The practice of experimentation on one’s own children belongs to a somewhat queasy tradition in psychology that embraces parenthood as an opportunity for “natural experiment.” Psychologists throughout the twentieth century have kept tabs on their children’s development, blending the pride of parenthood with the detached methodology of science. So it’s no surprise to find in the papers of William McDougall, the first head of Duke University’s psychology department, extensive notes on four of his children, Angus, Duncan, Janet, and Leslie. Just how the disciplinary practices of psychology in the early twentieth century filtered into McDougall’s child-rearing becomes apparent when comparing the McDougall journals to a contemporaneous laboratory notebook from a psychology student, Walter R. Miles, in the Rubenstein Library’s History of Medicine Collections.
McDougall’s “localization of touch” experiment on his son Duncan.
These images depict similar experiments in localizing sensation. The experimenter stimulated a spot on the subject’s hand or arm using a sharp object (Miles used the point of a compass); a few seconds later, the subject had to indicate, either on the actual hand or on a diagram, where he or she believed the point had been applied. The experimenter recorded both points, noting any discrepancy between the actual and perceived site of stimulation. For Miles, this was a bread-and-butter exercise in the methods of scientific psychology.
The McDougall image comes with a twist, since the experimental subjects were his young children. Rather than illustrating basic principles on a standard psychological subject, McDougall was inquiring specifically into the changing sensory and perceptual abilities of his own kids. The diagram of his son Duncan’s hand and arm are part of a record-keeping practice that encompassed everything from the children’s recognition of colors to their fear of bears.
The fact that these methods traveled a fairly direct path from the lab to the McDougall home, and from the “standardized” psychological subject to the developing child, reveals itself in the telling visual differences between the two sets of experimental notes: Miles’s experiment, neatly taken down in a lab notebook, uses ruler-drawn grid lines and a smoothly-traced outline of the hand and arm, while McDougall’s journal bears indications of its setting in the domestic scene of child-rearing: the data is recorded in grid-less, slanted columns, and the outline of the hand is traced hastily, as though the subject was loath to hold still.
Data from Miles’s experiment in the relative location of pain stimuli
Data from McDougall’s test of his children’s color recognition.
Post contributed by Alicia Puglionesi. Puglionesi is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation is on “The Astonishment of Experience: Americans and Psychical Research, 1885-1935.” Alicia is particularly interested in the relationship between the amateur tradition in which psychical research developed and the emerging academic discipline of psychology. She is a 2014 History of Medicine travel grant winner.
Phrenological bust from the commonplace book of E. Bradford Todd.
The image above, taken from the commonplace book of E. Bradford Todd (found in the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library), is representative of a popular view of the science of phrenology. Seen today on ironic posters and T-shirts, as well as modern ceramic reproductions, the phrenological bust has come to serve as metonym for the entire science of phrenology. The image persists, but so too do misconceptions about the nature of this peculiar nineteenth-century science, which proposed to articulate and even predict the character of an individual based on the shape of the skull.
Phrenology was attractive to the masses and inspired writing of all kinds, from diary entries to letters, as well as published texts and broadsides. E. Bradford Todd, as shown above, recorded the phrenological doctrine – complete with his own sketches – into his commonplace book in mid-nineteenth-century America. Eugene Marshall, a schoolteacher in 1851 in Rhode Island, went to see a phrenological lecture and resolved to study the science, a project he took on with such zeal that he eventually attempted to phrenologize himself. Writing in 1823 when the science was still young, another individual gossiped to a friend via letter that a mutual acquaintance was looking for a wife “with all the proper bumps on her head for he is a great believer [of phrenology]” (Eliza K. Nelson papers). As seen in these letters and diaries from Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, from its earliest introduction, phrenology captured the mind of the public and promised solutions to life’s problems, both great and small, not least of which was the problem of crime.
