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As Women’s History Month comes to a close and we transition to National Poetry Month in April, your reading list might benefit from a combination of the two! This post features recent poetry collections by women authors available at Collins Library. Search these titles in Primo or use the subject heading American poetry — Women authors to find additional titles.

Magical Negro: Poems by Morgan Parker

Winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. From the publisher: “MagicalNegro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans.”

Lima::Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s second poetry collection is a lyrical exploration of the intersection between gender roles and desire on the U.S.-México border.

Nasty Women Poets: an unapologetic anthology of subversive verse 

edited by Grace Bauer & Julie Kane

An anthology of poems– from women poets– that address stereotypes and expectations women have faced from the time of Eve to today’s political climate. This anthology is curated to represent a range of diverse voices unified in a message of female empowerment, activism, and the subversion of gender expectation norms.

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier

Winner of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Oglala Lakota author, Layli Long Soldier wrote this collection in response to S.J. Res 14, a congressional apology and resolution to the native peoples of the United States. Adapted from the publisher: Through an array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, she confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators.

Women’s History Month encourages reflection and engagement with women’s historical and contemporary contributions to American society, but what of the future?

In The Feminist Utopia Project: fifty-seven visions of a wildly better future, editors Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff combine over 50 contemporary voices and invite us to imagine a truly feminist world. Among the many writers represented in this collection are Melissa Harris-Perry, Janet Mock, Sheila Heti, and Mia McKenzie, Joey Soloway, Mariame Kaba, and many more. Their contributions cover a wide range of topics, including reproductive rights, justice, empathy, body image, parenting and employment. These selections challenge the status quo that accepts inequality and violence as a given, “offering playful, earnest, challenging, and hopeful versions of our collective future in the form of creative nonfiction, fiction, visual art, poetry, and more” (Library Journal).

Available to read now as an ebook!

Continuing our celebration of Women’s History Month and last year’s 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, we recommend these digital collections featuring a wide variety of primary sources related to women’s suffrage and women’s political organizing in the United States.

Women’s Suffrage: Campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment is a primary source set from the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) that documents women’s struggle for voting rights in the United States and the eventual passage of the 19th Amendment. Sources featured include photographs, advertisements, maps, and other documents that shed light on this historic moment in U.S. history. Dig deeper with DPLA’s additional primary source sets related to other eras and aspects of women’s history. 

Although the 19th Amendment states that voting rights should not be denied on the basis of gender, the reality was that the vast majority of women who were able to vote after its ratification in 1920 were white; most Black women and all Native American women remained disenfranchised for decades due to a tangled web of exclusionary laws and policies. The Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection is a collaborative project from the Digital Public Library of America and their academic partners to provide access to primary source materials “documenting the roles and experiences of Black Women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and, more broadly, women’s rights, voting rights, and civic activism between the 1850s and 1960.”

The Women’s Rights page on DocsTeach features primary sources from the National Archives and document-based teaching activities related to women’s rights and changing roles in American history – including women’s suffrage, political involvement, citizenship rights, roles during the world wars, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and more.

In Fall 2020, students, faculty, and staff celebrated the arrival of Puget Sound’s new academic major in Gender & Queer Studies, but did you know that the university has offered courses in Women’s Studies since 1972? 

As reported in the November 5, 1971 issue of The Trail (pg. 9), the first was an introductory course titled “Women in American Society,” which promised to “foster an understanding of the contemporary situation of women through historical introspection.” To generate interest and promote the new course to the campus community, students coordinated a special women’s issue of The Trail published in December 1971. This fascinating issue features contributors engaging with a variety of topics reflecting the agenda and concerns of the national women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as competing perspectives on feminism from Puget Sound students.

Like many early Women’s Studies programs, University of Puget Sound’s program experienced its share of growing pains and other difficulties due to limited administrative support, budgets, staffing, and resources, in addition to broader challenges to Women’s Studies as a necessary, political, and academically valid field of study. Its survival, promotion, and continued development into our current GQS program relied on the interest, support, and dedication of a sometimes small, yet passionate group of students, faculty, and staff over the past (nearly) 50 years. Learn more about the history and development of the Gender & Queer Studies program at Puget Sound and gendered experience on campus through our University Historical Collections, which include digitized copies of The Trail, yearbooks, University Bulletins, and much more! 

Women’s History Month is an annual celebration of women’s contributions to American history and contemporary society, and a great time to familiarize yourself with women’s stories, women authors, organizers, and media makers. This week, we’re featuring feminist manifestos, old and new, available at Collins Library. Manifestos have been an historically important genre for feminist thinkers and activists to challenge the status quo of gender and sex, make declarations about identity and politics, and advocate for change in our communities.

Search for these titles and many more in Primo and be inspired by perspectives from a variety of feminisms and time periods. Stay tuned for future posts this month highlighting more aspects of women’s historical, cultural, and creative production!

Burn it Down!: feminist manifestos for the revolution edited by Breanne Fahs

Spanning three centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing from the nineteenth century to the present day, this collection chronicles the rage, dreams, and calls to action from women in a variety of contexts. The urgency and awareness represented in these documents, Fahs argues, are where new and revolutionary ideas are born.

Feminist Manifestoes: a global documentary reader edited by Penny A. Weiss

This collection brings together 150 documents, each with their own introduction, from feminist organizations and gatherings in over 50 countries over the course of three centuries. In the introduction, editor Penny Weiss explores the value of these documents, especially how they speak with and to each other.

Hood Feminism: notes from the women that a movement forgot by Mikki Kendall

In this collection of essays, Mikki Kendall critiques the modern feminist movement, arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Kendall explores a variety of topics such as access to education, healthcare, wage inequality, food insecurity and more to show how race, class, sexual orientation, and ability intersect with gender.

Women & Power: a manifesto by Mary Beard

In two essays, well-known classicist, Mary Beard, offers a timely exploration of our cultural assumptions about women’s relationship with power, through examples ranging from the classical world of Medusa and Athena to modern women such as Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren.