The Patriotic Pinch Hitter: The AAGBL and How the American Woman Earned a Permanent Spot on the Roster

Little League baseball has been available for American youth since 1939. Little League Baseball, Inc. is a nonprofit organization that holds a federal charter by a 1964 Act of Congress. In the mid-1970s, Little League bent to intense outside pressures and expanded its organization to include girls. Little League has taken pride in its long history of relative absence of racial discrimination. In the mid-1980s, a California court ordered Little League to allow boys to play in the softball league with the girls. Softball and baseball are two different games, and just as there are some girls who prefer baseball, there are also some boys who prefer softball. The National Organization for Women (NOW) sought the admittance of girls to the all-boys Little League program in that state. The New Jersey court found in favor of NOW and mandated that all Little League programs within New Jersey be open to girls as well as boys.

More than 1,400 Latin American professional baseball players, age 16-21, are employed by 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) academies in the Dominican Republic. The popular press has highlighted scandals related to professional youth baseball player recruitment, selection, and exploitation in the academies, but little attention has been given to the academy experiences of youth baseball players from the perspective of the players themselves. For this research, 11 professional baseball players residing at an MLB Academy in the Dominican Republic participated in semi-structured interviews. Players described their transitions into the baseball academy system, their experiences in the academy, and their perceptions and expectations upon leaving or being released from the academy. Themes that emerged from the data included athletes’ hopes and dreams, stress, faith, and career transitions. Clinical implications of these findings for sport psychology practitioners are discussed.

Mindy Calling: Size, Beauty, Race in The Mindy Project

More American women fought in a war zone during the 1990–91 Gulf War than had fought in any American war since the Second World War. The 40,000 white, black, Asian-American and Hispanic American women who were deployed to Saudi Arabia during this nine-month military build-up amounted to four times the number of American military women sent to Vietnam over the entire decade of US involvement in that country. Three-fourths of those women were deployed by the Army. Only 3 per cent of Canada’s forces sent to the Gulf were women (though women make up 10.6 per cent of Canada’s entire active duty force), while Britain’s units were 1.5 per cent women (again lower than the 5 per cent level of its total military). France deployed 13 women in its 10,000-soldier force. Kuwait included 9 women among the 250 Kuwaiti volunteers sent to the US for military training in 1991.1

Background: Ankle and lower leg injuries are very common in sports, and numerous studies have discussed their diagnosis and management. Our study differs in that we report lower leg injuries in professional baseball players spanning the 2011-2016 seasons by utilizing a comprehensive injury surveillance system developed by Major League Baseball (MLB). Purpose: To determine the injury characteristics of ankle and lower leg injuries in professional baseball players during the 2011-2016 seasons by utilizing the MLB injury surveillance system. Study Design: Descriptive epidemiology study. Methods: Our study is a descriptive epidemiological evaluation through a retrospective review of injury data from the MLB Health and Injury Tracking System (HITS) since its implementation in 2010. We included any professional baseball player (MLB and Minor League Baseball [MiLB]) who was identified as having an ankle or lower leg injury between January 1, 2011, and February 28, 2017. Results: Over the study period, there were a total of 4756 injuries, of which 763 (16%) occurred in MLB players and 3993 (84%) occurred in MiLB players. The mean number of days missed for all players was 27.8 ± 141.4 days, with a median of 3 days. From 2011 through 2016, it was estimated that there were 414,912 athlete exposures (AEs) in MLB and 1,796,607 AEs in MiLB. Of the 4756 injuries recorded, 550 (12%) took place during the MLB regular season, and 3320 (70%) took place during the MiLB regular season. Injuries in MLB players, however, were 1.7 times more likely to require surgery (P < .001). Additionally, rates of injury to the lower leg were stratified by position, with infield players experiencing injuries at a 1.6 times greater rate than any other position (P < .001). Conclusion: In conclusion, this is the only epidemiological study to focus primarily on ankle and lower leg injuries in professional baseball players, utilizing an injury surveillance system developed by MLB.

