[bell tolls]
- Welcome to Suffrage School.
I am Durba Mitra,
assistant professor
of studies of women,
gender and sexuality
and the Carol K.
Pforzheimer Assistant
Professor at the
Radcliffe Institute
at Harvard University.
I am a scholar of feminisms and
sexuality in the global south,
and the author of
Indian Sex Life:
Sexuality and the Colonial
Origins of Modern Social
Thought out this year from
Princeton University Press
Today I want to share with
you my experiences exploring
the digital collections
of the Arthur
and Elizabeth
Schlesinger Library
on the history of
American women,
particularly the Schlesingers'
amazing collections
of digitized posters
that visualize
the history of women's movements
and transnational women's
organizing.
If you navigate to
the poster collection
at the Schlesinger
Library website,
you will find posters from the
UN Year and Decade of Women.
These posters were used to
advertise and memorialize
the important international
conferences on women that
occurred as part of the
United Nations Women's Year
in 1975 that took place in
Mexico City in Copenhagen
in 1980, and in Nairobi in 1985.
The Schlesingers' collection
features a digital poster
for the 1975 UN
Women's Year that
has an image that has
now become iconic--
a dove, illustrated with an
equals sign and the symbol
for women embedded in
the graphic of the dove.
The poster was created by
the New York City-based
graphic designer
Valerie Pettis, age 27
at the time, who donated
the poster to the conference
efforts.
In the poster, we see the icon
of a dove, representing peace.
The two embedded
symbols also represent
the promise of women's rights,
an equal sign representing
women's equality, and the symbol
of the female sex, of women.
The pictogram of the female sex,
originally invented as a sign
by Carl Linnaeus
from his 18th century
work on the sex of
plants, was by the 1960s
a key image used in
US women's movements.
The poster places
the dove in the stars
with a galaxy centered
inside the dove, a claim
to the truly universal
cause of women.
The dove symbol, characterized
by this equal sign
and the symbol for
women, featured
on all posters for
the UN Decade on Women
and continues to be the
symbol of UN Women today.
The 1975 conference
happened only a few years
after decolonization in many
parts of Asia and Africa,
when people of
the colonial world
began to access
democratic voting
rights with independence,
and just a decade
after the US became a
full democracy, when
African-Americans
legally achieved
full franchise with the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
These posters and
these conferences
are an integral part
of the complex history
of US imperialism and racism.
The rise of US power
in the United Nations
and the important role
of images and iconography
played in the international
women's movements
in the second half
of the 20th century.
I hope you will explore
these digital posters
and so many more that are
available on the Schlesinger
Library's digital collections.
Thank you.
