blended into a persona that has accepted that I will geek over the site of the 11th Doctor, but even so, I cannot help wonder why I am handing over my credit card to have a few brief moments with a designated VIP, or better yet, what am I expecting in this transaction?
The Long and Short of It: Looking Back on the History of Same-Sex Marriage, One Year after Windsor
A year ago June, the United States Supreme Court published its decision in the case of United States v. Windsor, […]
Make Love Not War: Changing the Conversation on Abortion
By Jacqueline Antonovich
Things have been pretty hectic lately for the folks who work and study in Lane Hall, the small, historic building at the far end of University of Michigan’s central campus. Over the past two months the building that houses the Women’s Studies Department and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) has been the target of anti-choice protesters. Lane Hall has been peppered with anti-choice leaflets, the main entry steps have been vandalized with chalk, and protesters have picketed the sidewalks in front of the building. Staff in Lane Hall have also been fielding phone calls from angry activists, alumni, and others. As Debra M. Schwartz, senior public relations representative for IRWG told me recently, “Some of us in Lane Hall and a few other university offices have been distracted from our routine work. But, in general, the protest has scarcely been noticed on campus. It feels like a tempest in a teapot.”
Announcing the First Ever Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at the Berkshire Conference
By Heather Munro Prescott
Last year I reported on the gender gap in Wikipedia and efforts by women’s historians and others to remedy it. To recap: Several years ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and found that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women. These sobering statistics gained widespread publicity in a January 2011 New York Times article by Noam Cohen and an ensuing flurry of media coverage in various venues, including Mother Jones, the Atlantic, and NPR. Blogger Tenured Radical (aka Claire Potter) reported on gender bias in Wikipedia in an article titled “Prikipedia? Or, Looking for the Women on Wikipedia.”
If the IUD is an Abortifacient, Then So Is Chemotherapy and Lunch Meat
When I criticized Hobby Lobby for its attempts to evade the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, a friend of mine thoughtfully replied, […]
Punishing Pushy Women: Gender and Power in the Newsroom
Until last week, Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times, was considered the nineteenth most powerful woman in […]