With generous assistance from the History of Medicine travel grant, I recently visited the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library to conduct research in support of my dissertation, “Criminal Minds: Law, Medicine, and the Phrenological Impulse in America, 1830-1890.” My research takes a serious look at the “pseudoscience” of phrenology and considers the ways in which it was viewed as truthful, scientific, and useful to nineteenth-century individuals. In particular, I examine how phrenology, at the beginning of the century, came to be viewed as a valuable possibility for crafting a criminal science avant la letter, more than half a century before the introduction of Cesare Lombroso’s positivist criminology that would later be considered the birth of modern criminology.
Phrenologists wrote early and often about the problem of crime, which was drawing attention from all corners in the nineteenth century. The growth of cities and urbanization, the increasing rapidity and ease of movement of peoples within and between countries, and the rise of mass media that made sensational stories about murder and theft national (and international) news – all of these nineteenth-century trends combined to render crime a particularly fraught problem. Yet well before “criminology” had been introduced, phrenologists and other enthusiasts were considering the ways in which this new science could be used to help solve crime.
While it was primarily intellectuals and professional phrenologists operating within a narrow orbit who ruminated on the potential of phrenology with regard to the criminal problem, we can also find glimpses of the reception of these ideas in the records of non-phrenologists who encountered the science. For example, in the diary of Jane Roberts, a British author, she records a trip on January 6, 1837, to visit a phrenologist in London, Dr. DeVille, with her friend Mrs. Phillips, Lord Byron’s daughter. During this visit, both received phrenological readings by DeVille, but they also heard a long discourse from him about the truth of the science. Interestingly, the examples DeVille chooses to illustrate and prove the science are linked directly to bad behavior and crime, explaining that attention to the developments of the mind (as read in the skull) can serve to prevent or cure evil propensities. He illustrates this claim with two examples: one story in which he identified two robbers before the fact, and a second where a father brings his son in to see DeVille, before he eventually is sent to prison for his crimes. Miss Roberts was impressed by these stories, and resolved to visit him again.
Whether or not Miss Roberts repeated her pilgrimage to the phrenologist’s office, this interaction is representative of the ways in which phrenological ideas about crime entered into vernacular culture. Phrenologists framed their enterprise as a solution to one of the era’s most pressing problems, in part to sell their services to individuals like Miss Roberts. Yet, as I argue, phrenology also made a clear claim attempted to predict and explain the behavior of criminals, and in so doing signaled the development of a new science of crime.
Courtney Thompson is a PhD candidate in the History of Science and Medicine Program, History, at Yale University
The Rubenstein Library’s three research center annually award travel grants to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars through a competitive application process. Congratulations to this year’s recipients, we look forward to working with all of you!
Courtney Thompson will use materials related to phrenology such as this small ivory bust in her research.
History of Medicine
Cali Buckley, Pennsylvania State University, Department of Art History, for dissertation work on, “Women of Substance: The Materiality of Anatomical Models and the Control of Women’s Medicine in Early Modern Europe.”
Alicia Puglionesi, Johns Hopkins University, Institute of the History of Medicine, for dissertation work on “The Astonishment of Experience: Americans and Psychical Research, 1885-1935.”
Courtney Thompson, Yale University, Department of the History of Science and Medicine, for dissertation work on “Criminal Minds: Medicine, Law, and the Phrenological Impulse in America, 1830-1890.”
