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the feminist librarian

Tag Archives: history

five books

12 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in linkspam

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books, feminism, genre fiction, history, technology

goodreads_aug2015I can’t seem to get it together to write reviews I haven’t promised to third parties this year. So in lieu of a subject/verdict post here’s a list of five books I’m currently reading, five books I’ve read recently, and five books I cannot wait to read.

You’re also welcome to stalk me on GoodReads if that’s your kind of thing. I’m ahead on my goal for the year! That’s what reading a lot of novellas will do for you, I guess. I’m still irritated there’s no good way to count fan fiction toward the total…

currently reading

Delirium
by Lauren Oliver

The Feminist Utopias Project: Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future
edited by Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kaunder Nalebuff

Orphan Number Eight 
by Kim van Alkemade

The Red Heart of Jade
by Marjorie M. Liu

Reflections (Indexing serial #2)
by Seanan McGuire

have recently read

Everything Leads to You
by Nina LaCour

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
by Sarah Vowell

Never After (short stories)
by Laurell K. Hamilton, Yasmine Galenorn, Marjorie M. Liu, and Sharon Shinn

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture
by Whitney Phillips

The Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels
by Valerie Weaver-Zercher

cannot wait to read

Archival Desires: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism (November 2015)
by J. Samaine Lockwood

Chapelwood (September 2015)
by Cherie Priest

A Red Rose Chain (September 2015)
Seanan McGuire

Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (August 2015)
Heather Rachelle White

Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel (October 2015)
by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

26.06.2015

26 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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family, history, marriage equality, married life, politics, sexuality

wedding_hands#LoveWins

 

virtual book tour: the right side of history

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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history, sexuality, virtual book tours

rightsideselfieI’m giving a copy of The Right Side of History away! Check out the end of the post for details.

I recently finished a review of Lillian Faderman’s forthcoming The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (Simon & Schuster, 2015) for Library Journal. In that review, I observed that “if Revolution has a weakness it is a by-product of Faderman’s laudable ambition: big-picture narratives inevitably short-change individual stories.” The day after submitting my review, The Right Side of History: 100 Years if LGBTQI Activism, an anthology curated by Adrian Brooks (Cleis Press, 2015) arrived in the mail to address this shortcoming.

A “willfully cacophonous” collection of essays and interviews (as the forward by Jonathan Katz observes), The Right Side seeks the opposite of a coherent historical narrative. Instead, it offers us windows through which we can peer into queer lives past and consider under what circumstances our forebears lived. From Isadora Duncan and The Cradle Will Rock to an interview with Matthew Shephard’s mother and Sultan Shakir’s reflections on being “Black, Gay, and Muslim,” this anthology resists presenting us with a march toward a near future gay liberation. Instead, we are asked to consider the freedoms and constraints of individual lives; instead, we are confronted with LGBTQI individuals who may, or may not, be poster children of queer equality achieved. I appreciate the authors’s divergent voices, some first-person reflection and some more scholarly in tone — and I appreciate that queer activism is not always the primary focus of each piece. Instead, we see queer individuals involved in the struggle for racial justice or better labor conditions as well as their rights as specifically non-straight citizens.

The Right Side of History is not an original work of historical scholarship. The essays, when they aren’t first-person pieces or interviews, rely on secondary sources for most of their historical claims. However, as I was reading it I thought of myself as a twelve-year-old, and how I likely would have benefited enormously from having a copy of The Right Side pressed into my hands as a birthday or Christmas gift. I was the sort of child who voraciously read young peoples’ biographical sketches of inspiring women of history (some of whom I now know were decidedly queer). This collection would have helped me see possibilities for myself in a similar way as those women-of-history collections did — helped me find language and historical context for longings I was just beginning to form. I suggest you consider this book for the queer, questioning, and just plain historically interested teenagers in your life; it’s never too early to start peering through the windows of the past and considering how and where you might fit yourself.

GIVEAWAY!

