A Usable Past

New Archival Digital Collection!  From “Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement“  An On-line Archival Collection, Special Collections Library at Duke University.

The materials in this on-line archival collection document various aspects of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States, and focus specifically on the radical origins of this movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Items range from radical theoretical writings to humourous plays to the minutes of an actual grassroots group.

Check out the sweet documents available, including this one below:

United Women's Contingent: March on Washington Against the War, April 24. (flyer)

From The Feminist Librarian Reads.

Student waitresses work in Wilder Hall

Women’s History Sources clued me in to a great exhibition on food at fellow Seven Sister school Mount Holyoke College called “Everything Is Wholesome and Abundant”: A Culinary Chronicle of Mount Holyoke College, 1837- today.  Check out the sweet (pun fully intended) culinary history of the oldest women’s college in the U.S.

Waitresses prepare to serve Deacon Porter's hat

And some great queer images I found of the gays:

Washington DC, Early 1970's

Enjoy!

So says James Oakes in The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (1982) where he dismantles Eugene Genovese’s argument in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) that the slaveholding class in the American South was a monolithic, paternalist group of upper-class white men.  Owners of enslaved Africans were very economically and socially diverse, and the New York Times recently uncovered this awesome map based on an 1860 slave Census that illustrates this diversity.

Thanks again to Sociological Images for this fascinating map.

Want to *really* feel no pain?

Try Pemberton’s French Wine of Coca!  Only five ounces of coca leaf per gallon of syrup!

Who says you shouldn’t mix your alcohol, cocaine and caffeine?

From Sociological Images.  Learn more at Professor Elliott’s Cabinet.

(Also – want to know how old Schweppes is?  Really old.)

Ah, the end of December.  Time to celebrate the holidays, seeing friends and family, finishing a semester, having successfully used all your flex benefits, your mastery at baking cookies, or keeping the dogs/kids alive for one more year.

Here are some photos to get you in the mood to don your party hat, pour yourself a drink, and crank up the happy tunes…

Happy Washingtonians witness soldiers, sailors and civilians joining a Conga line in Lafayette Square Park as a celebration near the White House warms up. (Library of Congress)

An unprecedented crowd, more than a million happy people, jam the crossroads of the world, Times Square, to demonstrate joy and relief that the war was over at last. Radio networks are on hand to broadcast the sound of celebration across the country. (National Archives)

“Lesbians in Revolt” by Charlotte Bunch and the Furies Collective, 1972

Lesbianism is the basic threat to male supremacy

Lesbianism is a threat to the ideological, political, personal, and economic basis of male supremacy.  The Lesbian threatens the ideology of male supremacy by destroying the lie about female inferiority, weakness, passivity, and by denying women’s ‘innate’ need for men (even for pro-creation if the science of cloning is developed).

The Lesbian’s independence and refusal to support one man undermines the personal power that men exercise over women.  Our rejection of heterosexual sex challenges male domination in its most individual and common form.  We offer all women something better than submission to personal oppression.  We offer the beginning of the end of collective and individual male supremacy.  Since men of all races and classes depend on female support and submission for practical tasks and feeling superior, our refusal to submit will force some to examine their sexist behavior, to break down their own destructive privileges over other humans, and to fight against those privileges in other men.  They will have to build new selves that do not depend on oppressing women and learn to live in social structures that do not give them power over anyone.

Heterosexuality separates women from each other; it makes women define themselves through men; it forces women to compete against each other for men and the privilege which comes through men and their social standing.  Heterosexual society offers women a few privileges as compensations if they give up their freedom: for example, mothers are respected and ‘honored’, wives or lovers are socially accepted and given some econoimc and emotional security , a woman gets physical protection on the street when she stays with her man, etc.  The privileges give heterosexual women a personal and political stake in maintaining the status quo.

Read the whole thing here!  H/T to Liza Cowan and The University of Michigan’s “Lesbians in the Twentieth Century” project.