Pushing Back: Interview with Ariella Rotramel
Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
Today on the blog, Gotham editor, Hongdeng Gao interviews Ariella Rotramel, author of Pushing Back: Women of Color–Led Grassroots Activism in New York City. The book explores women of color’s grassroots leadership in organizations that are not singularly identified with feminism. Centered in New York City, Pushing Back brings an intersectional perspective to communities of color as it addresses injustices tied to domestic work, housing, and environmental policies and practices.
Read More“Ten Thousand Bigamists in New York”:
The Criminalization of Jewish Immigrants Using White Slavery Panics
By Mia Brett
The late 19th century and early 20th century saw a huge influx of Jewish immigrants settling in New York City. Eastern European Yiddish speaking immigrants fled the Pale Settlements due to violent pogroms and punitive decrees after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.[1] This rise in immigration created a backlash of nativism and criminalization. In particular, anti-Jewish bigotry in New York City’s criminal justice system began to take the form of large-scale stereotypical assumptions as police, judges, prosecutors, and investigators became more familiar with Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland.
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Imitation Artist:
An Interview with Sunny Stalter-Pace
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Katie Uva talks to Sunny Stalter-Pace, author of the recently published Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance. The book examines the life and times of Gertrude Hoffmann, an early 20th century dancer and choreographer whose career highlights the intersections of high and low culture in the performing arts of that era.
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The Remarkable Life of Teuntje Straetmans, a Woman in New Amsterdam
By Annette M. Cramer van den Bogaart
Today, when you look at the impressive facade of the neoclassical building at 55 Wall Street in Manhattan, known as the National City Bank Building, you would never guess that somewhere buried deep below its foundation lie the remnants of a house owned by a woman with a storied past in the Dutch Atlantic world. On a map of Manhattan in 1660, we find at the intersection of Wall Street and Williams Street the entry, “two small houses under one roof” listed as owned by “Teuntje Straetmans and her fourth husband.”
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Mapping the Suffrage Metropolis
By Lauren C. Santangelo
Last summer, Oxford University Press published my book, Suffrage and the City: New York Women Battle for the Ballot. The book examines how leaders in such suffrage organizations as the New York City Woman Suffrage League and the Woman Suffrage Party perceived New York City, how those perceptions changed over the course of five decades, and how they informed campaign strategies.
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Magdalena Dircx’s New Amsterdam:
Speech, Sex, and the Foundations of a City
By Deborah Hamer
There is a curious passage in the correspondence of the directors of the Dutch West India Company and Peter Stuyvesant. Commenting in May 1658 on one Magdalena Dircx, who had been banished from New Amsterdam on Stuyvesant’s orders for her “dissolute life,” the directors wrote she would “not again receive our permission to return to New Netherland.” If she returned through “deceitful practices or under a false name,” the directors authorized Stuyvesant to punish her with a yet harsher sentence than banishment.
Read MoreIn Pursuit of Knowledge: An Interview with Kabria Baumgartner
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva speaks to Kabria Baumgartner, author of In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. In her book, Baumgartner explores the origins of the fight for school desegregation in the 19th century Northeast by focusing on the stories of African American girls and women.
Read MoreThe End of the Downtown Scene
Jeffrey Patrick Colgan and Jeffrey Escoffier
Late in 1978, Peter McGough arrived in New York City, just when it was its most “dirty and dangerous.” He was 20 years old and had grown up in Syracuse. He came to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology but soon dropped out. He spent his tuition going to clubs like the Ninth Circle and Studio 54, drinking, taking drugs, and hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel with Village denizens like Cookie Mueller, the writer and John Waters actress, and fashion designer Michael Kors, a former classmate at FIT. For a while he made money doing odd jobs, sketching for fashion magazines, working at vintage shops, and eventually selling drink tickets at Danceteria. When he first became acquainted with the fledgling artist David McDermott, his friends warned him that McDermott was crazy.
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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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