Special Topics and Displays: Celebrating Women's History Month

EKU 2021 Women's History Month Chautauqua speake

This article provides a history of relationship advice from the early-1900s to the 1970s.

This study analyzed a contemporary high school United States history textbook’s representation of women in the Progressive Era compared to an earlier edition textbook. Using their visual representation of women, it was found that the textbooks continued the patriarchal view of women and their roles in society.

Economists, sociologists, political scientists, and others have long sought to explain the factors underlying the timing and the success of the women’s suffrage movement. An extension of voting rights can fundamentally affect the distribution of resources in a society.

At specific moments in history, women publicly entered the masculine realm of baseball to advance female suffrage in the United States. Girls and women took to the field in the nineteenth century, enjoying newfound bodily freedoms and disrupting Victorian constraints. While their performances may not have always translated into explicit suffrage activism, their athleticism demonstrated strength at a time when many people used women’s supposed weakness as an argument against their political enfranchisement.

In the first-ever article written about breaking, performance critic Sally Banes (1981) characterized the dance as “a celebration of the flexibility and budding sexuality of the gangly male adolescent body.” The “macho quality” she found embodied in the form was highlighted in terms of its “ritual combat,” its “sexual braggadocio,” and the “physical risk involved” in executing movements. Although, at that point, she had only witnessed the dance performed by a single group, the Rock Steady Crew, and admittedly knew little about its history.