Category Archives: Bingham Center

The Power of This Story: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Durham 1960-1990

Whole Women Carologue

 

The Sallie Bingham Center has partnered with the Women’s Studies Senior Seminar to present a series of public conversations exploring how social change happened here in Durham. Each panel features individuals and representatives of organizations whose papers are held by the Bingham Center.  Please note the different locations for each panel.

 

 

Panel 1:

Joanne Abel, YWCA’s Women Center, Triangle Area Lesbian Feminists, and War Resisters League
Barb Smalley, Ladyslipper Music
David Jolly, NC Lesbian and Gay Health Project

Date: Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Time: 5:30-6:30 p.m. (Reception to follow)
Where: East Duke Parlors, East Campus, Duke University

 

Panel 2:

Jeanette Stokes, Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South
Kat Turner, Lesbian Health Resource Center and NC Lesbian and Gay Health Project
Donna Giles, Triangle Area Lesbian Feminists and Feminary

Date: Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Time: 5:30-6:30 p.m. (Reception to follow)
Where: Perkins Library, Room 217, West Campus, Duke University

 

Panel 3:

Mandy Carter, Southerners On New Ground (SONG) and War Resisters League
Caitlin Breedlove, Southerners on New Ground (SONG)
Steve Schewel, Founder, Independent Weekly

Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Time:  5:30-6:30 p.m. (Reception to follow)
Where: Durham County Library, 300 N. Roxboro Street, Durham, NC

 

Sponsored by Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, Rubenstein Library; Durham County Library; Duke Program in Women’s Studies; Vice Provost of Academic Affairs; the Pauli Murray Project; and in conjunction with Women’s Studies Senior Seminar.

The Spiritual is Political

With generous assistance from a 2012 Mary Lily Research Grant, I visited the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture this past summer to conduct research for my dissertation, “The Spiritual is Political: How the Southern Baptist Convention Debated Feminism and Found the New Right.”

I focused primarily on records in the Resource Center for Women in Ministry in the South collection.  The Resource Center was founded by Jeanette Stokes in 1977 to provide support for women who were in ministerial leadership roles.  Its extensive archival records at Duke University include back issues of its publication, “South of the Garden,” materials from its annual “Women in Ministry in North Carolina” conferences, and the newsletters and paraphernalia of affiliated religious organizations.

newsletter image
Illustration from the “Southern Baptists for Family and Equal Rights” newsletter. From the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South records.

In my examination of the Resource Center files, I came across an interesting collection of newsletters for Southern Baptists in North Carolina who supported feminism in the 1970s and 1980s.  These newsletters were produced by “Southern Baptists for the Family and Equal Rights,” or SBFER, an organization formed in 1981 to create support for the Equal Rights Amendment and issues related to women’s health and welfare in the North Carolina Baptist Convention and in state politics.SBFER was short-lived, lasting less than five years. Though it failed to attract considerable support in the national denomination, it enjoyed limited success as a local organization.  After its efforts to promote the ERA in the state were unsuccessful and the deadline for ERA ratification came and went, the organization turned its focus to women’s ordination and other expressions of feminism in the Southern Baptist Convention.  After 1985, however, the organization began to decline as it became clear that the denomination was not returning to a moderate course.The SBFER’s newsletters are crucial for my dissertation as they provide evidence of grassroots feminism within the Southern Baptist Convention at a time when the denomination was reversing course on many issues regarding gender equality, in full retreat from moderate positions it had taken in the 1970s.  These materials from the early 1980s reveal strong dissenting views, which complicate the narrative of the Southern Baptist Convention’s right turn on social issues.  SBFER aimed to throw a wrench in the plans of the denomination’s new conservative leaders. And while they were unable to stop the Southern Baptist Convention from aligning itself with the Religious Right, they did succeed in keeping women’s issues part of denominational dialogue in the 1980s.

Post contributed by Laura J. Foxworth, Ph.D. candidate,  University of South Carolina, Department of History.

