Women's History
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Via Library of Congress, Yanker Poster Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016648550/. ↩︎
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Susan Saxe has a sparse Wikipedia entry. She was Nancy Gertner’s first case, which the latter writes about in In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate Beacon Press, 2011), chap. 1 (sample with salient details). ↩︎
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Lucinda Franks, “Return of the Fugitive,” The New Yorker, June 5, 1994, https://archive.ph/5mJ5P. ↩︎
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“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…
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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.
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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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“Welcome to All!,” color lithograph, Puck April 28, 1880, pp. 130–31, Library of Congress, PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002719044/. A high-resolution TIFF file is available for closer scrutiny. ↩︎
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Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West, “What Fools these Mortals Be!": The Story of Puck (IDW Publishing, 2014) ↩︎
New York World-Telegram photograph by Fred Palumbo, 1964:
Miss April Lou, teacher at PS 1, Manhattan, with six Chinese children, recent arrivals from Hong Kong and Formosa [Taiwan], who are holding up placards giving his or her Chinese name (both in ideographs and in transliteration) and the [American English] name to be entered upon the official school records.
Library of Congress, New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/94512334/.
CB Radio Cards and Sociability
One interesting artifact of 1970s and 1980s CB radio sociability is the QSL card, a printed or hand-drawn confirmation of having been in contact with someone else via radio. Apparently one could collect them or pass them along to someone else as a recommendation.
The cards from CB radio operators that I’ve examined among the Newberry Library’s digitized collection of African American QSL cards seem to have been exchanged in person, presumably somewhere on the road. They used radio lingo, like we do abbreviations for the internet and instant messaging. Often preprinted with applicable check boxes for such exchanges, there was also space for hastily scrawled messages, written the way one might speak over the air without regard to more formal written conventions. Sound familiar?
The Newberry’s collection of 52 cards from men and women CB, ham, and shortwave radio operators include a mailing address, always a P.O. Box.
The card I’m sharing here was given to the recipient in person, as you can see from the message on the back. The “73’s” and “88’s” referenced on the card stem from old Western Union telegram codes, in this case meaning something akin to “best regards” and “love and kisses,” with “44’s” referring to prompt replies. The author also used a handwritten ten-code on the back to indicate that there had been a clear signal the whole time: “you be 10-8 all the way.”
![Backside of a postcard with preprinted and handwritten text. They communicated on March 29, 1981, on channel 13, and she wants station unit 793 to send her a card: 'Nice [to] talk to you, today, time 10:56, in Waterloo Iowa. You [sound] so good, I am glad to talk to you. you be 10-8 all the way. I am so glad, thanks […?…] here my state today.](https://eu.uploads.micro.blog/166262/2025/b414ddd221.jpg)
Before running across these cards, I only ever experienced American CB radio culture through television and movies. I did see CBs in Europe when catching rides with truck drivers during my hitchhiking days. In any case, these cards add an entirely new dimension to radio sociability for me.
Given our contemporary reliance on big internet systems, maybe those people who still use these older forms of communication are doing the rest of us a real favor. Maintaining knowledge of such technology—and a market for it—could be a real lifesaver one day.
YWCA War Work Council poster, ca. 1917 (United States)
Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002707403
"Girl with Blue Hair" by Blanche Grambs. Lithograph signed by artist, ca. 1935–43.
Works Progress Administration (WPA) Art Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, image id 5181000.
“Mexican miner’s wife and child are visited by another miner’s wife (Hungarian) who is interested in starting a maternal health clinic there. Scotts Run, Bertha Hill, West Virginia” by Marion Post Walcott for the Farm Security Administration, 1938. NYPL Digital Collections, image id 58749987.
A 1943 Photo of Welders for Women's History Month
“Skilled women workers helped build SS George Washington Carver.” Photo by E. F. Joseph for the Office of War Information, Kaiser Shipyards, Richmond, California, ca. 1943.
With nearly 1,000 Negro women employed as burners, welders, scalers and in other capacities at the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, Calif., women war workers played an important part in the construction of the Liberty Ship, SS George Washington Carver, launched on May 7, 1943. Welders Alivia Scott, Hattie Carpenter and Flossie Burtos await an opportunity to weld their first piece of steel on the ship.
Repository: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL Digital Collections, image id 1206635.
