These women’s prisons believed there were only three legitimate jobs a woman could have: wife, maid, or nursemaid. For any of those jobs, a woman needed to be properly feminine (in the eyes of white Victorians). Any woman deemed not feminine enough (too masculine, too sexual, too willful, too Black, etc.) would inevitably end up unmarried and out of work, at which point she would become a prostitute. For this reason, reformers spent the late 1800s and the early 1900s developing a system of “women’s justice” that targeted women at younger ages and for smaller offenses, in order to get them into prisons where they would be forcibly feminized. As the annual report of the first women’s prison in America put it in 1875, their job was “to take these [women] and so remold, reconstruct and train them, as to be fitted to occupy the position assigned them by God, viz., wives, mothers, and educators of children” — a sentiment not far off from that expressed in a report on prostitution and the Women’s Court put together for Mayor LaGuardia in 1934, which stated that the best way to reform arrested women was “wholesome marriage and the responsibility for children.”
In Brooklyn Heights, Private Schools Won So Integration Lost
By Rebecca Zimmerman
Public and private schools’ histories have often been told separately. By including private schools in the story of the attempted integration of Brooklyn Heights, we can better understand how they came to take on so much power. Furthermore, private schools are an underexplored actor within this tumultuous moment in New York City’s schools. With the added pressures of the 1964 school boycott and 1968 teacher strike, private schools got a unique boost from parents who gave up on public schooling. Those parents charted a course that continues to this day, with Brooklyn Heights private schools growing in both campus size and enrollment numbers over the second half of the twentieth century. This story also partly explains why New York’s public schools remain among the most segregated today.
Brooklynites: An Interview with Prithi Kanakamedala
Interviewed By Katie Uva
At the end of the American Revolution, even as slavery was on the decline in places like Philadelphia, Boston, and neighboring Manhattan, slavery’s numbers strengthened in Brooklyn. And that traumatic history is intricately tied to the land. The economy in Kings County was still largely agricultural, and so it was the labor of enslaved people of African descent who made this land a capitalist possibility. Simply put, there would be no Brooklyn without the labor of unfree Brooklynites. That history deserves to be honored; we owe Black Brooklynites a debt today as New Yorkers. In addition, the idea of Brooklyn that we know today — a brand in its own right, with its own attitude and its own entrepreneurial spirit — all of that is deeply embedded in the history of its free Black communities.
The Famous Lady Lovers: An Interview with Cookie Woolner
Interviewed By Katie Uva
By 1929, Black lady lovers were becoming so visible in Harlem that the powerful and popular pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., delivered one of the first known sermons that singled out the harm caused by queer women. The New York Age reported he declared, “homo-sexuality and sex perversion among women” has “grown into one of the most horrible debasing, alarming and damning vices of present day civilization.” Powell “asserted that it is not only prevalent to an unbelievable degree but that it is increasing day by day.” This shows the community pushback that accompanied the increasing awareness of Black women in Harlem who sought relationships with other women.
An Irish Passion for Justice: An Interview with Robert Polner
By Robert W. Snyder
In the city of New York from the 1930s to the 1990s, Irish attorney Paul O’Dwyer was a fierce and enduring presence in courtrooms, on picket lines, and in contests for elected office. He was forever the advocate of the downtrodden and marginalized, fighting not only for Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland but for workers, radicals, Jews, and African Americans and against the Vietnam War.
The Battle For Gay Rights In New York City – a Conversation With Stephen Petrus
Stephen Petrus, interviewed by Adam Kocurek
Adam Kocurek interviews Dr. Stephen Petrus about his new project, a virtual exhibition titled The Battle for Intro. 2: The New York City Gay Rights Bill, 1971 – 1986. Petrus is the Curator, as well as the Director of Public History Programs, at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives. This exhibition dives into the story of New York City’s Gay Rights Bill, a local law known as Intro. 2 in the City Council. This was a collaborative project, with faculty and undergraduate students at LaGuardia Community College compiling sources, conducting and recording oral history interviews, and chronicling the many key individuals and moments leading up to the passage of the Gay Rights Bill.
Women Were a Force Behind New York Progressive Reform
By Bruce W. Dearstyne
Several of the women progressive leaders in New York City knew and collaborated with each other and worked on more than one reform. New York City had a community of women leaders and many of the ideas that came to fruition in New York in the Progressive Era, and at the national level, originated there. Some women honed their leadership skills in New York before later using them on a national level.
“The Same Slow Pace”: Nelson Rockefeller and Resistance to Open Housing in New York
By Marsha E. Barrett
Despite his continued interest in housing policy and urban renewal programs, integration proved to be a stumbling block that Rockefeller could not overcome. It was an especially difficult issue for Rockefeller because he relied heavily on suburban voters who, as the 1960s progressed, became more organized and vocal in their opposition to housing integration and state efforts to promote equality. Rather than bring diverse New Yorkers together, issues such as housing demonstrated the limitations of Rockefeller’s original approach to coalition building and a fundamental weakness to his brand of pro-government moderate Republicanism.
Civil War-Era Black New York and Historical Memory: Locating the Eighth Ward
By Marquis Taylor
Researching Manhattan’s Eighth Ward presented an exciting opportunity to learn about a neighborhood deeply tied to Civil War-era Black New York — yet it also posed challenges regarding archival constraints. Newspaper articles from the mainstream white press, records produced by the city’s burgeoning municipal government, and reports from reformers and their institutions comprise the dominant archive of Lower Manhattan’s Eighth Ward, which is fragmented and tainted with racist ideology. Also, with much of the 19th-century built environment of present-day SoHo gone, researchers and historians alike are forced to not only confront these limitations but construct a counter-archive. Only through engagement with the Black press, particularly The Weekly Anglo-African (later known as The Anglo-African), do critical aspects of the Black New York of Joseph and Rachel Moore’s era become more legible.
“Twenty-Two of the Healthiest Blacks”; The Ship Bruynvisch and the First Arrival of Enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam in 1627
By Jaap Jacobs
[…] establishing that the first enslaved Africans arrived on the Bruynvisch allows us to pinpoint exactly when the institution of slavery was introduced into New Amsterdam and New Netherland and thus into what later became New York City and State. It is New York’s 1619 moment. Whether and in what way 29 August 1627 should be commemorated in New York is not a scholarly matter, but those who value accuracy and reliability in history will no doubt find ways to do so. And we now have not just a correct year but even an exact day to replace the inaccurate dating of 1625/1626. The year 2027 provides the opportunity to commemorate both the abolition of slavery in New York State—1827—as well as its beginning in 1627.
