Highlights Archives
More Women's History Sources Go Online
March is Women's History Month, an event that highlights the contributions of women to events in history — and which traces it origins to International Women's Day in 1911. Over the past several months leading up to Women's History Month, the Society's library and archives have reproduced a large number of original historical documents about women's lives here on the Society's Web site:
- "A Few Thoughts of the Long Ago" by Harriet de Neveu
In this remarkable memoir written when she was 86, de Neveu (1818-1906) recalls her childhood in Green Bay and her home life after marrying in 1838 and settling at Buena Vista, outside Fond du Lac. She describes her managing the household, parenting, interactions with American Indian neighbors, panic caused by the 1862 Sioux uprising, and other stories of homesteading on the Wisconsin frontier.
- New Historic Images
More than 500 pictures documenting women's lives have been added to Wisconsin Historic Images. These include early pictures of Milwaukee-Downer College, the state's oldest women's educational institution, and candid snapshots of Wisconsin leaders such as Belle La Follette. There are also dozens of new historic photographs of women at work and play.
- Report and Recommendations of the Wisconsin Legislative Committee to Investigate the White Slave Traffic
Last year we mounted a selection of working-class women's testimony before the Legislature's "vice committee," and recently several readers asked to see the committee's official 1914 report. This final report contains private investigators' reports on pimps, prostitutes, and brothels around the state; a table showing the characteristics of 60 prostitutes; the legal, economic and political aspects of the problem; and a discussion of what induced women to become prostitutes during the era of sweatshops.
- World War Two Women's Letters and Diaries
Last summer, to support Wisconsin Public Television's airing of Ken Burns' The War, we published on the Web two fascinating World War II documents by Wisconsin women. Signe Skott Cooper, a nurse from Middleton, Wisconsin, sent many letters home during her training in Virginia and her assignment to a military hospital in India, 1944-1945. Her letters describe segregated medical facilities, homesickness, her flight to Assam, the wards where she worked, and the nurses' social activities. Frances Otis of Oshkosh spent much of the war on the other side of the world from Cooper. She was trapped in Florence, Italy, when the war broke out and kept a diary that provides an almost daily account of the hardships of living under Axis occupation and Allied bombardment. The whole diary is online, including her eyewitness accounts of the murder of 40 boys who refused to join the Facist army, a night of intensive bombing, the cruelty of German soldiers in Italy, the battle for Florence when Allied troops arrived, and her feelings when the city was finally liberated.
Since last year's Women's History Month, the entire archives of our Wisconsin Magazine of History have been made available free online. Over the decades dozens of its feature articles focused on women. You can see those here (click the thumbnail image to read the text). You'll also find a short overview of women's history among our essays on specific topics in Wisconsin history.
:: Posted March 3, 2008
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