Exhibition Announcement: Feminist Collections at SCUA
Linda Long, our Curator of Manuscripts, has put together a new exhibit highlighting the many feminist-focused manuscript collections at Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA). The materials include:
Feminist science fiction
Women writers who explore gender and sexuality in their writings abound at SCUA. Featured materials in the exhibit include the first draft of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, as well as drafts of Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, James Tiptree, Jr.’s The Women Men Don’t See, and Sally Gearhart’s The Wanderground.
Feminist language and communication
Today, it can be strange to see the pronoun “he” and the noun “man” used as generic defaults in formal writings. SCUA is home the papers of scholars and writers who made this change happen over the past forty or so years, including those of Casey Miller and Kate Swift, co-authors of Words and Women and The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing. At the Library, we are know that it really is okay to say, “Staff the reference desk” instead of “Man the reference desk.”
Lesbian separatist lands in Oregon
Women seeking to escape the patriarchy established communes and collectives in southern Oregon to live freely among themselves.
Tee Corinne’s photography
In the 1970s, lesbian writer and artist Tee Corinne challenged the art establishment with her explicit images of women’s bodies and lesbian sexuality.
Oregon Women’s Political History Collections
Women working in the Oregon Women’s Political Caucus taught women how to run successful political campaigns, resulting in a 400% increase in the number of women elected into the Oregon Legislative Assembly over a twenty-year period in the 1970s and 1980s.
Jane Grant Papers
Grant, the cofounder of The New Yorker with her husband Harold Ross, was a lifelong feminist and worked to help women keep their own last names after marriage. Some of you reading this probably know that Grant’s second husband, William Harris, donated Grant’s Papers and 3.5 million dollars to endow the University of Oregon Center for the Study of Women in Society in the 1980s.
The feminist science fiction collections, the Oregon lesbian land collections and Tee Corinne Papers in our repository account for a very high percentage of researchers who access these collections in-person in our reading room annually.
Wondering what all the fuss is about? Come on up to take a look and learn more about these valuable collections.
SCUA is currently open Tuesday through Friday, 10am to 4pm. When fall quarter starts, we’ll also be open on Mondays from 10am to 4pm.
Come and take a look!