In his 1914 book America through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat, Wu Tingfang worried about the ‘one fault’ he found with American women; their inquisitiveness. If Wu were alive today, he would see many exemplars of the inquisitive American woman in the globalized sphere of popular culture. He would also note the increase in the number of American women who are curious about China. This paper considers several contemporary China-focused ‘texts’ written/created by ‘inquisitive American women.’ These texts enjoy a global readership/viewership as they are all circulating in the public sphere in China, in the US, and beyond, particularly in the wake of the Beijing 2008 Olympics. From books such as Sara Bongiorni's, A Year Without ‘Made in China’: One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy and Robyn Meredith's The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us, to Anna Sophie Loewenberg's internet television show Sexy Beijing, a Beijing-centered look at life in China based on the HBO series Sex and the City, American women are asking a range of questions about China. As these women quell their curiosity about a ‘foreign’ nation, however, they are concurrently manifesting a particular national identity of their own. The preoccupations of these women, then, are worth noting for what they say about the US as well as China.

This paper is a comparative research study between Korean and American women's garments from the 1910s to 1930s. It focuses on the articles and advertisements of Korean women's magazines and American women's magazines. The Korean women's magazines investigated are 신여자[Siyeoja], 신가정[Singajung], 부인[Buin], 신여성[Sinyeosung], and 여성[Yeosung]. The American woman's magazine investigated is Ladies' Home Journal. This paper explores the differences and similarities between the garments that appear in these magazines. There is little evidence about women's clothing in Korean women's magazines while the American women's magazine includes a lot of information about women's dress and life. Korean women usually wore Korean traditional costumes with traditional terms like Chima and Jeogori but they wore western shoes, stockings, shawls, umbrellas, and some clothing with western materials such as lace, velvet, and rayon with borrowed words. These western accessories and some clothing materials like lace and rayon were the same fashion in America. So, Korean women wore traditional and western clothing together while American women wore clothing influenced by Paris fashion. American women wore various pieces of clothing like suits, frocks, coats and sportswear with undergarments. There were also lots of advertisements about women's under garments and sportswear which was different from Korean women's clothing during the period.

U.S. women's Holy Land writings—a body of novels, travel narratives, and children's literature—uniquely illustrate Americans' complex and often conflicting imperialist and religious investments in the Near East. U.S. women writers embraced the Holy Land as an extranational domestic space, a spiritual and prenational homeland that empowered American women as their nation's presumed spiritual guardians. From the 1840s through the 1890s, the American woman that was represented in women's Holy Land writings bound and reconciled the political and spiritual forces at work in the Holy Land, especially during times of national vulnerability. In the late 1850s and 1860, when the outbreak of sectarian violence in Mount Lebanon provoked further anxiety about growing sectional and racial hostilities in the United States, women writers imagined the American woman capable of reordering a contentious, religiously diverse society. The multicultural community that women writers envisioned, however, was founded on the subordination of religious and racial others; moreover, women's Holy Land writings conflated religious and racial otherness as a way of containing difference. The Muslim-Arab became the emblem of this conflation, a figure both immoral and unalterable. Despite the dangers this Muslim-Arab posed to diverse society, he was represented as mollified by the American woman's pious presence. An inherent deference for U.S. domesticity, these women writers suggested, can compel religious-racial others to submit willingly to a clearly hierarchized social order. Innate piety enabled the American woman to reconfigure class in the Holy Land and make diversity safe, in turn reinforcing the Holy Land as a feminine domain.

In 2005, fifty women photographers participated in a project to capture the everyday lives of over seventy American women on the same day in order to provide a composite portrait of the modern American woman in the twenty-first century. Through a close analysis of the photographs and accompanying texts this article questions to what extent the definition proposed by the book A Day in the Life of the American Woman remains faithful to a “traditional” vision of the American woman, or on the contrary to what extent this definition reflects an empowered and diversified vision of women since the 70s feminist movement. Our findings reveal that although A Day in the Life presents a diversified vision of the modern, American woman, it simultaneously remains faithful to a more stereotypical vision where a woman’s primary goal is to remain a mom.

