Month: March 2020

Hertwig, John George. Woman Suffrage Pamphlet. Washington, D.C: Eckler, printer], 1883. Digital surrogate available on Gale Cenage Learning (license required) https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=NCCO&u=balt85423&id=GALE|AYOQLV128351566&v=2.1&it=r&sid=NCCO&asid=74a2c182 Woman Suffrage: Equal Rights to All in All Matters of Public Concern is a title that might have had you thinking seriously about letting American women vote, if you were debating the issue of … Continue reading John Hertwig’s 1883 Arguments Against Women’s Suffrage: Why They Still Matter in 2020

Louisa May Alcott’s short story “The Brothers”, originally published in the November 1863 issue of The Atlantic, details the complicated relationship between two brothers, one a former slave and the other his former owner, as told through the point of view of the hospital nurse charged with taking care of both of them. The story … Continue reading Louisa May Alcott’s Language Problem in “The Brothers”

Zitkála-šá advocated for the preservation of Native American culture for most of her life. As a young girl, she was persuaded to leave the Yankton reservation to receive an education at a white boarding school. While there, white missionaries tried to force Zitkála-šá to abandon her Dakota culture and adopt their white American culture. While … Continue reading From Print to Eye: The Cover Art of Zitkála-šá’s American Indian Stories

According to poet Jane Schoolcraft, the name “Bame-wa-wa-ge-zhika-quay” can be translated to “Woman of the Sound that the stars make Rushing through the Sky”. This was the name given to Schoolcraft in 1800 when she was born to the Ojibwe woman Ozha-guscoday-way-quay (Green Prairie Woman) and the Scottish-Irish fur trader John Johnston. As a result … Continue reading Jane Schoolcraft: My thoughts on why she wrote and what her work means

The elusive Emily Dickinson, who lived from 1830 until 1886, is now a canonical figure. Work after work has been published about her, but she rarely published herself, and when she did, it was not under her own name. This is something to question. Why didn’t she publish much of her work, and why didn’t … Continue reading The Unbinding of Emily Dickinson

Portrait, from Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828. (New York: For The Author, 1853). From the Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University. Photograph by Rudy Malcom. At the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth gave her famous “Ain’t … Continue reading Does The Sojourner Truth Project uphold its own mission?

Black and White Photograph of Emily Dickinson by William C. North via Wikimedia / public domain. Original daguerreotype from Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College. If you’ve ever felt like nobody, don’t worry—you’re in good company, says poet Emily Dickinson, according to one of her best known poems, "I'm Nobody! Who Are You?" To … Continue reading Emily Dickinson, an American Great

In May 1866, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper addressed the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention in New York. Her speech, which is accessible through the Archives of Women’s Political Communication at Iowa State University, is fittingly titled “We Are All Bound Up Together” and urges unity between white women and black women in America. Identified as … Continue reading “One Great Bundle of Humanity”: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper on Gathering Solidarity