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History
FOARE Fellowship for Outdoor Advertising Research
Craig Lee, Department of Art History, University of Delaware, “Letter Building: Signage, Supergraphics, and the Rise of Semiotic Structure in Modern American Architecture”
Daniel Towns, Department of History, Stanford University, “The View and the Value: Historical Geography of Signs in San Francisco”
John Furr Fellowships for JWT Research
Lisa Haushofer, Department of History, Harvard University, “Edible Health: ‘Health Foods’ in Science, Industry, Culture in Britain and the United States, 1884-1950
Alvin A. Achenbaum Travel Grants
Dr. Cynthia Meyers, Department of Communications, College of Mount Saint Vincent, “Advertising Agencies and the Decline of Sponsorship in the Network Era of Television”
Dr. Cristina Ziliani: Economics, University of Parma, Italy, “Premium Sales Promotions: A History of Practice and Research, 1890-1990”
Cara Fallon, Department of History, Harvard University, “The Emerging Concept of Healthy Aging in the United States, 1920-1990”
Catherine Hennessey Wolter, Musicology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, “Sound Conversions in Print: A Cultural History of the Player Piano and Early Radio in America Through the Lens of Print Media”
Kelly Jones, History of Medicine, State University of New York – Stony Brook, “’New Hope for Headache Sufferers’: Pain and its Control in Advertisements for Headache Remedies, 1950s-1970s
Daniel McKay, Independent Scholar, “Trading Fears: Marketing the ‘Japan Brand’ to American Tourists and Consumers”
John Hope Franklin Research Center 2014-15 Travel Grant Awardees
Emilye Crosby, State University of New York-Geneseo Topic: “Anything I Was Big Enough To Do: Women and Gender in SNCC”
Paul Grant, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Topic: “Unimagining the Christian Nation: Alienation, Memory, and German-African Reciprocity in Akropong, Ghana 1835-1938”
Nicole Maurantonio, University of Richmond, Topic: “Ombudsman for Humanity: Chuck Stone, Mediation, and the Graterford Prison Hostage Crisis”
Gilet Rosenblith, University of Virginia, Topic: “Low Income African American Women in the South and the Carceral State”
Nicholas Syrett, University of Northern Colorado, Topic: “American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States”
Adam Wolkoff, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Topic: “Possession and Power: A comparative social and legal history of capitalist social relations in the late nineteenth-century United States”
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture Mary Lily Travel Grants
Dr. Georgina Colby, linguistics and cultural studies, University of Westminster, for a book on Kathy Acker combining philosophical analysis with literary and critical theory, exploring connections between feminist theory, Acker’s use of philosophy, and her experimental writing practices.
From the Kathy Acker Papers
Dr. Donna Drucker, civil and environmental engineering, Technische Universität Darmstadt, for a journal article on sexual behavior and the science of contraceptive testing in the mid-twentieth century United States.
Sara Mameni, Ph.D. candidate, visual arts, University of California, San Diego, for dissertation research on Iran-US relations in the 1960s and 1970s—leading up to Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979—through the lens of queer theory, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies.
Ivy McIntyre, Ph.D. candidate, history, St. Louis University, for dissertation research on South Carolina families in times of personal crisis in the early Republic.
Andrew Pope, Ph.D. candidate, history, Harvard University, for dissertation research on radical social movements and the New South in Georgia from 1968-1996.
Dr. Jason Scott, Dr. Annalisa Castaldo, and Jennifer Lynn Pollitt, for an edited collection of essays looking at how kink identities, behaviors, and lifestyles are represented in popular and cultural studies.
Mairead Sullivan, Ph.D. candidate, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, Emory University, for dissertation research on questions of breastedness in feminist and queer theory.
Hope Tucker, independent scholar, for an artist’s video on the fragility of reproductive rights in the American South, as seen through the work of those who documented and labored for these rights in the second half of the twentieth century.
It was a great pleasure to conduct research at the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke. As a recipient of the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture travel grant, I looked forward to exploring the Library’s holdings that would advance my understanding of black women’s history.
National Negro Health News, Vol. 6, no. 3. From the Alliance for Guidance of Rural Youth Records.
My dissertation project, “Mind, Soul, Body, and Race: Black Women’s Physical Culture, 1900-1939,” investigates the structural barriers to health and fitness for black women and the ways in which they circumvented those barriers and engaged in the physical culture movement. I examine how black women used purposeful exercise to create a new, fit vision of black womanhood that had implications for public health, recreation, and ideas of beauty, citizenship, and racial uplift. As a national project, I want to capture how Southern women, who had even less resources and access to physical culture, participated in the movement.
