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Category: Women’s History

Claire Rochester. Photo by Bain News Service, 1916 April. http://hdl.loc.gov

Pictures to Go: Women and Automobiles

Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson

How have women and automobiles been depicted together? The image I conjured in my mind’s eye involved attractive women draped across a car in a purely decorative fashion–something like the image below, where the finer features of the bathing beauties are more on view than the Columbia Six Sport they are presumably helping to advertise. …

Women Photojournalists

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

The names of some landmark women photographers, Lisette Model, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White, to name three, may not only ring familiar but also prompt clear visual associations of now iconic images shot by each. Other names such as Zaida Ben-Yusuf, Thérèse Bonney, and Hansel Mieth, may be less familiar. Yet, they all, and another …

Photograph shows three women and a man holding croquet mallets in front of a nearby structure. An African American boy sits on the steps. The location, on Port Royal Island in Beaufort County South Carolina, later came to be known as Smith's plantation.

Entering the World of a Civil War Missionary: Laura M. Towne

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

The following is a guest post by Gay Colyer, Digital Library Specialist in the Prints and Photographs Division. Not every Northerner who traveled to the Confederacy during the Civil War went to fight. Some journeyed South on a variety of educational and humanitarian missions. After Federal forces seized Beaufort, South Carolina, and the sea islands …

Ann Rosener, Documenting the Home Front

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

A new biographical essay about photographer Ann Rosener (1914-2012) sheds light on her wartime work as she focused on the contributions of women workers and other aspects of the World War II home front. In the early 1940s Rosener documented preparations for war and home front activities for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) by contributing …

Smiling woman dressed in outdoor winter clothes holds a large, old-style camera

Alice Rohe: Pioneering Woman Photojournalist

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

Start with a solid upbringing as the daughter of an artist father in late 19th-century Kansas; add a college education at a time when women were generally not college-bound; combine a heaping helping of five years in turn-of-the-century New York City with a dash of women’s rights. Then, fold in recovery in a Colorado sanitorium …