The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America by Linda Gordon
Gordon’s classic study is the most complete history of birth control ever written. It covers the entire history of the intense controversies about reproductive rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years, from the earliest attempts of women to organize for the legal control of their bodies to the effects of second-wave feminism. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention by Judith Wellman
Feminists from 1848 to the present have rightly viewed the Seneca Falls convention as the birth of the women’s rights movement in the United States and beyond. The convention succeeded by uniting powerful elements of the antislavery movement, radical Quakers, and the campaign for legal reform under a common cause. Wellman shows that these three strands converged not only in Seneca Falls, but also in the life of women’s rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

Echoes of Chongqing: Women in Wartime China by Danke Li
This collection of annotated oral histories records the personal stories of twenty Chinese women who lived in the wartime capital of Chongqing during China’s War of Resistance against Japan during World War II. Their stories demonstrate that the War of Resistance had two faces: one presented by official propaganda and characterized by an upbeat unified front against Japan, the other a record of invisible private stories and a sobering national experience of death and suffering. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music by Eileen M. Hayes
Drawing on fieldwork conducted at eight women’s music festivals, Eileen M. Hayes shows how studying these festivals—attended by predominately white lesbians—provides critical insight into the role of music and lesbian community formation. She argues that the women’s music festival is a significant institutional site for the emergence of black feminist consciousness in the contemporary period. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

Kaija Saariaho by Pirkko Moisala
This book is the first comprehensive study of the music and career of contemporary composer Kaija Saariaho. Born in Finland in 1952, Saariaho received her early musical training at the Sibelius Academy, where her close circle included composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. She has since become internationally known and recognized for her operas L’amour de loin and Adriana Mater and other works that involve electronic music. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens by Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone
Growing up in a West Virginia coal mining community, Hazel Dickens drew on the mountain music and repertoire of her family and neighbors when establishing her own vibrant and powerful vocal style that is a trademark in old-time, bluegrass, and traditional country circles. Working Girl Blues presents forty original songs that Hazel Dickens wrote about coal mining, labor issues, personal relationships, and her life and family in Appalachia. Conveying sensitivity, determination, and feistiness, Dickens comments on each of her songs, explaining how she came to write them and what they meant to her. Buy the Kindle version here. Buy the Kobo version here. Buy the NOOK version here.

Mary Sue Welsh

Q: Who was Edna Phillips?  

Welsh: By joining the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1930 as its principal harpist, Edna Phillips became not only that orchestra’s first female member, but also the first woman to hold a principal position in any major symphony orchestra in America.

Q: Was her addition to the orchestra controversial?         

Welsh: In 1930 it was almost unheard of for a “regular” (meaning all-male) orchestra to hire a woman, even at the local or regional level. For an orchestra as prestigious as the Philadelphia to hire one and put her in a principal position was definitely controversial. It had never been done at that level.

During the first half of the twentieth century a majority of male musicians and their audiences believed that women were incapable of holding their own in professional orchestras because they lacked the stamina, power, and reliability to do so. That (plus the strong likelihood that male musicians didn’t want their jobs jeopardized by competition from women) meant that most female instrumentalists in the 1920s and ‘30s never had the opportunity to play in a professional orchestra. The only way they could do so was to join one of the all-female professional orchestras that had come into existence at that time.

Q: Did she experience sexism from within the orchestra?

Welsh: When Phillips first arrived at the orchestra, she experienced hostility from some of the men who made it obvious that they regarded her as an unworthy intruder and who resented her taking the place of a well-liked male colleague who had been with the orchestra for seventeen years. Even Stokowski, who had hired her, poked fun at her as “a foolish virgin” during one rehearsal, but his attempted joke didn’t work. She subtly called his bluff by maintaining her composure instead of reacting with dismay and embarrassment as he had expected her to do.

Q: How was the Philadelphia Orchestra regarded at the time?

Welsh: In 1929, Sergei Rachmaninoff called the Philadelphia Orchestra “the finest orchestra the world has ever heard.” Whether that was absolutely the case, the Philadelphia Orchestra was held in extremely high regard throughout the musical world. It
was considered a major orchestra, a category that at that time included the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Philadelphia.

Q: The book presents the many challenges orchestra members faced working with Conductor Leopold Stokowski. What one stands out most?

