Mark Stoneman Profile Photo

Mark R. Stoneman

Historian, editor, and translator for hire (German to English). Longtime resident of Washington, DC, now in Conway, NH, as a caregiver (he/him).

  Sexuality

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    Orange, white, black, brown, and tan poster depicting nine women of various backgrounds engaged in different activities, including arts, activism, and blue-collar work. The accompanying text reads: 'Radical Women Annual Conference – 1976'. 'A New Era for Women Workers, Minority Women and Lesbians': 'Women in the Labor Movement', 'Feminism and the Minority Woman', 'Gays and the Class Struggle.' 'Panels; Workshops; Role Playing; Dinner & Party, Saturday.' Held on Sat. and Sun., October 9–10, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, along with addresses, phone numbers, and a few more details.

    A New Era for Women Workers, Minority Women and Lesbians. 1976 poster by a Seattle organization called Radical Women.

    Via Library of Congress, Yanker Poster Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016649885/.

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    Two Suffragettes

    Black and white photo: Fay Hubbard full-length, standing, showing publication to young man, bag labeled 'American Suffragette' slung over her shoulder.
    Black and white photograph: full-length portrait of elderly woman, standing, facing slightly right, holding an umbrella and wearing a top hat and tails. She's got chains suggesting a pocket watch and wallet of some kind, but also a rose. She's also wearing a medal of some kind, probably the Congressional Medal of Honor.

    1. “Fay Hubbard, 13-year Old Suffragette” in New York on February 9, 1910.

      “Suffragette! Suffragette!” This is the cry of little Fay Hubbard as she goes through the crowd at the suffragette meetings in New York selling copies of the paper… Miss Hubbard is a niece of Mrs. E. Ida Williams, the recording secretary of the Suffragette…

    2. Mary Edwards Walker (1832–1919). Dr. Walker served as a surgeon in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. She was a Medal of Honor recipient, a suffragette, and a dress reformer.

    Images via Library of Congress, PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92510578/ and https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2005684835/.

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    Gladys is a tired Black woman. She is sitting in a wooden chair, her side to the back, leaning on her arm on the back. The floor of the room is wooden. There appears to be natural light coming from a window just out of sight. A desk or dresser is in the corner with a lot of books on top between bookends.

    “Gladys” by Will Barnet, 1936, for the Federal Art Project NYC WPA. Signed, dated, and stamped print from engraving.

    Via the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179795.

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    📽️ “Conclave,” dir. Edward Berger (USA/UK, 2024), is one helluva good movie. Made differently, the same story could have yielded a drama, but here it is a thriller, driven by dialog, cinematography, and sound—with superb use of space, ceremony, and costumes.

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    Good piece on the role of Black children and youth in the civil rights movement: “Hidden Herstory: The Leesburg Stockade Girls” by Tulani Salahu-Din, National Museum of African American History and Culture, nmaahc.si.edu….

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    Good piece: “The history and resurgence of The Transexual Menace” by Riki Wilchins and Denise Norris, Gay City News, February 25, 2025, gaycitynews.com….🏳️‍⚧️🗽

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    The way “Suffragette” depicts the use of social pressure to make and then ostracize a working class suffragette, drive her out of her home, lead the father to give up their child… Yikes! This film should inspire productive classroom discussions.

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    📽️ A well reviewed historical drama is streaming on Paramount+ in the United States: “Suffragette,” dir. Sarah Gavron (UK, 2015). The struggle it dramatizes was about getting the vote in order to shape the laws and policies that affected women in uniquely cruel ways.

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    🏳️‍⚧️ The U.S. federal government has opened public comments on its dehumanizing passport regulations vis-à-vis trans people. These comments will be public, so weigh carefully how much, if any, personal information you can safely include.

    There are three different parts to this, but they’re all about passports. I provided the same comment for each.

    https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6771
    https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6772
    https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/DOS_FRDOC_0001-6773

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    'When you're famous, they let you . . .'

    “When you’re famous, they let you grab ‘em by the pussy,” bragged a choad from Queens. But in 2020–21 we didn’t let him. He lost the election and his coup too.

    Now the butthurt swine is fucking the entire country. He’s letting Musk and Putin have a go too.

    “When you’re famous, they let you do it. If they don’t, you must do it anyway. You must say it’s all their fault because they didn’t negotiate, I mean, submit.”

    “Now stop complaining, Republican senators. Say Daddy’s name like you mean it! You, too, Ukraine. You know you want it!”

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    'A Bit of War History' – Three Paintings by Thomas Waterman Wood (1865–66)

    Description from The Met: 'This work, painted at the close of the Civil War, forms a narrative triptych … of African American military service. In 'The Contraband' … the self-emancipated man appears in a U.S. Army Provost Marshall General office, eager to enlist.' He is raising his hat, and the U.S. flag is visible behind him.

    "The Contraband"

    'The Recruit' depicts the same man as a proud new soldier wearing union blue with a rifle slung over his shoulder.

    "The Recruit"

    In 'The Veteran,' the same man appears on crutches because he is missing his lower left leg. His clothes are civilian, but he's got a Union army cap on. He is saluting.

    "The Veteran"

    The word “contraband” referred to an enslaved person who had escaped. Given that the term usually indicated illegally imported or exported goods, its dehumanizing quality in the context of someone who has escaped bondage is palpable. Here, however, it stands in contrast to the painting, which shows a man, not a chattel or a caricature.1

    The other two paintings see the same figure transformed into a soldier and a veteran. Both of these images underlined the figure’s manhood. With time, in fact, military service came to be associated with masculinity and citizenship in an age of people’s wars fought in North America and Europe.2

    From this point of view, the paintings represent a message not only of self-emancipation through military service but of modern masculine citizenship shortly before the nineteenth amendment was ratified. In the West, this image of manhood and military service reached its high point in World Wars One and Two.

