"...these visible and invisible things..."
Wrapping up Women's History Month by exploring online archives, making Malinda Russell's lemon cake, & celebrating people "whose names we do not easily remember."
In “Woman Born of Man,” a 1963 speech to university students in Florida, writer Lillian Smith reflects on her generation’s youthful attitude towards women’s suffrage activists: 1
“…though we still couldn’t vote we had acquired a great many little privileges and rights: we could wear bloomers in gym classes; we could wear divided skirts when riding horses, we did sneak a cigarette if we wanted to…We felt we were doing all right; and when we read about those women in the late and middle nineteenth century screaming for women’s rights, we sometimes laughed. What my generation did not know was how many important legal rights had been won by those screams: rights that have to do with property, with the right to get divorce, with the right to hold on to one’s money, etc. We were a little ashamed of those brave but rather noisy women who won for us such a nice handful of our civil rights. Of course, we don’t have all of them now; we have a great many.
And these women did this for us. Women whose names we do not easily remember.”
In the United States, the framing of Women's History Month often emphasizes a presidential proclamation that has been repeated each March since 1988. But legal recognition followed decades of global activism rooted in labor and social movements. This year, the annual proclamation and related messages from the government call for an erasure of history and degradation of the rights of specific groups of women and are therefore—willfully, of course—obscuring the point entirely.
In 1980, when President Jimmy Carter declared the first official Women’s History Week, he stated: “As Dr. Gerda Lerner has noted, 'Women's History is Women's Right.' It is an essential and indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long-range vision…Understanding the true history of our country will help us to comprehend the need for full equality under the law for all our people.”2 Today, there is a direct threat to work that fosters a deeper understanding of the past. But, as individuals, organizations, and communities, we do have access to resources that can help us engage with the true(r) history that shapes our present reality, no matter our gender. We can stay committed to using those tools and celebrating the pioneers of the past who gave them to us.
Feminist Journals and Magazines, Digitized
In last March’s Bulletin, we looked at mainstream women’s magazines in the United States, inspired by a Women’s History Month event at the San Francisco Public Library. While magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping had vast reach in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, parallel feminist magazines challenged their messaging. These alternative publications may have had short runs or modest circulation in terms of numbers and geography, but they gave people a vehicle for sharing ideas that pushed far outside the limits of societal norms.
Some subjects earlier feminist magazines tackled may feel like things we can now take for granted, like Lillian Smith’s “bloomers in gym class.” But most remain highly relevant. Beyond specific issues, there is much to learn from how people reached out to each other through articles, editorials, letters, poems, stories, and design. Many libraries hold physical copies of rarer magazines (see the New York Public Library catalog for an amazing selection), and it’s becoming more and more possible to access such publications thanks to efforts to put them online and make them available to anyone, anywhere. Below is just a sampling of what is out there.
The Freewoman, from the Modernist Journals Project
The Modernist Journals Project has digitized copies of English-language journals from the 1890s to the 1920s, offering a collection that ranges from Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth to The Atlantic Monthly. This includes three publications shaped by Dora Marsden as editor: The Freewoman (1911-1912), The New Freewoman (1913), and The Egoist (1914-1919). Marsden founded The Freewoman after breaking from the suffrage organization Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU); she wanted the magazine to cover issues beyond voting rights and to delve into subjects rarely discussed in print, like sex work and birth control. Where The Freewoman looked at all aspects of life from a feminist lens, its successors moved away from an explicit feminist focus.
“The publication of The Freewoman marks an epoch. It marks the point at which Feminism in England ceases to be impulsive and unaware of its own features, and becomes definitely self-conscious and introspective.”
—The Freewoman, issue 1.1, 1911
Urania, from the LSE Digital Library
The Women’s Library holds over 3,500 magazines and journals, including twenty-three issues of Urania dating from 1919 to 1940 that are available through the LSE Digital Library. Urania was founded in 1916 by five feminist activists: Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Irene Clyde, Dorothy Cornish, and Jessey Wade. While their other pursuits ranged from international law to animal rights to literature, the founders shared an aim to abolish the gender binary. The journal aggregated content from other publications alongside original poems, brief personal accounts, and articles about scientific research related to gender (including early gender confirmation surgeries). It was entirely self-published and privately circulated; interested “friends” subscribed or requested available back issues by writing directly to the editors.