Welsh: Probably his intensity and a certain amount of relentlessness. He imposed the highest standards on his players and expected them to be able to respond instantly to his direction, often jumping through different parts of a score in rehearsal and expecting his musicians to immediately find the correct spot many measures ahead and begin playing without pause. He would work relentlessly to mold certain sections of a work in rehearsal and leave other more routine sections for the players to master on their own, forcing them to pay extraordinary attention to him in concert to make sure that the piece unfolded as the maestro wanted it to.

Q: Was there something about Phillips’s personality that helped her thrive as “one woman in a hundred?”

Welsh: Phillips was very savvy. She seemed to know instinctively how to take care of herself. In 1927 she played for a brief spell in the Roxy Theatre Orchestra in Manhattan, joining her teacher at the time, Florence Wightman, as the only women in an orchestra made up of 110 men. It was a terrible experience. Forced to dodge aggressive passes from her colleagues, she fled after six weeks, vowing never again to play in an all-male orchestra.

Eventually her teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music, the brilliant and wily
Carlos Salzedo, talked her into auditioning for the Philadelphia Orchestra by assuring her that there would be no “Roxy Romeos” there. When she did join, Phillips devised a plan for deflecting possible passes that worked well with the men of the orchestra, but not so well with Maestros Stokowski and later Ormandy, both of whom made overtures toward her that could not be deflected so easily. What can a female member of such an organization do when the leader of that organization makes a pass at her – say no and possibly get fired or say yes and eventually be “thrown away like an old shoe?” It was a conundrum that Phillips handled with wit and much aplomb.

Q: What contributions did Phillips make to the performance of the harp?

Welsh: In order to expand its repertoire, Phillips and her husband, Samuel R.  Rosenbaum, commissioned fifteen works for the harp, including what is today considered to be a masterpiece for the instrument, Concerto for Harp and Orchestra op. 25 by Alberto Ginastera, as well as significant works by Nicolai Berezowsky, Norman Dello Joio, Erno Dohnanyi, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Ernst Krenek, Harl McDonald, José Serebrier, and Paul White, among others.

Q: What was the most interesting thing that you learned while researching the book?

Welsh: How fascinating the behind-the-scenes life of the Philadelphia Orchestra was during the 1930s and ‘40s when seen through the eyes of an astute observer who relished the humorous incidents that occurred as well as the greatness that surrounded her.

*****

Author photo credit: Susan Beard Photography

Q:  The previous books in The Beauvoir Series cover Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical writings, student & wartime diaries, and literary writings. How did you decide to place her political writings at this point in the series?

Simons:  The volumes, while organized thematically, also reflect a certain chronological development in Beauvoir’s work. Her most explicitly philosophical writings come earliest in her body of work. So the volume of philosophical writings reflects her early intense focus on philosophy beginning in the 1920s during her years as a philosophy student and extending through her post-World War II articles in existential ethics.

Although Beauvoir continued to work in philosophy, as is evident, for example, in her life-long interest in the problem of writing philosophy in literature, that interest is not as explicit in her later writings. Indeed, beginning in 1958 she paradoxically sought to
erase all references to her work in philosophy from her autobiography–an erasure that only became apparent with the publication of our volume of her 1926-27 student diaries. As primary sources the texts in these volumes are providing invaluable for dismantling the autobiographical narrative that has long dominated Beauvoir scholarship.

Beauvoir’s work in literature, unlike her contributions to philosophy, is well known and our volume of her literary writings includes texts from throughout her life, including a new translation of her 1944 play, “The Useless Mouths;” a beautiful, recently discovered novella from the 1960s, “Misunderstanding in Moscow;” and a set of handwritten “Notes for a Novel,” tentatively dated 1928, which we found housed in the archives of the University of Wisconsin library. A manuscript of the 1928 novel, itself, by the way, was recently found and is now being edited for publication by my co-editor of the Beauvoir Series, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir. It will be very interesting to write the novel in the light of the brilliant analysis of the “Notes” that Meryl Altman wrote for our volume.

The texts included in our volume of Beauvoir’s political writings, on the other hand, date primarily from the 1950s-1970s, reflecting the dramatic transformation in her thought brought on by her experiences of the Nazi Occupation–and recounted in her Wartime
Diary.

The Occupation revealed to her the depth of both her emotional and political dependence on others, demonstrating the political basis of an individual freedom that she had taken for granted. The political writings in our volume show Beauvoir drawing out the consequences of this dramatic philosophical transformation.

Q:  How did Simone de Beauvoir’s political ideas change over the course of her lifetime?

