This presentation offers documents on women and social movements in the United States from 1820 and beyond.

1. Women and Social Movements:
Modern Empires Since 1820
Selections from Document Clusters on
United States Empire

2. Women Medical Missionaries in China Interact with Chinese
Women Physicians, 1894-1991
Chinese women embraced and transformed the introduction of Western medicine to China.
During the late 19th and early twentieth century, when many Western nations colonized
China economically, Western missionaries introduced aspects of Western medicine.
American women missionaries were the most committed to the health of Chinese women
and the only ones to educate Chinese women as physicians. This collection of documents
allows scholars and students to evaluate this missionary intervention--to explore the
motivations of American women physicians and nurses who brought Western medicine to
Chinese women, and the response of Chinese women physicians and nurses who were
educated in mission institutions. The collection ranges from the 1890s to the end of the
1940s, with later reminiscences into the 1990s. Both American and Chinese women
medical professionals responded to the challenges to Western imperialism and to
increasing demands for Chinese control of mission institutions from 1910 to 1940, and
finally the end of the missionary enterprise in 1949.
House of a Thousand Babies explores an American doctor's experience in China.
产科教育计划 杨崇瑞 [Educational Plan on Obstetrics] by Yang Chongrui, also known as
Marian Yang, explains why she helped create a public school of obstetrics to combat high
rates of maternal and infant mortality. Her proposal for the school includes a school
building, a hospital for students' clinical work, faculty, staff organization, a funding plan,
and school regulations.
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3. Anti-Imperialist Writings of Cuban Feminists, 1896-1985
This cluster offers documents and writings by a wide range of feminists who held differing
views of U.S. imperialism in Cuba (1898-1958), showing nationalist sentiments from both the
left and right wings of the woman’s movement. The memoirs of women activists who
confronted Cuba’s lack of sovereignty include that of Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, radical
women’s rights advocate, and María Collado, elite suffragist and reformer. Ofelia Domínguez
Navarro (1896-1977) belonged to feminist, nationalist, and communist revolutionary groups
in Cuba between 1920 and 1977. A teacher, lawyer, firebrand, journalist, and activist for
working class women, she was also one of the initial members of the Cuban Communist Party
and a close friend of Julio Antonio Mella, its founder. She founded her own women’s and
worker’s rights parties: the Unión Laborista de Mujeres (1930) and the Unión Radical de
Mujeres (1931). The context of her activism can be seen through her participation in three
national congresses on women’s rights, 1923, 1925, and 1939. She was imprisoned in the
1930s but her prominence in Cuban society led her to lead dictator and President Fulgencio
Batista’s delegation to the United Nations in the 1950s.
La Vida en las Prisiones Cubanas records Navarro's experience as a political prisoner during
the brutal repression of President Gerardo Machado from 1925 to 1933. Since Machado
destroyed imprisonment records, this and other writings constitute important public
testimonies. To write the memoir Domínguez gathered notes of her fellow prisoners as well as
her own records and consulted with them before she published the book in Mexico, where she
was a political exile in 1937.
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4. Filipino Women and American Empire, 1904-2004
These documents advance our understanding of the history of Filipino
women’s activism in the movement for women’s voting rights and
other social movements in a wide range of the Philippines during and
after its occupation by the United States. We include documents from
the National Federation of Women’s Clubs and from women’s clubs in
such places as Pangasinan and Iloilo. Women’s club activities reveal
the diverse ways that Filipino women engaged with the colonial state.
In their speeches and essays, women supported movements for
Philippine independence, urged the American governor general to
support free public education, and worked with U.S. women on
projects that supported the colonial state’s modernizing and civilizing
projects.
This book by Encarnacion Alzona, a pioneering Filipino historian,
educator, suffragist, and first Filipino woman to obtain a PhD, traces
the history of education in the Philippines from the sixteenth century
to 1930, highlighting the education of women. The volume includes a
Spanish and an English text.
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5. Korean Women in Hawai'i, 1916-1961
Between 1903 and 1924, 2,000 Korean women
immigrated to Hawai‘I, which was annexed by the
United States in 1898. Many participated in Korean
nationalist activities that supported Korean
independence from Japanese colonial rule. To support
the 1919 Independence Movement, Korean women in
Hawaii formed the Korean Women’s Relief Society,
through which they fundraised, lobbied and raised
public awareness about Japan’s occupation of Korea.
This document cluster includes official immigration
documents and sources generated by the Korean
Women’s Relief Society, such as by-laws, incorporation
papers, financial ledgers, and notes.
This inspection card and ticket issued to Susan Chun
depict her travel aboard the Shin Maryu to Hawaii.
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6. African American and Black African Women Build Civil
Society in South Africa, 1920-1960
This document cluster focuses on the interactions of African American and Black South
African women in advancing mutual aid associations in South Africa in the first four decades
of the 20th century. Through groups like the Bantu Women’s League, the Bantu Youth
League, and the Unity Home-Makers’ Club, Black South African women introduced self-help
organizations modeled after African American women’s clubs. African American women
supported these efforts. Together these women founded and led associations that improved
the lives of Black South Africans prior to Apartheid, combatting, for example, an inferior and
inadequate education system and restrictive labor laws. In a tumultuous political landscape
they simultaneously challenged imperialism and beliefs about racial inferiority.
While Susie Wiseman Yergan and Madie Hall Xuma, two African American wives who lived
in South Africa (1922-1936 and 1940-1963, respectively) eschewed overt politics in favor of
activism that steadily upheld African Americans as models of respectability, Black South
African Christian converts Sibusisiwe “Violet” Makanya and Florence Thandiswa Makiwane
Jabavu sought to instill pride in African customs and traditions. This divergence sparked
debates and questions about how to best represent and serve Black South Africans in their
path to modernity (and what modernity meant). Their activism pointed the way to women’s
direct protests in South Africa and in the United States in the 1950s.
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Umteteli Wa Bantu: The Mouthpiece
of the Native People

7. Native Women Oppose Colonialism in Guatemala, 1960-2016
Many Mayan women in rural Guatemala
considered it part of their community
responsibilities to oppose American-
financed, state repression of their culture.
Original interviews with guerrilla
combatants and organizers during the
Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996) explore
the varied work by women in rural Mayan
communities. Interviews discuss women’s
activism during the conflict and in their
promotion of community development after
the war ended. Based on fieldwork in
Chiché, El Quiché, Guatemala, 2002-2005,
2006, and 2015, the interviews were
translated from Chiché into Spanish, and
from Spanish into English.
Here an interviewee discusses her family
life during the Guatemalan civil war.
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8. U.S. Women Aid Workers in Indochina, 1955 to 1970
Female aid workers played an important role in American
efforts to modernize Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and bring
those countries into the U.S. orbit during the Cold War. What
experiences did American women have in Indochina? How did
U.S. development programs affect communities and especially
women and children in the host countries? How did
Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian people respond to the efforts
of American aid workers? These sources come from the
personal collections of some of the American women involved
in development and aid projects and seek to address these and
other important questions about American involvement in
Indochina.
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