This essay discusses the first two episodes of The Gilded Age. In what is by now a classic essay, historian Elisabeth Israels Perry argued that “Men Are from the Gilded Age, Women Are from the Progressive Era,” lamenting the lack of attention historians gave to women beyond their role in reform movements.[1] Women were relegated… Read more →
Tag: Women’s History
Pandemic Parenting and the Lessons of Nineteenth-Century Romantic Friendship
When Mathilde Franziska Anneke and Mary Booth found their lives crumbling in 1860, they packed up their three youngest children and moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Zürich, Switzerland.[1] Mathilde and Mary were unusual. It was not common for two women to raise children together and leave a record of their intense affection for one another…. Read more →
The Handmaids of Surgery: The Role of Nurse Anesthetists
Imagine the horror of waking up in the middle of your surgery – or worse, never being asleep at all. In the early days of surgery, this was a reality. Patients were awake throughout procedures, given alcohol and something to hold on to in order to endure the pain. The introduction of general anesthesia made… Read more →
Oscillating and Depreciating: Early Modern Spanish Views of Unsanctioned Female Healers
Antonio asks, “Do you believe that God will burn all of the sinners forever and ever when they die?” “Si,” replies his uncle Pedro as their old truck bumbles past a brothel where several women are hanging their laundry. While Antonio makes eye contact with one of the women hanging her clothes, he asks his… Read more →
It Just Wasn’t a Good Fit
Charity Adams Earley’s winter coat didn’t fit. At the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps Training Center in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1942, women had been issued winter overcoats designed for enlisted men. Earley’s coat was too short in the arms, but many other Army women found their coats too large. And, although Earley was training to… Read more →
Writing Black Women’s Stories in French: A Review of A Decolonial Feminism and Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire
Since January 2011, an archived rendition of the “Anthem of the Movement for the Liberation of Women” (MLF) has garnered more than 300,000 views on YouTube. The song was collaboratively written by MLF leaders and sung for the first time in March 1971 to commemorate the lives of the women who died during the Parisian… Read more →
Lieutenant Lowderback’s Short Snorter: A Flight Nurse’s Service and Souvenir in WWII
Lieutenant Ruth Banfield Lowderback was nervous on her first flight accompanying wounded and ill soldiers back to the mainland U.S. The plane barreled down the runway of Hawaii’s Hickam Airfield to embark on a twenty-hour flight to San Francisco. On February 17, 1945, twenty-seven-year-old Lowderback, newlywed and newly deployed, marked two milestones: her first service… Read more →
A Different Kind of Expert
In the spring of 1813, Abigail Adams wrote to her friend Julia Rush inquiring after the death of Julia’s husband physician Benjamin Rush.1 “[O]h how shall I address you. how offer the consolation I need for myself upon an occasion which has torn my heart in anguish, filled by Bosom with Grief, and so overwhelmed… Read more →
How the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Gave Working Women a Place to Breathe
In September of 1909, San Francisco’s businessmen opened the latest issue of the Merchants’ Association Review, looking forward to reading stories about the city’s recovery in the years since April 18, 1906. The earthquake on that spring day flattened the city’s financial center and its working-class district, and then reduced them to cinders in a… Read more →
Hijabophobia: An Unseen but Entirely Visible Force
In August 2017, a burqa-clad woman stepped into the chambers of the Australian parliament and sat down. To the individuals behind the cameras, she was entirely unknown. But for the members of Parliament, it was all too obvious who she was and what she was trying to do. The black cloth came off to reveal… Read more →