Cleis Press has generously offered one free copy of The Right Side of History to readers of this review. If you would like to put your name in the hat, please comment (here on this review) or Tweet (to me @feministlib) sharing the name of an individual or an event that you feel is under-recognized in queer history. If you had been tasked with writing a chapter for Brooks’ anthology, whom or what would you have chosen to write about? Deadline for entries is 5pm Friday 6/12 and I will contact the winner* on Monday 6/15 to obtain a mailing address.**

*I will use an online randomizer to select one out of all valid entries.
**Cleis Press will only mail to a U.S. address.

professionally speaking

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in library life

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hanna, history, librarians

45/365 #365feministselfie

Hanna and I had a meeting yesterday afternoon with Natalie Dykstra at which I snapped my Wednesday #365feministselfie (above). It was the penultimate planning meeting for the GLCA Boston Summer Seminar which we’ve been involved in proposing, planning and — soon! — putting into action this June. We’ve got three teams of researchers, three faculty members and six undergraduates, coming to Boston to spend some quality time in the archives. It’s been a lot of fun and rewarding to develop a program from scratch. I’ve learned a lot — and look forward to learning more over the next six weeks!

You’ll be able to follow us @GLCABOSTON, from which Hanna is going to be live-tweeting our five evening seminars and sharing other tidbits during the June 1-18 residency.

movienotes: miracle on 34th street

22 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in media

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history, holidays, movies

Hanna and I watched Miracle on 34th Street over the weekend — the proper 1947 version, of course! — and it was interesting to consider some of the adult characters and their storylines in what is on its surface billed as a feel-good children’s story about wish fulfillment and belief and hope and goodwill during the holidays.

In the twenty minutes before the workday begins, here are some “history hat” observations… Continue reading →

our lovely mechanical box, and other updates

14 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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cat blogging, domesticity, history, professional gigs, work-life balance

Graphic by @K8_Bowers.

Graphic by @K8_Bowers.

Last night, I rhapsodized on Twitter about how glorious it is to have the dishwasher in our new apartment wash dishes while Hanna and I snuggled down in bed to read. This morning, I woke up to this glorious meme, courtesy of our librarian friend Kate Bowers! Life is, indeed, good.

As the history of photo posts since mid-September attests, it has also been busy. In no particular order…

  • Geraldine, age six(ish), was at the dentist on Halloween and had to have two molars removed. Doing well, she — and by association Teazle — have been on vet-prescribed soft food diets for two weeks, plus liquid painkiller and mouthwash (just Gerry, not Teazle). We’ve been having adventures in oral syringes! She seems to be a bit less tetchy and cuddlier since the operation, so we hope she’s feeling better.
  • Teazle, age two, is experiencing her first autumn with access to “the out” (in the form of our back porch); she spends much of her time going out and returning with fallen leaves for us to admire. Or complaining that we have closed the window due to cold and cruelly blocked her way.
  • Hanna’s been crocheting lots, thanks to JP Knit ‘n Stitch‘s selection of Cascade Yarns. Her latest project is star scarves, which she makes out of handfuls of these guys.
  • Hanna and I met with our friend Natalie in mid-October for a marathon Boston Summer Seminar planning session, and are well on our way to planning an exciting program for the June 2015 attendees.
  • I’ve been blogging less here, but wrote two blog posts for the MHS on teen sexuality in the 1930s and trans-continental travel in the 1910s. Both were enjoyable little projects; my self-challenge is to focus on our 20th century collections, so often overlooked, and the results of that limitation can be quite gratifying.
  • Plus the Amiable Archivists project burbles on, mostly with a links list every Wednesday highlighting issues of workplace, power, and identity.
  • While illness prevented us from traveling to the NECBS conference at Bates College (Lewiston, Me.) on Patriot’s Day weekend, Hanna posted her presentation online anyway and continues to explore historical memes in Irish nationalist autobiography in her “spare” time.
  • Hanna has also been enjoying her “ultimate power” of meal planning and preparation (while I run errands and load the mechanical box) which I ceded to her over the summer — a decision that has worked well for both of us! Most recently, she successfully test-drove the slow cooker we inherited from the previous tenant with mac and cheese.
  • As co-chairs of New England Archivists’ LGBTQ Issues Roundtable Hanna and I launched the new Queer!NEA WordPress site this fall and I have had the pleasure of working with our volunteer “Q5” series editor, Brendan Kieran, to develop a series posts profiling New England scholars and archivists working in the field of history of gender and sexuality. We will be cycling out of roundtable leadership in January and are currently looking for a candidate to take over the position of Chair for 2015-2016.
  • One reason I won’t be returning as Chair for LGBTQ Issues is that I have volunteered to serve as NEA’s first-ever Inclusion and Diversity Coordinator. I’m gonna do my best to effect small-scale yet concrete change, particularly when it comes to keeping diversity coupled to issues of structural inequality and social justice. I expect to screw up, and am already practicing in my head how to respond constructively and non-defensively.