"THE FEMALE APPENDAGE": Feminine Life-Styles in America, 1820 1860 Ronald W. Hogeland Various keen commentators such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller and Simone de Beauvoir who have directed their attention to the history of femininity have correctly observed that men have consistently usurped the initiative in defining the life-styles of the "second sex."1 For this reason it appears futile to attempt to approach the subject of women—in any age—either by way of a "pots and pans" pseudocultural inquiry,- or by means of merely studying atypical women. In the former instance one falls prey to an inclination, which many historians have not avoided, of devaluating the nature of femininity by making women invisible in a sea of domesticity. It is just because of this attitude that a score of female critics of the American scene have concluded that women have always been "a class outside of history."3 In the other instance, it appears ineffectual to trace accurately the evolution of the 1 Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women ( London, 1792 ) ; Margaret Fuller [Ossoli], Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Boston, 1845); Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated and edited by H. M. Parshley (New York, 1949). Also consult Ernest R. Groves, The American Woman: the Feminine Side of the Masculine Civilization (New York, 1942); Edna G. Rostow, "The Best of Both Worlds: Feminism and Femininity," Yale Review (Spring, 1962), 384-399; and Betty Friedan's highly popular volume, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963). The most accessible and scholarly recent bibliographical treatment of the subject of femininity in America is to be teased-out of Andrew Sinclair's The Emancipation of the American Woman (New York, 1965), which traces its theme from the colonial period to the present. 2 See David B. Davis' very suggestive "Some Recent Directions in American Cultural History," American Historical Review (Feb., 1968), 696-707. I must admit I find myself attracted to "the third level" of investigation which the author notes "is still the most neglected." (704-705). 3 This assertion was underscored afresh by the works of Mary Ellmann, Thinking About Women (New York, 1968); Caroline Bird with Sara Welles Briller, Born Feriale : The High Cost of Keeping Women Down (New York, 1968); and Aileen S. Kraditor, who has edited an impressive selection of writings about women, Up From the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago, 1968). In the past decade there have been numerous books and articles written about women as a distinctive class. Most of them dealing with American women are broad in their scope and polemical in nature. Hence, they fail to delimit their inquiry historically as both James R. McGovern and Anne F. Scott have illustrated recently can be done successfully: "The American Woman's Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals," Journal of American History (Sept., 1968), 315-333; "The 'New Woman' in the New South," South Atlantic Quarterly (Autumn, 1962), 473-483. For the most successful current historiographical treatment of the subject consult Gerda Lerner's "New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History," Journal of Social History, (Fall, 1969), 53-62. 101 102CIVIL WAR HISTORY American women by alluding to nonconventional or "radical" women such as Anne Hutchinson, Mother Ann Lee, Frances Wright, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Here the student of history fails to avoid another trap, despite his good intention, of simply underscoring a few women's unconventional practices which are identified (often mistakenly) with feminism. This often subtle (or unconscious) form of ridiculing the atypical woman only reinforces the age-old masculine disposition not to take women seriously. In either case—by writing as if women were invisible or absurd—the historian has not substantially come to grips with the nature of femininity . To do this, one must try to relate women as fully human agents who have the capacity to choose meaningful life-styles, to concentrations of power—and hence to men. For what is evident in the American experience , from the colonial period to the present, is that "the male attitude" has been responsible for defining the dimensions of femininity and the roles which the members of the...