Susan Reverby to Lecture on “Escaping Melodramas”

Date: Thursday, November 1, 2012
Time: Lecture begins at 5:30 p.m.; Reception to follow
Location: Gothic Reading Room, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, NC
Contact information: Rachel Ingold at (919) 684-8549 or rachel.ingold@duke.edu

 

Please join the History of Medicine Collections for our fall lecture to be held on Thursday, November 1, at 5:30 pm in the Gothic Reading Room. Susan Reverby, PhD, will be presenting on “Escaping Melodramas: Reflections on Telling the Histories of the Public Health Service’s Research in Tuskegee and Guatemala.” Susan Reverby is a historian of American women, medicine, and nursing, and is the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College.

She has written one book and edited a second on the Tuskegee Syphilis study (1932-72), the longest running non-therapeutic research study in U.S. history that involved the United States Public Health Service and more than 600 African American men in the counties surrounding Tuskegee, Alabama. Her scholarship has appeared in a broad range of publications from scholarly journals to editorials in the popular press. Professor Reverby speaks widely on the history of gender, ethics, and health care issues.

This event is co-sponsored by the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, Duke University Department of History, and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and the History of Medicine.

Make Your Own History Reading, Sept. 19th

Date: Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: Rare Book Room
Contact Information: Laura Micham, 919-660-5828 or laura.m@duke.edu

Cover of Make Your Own HistoryJoin the staff of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture for a reading from the new anthology Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century (Litwin Books, 2012) with co-editor Kelly Wooten, research services librarian with the Sallie Bingham Center, and contributor Alexis Gumbs, founder of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind multimedia community school and long-time Bingham Center collaborator.

Light refreshments will be served!

Several other contributors to this volume have Bingham Center connections, including co-editor Lyz Bly, Alison Piepmeier, and Kate Eichhorn, all Mary Lily Research Grant recipients; Sarah Dyer, donor of the ground-breaking Sarah Dyer Zine Collection; and Angela DiVeglia,  former intern.

Make Your Own History has chapters about colleting zines; documenting the LGBT community: the future of collecting electronic and online records; and a look at how the Second Wave continues to contribute to the feminist movement. Read more about this book or buy a copy online from Litwin Books.

Post contributed by Laura Micham, Merle Hoffman Director of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.h

Dwayne Dixon Zine Collection Expands

Cover of Smash Action, no. 3Dwayne Dixon, a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Duke,  recently donated a treasure trove of new titles to the his zine collection, part of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.

Dixon wrote in an email to Bingham Center archivists:

While DJing a party last night at a professor’s house, I was told by a faculty member in the Music Dept that my zine collection was being used by a grad instructor teaching a course on punk history. I was so thrilled, as you can imagine, and it inspired me to unbox the last treasured horde of zines. I must confess I held the best in reserve in my initial donation. I have approx. 68 zines that are aesthetically, politically, and creatively rich.  Hand-screened covers, some of the best zine writing ever, and incendiary politics that changed my life.  I want others to be moved, too—by Mimi Nguyen’s Slander zine, by [anonymous’] Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars zine, by the dense tangle of punk and race and gender and a changing America of the last 2 decades.

As Dixon mentions in his note, classes frequently use zines as a resource for learning. As with any other historical manuscript or artifact, zines help illuminate specific aspects of culture through their method of creation and their content. Zine authors use the freedom of the medium to confront important cultural issues as well as to divulge their own reflections and emotions. The handmade nature of zines also allows for more artistic presentations of information, creating visually engaging objects that also serve as reading material.

Cover of A Renegade's Handbook to Love & Sabotage, issue 1While zine culture still exists in a variety of vibrant formats, the movement was at its most powerful from the late 1980’s to the mid-1990’s. During that time, Dixon snapped up a great number of these publications and eventually gifted them to the Bingham Center in 2001 with an initial donation of over a hundred zines. Including the latest addition, the Dixon collection now contains almost two hundred zines chronicling topics such as body image, depression, politics, racial inequality, history, and personal exploration.

