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                                                                                                January 2007

                        ISSUE 10:4 IS ONLINE AND OTHER WASM NEWS

Dear Colleague—

This newsletter is our winter update on Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.  We’ve added a lot to the site since our fall newsletter. 

DISCUSSION GROUPS:

For five months we have been sponsoring The "Second Wave" and Beyond, a free online "scholarly community" of feminist thinkers to discuss and record the history of feminist activism since 1960.  This new resource is directed by an editorial board consisting of Judith Ezekiel, Stephanie Gilmore, Kimberly Springer, and Sherri Barnes.  Check it out and register to participate at
http://scholar.alexanderstreet.com/display/WASM/Home+Page

We also plan a second online community, "Teaching Women’s History," and we'll be touch in future newsletters as that initiative gets closer to launching.

A NEW PUBLISHING INITIATIVE:  WASM SCHOLAR'S EDITION

Strong interest in our database on local and state commissions on the status of women permits us to offer it as part of an expanded version of WASM, the Scholar's Edition.  The Scholar's Edition will include WASM as you have come to know it, our database on Women's State Commissions and an online edition of Notable American Women.  We're beginning this expansion by publishing a preliminary version of the database of all publications of local and state commissions on the status of women and fabulous related reports on gender bias in state courts.  We expect the database to include about 80,000 pages of primary sources published between 1963 and 2004.  We are merging this resource into Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 and in this way we'll be taking full advantage of WASM's database and searching capabilities.  Later this year we will add to this package an online, indexed and searchable, edition of the classic biographical dictionary, Notable American Women.  We are very excited to have this resource in WASM Scholar's Edition.  For a modest additional charge, WASM subscribers can upgrade from the Basic to the Scholar's Edition.  Have your acquisitions librarian contact Eileen Lawrence at Alexander Street Press (Lawrence@astreetpress.com or 800-889-5937 ext. 211 (U.S. and Canada) or 703-212-8520 ext. 211 (international)) for prices, which will range from $150 to $1000 a year, depending on the size and budget of your library. 

The new Scholar's Edition (and its resources from commissions on the status of women) will be freely accessible during the month of March.  You will be able to go to NEED URL to access this expanded version of WASM.  We expect the state commissions database will include 20,000 pages in this release, fully integrated into WASM's database and search capabilities. 

THE CANADIAN INITIATIVE:

As announced in October 2006, a group of Canadian scholars of Women’s History is editing a special quarterly issue with document projects and book and website reviews devoted to Canadian Women’s History.  We hope that these and other future document projects will give the website a thoroughly North American perspective. The call for submission of proposals for this initiative is available online at:  http://www.alexanderstreet6.com/wasm/wasm.canadian.html

 

CATHOLIC WOMEN AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS:

We are pleased to announce a new effort to integrate more fully the history of Catholic Women and Social Movements in the United States into WASM.  To that end, Professor Carol Coburn ( Carol.Coburn@avila.edu) of Avila University will be taking a lead in soliciting proposals for document projects that address this topic.  Her call for submission of proposals is available at http://womhist.binghamton.edu/proposals.htm#catholic.
 

NEW DOCUMENT PROJECTS IN THIS ISSUE:

In this final WASM issue of 2006 we are publishing two new document projects and a robust complement of teaching tools, reviews, and news from the archives. One project, authored by Judith N. McArthur and Harold L. Smith, examines the successful effort in Texas in 1918 to secure woman suffrage in whites-only primary elections. It demonstrates how suffragists took advantage of a major split in the Democratic party in Texas to gain leverage for their cause. Another document project, written by Tamar Carroll, explores the multi-racial, cross-class organizing of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women of Brooklyn in the 1970's and '80's, showing how neighborhood organizing expanded and took on national and international dimensions. The two projects demonstrate the wide range of perspectives on race displayed by women's social movements across the twentieth century.
This issue also includes four book reviews and one new teaching tool. Teaching tools provide lesson ideas for working with documents found on Women and Social Movements in the United States. Bonnie Laughlin Schultz provides a framework for exploring the document project, "How Did Oberlin Women Students Draw on Their College Experience to Participate in Antebellum Social Movements, 1831-1861?" If you are interested in preparing a teaching tool for the website, please contact Laura Westhoff of the University of Missouri-St. Louis to discuss possibilities.

This issue also includes our regular feature, News from the Archives, edited by Tanya Zanish-Belcher, Associate Professor and Head of the Special Collections Department and University Archives at Iowa State University.   

With this quarterly issue of the database, we continue to publish full-text sources related to the history of the women’s organizations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This issue includes the second installment of twenty-five years of the minutes and reports of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1874-1898.  When this series is complete in the summer of 2007, we expect to have published 6,000 pages of NWCTU annual reports from the Union’s first national convention through the close of Frances Willard’s period as president of the organization.  We are now gathering publications of the League of Women Voters, 1920-2000, and plan to launch a new focus on the League in our full-text sources section beginning in September.

You can access a table of contents of the new issue of the journal at http://www.alexanderstreet6.com/wasm/issueV10N4.htm

FUTURE ISSUES:  Future document projects in our pipeline focus on:

 

TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL:

We continue to solicit new proposals for document projects to be published on the website.  Our national editorial board oversees a peer review system that evaluates prospective contributions and offers editorial support to author/editors.  If you are interested in preparing a document project based on your research, we would be glad to exchange email with you about your work and the submission process.  If your prospective document project concerns post-1960 feminism, please contact either Judith Ezekiel at ezekiel@univ-tlse2.fr , Kimberly Springer at kimberly.springer@kcl.ac.uk, or Stephanie Gilmore at shgilmore@sbcglobal.net.  For a project idea concerning women in the colonial or early national period, contact Patricia Cleary at cleary@csulb.edu. Finally, Carol Lasser (at Carol.Lasser@oberlin.edu)  at Oberlin College serves as the editor for our images initiative.  If you would like to prepare a document project or analytic essay that explores some aspect of women and social movements from a visual perspective, please contact Carol.  For other project possibilities, please contact Tom Dublin at tdublin@binghamton.edu or Kitty Sklar at kksklar@binghamton.edu.

 
THANK YOU:
Thanks for your continuing interest in Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.  As you look over the website, please share your reactions with us and let us know any ideas you may have about how we can better serve your needs and interests.

                                                                 Best wishes,

                                                         Kitty Sklar
                                                         kksklar@binghamton.edu

                                                        Tom Dublin
                                                        tdublin@binghamton.edu

                                                        Kate Babbitt
                                                        kbabbitt@stny.rr.com



If you received duplicates of this newsletter or would like to be removed from the mailing list, please contact us at tdublin@binghamton.edu.

 

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