Simons:  As a young woman, Beauvoir was resolutely apolitical, rejecting any concern with “the earthly kingdom,” a consequence of both her deeply religious upbringing and her rebellion against her politically conservative parents. The defiant individualism she embraced in the 1930s–following a long tradition in French philosophy–culminated in her pre-war masterpiece, the metaphysical novel, She Came to Stay, in which the female protagonist, a solipsist, resorts to murder to solve “the problem of the Other.”

In the first articles in Political Writings–reports from 1945 of the plight of the poor among the wealthy classes of fascist Spain and Portugal–we see Beauvoir defining a leftist political engagement that would endure throughout the rest of her life.

The Second Sex (1949), which laid the philosophical foundations for the 1960s radical feminism of the women’s liberation movement, reflects this leftist political engagement and Beauvoir was shocked that it was attacked not only by the political right but also by
the left.

During the 1950s, as a resurgent political right led France in futile battles to retain control of its colonies, and French intellectuals struggled for political relevance in a world defined by the Cold War between the US and the USSR, Beauvoir moved further to the left
politically. By the 1970s, when Beauvoir became actively involved in the French women’s liberation movement, she had moved, philosophically, from radical feminism to a socialist-feminist position.

Q:  Are there any essays in the book that substantially challenge what we know about Simone de Beauvoir?

Simons:  The essays as a whole–revealing the depths of Beauvoir’s political commitment–challenge the traditional view that she simply followed Sartre politically. Also I hadn’t realized until editing this volume how far left she had moved politically during the Cold War or how deeply rooted her feminism was in progressive politics.

Beauvoir’s lengthy articles from the 1950s analyzing conservative thought were another surprise for me, challenging my reading of her autobiographies. “Must We Burn Sade?” for example, in which she defends the Marquis de Sade, a misogynist 18^th century pornographer, as a ‘great moralist,’ still shocks me. But, read in the context of her analysis of right-wing thinkers, it suggests a critical reflection on her own earlier ethical egoism celebrated in She Came to Stay.

And “Right-Wing Thought Today,” often criticized for the stridency of Beauvoir’s political critique, now (given US politics in 2012) seems insightful and politically relevant in its close reading of conservatism. But her analysis also reveals striking similarities with Beauvoir’s own thought, i.e. her early idealism, ethical egoism, and preoccupation with death, which might explain the harshness of her attack and provide a new political context for reading her autobiographical writings that followed (1958-1963).

Finally, the volume confirms the importance of Beauvoir’s work on the concept of ‘situation’ as grounding embodied consciousness in a world shaped by politics and economics. The volume concludes with an amazing 1974 documentary film script, “A Walk through the Land of Old Age,” that contrasts Beauvoir’s own privileged situation of aging to expose of the treatment of the aged poor in France.

Q:  What is coming next in the series?

Simons:  Two of the most anticipated volumes in the series are coming next. The volume of Beauvoir’s feminist writings, which reveals a feminist political engagement that stretched unbroken from The Second Sex through the 1950s and 1960s, challenges the view that Beauvoir only became a feminist with the arrival of the women’s liberation movement in France in 1972.

Then we’re publishing the much anticipated second volume of Beauvoir’s student diary, from 1928-1930, with accounts of meeting Sartre in 1929 and their famous argument in the Luxembourg Garden, which has been read (based on the autobiography) as explaining Beauvoir’s subsequent withdrawal from philosophy. But, in fact, the diary suggests that the argument instead ignited Beauvoir’s intellectual aggression and spurred her to success in the oral exams for her graduate degree in philosophy.  Great fun!

Perhaps the most high-profile trial was Mary Lincoln’s Insanity Case. The author, Jason Emerson, is a participant in The Insanity Retrial of Mary Lincoln, a project “to educate and inform the public about Mary Lincoln’s insanity episode and modern-day mental health issues.” Many of the events are sold out but the online coverage is robust.

Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight, examines how an Illinois woman went from wife and asylum-committed heretic to author and lobbyist for the civil rights of married women and the mentally ill.

In The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law, A. Cheree Carlson writes about the trials of Mary Lincoln, Elizabeth Packard, as well as Lizzie Borden and other less-well-known cases where women were tried for crimes ranging from committing abortions and passing as white to killing a married boyfriend.

Michael A. Rembis takes us nearly to the present day in Defining Deviance: Sex, Science, and Delinquent Girls, 1890-1960. Unlike the previous books, Defining Deviance focuses mostly on women and girls whose behavior and names did not make the headlines. Instead of following more well-known and oftentimes more powerful women into courtrooms and jails, interpretations by those in power of the girls as undesirable “defectives” landed them in the State Training School in Geneva, Illinois, where their threatening behavior could be corrected.

