This website is part of a Women’s and Gender Studies course at LMU. Students from different semesters of Dr. Danielle Borgia’s Women and Gender Studies 1100: Race, Gender, and Sexuality have chosen to participate in this project. Students use their coursework in intersectional feminist thought to create a list of questions for an interview subject of their choice. They were asked to select a woman of color currently living in the United States, preferably a woman a generation older than the student who grew up in this country. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and edited by each student, who then used feminist analysis to create a narrative about the student’s interpretation of what viewers/listeners can learn from the woman’s words.
Please contact Dr. Borgia at danielle.borgia@lmu.edu with any questions about this assignment or any material found on this site.
“If women could go into your Congress, I think justice would soon be done to the Indians.”
-Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, 1884
“I studied; I read about all your men who wished to be president. I learned about the new laws. I wanted to know what was right, and not to act blindly… I think it right we should all try to learn, not vote blindly, since we have been given this right…”
-Tye Leung Schulze, about being one of the first women to vote, in 1912 in California
“…Not only are colored women with ambition and aspiration handicapped on account of their sex, but they are everywhere baffled and mocked on account of their race. Desperately and continuously they are forced to fight that opposition, born of a cruel, unreasonable prejudice which neither their merit nor their necessity seems able to subdue. Not only because they are women, but because they are colored women, are discouragement and disappointment meeting them at every turn.”
-Mary Church Terrell, from her speech at 1898 National American Woman’s Suffrage Association
“…those hated men have inspired in me such a large dose of hate against their race that though twenty eight years have elapsed since that time, I have not forgotten the insults heaped upon me, and not being desirous of coming into contact with them, I have abstained from learning their language.”
-Rosalia Vallejo de Leese, 1874, speaking of the Americans who arrested her brother and husband in the Bear Flag Revolt preceding the U.S. Invasion of Mexico in 1846