The new addition has been added to the finding aid and is now available for research.  Come take a look!

Post contributed by Rosemary K. J. Davis,  Bingham Center volunteer.

New Acquisitions Week, Day Two: Self-Portraits in Image and Word

We’re celebrating the beginning of a new fiscal year with a week’s worth of new acquisitions from the first half of 2012.  Two newly acquired selections will be featured in a post every day this week.  All of these amazing resources will be available for today’s scholars, and for future generations of researchers in the Rubenstein Library!

  • Quintilian, Institutiones Oratoriae: This 1482 incunable (or book printed in Europe before 1501) printed in Tarvisio, Italy, is a rare edition of one of the great Renaissance guides to rhetoric.  The remarkable copy now at Duke is unique, bearing the extensive handwritten annotations of a 16th-century scholar, Augustino Pistoia (or Agostino da Pistoia).  In addition, Pistoia drew two self-portraits at the end of the text, and noted the date on which he finished reading the work: “On the 20th of October [?] 1583 I Augostino Pistoia have read this book by Quintiliano under the teaching of mag. Pompeo Gilante my master/ 1583 1584.”
Self-portrait by Augustino Pistoia, in Quintilian, Institutiones Orationae (1482).
  • Edith Ella Baldwin Papers: Born in 1870 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Ms. Baldwin was an artist, craftswoman, and author.  Frustrated in her early attempts to publish her writings, Baldwin decided instead to keep one copy of each of her works for posterity, making a binding for each herself.  The collection consists of 38 unpublished volumes of stories, novels, poetry, lecture notes, and family history, including a novel about sex education for women, diary excerpts describing her visits with painter Mary Cassatt in 1890s Paris, and copies of letters from her aunt, Ellen Frances Baldwin, dating from 1848 to 1854. Edith Baldwin’s writings tend to cover timeless themes of religion and love, although many compositions feature contemporary issues such as automobiles, labor strikes, and women’s rights. The Baldwin Papers add to the rich body of materials documenting women’s literary expression in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.

Previous posts:

 

E-Records in the Reading Room

Special Collections Library reading rooms often require special equipment to view non-traditional record formats such as VHS players, cassette players, microfilm readers, etc. The Rubenstein Library recently welcomed a new piece to the set: a desktop computer.

Rubenstein Library Research Services staff check out the reading room's new e-records computer work station.
Rubenstein Library Research Services staff check out the reading room's new e-records computer work station.

Though public computers have been available in our reference room for a long time to assist in finding and requesting physical materials in the reading room this new machine has been designed to support providing local access to electronic records and audio/video materials.

Some of the materials you can explore on the computer include:

Visit the reading room today and start that e-research!

Post contributed by Seth Shaw, Electronic Records Archivist.

Black Feminist Filmmaking: The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye

Black Feminist FilmmakingDate: Thursday, April 19, 2012
Time: 5:00 PM **Please note new time!**
Location: FHI Garage, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse, Duke University
Contact: Kelly Wooten, kelly.wooten(at)duke.edu

Cheryl Dunye’s work as a Black lesbian filmmaker has challenged, transformed and sometimes even stood in for a conversation about race, feminism, lesbianism, the archive and the practice of contemporary film.

This program will include a screening of selected shorts from the often neglected early work of Cheryl Dunye followed by a panel discussion featuring local Black lesbian and queer filmmakers Yvonne Welbon, Katina Parker and Julia Roxanne Wallace, moderated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. This program coincides with the public launch of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind‘s new Black Feminist Film School. Light refreshments will be served.

Co-sponsored by African and African American Studies, the program in Women’s Studies, the program in the Study of Sexualities, the program in the Arts of the Moving Image, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.