In addition to being a top seller for the University of Illinois Press since its original publication in 2010, Hands on the Freedom Plow has earned numerous plaudits:

-Winner of the Letitia Woods Brown Book Award, sponsored by the Association of Black Women Historians, 2011

-Winner of the 2010 Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change’s National Book Award, 2011

-Received a nomination for the 42nd NAACP Image Awards in the category of Outstanding Literary Work, Nonfiction, 2011

“The stories of the ‘beloved community’ of unknown women in Hands on the Freedom Plow convey a transcendent message of how history can be changed by committed individuals who stand up to what is wrong and live by that old freedom song ‘Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me roun.’”–Essence, Charlayne Hunter-Gault 

“Page after page reveals remarkable stories of courage and defiance. . . . The book opens a window onto the organizing tradition of the Southern civil rights movement.”–The Root 

“Completely upend[s] both traditional and radical histories of the modern civil rights movement by placing women at the center of their narrative and interpretive process.  This is a breathtaking achievement. . . . Because of the power of the storytelling, as a reader I felt as though I were living through events as they were unfolding.  I felt the terror of the violence and the euphoria of triumph.”–Women’s Review of Books

“Powerful, inspiring, and tremendously moving, the oral histories collected here highlight the essential role women played as organizers and activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the South of the early 1960s. . . . Essential reading for anyone interested in the Civil Rights Movement.”–Library Journal

Though the official publication date is still a few weeks away, Hands of the Freedom Plow has started appearing in bookstores and is shipping from our website and major online retailers.

Q:  What is the timeframe of your study?

Gallagher:  My study begins in the 1910s and concludes in the 1970s.  The timeframe covers the period from the final push for women’s suffrage and the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North, through Shirley Chisholm’s historic run for the U.S. presidency in 1972.

Q: Why did you focus on New York City?

Gallagher:  New York City is more than a backdrop in this story—it was a way of life, a vibrant arena of activism, and a place where important connections were forged.  I
focused on New York City for three reasons. First, it was a significant destination for African Americans moving out of the South starting in the 1910s; by the 1920s, Harlem had become known as the “Negro Mecca.”  As the African American population grew, major institutions in black life and in the national culture were founded in New York City including the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Harlem YWCA and YMCA, and the Schomburg Center.  The networks women like Dorothy Height, Pauli Murray, Ella Baker, Constance Baker Motley, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and Shirley Chisholm forged in New York City and the skills they developed in the city’s organizations shaped their thinking and the ways they engaged in political activism as they moved into national prominence. Second, despite Tammany Hall’s dominance in New York City through the 1940s, a broad array of political parties vied for, and sometimes achieved power, including Communists, Socialists, American Labor Party, the Liberal Party, and Republicans.  African American women ran for office on all of those party ballots which demonstrated the diversity of political opinion and the richness of political life that thrived in New York City until the McCarthy era.  Third, I am a native New Yorker and remember Shirley Chisholm as an exciting, local politician.  I wanted to write about how she came to office and what she accomplished when she got there.  What I realized, as I dived into the archives, was that there was a wonderfully rich history of women who had engaged in formal politics before Chisholm and I felt their story was important to tell as well.

Q: What does participation in New York City politics reveal about larger trends of African American female participation in national politics?

Gallagher:  Although African American women ran for office on a number of political parties’ tickets, they had most success when they forged their way into the Democratic Party and won on that ticket.  The New York City story portends the national political dynamics, especially after 1960, and underscores the centrality of the Democratic Party for African American women.

Q: How did female activists appeal to the larger population for support?

Gallagher:  Female activists appealed to the larger population by focusing on their past experience with community-level activism and their dedication to struggles for social justice and racial equality.  A number of black female candidates, including Sara Speaks, Ada Jackson, Bessie Buchanan, and Shirley Chisholm also appealed directly to African American female voters by referring to the need for black women to have their voice heard in politics.  Oftentimes, it should be noted, the community asked women to run for office; it was the political party bosses that needed convincing.

Q: How do the views of these activists reflect the communities they represent?  

Gallagher:  These activists were dedicated to racial equality and social justice.  Their commitments to eradicating racial discrimination in job hiring and housing, their efforts to get better schools and safer streets, and their determination to secure African American political leadership for predominantly black communities were reflective of their own
values, but also of their communities’ priorities.

