Women, Work, and Family in the Distinguished Career of Leila J. Rupp

• Published in: Journal of women's history 2017-03, Vol.29 (1), p.153-159
• Main Author: Freeman, Susan K
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic freedom; Acquired immune deficiency syndrome; Activism; AIDS; Anthologies; Archival research; Bisexuality; Cabaret; Cultural history; Culture; Disability studies; Disorders; Essays; Feminism; Gays & lesbians; Gender identity; Group identity; Historiography; History; HIV; Human immunodeficiency virus; Identity; Internationalism; Law; Lesbianism; LGBTQ people; Marginality; Nonprofit organizations; People with disabilities; Propaganda; Research methodology; Rituals; Sex crimes; Social activism; Social movements; Social studies; Society; Students; Teachers; Teaching; Transgender persons; Transsexuality; Vice Presidents; Women; Working women; World War I
• ISSN: 1042-7961; 1527-2036; 1527-2036
• DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2017.0009

Yet even as lesbians formed a subculture that veered at times toward essentialist views, Taylor and Rupp argued that women’s community institutions and rituals fueled activist identities and engagement: whether about straightforwardly feminist issues like sexual violence, or in a diverse array of coalition work, including labor struggles, Latin American solidarity, AIDS activism, and reproductive freedom. [...]two recent edited collections—Nancy Hewitt’s No Permanent Waves, and Kathleen Laughlin and Jacqueline Castledine’s Breaking the Wave—carry forward this thread; they also include essays by two of Rupp’s former students, Stephanie Gilmore and me.5 Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (1997) continues the project of challenging the historiography and periodization of women’s movements.6 Employing feminist sociological and social movements frameworks along with exhaustive archival research and analysis, Rupp showed how internationalist women after the First World War sustained a collective identity and brought forward feminist concerns. Rupp and Taylor’s projects on drag queens and young women’s sexual lives at the turn of the twenty-first century exhibit a feminist curiosity about the work of identity, influenced by theoretical questions about gender performance that are grounded in empirical research. In Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History (2014), Rupp and I worked with terrifically accomplished contributors to offer readers simple and more elaborate ways to integrate queer history into existing history classes.13 In addition to coediting this Lambda award-winning book, Rupp serves as the Vice President of Teaching FAIR (teachingfair.org), a nonprofit organization that helps California teachers fulfill the state law mandate to include LGBT people (as well as marginalized ethnicities and people with disabilities) in social studies classes.