Writing from the Library (Spring 2018)

Scholars continue to flock to the Schlesinger to conduct research for their projects. Here we highlight three recently published books whose authors relied in part on the Library’s holdings.

R. Marie Griffith
Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians & Fractured American Politics
(Basic Books, 2017)

While researching her newest book, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians & Fractured American Politics, R. Marie Griffith dove into the papers of the physician Mary Steichen Calderone. After serving as a medical director for Planned Parenthood, Calderone founded the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States in 1964, only to find herself a target of venomous hate mail, much of which is in the Library’s archives.

A review in the Washington Post called Griffith’s book “magisterial,” saying, “Moral Combat is an impressive history of a massive fault line running through American history and politics: namely, sex. In eight rich chapters that span a century, Griffith traces the ridge where the tectonic plates of very different kinds of Christians have abutted.”

Griffith is the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where she directs the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics.

Brittney C. Cooper
Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women
(University of Illinois Press, 2017)

In Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, Brittney C. Cooper looks at African American women as public intellectuals from the late 1800s to the 1970s, focusing on the evolution of several prominent thinkers and activists, including Pauli Murray. Cooper spent valuable research time at the Schlesinger, which houses the Pauli Murray Papers.

A review on NPR praised Beyond Respectability as a “work of crucial cultural study,” saying it “lays out the complicated history of black woman as intellectual force, making clear how much work she has done simply to bring that category into existence.” Bitch magazine advised readers: “If black women’s history is your thing, Beyond Respectability should definitely be on your reading list.”

Cooper, an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, took part in the panel “Rediscovering Pauli Murray” at Radcliffe in the spring of 2017. Watch the event video.

Agatha Beins
Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity
(University of Georgia Press, 2017)

During the research for Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity, Agatha Beins not only perused many titles from the Schlesinger’s periodicals collection but also looked at the papers of Charlotte Bunch, Wini Breines, Ann Popkin, and Rochelle Ruthchild, among others. The result is a volume that reveals the complexity of and diversity within feminism—including some understudied aspects of the movement.

Liberation in Print is part of the Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America Series, which is coedited by the Schlesinger Library Council member Claire Bond Potter, a professor of history at the New School. Beins is an associate professor of multicultural women’s and gender studies at Texas Woman’s University.