Q: Do you feel that the work of these female African American political activists has made in an impact in current politics?  If so, how?

Gallagher:  I feel that these female African American political activists have made an impact in current politics in some important ways which need to be acknowledged.
Their impact is felt in the issues that were introduced into the national discourse and the legislation that was secured starting in the 1960s, including more focus on poverty, gender discrimination, racial inequality, and child care.  Moreover, since Shirley Chisholm’s historic election to the House of Representatives in 1968, there have been a small but growing number of African American women in Congress, and a notable number of African American women in state-level offices and municipal government.  These women make substantial contributions to policy debates at all levels. And at the same time, just as the generations I write about in Black Women and Politics in New York City did, these current African American female legislators serve as mentors and as inspiration to a new generation of young women and men who are now only dreaming about their future.

Q: What do you believe needs to be done to make Shirley Chisholm’s “someday” possible?

Gallagher:  To a larger extent than Americans like to believe, at the national level politics is still very much dominated by men – often white men.  Currently women comprise 17% of the U.S. Congress; African American women make up 3% of the members of Congress.  There has only been one African American woman to serve in the U.S. Senate in its entire history (Carol Moseley Braun.) There have been no African American female governors.  The conventional pipelines to the presidency – governors’ offices and the U.S. Senate – have no black women in them.  For Shirley Chisholm’s “someday” to become possible, African American women need to be in these political pipelines.  And, the levels of racial and gender discrimination that African American women face as a combined dynamic in this country need to diminish – significantly.  Despite the fact that African American women have generally achieved educational parity with white women, pernicious stereotypes still linger in the national imagination (variations of the “welfare queen” epithet have persisted since Ronald Reagan gave it life in the 1980s).  It needs to be much more common for people around the entire nation, not just in pockets of it, to associate concepts of national and presidential leadership with women as well as men generally, and with African American women as well as African American men in particular. I fear that “someday” is still a long way off, but I would love to be proved wrong.

The current debate over the mandate for employers to cover contraception in health
insurance plans harks back to earlier confrontations between the Catholic Church and family planning advocates. From the early 1920s until the early 1960s, Margaret Sanger was usually in the middle of this debate, countering Catholic pronouncements on the
immorality of birth control and baiting the Church into creating public controversies that ultimately advertised her cause.

The three published volumes of The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger,  Vol. 1: The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928 (2003), Vol. 2: Birth Control Comes of Age, 1928-1939 (2006), and Vol. 3: The Politics of Planned Parenthood, 1939-1966 (2010), provide an unparalleled documentary resource on the battles between the Church and the birth control movement in the first half of the twentieth century.

Volume 1 highlights the Town Hall Raid, one of the pivotal events in the history of the birth control movement and the first major public confrontation between Sanger and the Church.  In November 1921, Catholic Archbishop Patrick Hayes exerted his influence over the city government and convinced the police to shut down the concluding session of the First American Birth Control Conference.  Police stormed into the Town Hall theater and arrested Sanger and another activist before the meeting began. Hayes told Catholics to “stop your ears to that pagan philosophy” as he defended the police action to stem the tide of an immoral practice.

The raid and arrests provided Sanger nationwide publicity and prompted an immediate show of support from women’s groups, the professional class and many younger Americans.  And it gave Sanger a public forum to respond to Church teaching. She told reporters that she had no objection to the Church telling its parishioners what to believe, but when they attempt to “force their opinions and code of morals upon the Protestant members of this country, then we do consider this an interference with the principles of this Democracy and we have a right to protest.” (Volume 1, pp. 334-335.)

When Catholic pressure succeeded in prompting police to arrest doctors and nurses in
a 1929 raid of Sanger’s New York clinic, featured in Volume 2, Sanger and her attorneys framed the incident as an assault on medical privacy and women’s health care.  By calling forth several of the most prominent physicians of the day to defend the use of contraception for child spacing and as preventive medicine, Sanger defined the terms of a debate that has reemerged today.

Also included in Volume 2 is coverage of Sanger’s testimony before several Congressional committees in support of bills to remove the legal barriers to birth control.  She was challenged not only by Catholic congressmen, who accused her of defying God and interfering with nature, but several heavy hitters in the Church, including Father Charles Coughlin, the popular radio priest, who reminded the House Judiciary Committee of God’s command to “increase and multiply.” Sanger responded by pointing out that celibate priests might not be the best sources of advice on procreation and parenthood.  In earlier testimony she snapped back against Catholic advocacy of large families by noting that Jesus was an only child.  And each time this debate went public, Sanger spoke movingly of the large number of Catholic women who came to her New York clinic or who wrote to her for contraceptive information. “I have myself had,” she said, “the most pathetic cases of Catholic women torn by their loyalty to the church and their desires to control the size of the family.” (Volume 2, p. 253.)