In this astute and extensive study of the material culture of the American women's movement, Amy Helene Forss provides an essential overview of the history of US feminism wherein a series of fascinating artifacts takes center stage to connect that history. While Forss focuses on each artifact and its role within the movement, she often delves much deeper by addressing how the leadership of certain groups in the movement has long been underrepresented, such as that of African American women.Forss frames material-culture items of the women's movement such as cartes de visite, clothing, service pins, jewelry, gavels, torches, urns, and sculptures, along with published texts, programs, and banners within each era's campaigns, while presenting specific women's experiences in and of the movement. Historical research throughout Borrowing from Our Foremothers: Reexamining the Women's Movement through Material Culture, 1848–2017 is thorough and impressive, but the book is also strengthened by 99 oral histories that Forss conducted with such accomplished individuals as Ellen Broidy (gay rights activist and co-organizer of the first gay pride parade), Rosalynn Carter (former First Lady of the United States and an Equal Rights Amendment supporter and author), E. Faye Williams (lawyer, civic leader, and named one of the hundred most influential Black Americans by Ebony magazine), and Frances “Poppy” Northcutt (a NASA Apollo 8 engineer). As Forss outlines, these individuals, along with dozens of others, add their voices to the multi-layered narrative that is so inherent to the American women's movement.One of the artifacts revealed by Forss as a primal touchstone for this project is a charm bracelet that chronologically documents the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) ratification process that began in 1972. As part of the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, this charm bracelet (and several similar bracelets) once belonged to Alice Paul, foremother extraordinaire. Paul's leadership through the Washington, DC, chapter of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), helped secure the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, granting women the right to vote. In her time, Paul organized parades and pickets addressing and supporting women's suffrage, including a parade of over 8,000 women participants who marched with banners down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House on March 3, 1913, just one day before President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration.Though Paul eventually broke away from the NAWSA, she continued her efforts for women's rights by forming the National Woman's Party and authoring the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Paul marked the milestone of each state that approved the ERA with an enamel-state-shaped charm. Attaching each charm to a bracelet, Paul filled many bracelets that reveal a remarkable story and “an intriguing angle of historical contemplation” (p. 2), even though the ERA fell three states short of constitutional passage in 1982.Forss documents the captivating story of 30 unifying artifacts “pertaining to foremothers of diverse race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and gender identity” (p. 2). Of interest to many is the author's solid research on Black suffragists, who formed their own organization, the National Federation of Afro-American Women, out of extreme frustration with white suffrage organizational marginalization and disgust at newspaper editorials describing Black women as “thieves and lying prostitutes” (pp. 65–6). Sojourner Truth's carte de visite conveys to readers the essential role of African American women within the movement, and Marian Anderson's evening gown worn for a special concert helps readers understand how history defines an artifact, and in this case, the wearer of that artifact.Much controversy arose around contralto Anderson and her soon-to-be landmark, open-air performance at the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939, when she entertained 75,000 people and many listeners via radio. Incredibly, a day or two ahead of the concert, Anderson had failed to reserve a hotel room in segregated Washington, DC. This spurred Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt's former US Forest Service Chief—whom Forss misidentifies as a “former National Park Service Chief”—to offer his home to Anderson, her mother, and her sisters (p. 70). Deliberately performing specific music “during an event tinged with racism” (p. 71), Anderson became a symbol of the Black community, and her dress, in and of itself, also became part of the singer's iconic status within that community and the women's movement for all women.Forss engages readers with the immersive history and provenance of many contemporary artifacts—such as the Radical Lesbian “Lavender Menace” T-shirt, Reverend Pauli Murray's sculpted hand, Billie Jean King's tennis dress, and, most recently, the Pussyhat Project Manifesto—whose tangible and intangible histories represent the inclusivity of the women's movement well into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Forss also provides insightful commentary on iconic items indicative of LGBTQ+ feminists, which demonstrates the author's skill as both scholar and storyteller.Scholars, researchers, and students of women's history, folklore, and material culture will not be disappointed by Forss’ inclusion of photographs for artifacts discussed, a helpful “cast of foremothers,” an appendix featuring speeches (particularly by Sojourner Truth), as well as extensive notes, a bibliography, and an index.There are few scholarly works that so profusely and precisely discuss the interconnection of artifacts surrounding the American women's movement as Forss does in Borrowing from Our Foremothers.

Beginning in the mid to late 1960s and continuing to the present, declines in the annual death rates attributed to coronary heart disease (CHD) have been observed in American men and women, reversing previously observed trends of steadily increasing mortality from CHD.1 Despite these encouraging trends, CHD continues to be a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in American men and women. It has been estimated that almost 1 in every 2 middle-aged American men and 1 in every 3 American woman will develop CHD during their lifetime.2 Article p 1203 Epidemiologists have provided extensive insights into the predictive and relative importance of a variety of predisposing factors for CHD. This has been accomplished through the conduct of a number of landmark longitudinal studies including the community-based Framingham Heart Study, the migrant Ni-Hon-San Study, and the international Seven Countries Study. Elevated blood cholesterol levels, cigarette smoking, increased levels of blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, the metabolic syndrome, and high fat diets have been consistently linked to the occurrence of CHD. More recent investigations have suggested that there may be other factors involved in the pathogenesis of CHD including cell inflammation, disturbances in clotting and hemostasis, plaque vulnerability, and alterations in autonomic tone of the coronary vasculature. Concomitant with an enhanced understanding of the risk factors involved in the development of coronary atherosclerosis and its different clinical manifestations, and greater appreciation of the multidecade-long natural history of CHD, remarkable advances have been made in the primary and secondary prevention of acute coronary disease, especially during the past 2 decades. In the 1960s, prolonged bed rest and treating complications as they occurred were the mainstay approaches used for the treatment of patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI). In the 1980s, however, coincident with new insights into the underlying pathophysiology of AMI …

