Editor's Note: This story originally appeared on the College of LAS website in September 2022. We're resharing it to celebrate the recent publication of professor Chaplin's book, Becoming Lesbian: A...
When professor Leslie J. Reagan entered her graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison she and the other students in her cohort were told they would never get a job. The field of women's history was virtually nonexistent at the time.
“I thought, that's okay, I’ll work in a...
Imagine it’s 1913 and you’re in a tiny basement restaurant called Polly’s in Greenwich Village, New York. Change is in the air and intellectuals, artists, and activists gather to debate the issues of the day: women’s suffrage, labor unions, socialism, birth control, and anarchism. The nightly crowd...