Maybe the closest episode to the current one occurred in 1958 when the New York City Hospital Commissioner enforced an unwritten policy prohibiting doctors from prescribing contraception in municipal hospitals. He refused to allow a Brooklyn doctor to fit a diaphragm for a woman who had been hospitalized for diabetes.  The battle that ensued is well documented in Volume 3. Catholic groups praised the decision as a victory for religious freedom.  Sanger and Planned Parenthood adroitly turned to the press and fed reporters enough material to keep the issue on the front pages for several weeks.  Before long, a coalition of medical, civic and religious groups came together to protest the commissioner’s decision.  Public pressure mounted and forced the political leadership to rescind the policy.

What Sanger said then still applies today, and to insurance coverage as well as medical
treatment: “The patient should be allowed to decide whether prescribed Medical treatment is in conformity with his or her religion.” (Volume 3, 445.)

*****

Peter C. Engelman is an associate editor of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, a freelance writer, and an archivist.

MARTIN: Well, you know, honestly, you have some fascinating nuggets in your book. You write, for example, that really up until the 1820s, you know, black men were prominent in the beauty industry until it became not acceptable for black men to start dressing white women’s hair. So then, kind of, black women took over. Tell us a little bit more about that.

GILL: Absolutely. Sure. I mean, we see that it’s around 1820 where there began to be sort of growing discourses about how African-American men were seen as dangerous, should not share spaces with white women, and so African-American women sort of transitioned very nationally to that. So we see African-American women in slavery caring for the beauty needs of those that they were forced to work for.

But also we see that, particularly in urban areas like New Orleans, that some of these enslaved women were able to actually hire themselves out and make some money in the process. So the beauty industry does provide opportunities for African-American women to earn a living.

Q:  Jane Matilda Bolin was the nation’s first African American woman judge.  Is there any one person who paved the way for her success?

A:  The argument can be made that every Black woman lawyer before Jane Bolin, beginning with Charlotte E. Ray in 1872, paved the way for Bolin’s eventual rise to the bench.  But more immediately, her father Gaius Charles Bolin (a lawyer and someone she hails as her role model) has to be singled out.

Q:  In the 1920s and 1930s, what was the greater impediment to Jane Bolin’s career advancement, her race or gender?

A:  I would argue that racial discrimination was the greater impediment to Bolin’s career advancement, but she has said that it was gender discrimination, as have other Black women lawyers.  However, in the case of Bolin, the intersectionality of race, class, and gender may have conspired to complicate how we understand, and how she experienced the circumstances of her racial reality in the 1920s and 1930s.

Q:   In 1936 she ran (unsuccessfully) for the New York State Assembly as a Republican.  Why did she run as a Republican?

A:  Bolin’s run as a Republican in 1936 was tied to the reform politics and anti-Tammany stance of the Party.  In addition, by 1936, Black loyalty to the Democratic Party, which had brought economic relief from the Depression, had not shifted solidly.

Q:  Did she have any affiliation with the NAACP?

A:  Did she!  Jane Bolin grew up reading the Crisis, the organ of the NAACP, and became a founding member of the Poughkeepsie Branch of the NAACP, before joining and becoming second vice-president of the New York Branch.  She was later elected to the Board of Directors of the National Office of the NAACP, and in 1950 resigned as a vice-president amid some controversy that played out on the pages of the Black press.

Q:  What interests did she have outside of the courts?

A:  Jane Bolin’s interests outside of the courts were very much tied to a philosophy of integration that she exhibited on the bench.  She fought against every act of segregation.  This commitment to integration led her to found, with Eleanor Roosevelt, the Wiltwyck School for Boys in upstate New York.

Q:  What most surprised you about Jane Bolin in your research of the book?

A:  I was most surprised to learn that she had a white housekeeper (German immigrant) at a time when the artificial markers of color/race would have suggested otherwise.

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in the SNCC

Any monograph, anthology or scholarly article written about or by an Africana woman scholar is eligible.

This year’s award was presented on October 8th at the 2011 Annual Association of Black Women Historian’s Luncheon.

Congratulations to all of the editors and contributors of Hands on the Freedom Plow!