A Decidedly Feminist Taxonomy: Meredith Tax Comes to the Sallie Bingham Center

Meredith Tax, taken by Miriam Berkeley
Meredith Tax, taken by Miriam Berkeley

The personal and professional papers of writer, organizer, and leading women’s movement activist Meredith Tax came to the Sallie Bingham Center in 2010. To celebrate the acquisition of this extensive collection the Center will host a symposium in Tax’s honor on April 13 and 14 called Acting Across Borders: The Future of the Feminist 1970s. Along with Meredith Tax, distinguished African scholar and activist Patricia McFadden will present the keynote address of an event that aims to grapple with how the interventions and methodologies of the women’s liberation movement inform current and future social justice movements. In anticipation of her trip to Duke, Meredith took a few minutes to share her reasons for putting her papers here and to give a sense of what people can expect to learn at the symposium.

Why did you decide to put your papers in the Bingham Center?

I investigated several feminist archives and chose the Bingham Center because it had a much more energetic and activist approach to archival work than I saw elsewhere. I want my papers to be used not only by scholars but by young people who want to learn from the history of earlier social movements. Because the Bingham Center does outreach to inform students about its collections and gives fellowships for researchers to work in its archive, I think my papers will be most accessible there.

What would you tell students about the upcoming symposium celebrating your work?

We are at the dawn of a period of increasing political activism. Attendees at this symposium will learn from the life stories of people who shaped the women’s movement here and internationally. Speakers will talk about their own work and life experiences. They will discuss the way issues of race and class impacted the relationship between feminism and the left, the development of ecofeminism and international women’s movements, and the centrality of questions of sexuality, gender, and LGBT rights. Feminists from Southern Africa, Algeria, and India will discuss their own rich and complex confrontations with sexism, nationalism and religious fundamentalism. These stories will show that, contrary to the right wing myth that feminists are white middle class women who are just out for themselves, feminists in the US and elsewhere have always grappled with issues of race and class, war and peace, nationalism and the environment, and that these efforts continue from one generation to the next.

Frances Ansley and Meredith Tax at a Bread & Roses-organized protest in 1970. Ansley will also speak at the upcoming symposium.
Frances Ansley and Meredith Tax at a Bread & Roses-organized protest in 1970.

What are some of the topics you plan to address in your keynote speech at the symposium?

I will tell the story of my life, from a childhood shaped by the sexism of the 50s to the early days of the Boston women’s movement, battles within the left and my own struggle to overcome the ignorance resulting from class and race privilege, my participation in the reproductive rights movement, and my work in International PEN (Postsecondary Education Network International) as part of a global movement for women’s human rights which must go on in this new period to link the struggle for social and economic justice and sustainability with the fight against all forms of fundamentalism.

For more information on Meredith Tax, check out her website. And be sure to register here to come to the Acting Across Borders symposium on April 13 and 14, 2012. Registration is free and open to the public!

New Acquisition: Panko Playing Cards

When you hear the word “Panko,” do you think of Japanese bread crumbs?

Box cover for Panko, or, Votes for Women: The Great Card Game
Box cover for Panko, or, Votes for Women: The Great Card Game

I did, until the Sallie Bingham Center acquired this deck of Panko playing cards. It’s named for the leader of the British suffrage movement, Emmeline Pankhurst  (1858-1928), and pits opponents and supporters of suffrage against each other in a game similar to rummy. The advertisement for the game claimed, “Not only is each picture in itself an interesting memento, but the game produces intense excitement without the slightest taint of bitterness.”

Pank! Pank! Pank! for Emmeline Pankhurst
Pank! Pank! Pank! for Emmeline Pankhurst

This translation of the women’s suffrage movement into card games, and also board games, helped bring the message of the cause into domestic circles where more overt forms of propaganda might not have been welcomed. These cards were designed by the well-known Punch cartoonist E. T. Reed, and published by Peter Gurney in 1909.

Votes for Women.
Votes for Women, say the suffragettes.

These particular playing cards are owned by only three other libraries and are an important, rare piece of suffragette memorabilia that joins a number of other decks of cards held by the Bingham Center that explore issues related to women and gender. Check out the Panko catalog record here!

Post contributed by Megan Lewis, Technical Services Archivist for the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.