During the Progressive Era, southern white women were aggressively recruited by the leadership of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the General Federation of Women's Clubs and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Each believed the inclusion of southern white women vital to its success as a national association of American women; consequently, by the beginning of the twentieth century, southern white women had achieved positions of leadership in each organization. This dissertation analyzes, primarily through the public statements of the leaders of these groups, how these women defined themselves as women, as white, and as southern vis a vis their region and their national associations. As members of national organizations, southern white women used national networks of propaganda--newspapers, speaking tours, convention meetings--to outline publicly their visions of the proper role of middle class southern white women in a New South. Southern white members of the WCTU and the GFWC used the rhetoric of domesticity to publicly construct a vision of useful, if not enfranchised, citizenship based on their traditional duties as women--mothers, wives, home keepers. However, members of the NAWSA argued for fully enfranchised citizenship based on their status as educated middle class white women who, they believed, should share an equal responsibility, along with white men, in governing a New South order. Members of each association used a racialize rhetoric to publicly outline their vision of proper race relations in the post-emancipation South. White WCTU leaders argued that freed blacks needed the social control of prohibition to be productive members of southern society. Southern white club women argued that the GFWC needed to protect the prerogatives of southern whiteness by excluding black club women from the national organization. And southern white suffragists used the language of white supremacy to argue the necessity of granting white women the vote. During the Progressive Era, membership in national women's organizations gave southern white women an unprecedented opportunity for regional and national activism. They used these opportunities to argue the necessity for their voice as an integral part of a New South.

The American women's rights movement has generally been regarded as being designed for and by women, but in fact men have committed to feminism since the emergence of the idea of women's rights. In her ambitious monograph, Men in the American Women's Rights Movement, 1830–1890: Cumbersome Allies, Hélène Quanquin re-evaluates the evolution of male activism in the American women's rights movement of the nineteenth century through the lens of the personal and political lives of nine male activists from the 1830s to the 1890s. Considering feminist activism to be heterogeneous, the author argues that male activists had a continuous influence upon American feminist discourse throughout the nineteenth century, but they were also ‘cumbersome’, for instance, when they used their position as self-styled disinterested actors to patronize women and control the movement's agenda (p. 158). With the examination of the combination of personal and public sphere, Quanquin reveals the complex roles of the male activists in the American women's rights movement, thus analysing the complexities of the nineteenth-century social justice coalition and engaged allyship. Based on a corpus of family archives, Quanquin investigates how the male activists made their choices, how they articulated their defence of women's rights with their personal lives, and how their personal life and political engagement intersected on a daily basis. She concludes that the activism was the result of private and public conversations about women's rights and gender relations within and outside the movement, contradicting the traditional vision of a strict separation of spheres in the nineteenth century (p. 4). Another important aspect of this book is the way race, gender and class issues intersected among female and male activists and within reform (p. 4). The nineteenth-century women's rights movement is known to be closely related to anti-slavery and other reforms. Here, Quanquin challenges traditional perspectives to consider anti-slavery as the centre to examine its influence upon the women's rights movement. By exploring biographies, memoirs and other archives, she articulates multifarious links between abolitionism and the women's rights movement as well as the intricacies of social justice coalitions. Following a chronological outline, the book is composed of five chapters, with two male figures in each chapter. In the introduction, Quanquin starts with a discussion of Thomas Wentworth Higginson's claim of men's ‘feebler voices’ at the 1887 annual meeting of the American Woman Suffrage Association and gives an academic review on ally activism of male participants in the women's rights movement. Chapter one focuses on William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips who defended women's rights at the first World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London in the year of 1840. The second chapter is devoted to the Seneca Falls convention in 1848, which claimed publicly for woman suffrage for the first time. Frederick Douglass and James Mott were important participants at this convention. With an analysis of their views towards marriage and masculinity, Quanquin points out the challenges these ‘reliable partners’ encountered and argues that the male counterparts did not always cooperate, especially on the ideological foundation of feminism at this stage. The third chapter investigates the controversial issue of marriage arising in the 1850s by exploring the marriages of Henry B. Blackwell and Stephen S. Foster. Both had failed business ventures and more famous feminist wives. With an analysis of their roles as husband and male activist, Quanquin stresses the crucial role personal relationships play in the construction of men's allyship. Chapter four turns to the meetings in the Reconstruction. Focusing on the positions of Robert Purvis and Henry Ward Beecher, this chapter presents the complexity of the feminist discourse between race and gender after the Civil War. The final chapter expounds upon the eviction of male activists in the late nineteenth century by portraying the positions of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Frederick Douglass in the last decades of nineteenth century in relation to their remarriage experiences. As an expert on the history of American feminism, Quanquin systematically investigates the development of the American women's rights movement in the nineteenth century through the actions and discourses of its male activists. The book clearly shows the mutual influence of personal ideals and collective actions in men's activism, and underlines the problematic relationship between allyship and ‘others’ in the movement. It provides new perspectives to evaluate the nineteenth-century reformers’ activism and contributes to an intellectual genealogy of the American women's rights movement. This groundbreaking book will be essential reading for students, scholars and researchers in the fields of gender history, women's history, gender studies and American history. This book review is supported by National Social Science Foundation of China (19CWW022).

