Women's History Month 2023 at Wofford College: Select Library Resources

"Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) are aware of the impassioned testimony that this Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist delivered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Far fewer people are familiar with the speeches Hamer delivered at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, to say nothing of addresses she gave closer to home, or with Malcolm X in Harlem, or even at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. Until now, dozens of Hamer's speeches have been buried in archival collections and in the basements of movement veterans. After years of combing library archives, government documents, and private collections across the country, Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck have selected twenty-one of Hamer's most important speeches and testimonies"--Publisher's description.

"This paper examines Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms, a 1969 farming cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Specifically, this paper interrogates how Hamer’s identity as a Black southern woman influences her formulation and daily activities at Freedom Farms. Theoretically, this paper situates Hamer as an expert agrarian labourer and knowledge producer who exists within a history of Black women who have always been utilised for their agrarian knowledge, but given little credit. Hamer’s knowledge is a part of her body. This paper argues that Freedom Farms is a Black radical geography operating at three scales: the body, the farm, and the southern agrarian landscape. This paper utilises Hamer’s speeches, interviews, and other archival documents to understand Hamer’s efforts. Hamer’s agrarian landscape is wrought with pain, but also the insistence in the economic opportunity that exists for Black people in agrarian spaces"--From the article's abstract.

"Pays tribute to Fannie Lou Hamer, nonviolent motivator in the civil rights movement. Includes an interview with her, comments from individuals who knew her or her work, and scenes of her galvanizing civil rights workers"--Description from the database Academic Video Online.

By focusing on male leaders of the abolitionist movement, historians have often overlooked the great grassroots army of women who also fought to eliminate slavery. Here, Julie Roy Jeffrey explores the involvement of ordinary women--black and white--in the most significant reform movement prior to the Civil War. She offers a complex and compelling portrait of antebellum women's activism, tracing its changing contours over time. For more than three decades, women raised money, carried petitions, created propaganda, sponsored lecture series, circulated newspapers, supported third-party movements, became public lecturers, and assisted fugitive slaves. Indeed, Jeffrey says, theirs was the day-to-day work that helped to keep abolitionism alive. Drawing from letters, diaries, and institutional records, she uses the words of ordinary women to illuminate the meaning of abolitionism in their lives, the rewards and challenges that their commitment provided, and the anguished personal and public steps that abolitionism sometimes demanded they take. Whatever their position on women's rights, argues Jeffrey, their abolitionist activism was a radical step--one that challenged the political and social status quo as well as conventional gender norms.

"For most of the time everyday life is composed of a variety of mundane activities that go almost unnoticed and unrecorded. Many of these will follow a regular rhythm or routine that may vary over the life course as personal and family circumstances change. They may also change over a weekly or seasonal cycle. Although individually such activities could be viewed as trivial, collectively these routines and rhythms construct the fabric of all societies, economies, and communities. Studying everyday life in the past is hard because few sources record mundane activities in their entirety or over a whole life span. In this paper the diaries of one woman who lived in north Lancashire (UK) from 1928 to 2018 are analysed to chart the changing rhythms and routines of everyday activities over her life course. She began writing a diary at the age of 13 and completed a detailed daily account of her activities every year until shortly before her death. By sampling the extensive run of diaries, I identify the ways in which her activities changed over her life course, and how they fluctuated over weekly and seasonal cycles. I identify seven key life-course stages during which her commitments to employment, housework, caring, and leisure activities varied in response to her changing circumstances. The paper uses both quantitative and qualitative evidence from the diaries to illustrate a rarely seen aspect of change over the life course, and relates this evidence to theories of everyday life, including Lefebvre's work on 'rhythmanalysis'"--From the article's abstract.

"The remarkable untold story of electronic music's female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today"--Production company's description.

