Seminar on American Women's and Gender History

From the desk of Dr. Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz:

MA students in Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz's seminar on American women's and gender history researched and wrote biographical entries for an online biographical dictionary of women involved in the National American Woman's Suffrage Association (NAWSA), focusing on four specific individuals from Illinois. Students will receive author credits for their entries, which will appear on the Women and Social Movements in the United States website. Students, professors, and independent scholars throughout the country are participating in this crowd-sourced research project, and editor Thomas Dublin hopes to gather over one thousand biographical sketches in time to publish them online to commemorate the centennial of the passage of the 19th amendment.

According to MA student John Bays, who co-wrote an entry on Illinois suffragist Harriet Grim, "the best thing about this project was creating something tangible. Usually as a student, you spend a great deal of time and effort on papers with no significant public result. Sure, you learn writing and research skills, but unless you publish in Historia or present at a conference, you do not usually create something that will contribute to anything other then your own development as a historian. Creating a biographical sketch that will help form a database and help advance knowledge on regional suffrage activities has been one of those rare opportunities as a student of history where you know you are helping to advance not just your own development, but the field of history itself."