A significant portion of my dissertation discusses the state of black health and the Library proved to be a valuable repository for exploring the public health aspects of black southern history. The archivists were informed and genuinely interested in assisting researchers and with their help; I consulted about a half a dozen collections in all including the African American Photo Collection, the Alliance for Guidance of Rural Youth records, and the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company archives.
One of the most useful collections was the Alliance for Guidance of Rural Youth. Although the Alliance was primarily a vocational guidance service organization, it sought to address several issues affecting poor, rural young people in the first half of the twentieth century including health issues. I found several documents from the collection related to health campaigns and the barriers to health for black people in the South. For example, a note in the 1934 National Conference on Negro Education proceedings indicated that “environmental rather than racial factors” compromised black health including low income, insufficient housing, and limited access to hospitals, preventive care, and recreational facilities. As it relates to black women’s health, the collection describes some of the difficulties black women had in accessing health information and clinics for their obstetric needs. The collection also contains sources on black unemployment, the black nursing profession, diet and malnutrition, and leisure during the New Deal era.
Trying to find a way to visit the Rubenstein Library to use our collections? You’re in luck! The David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library is now accepting applications for our 2014-2015 travel grants.
Want to be as cool as these gentlemen? Apply for a travel grant and come visit us!
The grants are open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, independent scholars, artists, and activists who live more than 100 miles from Durham, NC, and whose research projects would benefit from access to collections held by one of the centers and collecting areas.
The deadline for applications is January 31, 2014. Announcement of grant recipients will be no later than March 28, 2014. Travel grants must be used between April 2014 and June 2015.
Another change this year – our application process is now online. You can find more details including the online application on our travel grant website.
On Thursday, November 7th, twenty of Al Achenbaum’s family and close friends joined Duke library staff and faculty in a ceremony to dedicate his papers as part of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History. In a series of comments given by Hartman Center staff, Achenbaum’s papers were lauded for their unique insight into building brand equity, strategic marketing planning, maximizing advertising agency-client relationships, and using systematic quantitative research as a guide to effective decision-making.
A display of materials from the Alvin A, Achenbaum Papers.
Over a remarkable 60-year career, he advised leading global marketers, including Procter & Gamble, GE, Toyota and Nestlé, on how to use marketing tools to improve the economic value of their businesses. He held senior executive positions at four major advertising agencies in New York, and was chairman of a series of leading marketing consulting firms which provided over 150 companies with systematic tools for addressing complex business challenges.
This 233-box collection will enrich the experiences of many students and scholars interested in the evolution of the advertising industry in the second half of the 20th century or the career of Al Achenbaum, known to many as the “Einstein of Advertising” and one of Advertising Age’s 100 most influential advertising people of the 20th century. Al’s son, Jon Achenbaum, described his father as the reason he started his own career in marketing, applying many of the marketing innovations that Al brought into the business world and read two passages from Al’s upcoming book.
Rounding out the event were remarks by Al Achenbaum himself, in which he stated that “marketing is the single most important driver of our modern economy” and that it will “continue to play a critical role in economic success – both in the U.S. and abroad.” He expressed his gratitude to his family and friends for supporting him throughout his life and career and expressed his enthusiasm for donating his papers to Duke and the Hartman Center.
To top off the ceremony, he announced that he is endowing the Hartman Center’s travel grant program, which will be named the Alvin A. Achenbaum Travel Grants. These travel grants will enable students and scholars to come from afar to use Hartman Center collections as part of their research each year. Since Achenbaum is in many ways a scholar of advertising and marketing himself, this is a wonderful way to continue his legacy in perpetuity.
Hartman Center director Jackie Reid Wachholz and Al Achenbaum.
The Rubenstein Library’s three research center annually award travel grants to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars through a competitive application process. Congratulations to this year’s recipients, we look forward to working with all of you!