"A 2015 survey of twenty-seven elite colleges found that twenty-three per cent of respondents reported personal experiences of sexual misconduct on their campuses. That figure has not changed since the 1980s, when people first began collecting data on sexual violence. What has changed is the level of attention that the American public is paying to these statistics. Reports of sexual abuse repeatedly make headlines, and universities are scrambling to address the crisis. Their current strategy, Donna Freitas argues, is wholly inadequate. Universities must take a radically different approach to educating their campus communities about sexual assault and consent. Consent education is often a one-time affair, devised by overburdened student affairs officers. Universities seem more focused on insulating themselves from lawsuits and scandals than on bringing about real change. What is needed, Freitas shows, is an effort by the entire university community to deal with the deeper questions about sex, ethics, values, and how we treat one another, including facing up to the perils of hookup culture--and to do so in the university's most important space: the classroom. We need to offer more than a section in the student handbook about sexual assault, and expand our education around consent far beyond 'Yes Means Yes.' We need to transform our campuses into places where consent is genuinely valued"--Publisher's description.

"Title IX has been widely recognized as a crucial step toward gender equality in America. Yet, it remains unclear how the law actually functions, particularly how it has been used in response to gender disparities in higher education. This article provides the first systematic analysis of how Title IX has been mobilized at the postsecondary level. Drawing on new data acquired through seven Freedom of Information Act requests, I analyze all resolved Title IX complaints filed with the Office for Civil Rights against four-year nonprofit colleges and universities from 1994 to 2014. I find that the mobilization of Title IX has changed both in frequency and in kind during this period. Filings started to rise after 2000 and exploded after 2009, while sexual harassment complaints nearly equaled academic and athletic filings for the first time in 2014. Private, more selective institutions as well as schools located in states with more women serving in state legislatures face a disproportionate number of complaints relative to enrollment, indicating the importance of institutional context to legal mobilization"--From the article's abstract.

"In the years following the Civil Rights movement and the passage of Title IX in 1972, Dr. Donnis Thompson (a headstrong African-American female coach), Patsy Mink (the first Asian-American U.S. congresswoman), and Beth McLachlin (the team captain of a rag-tag female volleyball team) battle discrimination from the halls of Washington D.C. to the dusty volleyball courts of the University of Hawaii, fighting for the rights of young women to play sports. Rise of the Wahine is the winner of the Hawaii International Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary, and is both rich in women’s history and inspiring for all who desire to transform the world around them. It is perfect for coaches to view with their teams, families to view together, high school/college classes, and for young men to grow in a deeper understanding in their hearts for the struggles of women and girls around them. Above all, the film reveals how change-makers overcome injustice with wisdom, an innovative spirit, and without becoming victims to their circumstances"--Description from the database Academic Video Online.

"This book is for higher education faculty and staff who wish to deepen their approach to mentoring all students, but it is especially concerned with outsider students--those who come from groups that were long excluded from higher education, and who have been marginalized and minoritized by society and academia. Mentoring is difficult work for an abundance of reasons, and given higher educations troubled history of exclusion, as well as a contemporary context fraught with social and power imbalances, it can be especially challenging when the mentorship takes place across dimensions of difference, such as social class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, or ability. Mutuality, Mystery, and Mentorship in Higher Education examines the seemingly spontaneous and serendipitous connection between mentor and protégé, and points to a new vision of mentorship based on a deep sense of reciprocity between the two. Hinsdale proposes that if more mentors take a responsive, decolonizing approach to their work across difference, then the promise of social and class mobility through education might be realized for more of our students, and the tide might begin to turn toward an increasingly inclusive, intellectually open academy"--Publisher's description.

"There is limited research on what works to support expectant and parenting teens and how to successfully implement programs to serve them. This introductory article highlights key findings and lessons learned from the supplement “Supporting Expectant and Parenting Teens: The Pregnancy Assistance Fund,” which provides insights into serving expectant and parenting teens through the Pregnancy Assistance Fund. Rigorous research shows [that] programs can improve outcomes for teen parents. Key lessons learned from program
implementation include allowing some flexibility in implementation while clearly outlining core programmatic components, using partnerships to meet the multifaceted needs of young parents, hiring the right staff and providing extensive training, using strategies for engaging and recruiting teen parents, and planning for sustainability"--From the article's introduction.