“Urania denotes the company of those who are firmly determined to ignore the dual organization of humanity in all its manifestations.”
—Urania, Issue 13, 1919
Fem, from UNAM’s Archivos Históricos del Feminismo
The Archivos Históricos del Feminismo project, hosted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), has made all print issues of Mexican magazine Fem (1976-2005) accessible online and searchable by author, date, etc. Fem is one of the oldest and longest-running feminist magazines in Latin America. Its content includes poems, short stories, criticism, and a range of articles on social issues impacting women in Mexico and Latin America. It was founded by Alaíde Foppa, a poet-activist who lived in exile in Mexico and disappeared upon returning to Guatemala in 1980, and Margarita García Flores, a lawyer, activist and writer. Literary icon Elena Poniatowska was an early contributing editor.
[Fem Collection.]
“fem se propone señalar desde diferentes ángulos lo que puede y debe cambiar en la condición social de las mujeres; invita al análisis y a la reflexión…Pretende ir reconstuyendo una historia del feminismo, para muchos desconocida. e infomrar sobre lo que en este campo sucede hoy en el mundo, y particularmente, sobre lo que pasa en Mexico y en America Latina.”
—Fem, Issue 1.1, 1976.
Feminist Voices, from JSTOR
JSTOR has compiled a wide range of alternative magazines, newspapers, and journals from various library collections for the open access project Independent Voices. The Feminist section includes more than seventy-five publications from the 1960s and 1970s—an incredible concentration of second-wave feminist writing, art, and commentary. Many feature work by writers like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Nellie Wong, Tillie Olsen, Alejandra Piznarik, and more.
Some examples:
Ain’t I a Woman?: Iowa Cita, Iowa
Up from Under: New York City, New York
13th Moon: Albany, NY
Country Women: Albion, California
Big Mama Rag: Denver, Colorado
The Lesbian Tide: Los Angeles, California
[Feminist, Independent Voices.]
From Archive to Art + Community
In a post for the LSE Review of Books blog, Jenny White explains how “the longstanding interconnections and solidarities between feminism, trans rights and sapphic lives” are reflected in the pages of Urania. One of Urania’s founders was Irene Clyde/Thomas Baty, whom today we might call transfeminine and/or nonbinary. In addition to their work with Urania, Clyde published Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), a utopian novel set in a genderless land, and Eve’s Sour Apples (1934), a collection of essays that pushed against gender stereotypes and societal expectations for women. [Cita’s post featuring Baty/Clyde and nine other pioneering trans/gender-nonconforming writers.]
Rebuilding Urania, an ongoing work by Irish visual artist Renèe Helèna Browne, demonstrates how digging into archival material—in this case, issues of Urania—for creative projects can foster present-day connection. What began as an “oral archiving project” has expanded to include drawings, soundscapes, murals, and a screening of the early films of Cheryl Dunye (director of The Watermelon Woman). The project has engaged contributors working across disciplines, “starting to build a community and friendships around ideas in the work.” [Clay AD on Renèe Helèna Browne's 'Rebuilding Urania'', for LUX Scotland.]
In addition to being the last day of Women’s History Month, today is International Transgender Day of Visibility. Organizations like the Digital Transgender Archive and Invisible Histories are working to make trans history more accessible, as are libraries, museums, and independent researchers around the world. The possibilities for what we can do with that accessibility as artists, writers, and creative communities are endless.
“My life would have been so much different if I had known a fraction of what we are discussing today about historical figures, particularly about how our experience has been erased culturally…what you call history is what I call childhood, but history and being able to excavate these pieces of evidence of people’s lives is vitally important.”
—Christine Burns, from “A Look into the Trans Archive,” a virtual event hosted by The British Library, 2021.
Print—>Web—>Kitchen
Bringing a recipe from the past to life in your kitchen may function as a form of culinary communing. But even if you don’t get in touch with any feminist forebears in the process, you’ll get to eat cake.
Malinda Russell was the author of A Domestic Cook Book (1866), the first published cookbook by an African American woman. It opens with an account of her life, her career, and her reasons for publishing the book. The brief narrative sheds some light on what life was like for a free Black woman of talent and experience working in the South during a tumultuous, momentous period of American history.
“I have been advised to have my Receipts published, as they are valuable, and every family has use for them. Being compelled to leave the South on account of my Union principles, in the time of the Rebellion, and having been robbed of all my hard-earned wages which I had saved; and as I am now advanced in years, with no other means of support than my own labor; I have put out this book with the intention of benefiting the public as well as myself.”
