The brutal southern Colorado coal strike reached its nadir on Easter night, 1914, with the horrendous deaths by fire of three women and eleven children at the hands of the Colorado state militia. Mary Thomas, whose husband was on strike, was interviewed at age eighty eight by historian Sherna Gluck in 1974 for the Feminist History Research Project. Thomas vividly recalled the horror of the infamous Ludlow Massacre, described her efforts to save the lives of women and children by hiding them in a dry well, and her jailing in the aftermath the massacre. She was the only woman strike supporter to be jailed during the strike.

The Women's Emergency Brigade, which Genora Johnson Dollinger helped organize, saved the 1936 sit down strike at Flint, Michigan more than once. In this 1976 interview with Sherna Gluck, Dollinger recalls the famous "Battle of the Running Bulls" when police--bulls--tried to regain control of the GM plant by force. Dollinger and the other organizers of the Women's Emergency Brigade faced constant sexist attitudes in their efforts to win the strike, even as they demonstrated their determination to put their bodies and their families' well-being on the line. Sometimes this sexism took the form of an unwillingness to allow women to speak, sometimes it took gentler forms: Dollinger recalls how, in the heat of battle, a passing striker tipped his hat to her. In a key moment, Dollinger took a loudspeaker and persuaded women in the crowd to join the group in front of the plant. Overwhelmed, and afraid to shoot at women, the police abandoned their assault.

We generally think of Puerto Rican migration to the U.S. mainland as largely a post-World War II phenomenon, since more than 800,000 Puerto Ricans came to the United States between 1940 and 1969. But immigration actually started much earlier in the century; between 1915 and 1930 more than 50,000 Puerto Rican migrants headed for the United States--especially New York City. The new immigrants faced a mixed reception, particularly from immigrants from other countries. In this interview for the radio program "Nosotros Trabajamos en la Costura"(We Work in the Garment Industry), garment worker Luisa Lopez told how she faced discrimination from European immigrant workers when she went to work in garment factories in the 1920s. Yet sometimes alliances crossed ethnic lines: Lopez found an ally in an Italian-American socialist.

Employers had many ways to retaliate against their workers who tried to organize, ranging from allies in state and local police forces to detective agencies that used secret operatives to disrupt unions and supplied thugs to protect strikebreakers during strikes. But the simplest expedient available was to simply fire employees who were perceived as potential troublemakers. In 1914, a former department store worker named Sylvia Schulman testified before the U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations. In the excerpt included here she described how she was fired simply for joining the retail clerk's union.

Farm households depended heavily on the work of women and children. At first children were assigned simple tasks; later they learned chores that were differentiated according to gender roles. In the 1790s, young unmarried women such as Elizabeth Fuller pursued work in the dairy or in home manufacturing along with their housework and garden tasks. Fuller lived in the central Massachusetts town of Princeton; her diary recorded her health, social activities, and any unusual events in her life. Mostly, she faced a regular round of household tasks such as making cheese or baking pies. She often washed, carded, and spun wool, since her most significant labor was the household textile production that provided most farm families with their clothing.

Women are not often thought of in association with the Populists, but the best-known orator of the movement in the early 1890s was a woman, Mary Elizabeth Lease. Born in Pennsylvania in 1850 to Irish parents, Lease became a school teacher in Kansas in 1870. She and her husband, a pharmacist, spent ten years trying to make a living farming, but finally gave up in 1883 and settled in Wichita. Lease entered political life as a speaker for the Irish National League, and later emerged as a leader of both the Knights of Labor and the Populists. Lease mesmerized audiences in Kansas, Missouri, the Far West, and the South with her powerful voice and charismatic speaking style. In hundreds of speeches, she apparently never said the one phrase most often associated with her name--the injunction that farmers should "raise less corn and more hell." Regardless of who called explicitly for more hell-raising, Lease was a powerful voice of the agrarian crusade.

The violent labor struggles of the early 20th century engendered concern at all levels of society and led to the appointment of a federal Commission on Industrial Relations in early 1913. Headed by Kansas City lawyer-reformer Frank Walsh, the commission was in the midst of taking testimony from owners, workers, and reformers in dozens of industrial communities around the country when the southern Colorado coal strike erupted late in 1913. The killing of three women and eleven children at a mining encampment in Ludlow, Colorado, on Easter night, 1914, sent shock waves across the country. After the "Ludlow massacre," as it came to be known, the commission held public hearings in Colorado where they heard horror stories about the brutality and rapacity of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, the region's largest operator of coal mines. These articles from the New York Times described the testimony of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., before the commission, where he denied any knowledge of his company's brutal actions against the Ludlow strikers.

This subject investigates the special relation of women to several musical folk traditions in the British Isles and North America. Throughout, we will be examining the implications of gender in the creation, transmission, and performance of music. Because virtually all societies operate to some extent on a gendered division of labor (and of expressive roles) the music of these societies is marked by the gendering of musical repertoires, traditions of instrumentation, performance settings, and styles. This seminar will examine the gendered dimensions of the music -- the song texts, the performance styles, processes of dissemination (collection, literary representation) and issues of historiography -- with respect to selected traditions within the folk musics of North America and the British Isles, with the aim of analyzing the special contributions of women to these traditions. In addition to telling stories about women's musical lives, and studying elements of female identity and subjectivity in song texts and music, we will investigate the ways in which women's work and women's cultural roles have affected the folk traditions of these several countries.

Many of those who took part in the student movement of the 1960's drew their inspiration from the African-American struggle for freedom. That was true for Cathy Wilkerson, who became involved in the civil rights movement and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1963 while at Swarthmore College. She described her experience as a college student listening to Civil Rights leader Gloria Richardson as the event that changed her life. Wilkerson went on to work in the SDS national office and edited the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. In 1968, she moved to Washington DC to open a SDS regional office, and later became a Weatherman. [The material in brackets was added to the transcript shortly after the recorded interview.]

In the early 20th century suffragists employed many different tactics in their struggle to win the vote for women. Members of the militant National Woman's Party (NWP), for example, rejected the patient waiting espoused by much of the movement. Some NWP members even chained themselves to the White House gates--an action that led to sentences in the Occoquan Workhouse. In this 1973 interview with historian Sherna Gluck, Ernestine Hara Kettler, a young woman of radical immigrant background, recalled her stint in the workhouse.

Union troops captured the former president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, in May 1865. Whether Davis, who had eluded arrest for over a month, was actually wearing his wife's dress when he was caught is open to question. Nonetheless, the depiction of the captured Davis in woman's clothes was featured in many illustrations and cartoons in the northern press. These images—like earlier pictures of southern women sending their men to war and rioting—questioned the South's claims of courage and chivalry by showing its men and women reversing traditional sex roles.

In her autobiographical essay, "How I Became a Socialist Agitator," which was first published in Socialist Woman in October 1908, Socialist Party organizer Kate Richards O'Hare credited her career as a "Socialist agitator" to her youthful exposure to poverty and "sordid suffering." As she explained in this essay, her disillusionment with the church and a talk by labor organizer "Mother"Jones further pushed her toward socialism.

Despite major cultural, legal, and medical impediments the use of birth control, including abortion, by American women was widespread at the turn of the century. In their quest to control unwanted pregnancies, American women could be surprisingly resourceful in the methods they used. In this audio excerpt from a 1974 interview with historian Sherna Gluck, Miriam Allen deFord described methods of birth control in vogue in the 1910s, including spermicides, douches, the Dutch pessary (an early diaphragm), and the use of ergot pills to induce abortion.

