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Feminism of the 1970s remains among the most influential social movements within the United States. Bestselling texts played a crucial role in spreading feminism beyond early activists into the mainstream of American society. Contemporary scholars of feminism continue to rely on these works as pivotal historical sources. This paper utilizes quantitative methods to compare six feminist bestsellers from 1970. Our data consists of three subcorpora of digitized books published in 1970 found in the Hathi Trust: six feminist bestsellers, a sample of non-fiction, and a sample of writing about women. Computational textual analysis identifies each bestselling title’s salient features and the contributions each text made at this key moment in the development of feminist thought. These results led us to propose a historiographical intervention that credits one bestseller, The Black Woman, with a more prominent role in the development of 1970s feminism.

How did women serving in World War I frame their encounters with mortality? While the sacrificial mother and the homefront sweetheart are familiar figures from the Great War, tens of thousands of American women who served overseas are left out of gendered depictions of sacrifice and loss. Although these valiant women willingly faced the dangers war brought, how they understood these experiences after the fact is less clear. An underutilized source, their wartime scrapbooks, provides insight into their responses. This article, the results of an honors undergraduate student project at Rosemont College, focuses on visual narratives of wartime nurses, two with Pennsylvania connections and one from New York, as examples of women's efforts to record histories of a war from which they are too often excluded.

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The scrapbooks and wartime papers of American Alma A. Clarke reveal how one woman repurposed gendered propaganda during the Great War. Clarke was in France from January 1918 to July 1919 as both a child welfare worker with the Comité franco-américain pour la protection des enfants de la frontier and as an auxiliary nurse in the American Red Cross Military Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine. The Great War provided Clarke with new ways to contribute, new arenas in which to share her expertise, and perhaps most importantly, new perspectives on the significance of her contributions to society.