Author: Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College

Call for Proposals: “In Her Own Right: Activist Women, 1820-1920” symposium

CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Title: In Her Own Right: Activist Women, 1820-1920
Date: March 18-19, 2021 (VIRTUAL conference)

Symposium overview

One hundred years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, the Philadelphia Area Consortium for Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) invites proposals for an online conference on women’s activism, 1820-1920. This conference will celebrate more than 5 years of work on the In Her Own Right project, http://inherownright.org/.

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Swarthmore releases zine on 19th/20th century women activists

Swarthmore College Libraries are celebrating the woman suffrage centennial in a big way! For the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, the libraries created a new zine recognizing 19th and 20th century women activists, focusing on Quaker women, diverse women who worked closely with Quakers, and women active in the Peace movement. Find the whole zine here

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Crowdsourcing in the Age of COVID

We promised pizza.

When the In Her Own Right project team started planning our second Metadata Enhancement Event, we thought we’d be sitting together in a computer lab on Drexel’s campus. And if you’re asking volunteers to help you, you gotta offer them pizza.

But when the specter of COVID-19 loomed before us, we knew we had to move our event online. Luckily, the PACSCL community rallied around us, and the event far exceeded our expectations.

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Mary and the Devil

Quaker minister Mary Kite was not like most Friends you may have heard of. Kite was born only a few months before well-known Quaker minister Lucretia Mott (Kite in late 1792, Mott at the start of 1793), and like Mott she was an outspoken woman who traveled widely to spread her message. However, in many ways the two were strikingly different. 

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Lucretia Mott: 19th Century Foodie

When I was hired to digitize collections for PACSCL’s In Her Own Right project, I was most excited to work with the Lucretia Mott papers. Mott (1793-1880) was a Quaker minister, abolitionist, social reformer, and one of the igniters of the women’s rights movement, and I was eager to learn more about her. One thing I did not expect was for Lucretia Mott to make me hungry. Though she was a tiny woman, she certainly enjoyed a good meal, and she often included the details of the fare she served or was served in her correspondence. She also touted her cooking skills, which her granddaughter Anna Davis Hallowell confirmed were excellent in the biography she wrote of her grandparents.
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Contraband: Centering Black Agency in the Civil War

Popular narratives of the Civil War often suggest that white Northerners saved otherwise helpless African Americans from slavery. However, such portrayals are far from accurate; African Americans played a major role in the war effort and in advocating for emancipation. In honor of #BlackHistoryMonth, today we discuss “contrabands,” African American refugees who contributed to both developments.

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