Women at the Center: News from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture

WOMEN AT THE CENTER: FALL 2021

Photograph of Pauline Bart, smiling, wearing a jaunty purple beret and purple jacket

Remembering Pauline Bart, Feminist Sociologist (1930-2021)

We are saddened to share the news that Pauline Bart, feminist sociologist and writer, passed away on Friday, October 8, after a period of declining health. From the 1960s to the 1990s Bart was active in many feminist and civil rights efforts, including anti-pornography protests, sexual assault and rape law reform, Jewish and middle-aged women's advocacy, and reproductive rights. Pauline Bart's Papers are part of the Sallie Bingham Center, and she enjoyed the scholarly community at Duke while attending events on campus after relocating to North Carolina in 2009. The New York Times honored Bart's life and accomplishments with a recent obituary. Photo of Pauline Bart courtesy of Cookie Teer.

Newly Available Online: Ann Henshaw Gardiner Diaries

Portrait of Ann Henshaw Gardiner in her nurse's uniform with hat and cape

Ann Henshaw Gardiner in her nursing uniform

Ann Henshaw Gardiner (1890-1982) was a historian, scientist, teacher, and founder of nursing education at the Duke University Hospital in 1930. Thanks to our newly implemented process for providing public access to reference scans, several notebooks documenting Gardiner's service as a nurse during World War I in a U.S. Army base hospital in France are now online. Gardiner's nursing scrapbooks include typed narratives, handwritten letters, photographs, and printed materials providing an engaging, multi-format narrative of her experiences from 1917 to 1918. Learn more about the Gardiner papers through the guide to the full collection.

Newly Acquired, with bundled letters in background

Cover of Les Blancs by Lorraine Hansberry with an outlined portrait of a Black woman

Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry

Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry

We recently purchased a first edition with dust jacket of this posthumously published collection edited by Hansberry's former husband Robert Nemiroff (New York: Random House, 1972). This volume includes three plays: Les Blancs; The Drinking Gourd; and What Use Are Flowers? Lorraine Hansberry was best known for her play Raisin in the Sun, which, in 1959, became the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. During her too-brief lifetime, Hansberry was an ardent civil rights activist and more quietly engaged in lesbian and gay liberation. Materials documenting her lesbian identity in her personal archives at the New York Public Library were closed to research until 2013, a restriction required by Nemiroff, her literary executor.

In the classroom, with folders full of pink paper from the Minnie Bruce Pratt Papers

This fall we resumed teaching classes in person, welcoming many new students to the Rubenstein Library and introducing them to a wide array of primary sources related to these courses:

Introduction to LGBTQ Studies
The Media and LGBTQ Americans
Men, Women, and Sports
The Price of Sex: Gender and the Global Political Economy
Women at Work: Gendered Experience of Corporate Life
Women in the Economy
Women in Visual Arts
Writing 101: Book, Art, Object

Cover of Black Women's Liberation pamphlet with photograph of two Black Women

Black Women's Liberation by Maxine Williams and Pamela Newman. Pathfinder Press, 1970.

Flashback to 1970: An Online Module

Over the past two years, our librarians have been developing a series of online instructional modules which provide access to well-designed activities based on selected primary sources from our collections. These modules have supported instruction within Duke courses and at other institutions as many schools adapted to teaching remotely. The "Time Machine" activity highlights documents created or published in 1970 and representing a variety of viewpoints, issues, and historical events related to women’s history, including Black Women's Liberation by Maxine Williams and Pamela Newman, The Woman-Identified Woman by Radicalesbians, and a scrapbook from the Durham-based organization Women-in-Action for the Prevention of Violence and Its Causes.

Detail of illustration of snowflake outlines with botanical border

Image detail from Cloud Crystals: A Snow-Flake Album (New York: Appleton, 1864), a snow-themed volume of poetry edited by Frances Chickering, from the Lisa Unger Baskin Collection.

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