John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture Travel Grant Recipients
Dr. Richard Bell, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park; Project: “Slavery’s Market: A Microhistory.”
Dr. Frederick Carroll, Instructor, Department of History, Norfolk State University; Project: “Race News: How Black Reporters and Readers Shaped the Fight for Racial Injustice, 1910-1978.”
Ms. Mandy Jolly, Undergraduate, Department of History, Lenoir-Ryhne University; Project: “Journalistic Racism from Early Travel/Exploration Logs from the 19th and 20th Century.”
Dr. Phillip Misevich, Assistant Professor of History, St. John’s University; Project: “On the Frontier of Freedom: Abolition and the Growth of Atlantic Commerce in Southern Sierra Leone, c1790s to 1880s.”
Ms. Marie Stango, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Michigan; Project: “Antislavery and Colonization: African American Women in Nineteenth Century West Africa.”
Dr. Shirley Thompson, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin; Project: “No More Auction Block for Me: African Americans and the Problem of Property.”
Dr. Charlotte Walker-Said, Theodore W. Lentz Fellow in Peace Studies and Human Rights, Webster University; Project: “Traditional Marriage for the Modern Nation: Family Formation and the Politics of Religion in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa.”
Mr. James Wall, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Georgia; Project: “Redefining Success: The Strule for Freedom Rights in Southwest Georgia, 1945-1985”
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History Fellowship and Travel Grant Recipients
Zoe Sherman uses the Outdoor Advertising Association of America Records
FOARE Fellowships for Outdoor Advertising Research:
Elizabeth Semler: History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Minnesota, “’Got Milk?’: Dairy Advertising and Scientific Authority in the late 20th Century”
Zoe Sherman: Economics, University of Massachusetts – Amherst, “The Commodification of Audience Attention in the US, 1865-1920”
John Furr Fellowships for JWT Research:
Ai Hisano: History, University of Delaware, “A History of Food Color in the United States, 1880s-1970s”
Cristina Sánchez-Blanco: Media Management, University of Navarra (Spain), “Advertising Account Planning in JWT”
Hartman Center Travel Grants:
Francesca Russello Ammon: American Academy of Arts & Sciences, “Culture of Clearance: Waging War on the Landscape in Postwar America”
Leslie Anderson: University of California – Merced, “The Politics of Domesticity” (Senior Thesis)
Mary Bridges: International Studies, Yale University, “Global Infrastructure of US Business Activities in the Interwar and World War II Periods”
Jessica Burch: History Department, Vanderbilt University, “Soap and Hope: culture, Capitalism, and Direct Sales in World War II America”
Dr. Andrew Case: Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin – Madison, “Dear Friend: Direct Mail Marketing and the Transformation of Buying and Selling in Postwar America”
Kristi Whitfield Johnson: Baton Rouge, LA, “Canning Foods and Selling Modernity: The Canned Food Industry and Consumer Culture, 1898-1945”
Dr. Richard K. Popp: Journalism, Advertising and Media Studies, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, “Direct Marketing, Communication Networks, and the Remaking of consumer Culture, 1960-2000”
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture Travel Grant Recipients
Valerie Behrer, English, University of Minnesota, for dissertation research on the connections between girls’ subjectivities, autobiographical practices, and the development of American radical feminism from the late 1960s to the 1970s.
Erin Leigh Durban-Albrecht, Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Arizona, for a set of related projects—including a film and her dissertation—that use Kathy Acker’s Kathy Goes to Haiti to explore racialized gender and sexuality, cultural production, and U.S.‐Haiti relations in the 20th and early 21st century.
Dr. Lauren Gutterman, Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, Columbia Law School, for a book that will examine the personal experiences and public representation of American wives who desired women, 1945 to 1979.
Monica Miller, English and Women’s & Gender Studies, Louisiana State University, for dissertation research on the use of ugly women as characters that defy the stereotype of the beautiful belle in the work of 20th century Southern women writers.
