NEW IPO Logo - by Charles Larry Home Search Browse About IPO Staff Links


The last quarter century has witnessed a blossoming of scholarship on the history of women in America, including Illinois. This issue of Illinois History Teacher highlights the diversity of women's experiences in Illinois while demonstrating the centrality of the roles women have played within their families, communities, and economies. In the four pairs of articles and curriculum materials that follow, the authors illustrate some of the many ways in which women's lives and opportunities have been shaped by race, ethnicity, class, and gender, as well as by time and place.

In the first section, the authors explore the richness and diversity of women's roles in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sauk and Mesquakie villages in northern Illinois. These women made vital contributions to the subsistence economy of their own villages and played a vital part in local trade networks. They were also prominent among those who shared in Black Hawk's resistance to the forced removal of Native Americans from Illinois in the early nineteenth century.

The second section examines the variety of contributions African-American women made through their clubs in turn-of-the-century Chicago. Women's club members provided a variety of social services to the city's black community, advocated for social and political reforms, fought against racial discrimination, and pursued self-improvement and education. In the process, they enriched their own lives as well as those of others in their communities. The authors of the third section focus on the employment experiences of white women in the clerical field in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chicago. Using excerpts from letters and magazine articles, the authors encourage students to analyze the variety and complexity of the responses of both the working women themselves and various societal observers to the new phenomenon of women office workers.

The final section deals with the experiences of Mexican women who migrated to and lived in Chicago in the twentieth century. The authors demonstrate the central roles that Mexicanas played in their families and community through paid employment, household management, social and religious activities, and political activism. By placing women's experiences squarely within the context of Chicago's Mexican community, this section highlights the impact of each on the other.

I am grateful to Keith Sculle for asking me to serve as Guest Editor of this issue of the Illinois History Teacher. I would particularly like to thank the authors who contributed to this analysis of the diversity of women in Illinois history. By taking us inside the lives of different groups of Illinois women, these historians and curriculum material authors have opened important and illuminating windows on the history of Illinois.

Sincerely,
Virginia R. Boynton
Guest Editor, Illinois History Teacher

1


|Home| |Search| |Back to Periodicals Available| |Table of Contents| |Back to Illinois History Teacher 2003|
Illinois Periodicals Online (IPO) is a digital imaging project at the Northern Illinois University Libraries funded by the Illinois State Library