Rachel Michelle Gunter

Vanguard: The Fights that Connect Black Women Activists across More Than Two Centuries

My undergraduate and MA adviser, Dr. Angela Howard, argued that women across time and space often have remarkably similar experiences if you zero in on major events in their lives. These include first marriages, first babies, menopause, or widowhood. She encouraged me to compare women at these moments of their lives even if they occurred… Read more →

Suffering a Suffragist: An 1880s Romance

When Nursing Clio put out the call for the Romancing Clio series, I searched Goodreads for historical romance novels in my field and was surprised to find eighty-two suffrage-themed romance novels, including one set in Texas, my specialty. Bobbi Smith’s The Lady and the Texan looked like an enjoyable romp about Amanda Taylor, a young… Read more →

Her Own Hero: How Self-Defense Became Acceptable for American Women

I was a seventeen-year-old college freshman when I realized I was being stalked. It started when a 27-year-old graduate student, whom I did not know, began showing up wherever I was on campus. Then he started following me off-campus. After I filed multiple reports with campus police, the Dean of Students summoned me for a… Read more →