Happy 4th! I hope everyone had a great long weekend. Here are a few links and images to keep you feeling celebratory.
Cyd Charisse - c. 1940s
1936 --- Ziegfeld girls march on the beach with an American flag. From left to right: Claire Owens, Claire Manners, Frances McInerny, Mary Lange, Monica Bannister, Bonnie Bannon, and Wanda Perry. --- Image by © John Springer Collection/CORBIS
“American Gothic,” considered to be Parks’s signature image, was taken in Washington, D.C., in 1942, during the photographer’s fellowship with the Farm Security Administration, a government agency set up by President Roosevelt to aid farmers in despair. “It’s the first professional image I ever made,” Parks says, “created on my first day in Washington.” Roy Stryker, who led the FSA’s very best documentary photographers—Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, etc.—told Parks to go out and get acquainted with the city. Parks was amazed by the amount of bigotry and discrimination he encountered on his very first day. “White restaurants made me enter through the back door, white theaters wouldn’t even let me in the door, and as the day went on things just went from bad to worse.” Stryker told Parks to go talk with some older black people who had lived their entire lives in Washington and see how they had coped. “That’s how I met Ella,” Parks explains. Ella Watson was a black charwoman who mopped floors in the FSA building. Parks asked her about her life, which she divulged as having been full of misery, bigotry and despair. Parks’s simple question, “Would you let me photograph you?” and Ella’s affirmative response, led to the photographer’s most recognizable image of all time. “Two days later Stryker saw the image and told me I’d gotten the right idea but was going to get all the FSA photogs fired, that my image of Ella was ‘an indictment of America.’ I thought the image had been killed but one day there it was, on the front page of The Washington Post .” At the time, Parks couldn’t have realized that the image would go on to become the symbol of the pre-civil rights era’s treatment of minorities. (PDN)
Not everyone is allowed the same opportunities and privileges, however…
Equal Rights Amendment protest.
First Lady Betty Ford works at her desk, where a “Don’t Tread on Me” Equal Rights Amendment doormat hangs. June 30, 1975.
Stonewall uprising, 1969
Finally, some fun times and Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., circa 1920. "Father Fealey and family." Ignatius Fealey, post chaplain at Fort Myer and future pastor of St. Agnes Catholic Church. National Photo Company Collection glass negative.
Washington, D.C. "Helen Davis, 1924." Helen's father, Dwight Davis, was Secretary of War in the Coolidge administration and a tennis champion who founded the Davis Cup. National Photo glass negative.
Freaks and Geeks (1999)
Tags: 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1970s, American Gothic, Betty Ford, Cyd Charisse, DC, Equal Rights Amendment, Gordon Parks, photographs, race, Stonewall, television, women's bodies, Ziegfeld girls
Posted by Usable Past under public history
No Comments
ANGELA DAVIS AND TONI MORRISON ON MARCH 28, 1974. PHOTO BY JILL KREMENTZ.
SELMA, Ala.—Freedom Day. Police arrest demonstrators from the SNCC for holding placards urging blacks to register to vote in front of the federal building, Oct. 7, 1963.
After Dinner At The Farm
Pearl Bailey as Madame Fleur in the 1954 Broadway musical, House of Flowers, with her “flowers”, Josephine Premice (Tulip), Enid Mosier (Pansy) and Enid Moore (Gladiola). Image via Corbis.
Eartha Kitt teaching a dance class, James Dean in the background.
Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin in the late 1950s.
Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a “Vengeance” dive bomber, Tennessee (LOC) 1943 (by The Library of Congress)
Tags: 1920s, 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 20th century, art, Civil Rights Movement, photographs, politics, technology, women's bodies
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!
Tags: 1950s, 1970s, 19th century, 20th century, activism, archives, feminism, food, identity, photographs, queer, sexuality, women's bodies, women's history
I ran across a number of these issues when I was processing Joan Biren’s papers at the Sophia Smith Collection, and they were great. Claire Bond Potter over at Tenured Radical and Historian at Wesleyan University posted about the publication and reminded me of how awesome it was.
Check out more dyke-aliciousness at Dyke: A Quarterly.
Tags: 1970s, activism, American history, dykes, feminism, gender, identity, lesbians, magazines, queer, sexuality, women's voices
From Ms.
“She’s rich, she’s beautiful, she’s smart. She has everything…but does she have everything? Not if she doesn’t have a Rusco American Bidet!”
This ad was reprinted in the June 1978 No Comment section of Ms.
