New York City’s Women Teachers, Equal Pay, and Suffrage
By Rachel Rosenberg
On May 7, 1908, Carrie Chapman Catt, the famous American suffragist, spoke at Association Hall in New York City. There were women in the hallway outside selling “suffragette” buttons. The hall was packed despite the bad weather, and the event went on past 11 pm. The evening, however, was not about suffrage. It was a meeting of the Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT), the organization demanding equal salaries for men and women teachers in New York City. Alongside many other speakers, Catt spoke as a woman taxpayer about the number of problems in the country that the women teachers in public schools were being asked to solve, and how important these teachers were to the nation. Her speech called for equal pay for women teachers, but also for woman’s suffrage in acknowledgment of that importance.
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Mapping a Queer New York: An Interview with Jen Jack Gieseking
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Katie Uva interviews Jen Jack Gieseking about their mapping project, An Everyday Queer New York, a companion project to his book A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, forthcoming in 2020. Jack discusses the challenges and opportunities in mapping as a way of understanding lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) history in general, and the history of queer women and trans and gender non-conforming people (tgncp) in particular.
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“Just Between Ourselves, Girls”: Rose Pastor Stokes and the American Yiddish Press
By Ayelet Brinn
n 1918, socialist agitator and women’s rights activist Rose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933) was tried and convicted of espionage after making public comments criticizing America’s involvement in World War I. After an anti-war speech in Kansas City, Stokes had published a letter in the Kansas City Star criticizing the American government for aligning with war profiteers to the detriment of the American people: “No government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, while the government is for the profiteers.”
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Everybody’s Doin’it: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917
Reviewed by Jeffrey Escoffier
Dirty Dancing, the 1987 movie starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, exploited a common cultural trope: the intimate connection many people feel between dancing and sex. It portrayed a couple whose dancing was explicitly sexual, who came from different social classes and who at the same time were falling in love. For many of its viewers, it presented a very romantic vision of the connection between sex and dancing. Dale Cockrell’s Everybody’s Doin’it: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 2019) sets out to explore a more historical account of the interrelationship between popular music, social dancing and sexuality in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. As he shows, the making of popular music during the nineteenth-century often took place in bars, brothels and dance halls where prostitution was endemic. Social dancing was one of the ways that sex and music are linked.
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The Piano in the Sukkah: Early Twentieth Century Immigrant Jewish Piano Culture in New York
By Sarah Litvin
In 1905, the Yiddish language New York newspaper Yiddishes Tageblatt reported on a new trend in the city’s Lower East Side, “The Greenhorn of Plenty: The Piano in the Sukkah.” Jewish families were hauling parlor pianos to rooftops to incorporate them into the fall harvest festival Sukkoth, the article explained. At the time, New York City was exploding as the center of the country’s bustling piano trade and its largest immigrant city. The peak year of immigration was in 1907 when 1.7 newcomers arrived, and the peak year of piano production was in 1909, when 364,545 pianos were sold. By 1910, more American homes had a piano than a bathtub.
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Desire & Documentary in the Photography of Alvin Baltrop
By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan and Jeffrey Escoffier
Documentary photography in New York City has a long history, going back to Jacob Riis in the 1880s and Lewis Hine in the early twentieth-century with their documentation of poverty and slums. During the 1930s and 40s, Weegee covered the criminal underworld and the world of high society for the tabloids, while Helen Levitt shot scenes of the everyday life of housewives, children and working men. In the 1950s and 60s, Roy de Carava, Garry Winogrand, Fred McDarrah and Nan Goldin managed to capture both the grit and the glamour of New York’s post-war period. By the seventies, however, the glamour was gone, though the grit remained, as New York was overtaken by its industrial collapse and fiscal woes.
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Suffrage and the City: New York Women Battle for the Ballot
Reviewed by Susan Goodier
Just when we thought there simply couldn’t be another thing to say about the New York women’s suffrage movement, Lauren Santangelo presents us with an immaculately researched, well-written book that adds a new and provocative dimension to the topic. At the center of this monograph is New York City itself, with its myriad public spaces and its fascinating complexity, and Santangelo draws us into her rendition of suffragism in the city that never sleeps. Suffrage and the City does not presume to replace the historiography of the movement, but it raises the bar for casting a wide net for sources, for contextualization of a social movement, and for bringing a historical period (in this case, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era) to life. She convincingly argues that the city—Manhattan in particular—is more than a setting; it is an essential part of the drama of the women’s suffrage movement.
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Rough Paradise: Sex, Art, and Economic Crisis on the New York City Waterfront
By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan and Jeffrey Escoffier
New York City was for many years one of the world’s leading ports. In the early 1950s, the docks in New York City, by far the country’s busiest, directly and indirectly supplied, according to the City’s Department of Marine and Aviation, livelihood for almost 10% of the city’s population. Nevertheless, even then there were signs of the port’s impending doom. Plagued with racketeering, traffic congestion, and outmoded facilities, the invention of container shipping was the final straw. Without adequate rail and road access and the space to operate cranes and stack containers, most of the port’s Manhattan-based business moved to New Jersey where new container facilities were being built.
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After the Vote: Feminist Politics in La Guardia's New York
Reviewed by Karen Pastorello
Elisabeth Israels Perry has enriched the historical record by documenting New York City women’s activism in the first half of the twentieth century. Inspired by the life of her grandmother, “political influencer” and civic reformer Belle Linder Israels Moskowitz, Perry goes well beyond recounting “firsts” for women and instead offers specific examples of accomplished women — all of whom surmounted a myriad of personal and professional challenges to enter a male-controlled political world. After suffrage was won, women attempted to ascend from their newly acquired position as voters to officeholders intent, for the most part, on advancing a social justice platform for all.
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