—Malinda Russell, A Domestic Cook Book, 1866
A pdf of the original is available to all via the Malinda Russell Recipe Testing Project. The group of culinary historians behind the project, which began as a lockdown-era endeavor, have adapted several recipes for modern kitchens and methods. “Our mission is to give life back to Malinda Russell’s fabulous recipes,” their site explains, “by working out all of the details, and then making this research available to anyone interested in the uniquely varied set of dessert recipes that she published in 1866.”
Below is a recipe that Cita editorial director Jessi Haley tried out, originally adapted by Mercy Ingraham (see this post for her version, with notes and historical context around lemon cakes in the United States).
Malinda Russell’s Lemon Cake
Originally adapted by Mercy Ingraham for The Malinda Russel Recipe Testing Project, notes from Jessi.
Ingredients:
1 cup unsalted butter
2.5 cups cane sugar
4 large eggs, separated
1 cup milk (I used almond milk and ~1 tablespoon of leftover heavy cream without issue)
Zest and juice of ~1 lemon (I used 2 Meyer lemons)
4 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
Instructions:
Assemble all the ingredients and allow them to come to room temperature.
Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Butter a 10” Bundt pan well. (This is a large cake, so you could probably cut the ingredients in half and use a 10” cake pan, but I haven’t tried that.)
Cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl, beating until light and fluffy.
In another bowl, beat the egg yolks well until light colored and mix into the butter/sugar mixture. Add the lemon juice and zest and beat to distribute evenly.
Add the milk into the batter and mix. (The batter looked slightly curdled at this point but it didn’t seem to be a problem.)
In a clean bowl with a clean whisk or whisk attachment, beat the egg whites until stiff and gently fold them into the batter with a spatula.
Mix the flour and baking soda together and sift into the batter, stirring well but gently after each addition. Mix just until you can no longer see any trace of the flour. (I used my stand mixer for this.)
Pour the batter into prepared pan and bake for 60 minutes in the preheated oven, until cake begins to pull away from the sides of the pan, springs back when touched in the center, and a toothpick comes out clean.
Allow to cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes; then unmold and continue to cool.
Serving Suggestion:
Mercy Ingraham recommends a light lemon glaze, with the suggestion to try Mrs. Russell’s Cold Icing from A Domestic Cook Book. That recipe calls for five egg whites and beating with “a silver spoon or wooden paddle” (you can see why the culinary historian’s adaptations are called for!). Since I had already used four eggs for the cake—and the situation with eggs is what it is—I made a simpler glaze that involved whisking the juice of one Meyer lemon with a scant cup of confectioner’s sugar. I drizzled it over the cake once it had cooled.
What Else?
Celebrate the close of Women’s History Month by visiting our catalog at citapress.org and reading a book, printing a zine (maybe to give to a friend), or downloading a reading guide. And share this Bulletin with a friend!
Register for an upcoming free online lectures series that aims to explore radical, community-centered, and non-Western approaches to technology. Presented by Futuress as part of their project “Unwired Currents—Imagining Technologies Otherwise.”
Read about how metadata can be a tool—and a hindrance!—to preserving American women’s history at the Smithsonian. From Educopia’s own Rachel Mattson!
Visit the National Gallery of Art (in person or online) to see the exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist. Learn more about Catlett via the National Museum of African American History.
Explore the Cita Canon Spotlight archive to learn about women writers and artists you may or may not know, all of whom shaped the future of art, literature, and women’s rights.
“This kind of realism is the realm of the creative writer: to show the invisible things actually present in contemporary life. This is one duty; one that we can commit ourselves to. Then we have another duty, another commitment to make. And that is to show it reflected against the future; and the past. Then we have a third commitment: to show these visible and invisible things as they look to each of us, in the dim depths of our own heart and mind, as they link on to what they find there.
This is art as the writer deals with it.”
—Lillian Smith, in a letter to Gerda Lerner from August 1961. Lerner had written to Smith for advice and affirmation as a writer. In 1979, Lerner chaired The Women's History Institute, which became instrumental in establishing Women’s History Month.
From The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith. Edited by Michelle Cliff. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 1978.
He went on to call for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which was first introduced in Congress in 1923.