Just in case you can’t visit the display in Hornbake Library, Defining “Normal,” here are some of the items we’re featuring to celebrate Women’s History Month!

Two feminists, two strategies

Both Dorothy Sucher and Djuna Barnes were women’s rights advocates, but they led very different lives.

Click to enlarge. From the Dorothy Sucher Collection, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries. http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/1404

Dorothy Sucher

How do we define Dorothy Sucher?

Mother
Mystery writer and founder of the Mid-Atlantic region of Sisters in Crime
Psychotherapist, with a Masters of Mental Health from Johns Hopkins University
Creative writing teacher at Georgetown University, Duke University, and the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland
Editor, reporter, and columnist for Greenbelt News Review
Watercolor artist
Women’s rights activist and Maryland’s Consciousness Raising Coordinator for the National Organization for Women
Normal?

Djuna Barnes being forcibly fed. New York World Magazine, September 6, 1914. Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland. http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/1512

Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes was a women’s rights activist, newspaper reporter, author and artist. Brooklyn Museum curator Catherine Morris describes Barnes’s reporting style as “stunt journalism” (see the NPR All Things Considered story Embracing the Quirkiness of Djuna Barnes).

For one of her articles, Djuna Barnes researched the force-feeding of British suffragettes by subjecting herself to the same treatment.

HOW IT FEELS TO BE FORCIBLY FED

Djuna Barnes, New York World Magazine September 6, 1914

“I shall be strictly professional, I assured myself. If it be an ordeal, it is familiar to my sex at this time; other women have suffered it in acute reality. Surely I have as much nerve as my English sisters? Then I held myself steady. I thought so, and I caught sight of my face in the glass. It was quite white; and I was swallowing convulsively.

“And then I knew my soul stood terrified before a little yard of red rubber tubing.”

Read the original at Digital Collections at University of Maryland Libraries (requires Flash).