    1. Digital images via The Met, objects 84.12a, 84.12b, and 84.12c. ↩︎

    2. Mark Stoneman, “War, Gender, and Nation in 19th-Century Europe: A Preliminary Sketch,” blog, June 23, 2017. ↩︎

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    Photo is described in common caption. Ernestine Eckstein can be seen from the side, one Black woman in the midst of white men.

    Photo is described in common caption. In this one Ernestine Eckstein is facing forward and enough of her sign is visible to deduce the rest.
    Photo is described in common caption. In this one Barbara Gittings is facing forward, and her sign reads

    Intersections: three photos of Ernestine Eckstein in a 1965 picket line outside the White House protesting Federal discrimination against gay people in civil and military service and their obtaining security clearances. Her sign reads, “DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL.” Eckstein was a Black woman, whereas most of the other picketers appear to have been white men. Another lesbian activist, white, is visible in one photo: Barbara Gittings. The photographer was Gitting’s white partner, Kay Tobin.

    Photos via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, images 1605765, 1605764, and 1605766

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    “Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?” by Samantha Hancox-Li, Contingent Magazine, October 1, 2019, contingentmagazine.org… 🏳️‍⚧️

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    Photo of Mixed Race Sociability in Jim Crow Washington, DC, 1944

    Black and white photo of a convivial scene. More details in caption.

    Pete Seeger at twenty-five entertaining federal workers, sailors, and soldiers with a banjo and song at the opening of the Labor Canteen in Washington, DC, on February 13, 1944. This unsegregated place in a Jim Crow city was sponsored by the Federal Workers of America and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.1 Note First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt enjoying herself in the mixed race and sex audience. On the wall behind the merrymakers are sketches of a hapless character undergoing physical training, perhaps Private Snafu.

    Source: Office of War Information, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017864322/

    1. For further details about the Labor Canteen, see the long caption for Washington Area Spark, “Social equality at the Labor Canteen,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/54266105006/. ↩︎

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    World War Two Poster Marking the Dignity and Humanity of Black Women on the Home Front

    Poster. The women described in the detailed caption below are separated into different quadrants with the help of a big 'V', which itself is underlined by the text 'for victory'.

    The American Front for Victory – This poster from World War Two operates on two levels. First, it emphasizes the contribution of “The American Front” to the victory for which the nation was fighting. American front because this was about the home front, the people, many of them women, contributing to victory in industry, in agriculture, through service, and with their savings. Second, the name makes an important statement about the women it pictures working. They are Black. In large parts of the country, racist Americans cast the fitness of Black people as American citizens in doubt, to say nothing of questioning their very humanity.1 Here, by contrast, four Black women are depicted doing dignified work for the national cause.

    Moving clockwise from the top, one woman, wearing some kind of civilian uniform, is holding a bucket marked “save” and is participating in either the sale or purchase of “Defense Bonds”; another is working a potato field with the words “strong bodies” underneath; there is a woman in a nurse’s uniform above the label “volunteer service”; and a woman can be seen working on an airplane, perhaps installing its propeller. This is a poster proclaiming the importance of the home front and the dignity and honor of the Black women fighting on it.

    Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_061.

    1. See a related poster for American men on this blog, one of them Black, captioned “Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!" ↩︎

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    Thick book: A Companion to Women's Military History, ed. Barton C. Hacker and Margaret Vining
    This is not a book I would have considered controversial even two weeks ago. Now I'm not so sure. Imagine having it on your desk in the Pentagon when the gender police come in. Women as part of military history despite Orange Oaf's decrees!

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    Inspiring Photo from 1971 for Our Troubled Times

    Black and white photo of men and women conference goers in a social situation of some kind, standing. The women described in the caption are in the foreground. They are the focal point.

    “Isabel Miller and Barbara Gittings hugging librarians” in 1971 at the American Library Association Conference in Dallas, Texas. (Miller is on the left. Gittings is on the right in the floral sleeveless dress.)

    Librarians can be central in the fight against bigotry and for equal rights, which might explain why some gay rights activists were there. (An important example: early professional Black librarians.)

    Photo by Kay Tobin, via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, image ID 1606079. 🏳️‍🌈

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    PS: The joyful picture of Barbara Gittings I posted earlier today came from the private sphere, but even their private moment was political. Certainly they left their papers to the NYPL under terms that allow it to share the image online.
    #PrivateLives #PublicPolicy #ThePersonalIsPolitical 🏳️‍🌈

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    Photo of Joy and Love, 1962

    Her head, one shoulder, and one hand is visible. Soap in hair and forehead. In a shower, the rest of her behind the plastic shower curtain. But all one sees are her radiant eyes and face, the big spontaneous smile or laugh. So much joy.

    So much joy in this photo, so much love: “Barbara Gittings in shower, circa 1962” by Kay Tobin. 🏳️‍🌈

    Via Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs collection, NYPL Digital Collections, image ID 1605708.

    Postscript

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    Digital Transgender Archive – Trans History, Linked
    www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net. 🏳️‍⚧️

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    😃 Roy Wood Jr. on “Masculine Commercials,” youtu.be… (6 min).

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    “To the Man on the Northeast Regional” by Charlotte Clymer, charlotteclymer.substack.com… 🏳️‍⚧️

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