Also, I have my own freakin’ meme. So there’s that.

Hope y’ll are staying warm, cuddling cats, and looking forward to a rejuvenating weekend.

booknotes: people’s history of the new boston

22 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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boston, history

I was excited to pick up A People’s History of the New Boston by Jim Vrabel (UMass Press, 2014) at our local branch of the Boston Public Library a few weeks ago; I’d heard about it through the Boston history grapevine and really wanted it to be good. It promised, in its opening pages, “to tell the other half of the story”:

It gives credit to many more people — women as well as men; black, brown, and yellow as well as white; the poor and working class as well as the well off. This story focused on how those people made Boston a more humane and morally better city (1-2).

Vrabel, a journalist and community activist, was involved in the very remaking of Boston that this narrative covers — the postwar struggles of a vacated central business district and “blighted” neighborhoods up through the community organizing of the 1970s and the unsuccessful attempts to desegregate Boston’s public schools. An inside observer, he is in many ways well positioned to write an accounting of grassroots change at the neighborhood level.

However, two major flaws make it difficult for me to recommend this work. The first is his near complete erasure of queer and feminist activism from his narrative (more below). The second, Vrabel’s nostalgia-ridden concluding chapters, a glossing of the present that ignores continued local agitation and sweat equity around affordability, equality, local control, and the role of city and state government in supporting or destroying communities. Continue reading →

booknotes: phyllis schlafly and grassroots conservatism

16 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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history, politics

I’m back in encyclopedia entry writing mode this month, and one of the subjects I volunteered to tackle was the life and work of Phyllis Schlafly in 750 words. One of the things I have gathered from Donald Critchlow’s excellent Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, 2005) is that Schlafly herself would likely approve of this creative discipline. She has, after all, built a career out of voraciously consuming and digesting the work of conservative intellectuals — and then translating them into a form easily communicable to the grassroots: speeches, pamphlets, articles, press releases, and runaway bestsellers.

Plus, did you know she comes from a family of lady librarians?

It is a mark of Critchlow’s excellence as a biographer that he is able to humanize his subject and make her interesting and compelling to even this lefty feminist who categorically disagrees with Schlafly on almost every political and social issue she has ever engaged on. Critchlow’s is an intellectual-political biography, touching on Schlafly’s personal details — family background, class status, marriage, children — as background for the larger points he wishes to make regarding her public career. Schlafly, he argues, is both a driving force behind — and emblematic of — the grassroots political organizing that flourished in America’s postwar years of supposedly “liberal consensus.” A voracious autodidact and driven student from a lower-middle-class background (she worked night to put herself through college), Schlafly completed a Master’s degree at Radcliffe in 1945 and took herself to Washington D.C. just as the Second World War was ending, landing a job at the fledgling American Enterprise Association (now Institute). By all accounts she had (and still has) a talent for digesting densely-written works of conservative political theory and translating them into vernacular, politically-motivating works. During the 1950s and ’60s her focus was on anti-communism, fiscal conservatism, and national defense; in the 1970s she discovered (anti)feminism and turned from international concerns to domestic policy and cultural issues — earning the hatred of many a committed feminist through her successful STOP ERA campaign, which killed what many had assumed was a foregone Constitutional amendment explicitly outlawing discrimination on the basis of sex.