CLARA BARTON, SOLDIER OR PACIFIST? Ellen Langenheim Henle The idea that women can be soldiers touches a sensitive nerve among the American people. A recent editorial in The Washington Post, "Why Should Girls Have To Play With Guns Too?," evoked so many letters from readers that an entire page in a subsequent issue was devoted to the debate on women's future role in the American Military. The actual role of American women in the armed services has increased substantially in the last decade and the day for debating a "proper" role for women may have passed. West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy now admit women. Female Marines are being trained for combat despite legal prohibitions against using women in actual combat. And the Army Chief of Staff advocates drafting women if the draft is restored.1 American women have participated in wars from the earliest days. They served with regiments in the French and Indian War—as laundresses, seamstresses, and cooks. There have been campfollowers in all wars: prostitutes from Philadelphia even journeyed out to Valley Forge during the American Revolution to warm things up a bit for the frozen soldiers there. Thousands of women served as nurses in hospitals during the Civil War. In this century, American women have worked in munitions industries, flown transport planes for the military, and gone directly to the front as Red Cross nurses.2 1 See The Washington Post, Aug. 20, 1977. See also "Women in Combat; A Matter of Rights?," ibid., Feb. 14, 1977 and "Female Marines Get Training in Field Tactics at Quantico," ibid., April 7, 1977. Preliminary versions of this paper were given at the Office of Military History, Washington, D.C., March, 1977 and at a Conference on the History of Women, College of St. Catharine, St. Paul, Minnesota, October, 1977. 2 See Walter H. Blumenthal, Women Campfollowers of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1952) for an interesting account of women in this war. There are several good secondary sources on women in the Civil War: Mary E. Massey, Bonnet Brigades (New York, 1966); and Agathe Young, Women and the Crisis: Women of the North in the Civil War (New York, 1959). Good primary published material on women in the Civil War include Frank Moore, Women of the War (Hartford, 1866) and Linus P. Brockett and Mary Vaughan, Woman's Work in the Civil War (Rochester, 1867). See Portia Kemodle, The Red Cross Nurse in Action 1882-1948 (New York, 1949) for information on wartime nursing since the Civil War. There is a real need for a good comprehensive history of women's varied roles in twentieth-century wars. 152 Historians have done little to shed light on women's roles in war. This is partly because women's history was considered unimportant by many professional historians until the last decade. Many of those currently doing research in the field of women's history have a pacifist bias which affects their choice of subject matter. In a session on women and war at a recent professional meeting, all three papers were devoted to female pacifists. The historians giving the presentations expressed their concern at "the increasing role of women in the United States armed forces." They were also bothered by the fact that "some of them [women] were demanding combat training and assignments."3 The life and writings of one American woman who was actively involved in three major wars of the nineteenth century may illumine the history of women and war and contribute new perspectives to the modern debate on women's future role in the military. Clara Barton was a Civil War heroine, founder of the American National Red Cross in 1881, and its first president for over twenty years. Miss Barton, born in 1821 in Oxford, Massachusetts, participated in the Civil War as a battlefield nurse and as a onewoman relief worker bringing needed medical supplies and food to the front lines in her army wagons. In the Franco-Prussian War, she followed the German troops into Strasbourg after a monthlong seige and stayed there for six months organizing a relief program for poor women in the city. In the Spanish-American War in...