Read recent press releases from Cornell University:

In a press release dated May 16, 2011, Cornell University celebrates the 10th year of the program with three new grants. To read the release, please click here.

In a press release dated May 18, 2010, Cornell University proudly discusses the success of the Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grant program. To read the release, please click here.

In addition, we highlight Brenda Marston's vetting process of one of our 2009 award winners, Lauren J. Gutterman:

• Lauren made an exploratory trip here last summer, and wants to come back for more serious research. She wrote: "Because married women were so secretive about their same-sex relationships it is very difficult for historians to learn about them; this is why the HSC's Valerie Taylor Collection and Valerie Taylor Papers are so crucial to my dissertation on lesbian wives and the discourse around them." For her dissertation, her research here will be complemented by research on two other major authors of lesbian novels during the Cold War era and on an overlooked expression of panic from moral and medical authorities about lesbian wives in the period. Her advisor wrote in the letter of reference "She is the kind of responsible scholar who sees her tasks not only as passing hurdles, gaining qualifications and getting a job, but also as adding to historical understanding in a way that will make a difference." In addition, she wrote that "Like so many graduate students in New York City, her fellowship stipend is not even enough to support her basic living expenses, let alone research travel.

Lauren J. Gutterman (whose project is entitled Stranger on Lesbos: Valerie Taylor and the Lesbian Wife in Cold War America), recently wrote us describing her visit to Cornell:

• I visited The Human Sexuality Collection July 6th through the 10th. I spent most of my time there looking through the Valerie Taylor Papers and Valerie Taylor Collection. I was able to skim Taylor's first published novel, Hired Girl, which I have not been able to find anywhere else. I examined photographs from her early years which give a sense of her challenging rural upbringing. I was also able to find published and unpublished poems written during her married years, which address themes of love, loss, longing, and death. Although I do not read the poems as entirely autobiographical, I take them as evidence of her dark mood during her challenging marriage.

  I also read through book reviews in lesbian and feminist newspapers and magazines following the 1982 re-release of her Erika Frohman pulp novel series from the 1960s and the release of her later novels, Prism, Ripening and Rice and Beans. I was surprised to learn how disapproving many reviewers were of Taylor's early pulp novels and how unappreciative they seemed of the feminist arguments and implications in her novels. In particular, they objected to her use of the term "girl" rather than "woman," her graphic sex scenes and her unsophisticated writing style, which several reviewers compared condescendingly to young adult fiction or Harlequin romance novels.

  I am now planning on writing an article comparing Taylor and Betty Friedan's life and politics. Both women had ties to the political left and were critical in the early 1960s of the housewife ideal. Both women used writing to draw attention to women's oppression before the second wave feminist movement emerged. Friedan's higher class-status and elite education allowed her to convey her politics through a more respectable type of journalistic, non-fiction writing, whereas Taylor was only able to publish dime-store pulp novels. Taylor's politics were, in fact, more radical than Friedan's as she connected women's oppression and homosexual oppression but her work was not canonized by feminists in the same way because of its less respectable form.

  One of the most exciting discoveries for me on this recent research trip was the oral history interviews in the Rochella Thorpe Collection. I surveyed the transcribed interviews in this collection and began listening to the oral history interviews on audio cassettes and I was happy to find several interviews with women who had engaged in lesbian relationships while married or women who had dated such "lesbian wives." I plan to make a follow-up research trip to the HSC this fall or winter to finish listening to these oral history tapes. This collection has changed the shape of my dissertation. While I was initially planning to focus on only three lesbian wives, I am now convinced that a broader social history of lesbian wives living in the US after WWII, is possible.

Phil Zwickler's archives are housed in Cornell University Library's Human Sexuality Collection. Brenda Marston heads this program and for over 20 years has been building a wonderful research facility for scholars of sexuality.

As curator of Cornell University's Human Sexuality Collection, Marston has, in the words of a former University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, "created space in the public sphere for a series of historical voices that were heretofore suppressed by a largely homophobic culture. Without the kind of resources Brenda has collected and profiled, these voices would not be heard, and thus, to a larger society, they would not even appear to exist. Brenda has, in effect, created a large part of the historical record that contemporaries and historians will have to study to understand the present."

Brenda is always eager to hear from people with new collecting ideas. She attends the national Creating Change conference sponsored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to be able to talk with activists about their issues and ideas. A few categories of material she is currently seeking include:

• papers of long-time HIV/AIDS survivors (letters, diaries, photo albums, notes reflecting the experience of people who have been living with HIV/AIDS for a long time now),
• papers of Intersex and transgender activists,
• records of national bisexual rights organizations,
• documents from same-sex couples' marriages around the country (photographs, copies of whatever legal forms were signed, wedding announcements, congratulations cards, rejection letters for marriage applications, etc.), as well as records of marriage equality activism,
• the tapes and transcripts from oral history projects, especially those documenting issues of race and sexual/gender identity, and
• the papers and libraries of long-time gay and lesbian activists.