Michelle Pronovost, Fashion Institute of Technology, for research on the confrontational fashion of riot grrrls in zines from the 1990s.
Dr. Andrea Walton, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, for research supporting an article and book chapter on philanthropist Eleanor Thomas Elliott.
Kelly Weber, History, Rice University, for dissertation research related to the politics of daughterhood in the New South, 1880 to 1920.
Stacy J. Williams, Sociology, University of California, San Diego, for dissertation research on how social movements have affected feminist discourse about cooking, 1874 to 2013.
Dr. Mary Ziegler, St. Louis University, for a book about how abortion providers helped define lay understandings of the constitutional, statutory, and common law concerning abortion in the United States.
Eleanore and Harold Jantz Fellowship
The first recipient of the Eleanore and Harold Jantz Fellowship is Chunjie Zhang, Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Zhang is a graduate of Duke (PhD 2010). Her project is “Representations of non-European cultures in the German discourse in the eighteenth century.”
The grants are open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, independent scholars, artists, and activists who live more than 100 miles from Durham, NC and whose research projects would benefit from access to collections held by one of the centers.
More details—and the grant application—may be found on our grants website. Applications must be postmarked or e-mailed no later than 5:00 PM EST on March 29, 2013. Recipients will be announced in April 2013.
NC Travel Billboard, “Only a Day’s Drive,” undated. From the Outdoor Advertising Association of America Archives.
Some of last year’s recipients include:
At the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture:
Bridget Collins, a graduate student in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used prescriptive literature held by the Bingham Center as part of her research for her dissertation, “From the Cradle to the Grave: Infectious Disease in the Twentieth Century American Home.”
Laura Foxworth, a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina, for research for her dissertation, “The Spiritual is Political: How the Southern Baptist Convention Debated Feminism and Found the New Right.” You can read more about her visit here.
Jessica Lancia, a graduate student at the University of Florida, conducted research for her dissertation, “Borderless Feminisms: A Transnational History of the U.S. Women’s Movement, 1967-1985.” You can read more about her visit in the Fall 2012 issue of the Bingham Center newsletter.
At the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture:
Brooke N. Newman, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, for a study on gender, race, and power in the eighteenth century British Caribbean.
Kathryn Banks, Assistant Professor in the History and Political Science Department at Andrews University, for an examination of African-American employment in the Southern textile industry from 1895 to 1945.
Max L. Grivno, Associate Professor from the Department of History at the University of Southern Mississippi, for an analysis of slavery in Mississippi, 1690-1865.
At the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History:
Anne Schmidt of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, for research for her book about the meaning and importance of emotions in advertising throughout the twentieth century in Germany and ways emotions were a constitutive element of capitalist practices of production and consumption.
Marcia Chatelain, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University, conducted research on the ways in which segregation shaped African-American food culture in the South for her book, A Taste of Freedom: African-American Dining Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights.
Rochelle Pereira-Alvares, a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Guelph, Canada, exploring how the marketing and advertising initiatives of Hiram Walker and Seagram influenced the way in which consumers purchased and imbibed spirits, and the impact consumers’ changing tastes had on the companies’ marketing and product development decisions, 1950-1990.
Bryce C. Lowery, a graduate student in Public Policy at the University of Southern California, for research for his dissertation, “The Consumable Landscapes of Los Angeles: How the Spatial Ecology of Outdoor Advertising Influences the Quality of Life.”
Post contributed by Stephanie Barnwell, Bingham Center intern.
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.
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.
She will speak about her research for her dissertation topic, Borderless Feminisms: A Transnational History of the U.S. Women’s Movement, 1967-1985, using a variety of collections from the Bingham Center. Lancia is a Mary Lily Research Grant recipient.
Please bring your own lunch. Drinks and cookies will be provided.
Post contributed by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian for the Bingham Center.
Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University