I am too young to remember first-hand the bitter disappointment of the ERA’s defeat, or the shocked sense of betrayal I think many American feminist felt when she discovered that not all women believed in feminist goals. Perhaps because of this, I have the emotional distance to appreciate the way Critchlow is not overtly partisan — either for or against — the Schlafly perspective. Instead, he clearly articulates how her work connected, and continues to connect, to the concerns and goals of the resurgent political and cultural right during the latter half of the twentieth century. I cannot say I share those concerns or goals, but perhaps I understand where they came from and how they came to be articulated a bit better than I did before.

My only disappointment with Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism is perhaps an unfair one — that Critchlow only glosses events following the defeat of the ERA and Reagan’s rise to the presidency in the early 1980s. Since Schlafly and her Eagle Forum continue at a tireless pace today, a deeper analysis of Schlafly’s enduring influence would have been welcome. Too, I would have been interested in a more substantial tour of her opponents’ (often muddled) rebuttals and (often failed) strategies. One comes away from Critchlow’s examination with the sense that Schlafly was always effectively on-message. Surely even the most charismatic of public figures has an off day.

presentation @ boston college

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in my historian hat

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history, professional gigs, religion, sexual identity, sexuality

On March 29th I attended the Biennial Boston College Conference on History of Religion and presented a paper that tried, for the first time, to offer up some analysis regarding my current project. A big thanks to the conference coordinators for a great experience!

This project is, broadly, exploring the ways in which the Christian left negotiated sex, sexuality, and gender during the thirty year period between 1960 and 1980. Narrowly, for this paper, I looked at a ten-year period of the Methodist publication motive for clues regarding mainline Protestant conceptions of gender and sexuality. As I’ve mentioned before in this space, I’m particularly interested in what the magazine had to say about sexuality because after breaking with the church, the publication’s final two issues focused on the topics of gay liberation and lesbian/feminism (their terminology). Rather than seeing this break as a natural, inevitable conflict between a traditionalist anti-gay church and more radical youth activists, I am asking why Christian left theology ultimately failed to provide a hospitable atmosphere for meaningful, nuanced discussion about queer sexual morality.

At least, that’s what I’m fumbling my way toward asking. I’m not sure how close this one conference paper gets to that goal — but it is a start. So for those who’ve been following my research this past year, I offer this work-in-progress as a reward.

Access the PDF online via Google Drive.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to my two excellent and inspiring co-panelists, Trevor Burrows (Purdue University) and Casey Bohlen (Harvard University), both of whom are working on aspects of Christian faith and political action during what we might term the “long Sixties” — looking back into the 1950s and forward toward the 1980s.  I look forward to watching their progress as scholars and writers in the field.

booknotes: the accidental diarist

31 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in book reviews

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books, history, MHS, professional gigs

The latest issue of NEHA News (PDF) arrived in the post earlier this week. Actually, four copies arrived because for some reason Hanna and I are listed on the membership rolls twice each and can’t get the organization to fix the glitch.

Anyway. I have a review therein of Molly McCarthy’s most entertaining new monograph The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013)*: 

For nearly two decades, I have habitually carried a day planner in which to note future tasks and appointments, track expenses, and mark the passage of time. At the end of every year, I add the used-up planner to a box in the back of my closet before opening a fresh volume and starting anew. Until reading Molly McCarthy’s The Accidental Diarist, I had never considered this habit in historical context. Now I have. 

In five thematic chapters, loosely arranged in chronological order, McCarthy (Associate Director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute) explores the development of the modern day planner from early Colonial almanacs to the advent of the Wanamaker Diary in 1900. Combing through centuries of daily records kept by American men and women in pre-printed “blank” books, McCarthy documents the way in which Americans learned to use almanacs, diaries, and planners to both reflect on the past and plan for the future. She argues convincingly that the daily planner was a training ground for modern ways of organizing life. 

Read the full review at the NEHA website.

In the interest of full disclosure, Molly McCarthy is a former MHS research fellow, although her residence at the MHS was before my time, and I assisted her on obtaining images of materials at the Society to illustrate the book. Her project is, I would argue, an excellent example of the work historians can do with the seemingly opaque objects of history that, when put in context, are much more revealing than they first appear.

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"the past is a wild party; check your preconceptions at the door." ~ Emma Donoghue

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