Women's History: Readings and Resources

"In 1924 Beulah Annan was arrested for kill­ing her lover, Harry Kalsted. Six weeks later, a jury acquitted her of murder. Inspired by the sordid event, trial, and acquittal, reporter Maurine Watkins wrote the play Chicago, a Broadway hit that was adapted several times. Through a fresh retelling of Annan’s story and Watkins’s play, Charles H. Cosgrove provides the first critical examination of the crim­inal case and an exploration of the era’s social assump­tions that made the play’s message so plausible in its time. Cosgrove expertly combines inquest and police records, and interviews with Annan’s relatives, to analyze the participants, the trial, and the play."

"During the American Civil War, more than four hundred women were arrested and imprisoned by the Union Army in the St. Louis area. The majority of these women were fully aware of the political nature of their actions and had made conscious decisions to assist Confederate soldiers in armed rebellion against the U.S. government. Their crimes included offering aid to Confederate soldiers, smuggling, spying, sabotaging, and, rarely, serving in the Confederate army. Historian Thomas F. Curran’s extensive research highlights for the first time the female Confederate prisoners in the St. Louis area, and his thoughtful analysis shows how their activities affected Federal military policy."

"During the early Great Depression, African American women in the Midwest directly engaged with members of the American Communist Party to fight unemployment, hunger, homelessness, and racial discrimination in the workplace. This book highlights these struggles and brings them to the forefront of Black radicalism during the Great Depression, focusing on the cities of Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis."

"[During the Rape of Nanking,] Vautrin, acting president of Ginling College, assisted by Tsen Shui-fang and a small Chinese staff, turned the women's college into a refugee camp specifically for women and children ... Vautrin's diary focuses on Gingling's refugee camp and the suffering endured ... It reveals a woman's voice on war in a foreign land as well as the humanity and courage of a female missionary in a time of terror ... Tsen's diary (1937-1948) is the first known daily diary recorded by a Chinese on the Rape of Nanking ... It ... reveals a Chinese national's anger and deep sorrow as she witnessed the atrocities committed by the Japanese, humiliation over the inhumane plight of refugees, compassion for her war-torn country, as well as her pain and humanity in a time of crisis."

"This thrilling story of a daughter of America’s foremost industrialist, John D. Rockefeller, is complete with sex, money, mental illness, and opera divas—and a woman who strove for the independence to make her own choices. Rejecting the limited gender role carved out for her by her father and society, Edith Rockefeller McCormick forged her own path, despite pushback from her family and ultimate financial ruin."

"This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women’s bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities. The attention to each community’s material practices reveals a gendered ecology, which in many ways squared unevenly with utopian claims. Nevertheless, this volume argues that this utopian moment inaugurated many of the norms and practices of labor that continue to structure women’s lives and opportunities today: the rise of the factory, the shift of labor from home spaces to workplaces, the invention of housework, the role of birth control and childcare, the question of wages, and the feminization of particular kinds of labor."

"Beginning with Sappho in the seventh century B.C.E and ending with Egeria in the fifth century C.E., Snyder profiles ancient Greek and Roman women writers, including lyric and elegiac poets and philosophers and other prose writers. The writers are allowed to speak for themselves, with as much translation from their extant works provided in text as possible."