- January 22, 1926. Washington, D.C. “Arcade Hockey Club.” And if roller hockey isn’t your cup of tea, we also have Billiards Dancing Bowling.
- Washington, D.C., circa 1919. “Sennett girls.” Producer Mack Sennett’s comedy reels featured a bevy of “bathing beauties,” among them Marvel Rea, seen here in the harlequin costume. National Photo Company.
- 1962, Seattle, Washington, USA – A little girl listens in on The Hearing Exhibition at the Seattle World’s Fair.
- Space Pilots. Minneapolis, Minnesota: A small boy’s dream of piloting a rocket ship through outer space came as nearly true as modern science could make it for plastic-helmeted Johnny Bower (left), and Neil Smith, both seven years old. The youngsters got their big break when Minneapolis-Honeywell’s Aeronautical company invited them, among other young sons of technical employees to visit the plant and see what their dads were doing. “Pilots” Bower and Smith are manipulating special computing equipment developed to duplicate characteristics of supersonic craft and the flight conditions they might be expected to encounter.
- Host Bud Collyer brings laughter and smiles to the faces of panelists Polly Bergen, Ralph Bellamy and Kitty Carlisle while Hy Gardner remains only mildly amused.
- Nazis burn the library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, 1933. In doing so countless texts and documentation of early 20th century LGBTQ* history disappears. Remember, it’s never “just some books.”
- Nun using card catalogue in the New York Public Library, 1944. Alfred Eisenstaedt.
Tags: 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1960s, Alfred Eisenstaedt, athletics, Berlin, Bud Collyer, Civil Rights Movement, comics, DC, film, gay rights, Hy Gardner, identity, Institute for Sexual Science, kiss, Kitty Carlisle, lesbians, libraries, Mack Sennett, Magnus Hirschfeld, Marvel Rea, nuns, Polly Bergen, protest, public history, queer, race, Ralph Bellamy, rockets, sexuality, space, television, theater, To Tell the Truth, World Fairs
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1962, Seattle, Washington, USA --- An 11-year-old girl bends light waves on the Hartl Disc inside the US Junior Laboratory of Science Pavilion at the World's Fair. This pavilion allows children to interact and gain knowledge of complicated science facts. --- Image by © Ted Spiegel/CORBIS
The FJ Holden, 1954.
No strings attached: Berlei girdles, 1954.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, circa 1905. "West Hotel." Busy both architecturally and commercially. 8x10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Co.
…aaaaaand Monkees!
Tags: 1900s, 1950s, 1960s, advertising, automobiles, hotels, LGBT, Minneapolis, music, protest, queer, sexuality, television, The Monkees, women's bodies, World Fairs
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Just what every young woman wants for Christmas…
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Aww, check out these delightfully non-sexist and completely factual VD awareness posters!
See them all at The San Francisco City Clinic’s awesome exhibit “100 Years of Sex: 1911-2011.”
Tags: 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 20th century, advertising, American history, art, Cold War, education, gender, health, hygiene, identity, posters, prostitution, sexuality, women's bodies, WWII
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Hey ladies! Need a little junk in the trunk? Or a breast massager? Lingerie for the little one? We got you covered!
Don’t worry, fellas! We’ve got treats for you, too!
Tags: 20th century, advertising, boys, breasts, children, clothing, gender, girls, sexuality, sexualization of youth, underwear, women's bodies
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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
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“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.