Poster from an Antiwar, Lesbian, Feminist Fugitive, ca. 1970
Poster with a message by Susan Saxe, depicted in the drawing.1 Based on the text, the poster is probably from around 1970, when its author, a Brandeis senior and antiwar activist, went on the lam after robbing a bank and a National Guard Armory. On the FBI’s most wanted list, she was captured in 1975 and did seven years in prison.2 Her roommate, Katherine Ann Power, surrendered in 1980.3
Joe Stieb has posted some good history recommendations to help counter Hegseth’s bizarre scrubbing of Department of Defense webpages of race, gender, sexuality, and other content verboten by Trump. https://archive.ph/zLEcs
Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, July 18, 2015:
Members of the Native American Women Warriors, a Pueblo, Colorado-based association of active and retired American Indians in U.S. military service, at a Colorado Springs Native American Inter Tribal Powwow and festival in that central Colorado city.
Credit: Gates Frontiers Fund Colorado Collection within the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Further details, including names and ranks, at https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2015633463/.
Women and Children Working in New York City Tenement Homes, 1908
Photographs of women and their children doing piecework: Lewis Wickes Hine took these for the National Child Labor Committee in New York City in January and February 1908. See individual captions below.
[1] 122 Sullivan St. 2nd Floor rear. Leveroni family. Earn 4 cents a gross making violets. Can make 20 gross a day when children work all day. Father has work. Mrs. Leveroni; Tessie Leveroni, age 9; Stephen Leveroni, age 6; Margaret Leveroni, age 7; Josephine Cordono, age 10. These children work on Saturdays on afternoons after 3 o’clock, and evenings until 8 or 9.
[2] Mrs. Finkelstein, 127 Monroe St. Bessie (age 13), Sophie (age 7). Girls attend school. Making garters for Liberty Garter works, 413 Broadway. Mother, a widow, earns 75 cents a day by working all day until 12 at night. Bessie works until 10 P.M. Sophie until 9 P.M. They expected to work until 10 P.M. to finish the job, although they did not know when more work would come in. Witness Mrs. Hosford.
[3] Widow & boy rolling papers for cigarettes in a dirty N.Y. tenement.
[4] Late at night. Sewing tapes on gloves. The boy helps. Family of five sleep in room where the work is done.
These photos are part of the National Child Labor Committee Collection held by the Library of Congress.
British “Votes for Women” postcard (stamped 1912) that centers on solidarity across social class and age. The purple, green, and white was the color scheme of the Women’s Social and Political Union.
Via The Newberry Library, Monroej_Sports_011485.
Two Suffragettes
Images via Library of Congress, PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92510578/ and https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2005684835/.
World War Two Poster Marking the Dignity and Humanity of Black Women on the Home Front
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.
Women installing assemblies and fixtures in the tail fuselage of a B-17F bomber (Flying Fortress) under construction at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California, in October 1942. The bodies of the women seem almost choreographed, embodying the dignity and high purpose of their labor. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer for the U.S. Office of War Information.
Source: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017878924/.
Rural health nurse, upstate New York, by Lewis Wickes Hine for the Milbank Memorial Fund, ca. 1934. The New York Public Library, image ID 460823.
🎙️ “Netanyahu and Trump’s ‘Creeping Authoritarianism’: ‘It Always Begins and Ends with Women’" – Allison Kaplan Sommer with Dahlia Lithwick and Yofi Tirosh (Haaretz) 43 min.
A threat to the U.S. military’s morale, cohesion, and effectiveness: "‘Profound fear and anxiety among women in uniform’: Pentagon reacts to sex assault allegations against Hegseth", Politico, November 22, 2024. 🪖
"Susan B. Anthony to the women of today: 'Everything but the vote is still to be won'" by Nina Allender (1872–1957) for the Women's National Party, Equal Rights: Official Weekly Organ of the National Woman's Party, February 24, 1923, via Library of Congress.
'Welcome to All' (1880 Cartoon)
This Puck cartoon from 1880 portrayed immigration in positive terms.1 Uncle Sam stands at the entrance to a wooden “U.S. Ark of Refuge,” a U.S. flag to the side. The image offers a strong contrast to the ramparts Uncle Sam stands at in 1903 and behind in 1916. Beside him is a list of “free” things offered by “U.S.”
