COSWL Cause

I find the fact that Salon used the brain-dead headline [Why can't a woman write...] for Elaine Showalter's new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx just the most banal attempt to make male readers feel superior.
The comments are reasonably interesting as women defend women writers.

Salon muck is here: Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?

The Robbie Emily Dunn Collection of American Detective Fiction at Jackson Library of the University of North Carolina Greensboro was begun in 1981 with the initial intention that only women writers would be included. It quickly became evident that to exclude certain works written by men would be to exclude some interesting women detectives. The character of Bertha Cool, for example, allowed the inclusion of Erle Stanley Gardner writing under the pseudonym of A. A. Fair. Gardner keeps company with approximately forty other gentlemen writers similarly brought in to the collection by their fictitious lady sleuths.

The collection has grown to approximately 3000 volumes representing nearly 200 authors, 85 percent of whom are women. The earliest known American work in the genre written by a woman predates, as far as is known, the earliest American novel to feature a female detective. Historians of popular literature credit Seeley Regester (pseudonym of Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, 1831 - 1885) as our country's first woman to write a work of detective fiction. It is with her novel, The Dead Letter (New York, Beadle & Company, 1867) that our collection begins.

"to whom liberty was more important than life itself...the story of your life will live as long as stories are told of women and men of courage and idealism."

The Emma Goldman Papers is part of a national initiative to retrieve the papers of individuals whose life work has had a lasting impact on the course of American history. Since 1980, the Emma Goldman Papers Project at UCB has collected, organized, and edited tens of thousands of documents from around the world by and about Emma Goldman (1869-1940), a leading figure in American anarchism, feminism, and radicalism. In the spirit of Emma Goldman, the EGPP has extended its scholarly research to serve the community-to educate the public about the complexity of engagement in social and political transformation. It has published a microfilm edition of the papers (1991-1993) and A Guide to Her Life and Documentary Sources (1995). The papers provide a window not only into Goldman but also into social and cultural movements in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. Other publications include The Life and Times of Emma Goldman: A Curriculum for Middle and High School Students, highlighting primary source historical documents, and With Speech as My Weapon: Emma Goldman and the First Amendment, A Unit of Study for Grades 8–12. Since 1990, the Project has toured an exhibition of thirty-eight reproductions of historical photographs, personal letters, government documents and other memorabilia.

In 2004, The Emma Goldman Papers became a part of Peace and Conflict Studies within International and Area Studies. [Thx, SD].

H.R.606
International Women's Freedom Act of 2009 (Introduced in House)

From Women's e-news:
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., will chair a new Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Human Rights, Democracy, and Global Women's Issues, her office announced Feb. 5. It will be the first Senate subcommittee to include a specific, global focus on women.

Boxer said the subcommittee would address the "overlooked issue" of
violence against women.

"Too often, we turn our eyes away as women are
persecuted, abused and treated as second-class citizens. But even the most conservative historians have noted that when women are given the freedom to live up to their full potential, society as a whole flourishes,

" Boxer said.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof praised the subcommittee's
formation on his newspaper blog. "Issues like trafficking and maternal
mortality and sexual violence finally seem to be getting some traction . .
." he wrote. "The new Senate subcommittee reflects all this progress and presumably under Senator Boxer will accelerate it."

Boxer also introduced the International Women's Freedom Act of 2009 on
Jan. 13. Sponsored in the House by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., the bill would establish a State Department office on international women's rights headed by an ambassador-at-large and a federal commission reporting to Congress and the president on international women's rights.