Illinois Press Book Blog

Searching for illustrations for my book, Breadwinners, recapped the challenges—and rewards—of writing about working women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Documentation of women who worked as servants, seamstresses, saleswomen, and factory hands has always been thin. The popular press tended to depict working women as unruly servants or downtrodden seamstresses.

My book contests these stereotypes by telling the stories of women who used their wage work to articulate a new sense of independence and to claim full rights of citizenship. After weeks of archival research, I was thrilled when I found images that captured the spirit of the women I knew so well from their diaries, letters, speeches, and investigations. My favorite discovery now graces the cover of the book: Maggie Hinchey, an Irish American laundry worker leading a parade of working women dressed in white to signal their support for suffrage.

In 1913 and 1914, Hinchey, an organizer for the Women’s Trade Union League, stormed the states of New York and New Jersey to explain working women’s need for the ballot. Her powerful appeal earned her an invitation to spread her message west, to union men in Montana and Nevada. This picture of Maggie Hinchey captures working women’s determination to be recognized as breadwinners and shows how they organized to achieve their goals.

*****

Lara Vapnek, assistant professor of history at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, is author of the new book Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920.

Jennifer Ring, author of the new book Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball, was interviewed by Baseball Digest.

BBD: Why do you think Ken Burns gave women’s baseball very little coverage in the Baseball documentary series?

JR: For the same reason that most people don’t think that excluding women from baseball is an issue. We tend to just assume that baseball is for boys…because it was intentionally presented, or marketed, as a “maker of men” throughout the twentieth century. As Zane Grey wrote, “All boys love baseball. If they don’t, they’re not boys.” I don’t think Ken Burns was particularly interested in documenting the history of women in baseball…it didn’t occur to him, or he didn’t know the history existed, and didn’t go looking for it. Bottom line: he didn’t put it in the documentary because he didn’t care about women’s baseball.

Margaret Washington’s new book, Sojourner Truth’s America, was one of two 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award winners.  Awarded annually by the Association of Black Women Historians, the competition honors the best book and article written about African American women’s history. 

Congratulations, Margaret!

Mia Mask, author of the new book Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film, was interviewed on New York’s CBS affiliate WCBS-TV .

CNN reports that a memorial bust of Sojourner Truth was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol today making Truth the first African-American woman to be so honored. To learn more about her life and times, check out Margaret Washington’s new biography Sojourner Truth’s America.

On Diana Nyad’s Score radio segment yesterday she reviewed Jennifer Ring’s new book Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball.

“Jennifer Ring, has crafted a great read, replete with rich story-telling, fascinating history, and eye-opening sociological analysis. I’ve known that women played baseball before the World War II All American Girls Professional Baseball League, but until reading Stolen Bases, I had no clue as to how far back the days of women playing the game go.”

Listen via the KCRW site.

Daily Routines tells us about the typical schedule for Simone de Beauvoir. For more on Beauvoir, see The Beauvoir Series and other books from UIP.

INTERVIEWER
Do your writer friends have the same habits as you?

DE BEAUVOIR
No, it’s quite a personal matter. Genet, for example, works quite differently. He puts in about twelve hours a day for six months when he’s working on something and when he has finished he can let six months go by without doing anything. As I said, I work every day except for two or three months of vacation when I travel and generally don’t work at all. I read very little during the year, and when I go away I take a big valise full of books, books that I don’t have time to read. But if the trip lasts a month or six weeks, I do feel uncomfortable, particularly if I’m between two books. I get bored if I don’t work.

Jennifer Ring, author of the new book Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball, is quoted in the March 1, 2009, issue of The New York Times in an article on a California girl’s attempt to play high school baseball.

Most people just are incapable of seeing beyond what’s easy.  It is much neater if we say, boys play baseball and girls play other sports.

The February 26, 2009, issue of London Review of Books includes a review of volumes 1 & 2 of Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, published late last year in paperback.

[Goldman’s career] as her adoptive country’s most notorious anarchist [is] richly displayed in these two volumes of documentary history.

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle includes Benjamin Ivry’s review of the new English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary.

“In 1991, Such a Sweet Occupation by Gilbert Joseph pointed out that Beauvoir and Sartre, far from deserving the reputation they were granted as heroic wartime resisters, were exclusively concerned with the advance of their own literary careers. Wartime Diary confirms this (if we add sex and food as other obsessions), in a fluent translation by Anne Deing Cordero, professor emerita of French at George Mason University.”

Wartime Diary is the third in our Beauvoir Series following Philosophical Writings (University of Illinois Press, 2004) and Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-27 (University of Illinois Press, 2006).