The southern textile mills, which had expanded dramatically during World War I, faced serious decline in the 1920s. New tariffs, the growth of textile manufacturing in other parts of the world and the shorter skirt lengths of the 1920s, which required less fabric, exacerbated the problems brought on by wartime overexpansion. Textile manufacturers responded by trying to cut wages and increase workloads. Nevertheless, textile workers often look back at the 1920s with genuine affection and nostalgia. In this 1979 interview with historian James Leloudis, Edna Y. Hargett, a former textile worker, described the closeness of the mill village and the "love offering": a collection for sick workers to replace lost wages in an era when there was no sick leave.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Louisa May Alcott's novel, Little Women. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

In October 1933 Chicana dressmakers in Los Angeles launched a citywide strike against the sweatshop conditions under which they toiled. An interview with Anita Andrade Castro, a young dressmaker who went on to become a longtime union activist, provided glimpses of the experience of the rank-and-file strikers. In two excerpts from a long interview done in 1972 by historian Sherna Gluck for the Feminist History Research Project, Castro described, first, her initiation into the union and, second, her arrest as a striker, her anxieties about the impact on her desire to become a citizen, and her encounter with a prostitute.

In the 1920s, new sexual ideologies reshaped prescriptions for marriage, incorporating moderate versions of feminism. "Modern Marriage," an excerpt from Floyd Dell's Outline of Marriage (1926), set out the ideal of companionship between husband and wife. In this mock dialogue, a savvy young wife instructed a professor in the ways of modern marriage. She frankly endorsed birth control, simplified housekeeping, shared housework, and paid work for childless wives. At the same time, Dell's dialogue affirmed a romantic view of fundamental sexual differences. Generically named "The Young Woman," the female character averred that she chose motherhood as "fulfillment of my nature." Circulated by the American Birth Control League, the tract sought to win support for contraception by portraying its place in respectable, if "modern," marriages.

A group of Boston capitalists built a major textile manufacturing center in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the second quarter of the 19th century. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force. These young women, far from home, lived in rows of boardinghouses adjacent to the growing number of mills. The industrial production of textiles was highly profitable,and the number of factories in Lowell and other mill towns increased. More mills led to overproduction, which led to a drop in prices and profits. Mill owners reduced wages and speeded up the pace of work. The young female operatives organized to protest these wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. Harriet Hanson Robinson was one of those factory operatives; she began work in Lowell at the age of ten, later becoming an author and advocate of women's suffrage. In 1898 she published Loom and Spindle, a memoir of her Lowell experiences, where she recounted the strike of 1836.

Examines cultural developments within European literature from different societies at different time-periods throughout the Middle Ages (500-1500). Considers--from a variety of political, historical, and anthropological perspectives--the growth of institutions (civic, religious, educational, and economic) which shaped the personal experiences of individuals in ways that remain quite distinct from those of modern Western societies. Texts mostly taught in translation. Topics vary and include: Courtly Literature of the High and Late Middle Ages, Medieval Women Writers, Chaucer and the 14th Century, and the Crusades.

In the Cold War period of the 1950s and early 1960s, an era in which married life was often idealized as essential for personal happiness and success, non-conformance became a social problem in need of study and explanation. Experts in social science fields of psychology and sociology, and commentators in the popular press conducted research and published findings that sought to account for the relatively large numbers of men and women who remained unmarried despite societal pressures to wed. In this sequel to an earlier article on unmarried women, Look magazine writer Eleanor Harris, in response to suggestions of readers, addressed the topic of bachelorhood by presenting testimonies of selected men on the reasons they remained unmarried and conclusions of authorities regarding these explanations. The divergent ways that the two articles presented their subjects revealed some gender biases of the period. Unmarried women were depicted as "depressed" or "frantic," while single men were typed as "fixated on a mother figure," inclined to "antiresponsibility," or "latent homosexuals." Men often failed to find the "perfect" woman; women frequently could not find even an "eligible" man. Ultimately, the articles portrayed the unwed female's predicament far more portentously than the male's: women were "likely to get stranded" if they waited too long to get married, but it was "never too late" for men.