In 2019, for the first time in history, the majority of students in American medical schools were female. The battle for women’s access to the medical profession has been long and arduous since 1849, when Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from an American medical college. Even in 1969, women still only made…
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The First Women Doctors: Q&A with Author Olivia Campbell
July 12, 2021
In 2019, for the first time in history, the majority of students in American medical schools were female. The battle for women’s access to the medical profession has been long and arduous since 1849, when Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from an American medical college. Even in 1969, women still only made…
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Cats in the Archive
February 4, 2019
A short history of the women who founded the world’s largest lesbian archive — and the pets who lived there. In November 1973, the Gay Academic Union (GAU) held its first conference at John Jay College in New York City. A product of the intellectual and activist ferment following the 1969 Stonewall uprising, the GAU…
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From the Page to the Public Stage: Alice Paul and the Mass Media Suffrage Sensation
January 29, 2019
“Beautiful New Jersey Girl, a Settlement Worker, Locked Up as a Suffragette. Her friends indignant.” This January marked two important anniversaries. January 11th was suffragist Alice Paul’s 134th birthday (described in the quotation above, from a clipping in her archive at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library). January 19th witnessed the third annual Women’s March. While contemporary women’s…
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Celebrating the First Year of “Women at the Center”
January 2, 2019
In December of 2017, the Center for Women’s History at New-York Historical Society launched Women at the Center, a new blog and social media project to highlight everything we do. Over the past year, our team has composed 46 blog posts, capturing the wide range of exhibitions, public programs, scholarly initiatives, and educational endeavors that the…
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Women, Work, Washboards: Betye Saar in her own words
November 27, 2018
The following is adapted from a conversation between artist Betye Saar (b. 1926) and Wendy Ikemoto, PhD, Associate Curator of American Art at the New-York Historical Society, at the The Excelsior Hotel in New York City on April 23, 2018. This piece also appears in the catalog for Betye Saar: Keepin’ It Clean, on view in the…
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Finding Women in the Archives: Female Remedies
November 13, 2018
Do you feel fatigued or suffer from poor nerves? Guaranteed relief from feminine afflictions! Is your baby fretful? Well, look no further! During the 19th century, these sorts of appeals were the bait to catch consumers suffering from anything from headaches to hot flashes to unwanted pregnancy. The unregulated “patent medicine” industry was big business….
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