"In 4 segments, Dr. Ruby Payne provides a wealth of tools for school counselors to build college readiness not just in high school, but starting in the early grades too"--Description from Academic Video Online.

"Takes as its starting point the provocative contention that Holocaust film scholarship has been marginalized academically despite the crucial role Holocaust film has played in fostering international awareness of the Nazi genocide and scholarly understandings of cinematic power. The book suggests political and economic motivations for this seeming paradox, the ideological parameters of which are evident in debates and controversies over Holocaust films themselves, and around Holocaust culture in general. Lending particular attention to four exemplary Holocaust art films--Korczak (1990), The Quarrel (1990), Entre Nous (1983), and Balagan (1994)--this book breaks disciplinary ground by drawing critical connections between public and scholarly debates over Holocaust representation, and the often sophisticated cinematic structures lending aesthetic shape to them in today's global arena"--Publisher's description.

"The purpose of this research study is to investigate the ethics of holocaust tourism as a niche market which is becoming very commercialised due to the growing demand for such activities at certain locations and to examine the motivating factors for tourists visiting these destinations. The main aim of this research is to explore whether holocaust tourism can be seen as education or exploitation. This will be investigated through a site visit to a holocaust tourism destination in Germany (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin) and a survey to identify those who engage in holocaust tourism, their motivations for doing so, and the outcome of their visits. Finally, this research study will provide results on the ethics of holocaust tourism and its educational value through a review of the academic research as well as the opinions of those who have or will engage in holocaust tourism. One of the main conclusions is that both primary participants and secondary authors spoke of how, when visiting these sites, you create a connection to the destination and a sense of what occurred at the location"--The article's abstract.

"Antisemitism in the US and Europe is worsening in ways not seen since the 1930s, mutating across cultures, borders and ideologies. Explore its viral behavior through interviews with victims, witnesses, antisemites, and others"--Description from the database Academic Video Online.

"For over a decade, Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education has served as the guide to multicultural art education, connecting everyday experience, social critique, and creative expression with classroom learning. The much-anticipated Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education continues to provide an accessible and practical tool for teachers, while offering new art, essays, and content to account for transitions and changes in both the fields of art and education. A beautifully-illustrated collaboration of over one hundred artists, writers, curators, and educators from in the contemporary art world, this volume offers thoughtful and innovative materials that challenge the normative practices of arts education and traditional art history. Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education builds upon the pedagogy of the original to present new possibilities and modes of understanding art, culture, and their relationships to students and ourselves"--Publisher's description.

"Ganesh's work has also been described as mythic, postcolonial, and rebellious, as it brings together a diverse array of images and referents from Indian mythic poetry; the Progressive Artists' Group (one of the most influential groups of modern artists in India, formed in 1947 and active until 1956); comics and graphic novels from the United States, India, and Japan; Mexican muralism from the early-twentieth century; contemporary street art and graffiti; as well as phantasmagorical motifs from Egon Schiele, Hieronymus Bosch, and Albrecht Dürer and autobiographical meditations in the vein of Bhupen Khakar, Frieda Kahlo, and Ana Mendieta. The mythological figure of 'The Negro,' who was always excluded from the good, the true, and the beautiful in Western aesthetics on account of his otherness, comes to embody the image of physical perfection and aesthetic idealization in which, in the canonical figure of the nude, Western culture constructed its own self-image. Some twenty-five years on, the problem in a solely oppositional reading of art that aims to push the boundaries of the canon is that it centers 'the center' as the subject and reduces the frames, critiques, and contexts for the work in question to a conversation with dominant modes of power and to a project of recuperating marginal subjects"--Summary provided by the journal Feminist Studies.

"Chitra Ganesh’s drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Her wall installations, comics, charcoal drawings, and mixed-media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms"--Description from the Hammer Museum.