In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World, Jen Manion, a Professor of History and of Sexuality and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College and author of the book, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021), joins host Liz Covart to investigate the early American world of female husbands, people who were assigned female gender at birth and then changed their gender at some point in their lives to live as men. [Read more…] about Female Husbands: Transgender People in Early American History
Gender History
Lucy Hobbs Taylor: Northern NY’s ‘Girl Against the World’
Lucy Beaman Hobbs was born in Constable, in Northern New York, raised in Ellenburg and later schooled in Malone. Early in her life she made it her mission to earn her living by the use of her brain, not by the sweat of her brow. One obstacle stood in the way more than others – she was a woman. [Read more…] about Lucy Hobbs Taylor: Northern NY’s ‘Girl Against the World’
Historical Travel: Mapping the Gay Guides
Mapping the Gay Guides (MGG) relies on the Damron Guides, an early but longstanding travel guide aimed at gay men since the early 1960s. An LGBTQ equivalent to the African American “green books,” the Damron Guides contained lists of bars, bathhouses, cinemas, businesses, hotels, and cruising sites in every U.S. state, where gay men could find friends, companions, and sex. [Read more…] about Historical Travel: Mapping the Gay Guides
Arrested Attention: The Women’s House of Detention
The quick-witted Hugh Ryan has a nose for history, as demonstrated in his book When Brooklyn Was Queer. His latest The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison mines little-known historical sources to point out how a large and vocal population of queer-identified and trans people passed through the old cement monstrosity that used to stand next to today’s Jefferson Market Library in Manhattan‘s Greenwich Village.
Now a community garden, the site is a shout away from the Stonewall Inn, and Ryan writes the story of some of those imprisoned voices left out of the customary tales of the riot. In fact, prisoners set fire to their bedclothes and tossed them from the barred windows overlooking 6th Ave chanting “gay rights, gay rights gay rights.” Even before Stonewall’s impassioned response to police exploitation of gay bars, House of D. queer women, transmasculine people and other women were rioting for their rights in the jail. [Read more…] about Arrested Attention: The Women’s House of Detention
The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison
The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells.
Some of these inmates — Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur — were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women’s prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher. [Read more…] about The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison
A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement
In the new book Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (NYU Press, 2022) Wendy L. Rouse of San Jose State University reveals that the suffrage movement included individuals who represented a range of genders and sexualities. However, owing to the constant pressure to present a “respectable” public image, suffrage leaders publicly conformed to gendered views of ideal womanhood in order to make women’s suffrage more palatable to the public. [Read more…] about A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement
Black History in Upstate New York Series Concluding
The final programs of the Black History in Upstate New York series created by Colgate University graduate and Upstate Institute Fellow Victoria Basulto will be posted online from August 23rd through 26th.
These short online programs highlight individuals, events, and places in Upstate New York central to movements like abolitionism, civil rights, and women’s suffrage movement. [Read more…] about Black History in Upstate New York Series Concluding
Slavery & Freedom in French Louisiana
The story of freedom in colonial New Orleans and Louisiana pivoted on the choices black women made to retain control of their bodies, families, and futures.
How did black women in colonial Louisiana navigate French and Spanish black and slavery codes to retain control of their bodies, families, and futures? [Read more…] about Slavery & Freedom in French Louisiana
Adirondack Gentrification: Depletion (The Devil’s Due, Part 3)
In the autumn of 2015, the Adirondack Research Consortium in partnership with the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government held a panel to discuss the diminishing demography of the Adirondacks. The all-male affair it convened to lead this conversation was typically partisan, casually excluding the perspectives, positions and participation of those primarily burdened with the labor of Adirondack propagation.
While this august assembly of middle-aged men sat pondering the problem with pie charts and furrowed brows, back home in the mountains, the keystone species of the demographic ecosystem – Adirondack mothers – got on with the business of raising children in a climate that is notably inimical to their interests even within the auspices of nation that is generally hostile to the working conditions of those who shoulder the bulk of the responsibility for social reproduction. [Read more…] about Adirondack Gentrification: Depletion (The Devil’s Due, Part 3)
Ashley Hopkins-Benton On LGBTQ+ History At NYS Museum
The latest episode of Empire State Engagements features a conversation with Ashley Hopkins-Benton of the New York State Museum. She discussed her panel exhibition on the history of the Pride Center of the Capital Region, as well as her work to recover and incorporate more LGBTQ+ history into the State Museum’s content. [Read more…] about Ashley Hopkins-Benton On LGBTQ+ History At NYS Museum