FREE EDUCATION
FREE LAND
FREE SPEECH
FREE BALLOT
FREE LUNCH.
U.S.
The meaning of “free” varies here. Sometimes it has to do with “liberty” (free speech and the secret ballot), and other times “no cost.” If public (“free”) education is an achievement some in our own time wish to destroy, its existence was bound up with both senses of “free.” No tuition was required, sure, but it was also a precondition for a free people and for making Americans. “Free land” in this list would have meant federal lands according to the terms of the various Homestead Acts. But “free lunch”? What was that about?
This last item was initially a head scratcher for me. I thought it might be a comment or joke about immigrant expectations, but it seems the saying “no such thing as a free lunch” only gained currency during the middle decades of the twentieth-century. In fact, American saloons were offering free lunches at the time of this cartoon, so there really was such a thing for those who liked their beer and whiskey. Given the loads of correspondence and rumors between Europe and the United States, this kind of knowledge would have filtered through, too.
Because saloons are the context of these lunches, it is tempting to gender these free lunches “masculine” and assume the existence of a social critique of intemperate immigrant men. The image, however, shows heterosexual couples in the prime of life, suggesting that such gendered moralizing was not part of the artist’s intention. Moreover, Puck had begun its life as a German-language publication in the previous decade, and the artist-publisher Joseph-Keppler had immigrated from Austria.2
Highlighting the list of attractions on the door is the metaphorically clear sky over the “ark.” Behind the migrants, to the east, are dark storm clouds with black carrion-seeking scavengers in them. The clouds themselves are monsters labeled “WAR” and “DISTRESS.” War entailed not only destruction but also mandatory military service of varying terms. Distress, in this context, probably meant economic distress. Europe was in the middle of a long depression, while it was continuing to experience great socio-economic changes in the course of its ongoing industrialization.
Adding more economic and political arguments to the mix, more liberty, a sign in the middle advertises more benefits to life in the United States:
NO OPPRESSIVE TAXES
NO EXPENSIVE KINGS
NO COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
NO KNOUTS [OR] DUNGEONS.
The cartoon’s pairing of dark and light, of the prospects of distress or prosperity, represented what migration discourse in our own time refers to as push and pull factors. Beneath the cartoon is a quote from the N.Y. Statistical Review that highlights the cartoonist’s main interest: “We may safely say that the present influx of immigration to the United States is something unprecedented in our generation.” The detailed cartoon offered a context for this rise.
UPDATE: On Bluesky, @resonanteye.bsky.social reminded me of the Page Act of 1875, which excluded Chinese women. That made me think of the two single men at the end of the line in this cartoon because one of them appears to be Chinese. It is likely that this represented an acknowledgement of the Page Act. It also seems possible that the inclusion of this figure amounted to a critique of it. Here's our exchange—unfortunately, her settings require one to be logged in to see her posts.
Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation
"How Black Librarians Helped Create Generations of Black Literature" by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, June 19, 2024.
This is a fascinating short history that references the scholars whose work the cultural reporter draws on.
Teaser: “Recent scholarship is uncovering the role of the women who ran libraries during the Harlem Renaissance where they built collections and, just as important, communities of writers and readers.”
Agents of change: The necessary activism required of librarians in oppressive contexts will sound familiar to people today in the context of bans related to race and sexuality. For example, the only significant collection in the Jim Crow South was in Roanoke, Virginia. When the librarian there, Virginia Lee, was eventually told to get rid of the books, she moved them to the basement instead and continued to discretely circulate them.
Knowledge formation: The seemingly banal work of collection, classification, and organization required the creation of new knowledge. For instance, cataloging using the Dewey scheme required the addition of new subjects because that system only foresaw shelving Black-authored and Black-themed books in two limited spaces: under the headings of “slavery” and “the Negro question,” the latter a subset of “colonization and migration.” Dorothy Porter added entirely new categories, including for slave insurrections, the blues, and passing. She also reorganized American political history by situating presidents in topics important to Black readers. Andrew Johnson’s tenure was filed under “emancipation” and Rutherford B. Hayes under “Ku Klux Klan”.
Knowledge, culture, and sociability: This article has some wonderful photographs, including of the women in groups.
Addendum: The New York Public Library and, within it, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture have digitized some of their materials. That’s where I found a powerful pastel by Morris Schulman titled “The Writing Lesson”.