Rupp focuses on three major organizations that were technically open to all women: the broadly based and cautious International Council of Women, founded in 1888; the feminist International Alliance of Women, an offshoot of a group originally called the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, founded in 1904; and the vanguard Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which grew out of the International Congress of Women that met at The Hague in 1915. The histories of these organizations, and their stories of cooperation and competition, shed new light on the international women's movement. They also help us to understand the different but connected story of the second wave of international feminism that emerged from the ashes of World War II.
I am a feminist and a lesbian, and those identities have shaped all of my writing. I came to feminism in college in the late 1960s--I read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in the summer of 1969--and I was hooked. There was no such thing then as women's studies, but my professors were very supportive of my passion for studying women in all of my classes. I majored in history and wrote an honors thesis on women in the labor force in Nazi Germany, and in graduate school I discovered U.S. women's history and wrote a dissertation that became my first book, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945.
After teaching in a temporary position at the University of Pennsylvania for a year, I was fortunate to be hired at Ohio State University, where I stayed for 25 years. That's where I met my partner, Verta Taylor, in 1978. We've been together ever since (and even got married in California for our 30th anniversary as a political statement). In 2002 we moved together to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is chair of the Department of Sociology and I am a faculty member in the Department of Feminist Studies (chair from 2003-2007) and now also Associate Dean of Social Sciences.
My first foray into lesbian history grew out of Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s, the first project Verta and I worked on together. I published a piece called Imagine My Surprise in the journal Frontiers about the problem of writing about women who look to us like lesbians and lived in a context in which a lesbian identity was available but who seemed to refuse such an identity. One of my colleagues told me I would be embarrassed by this article, but it remains my most cited piece.
While working on my book Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement, which took me back to my roots in European history, Marty Duberman asked me to contribute a book on U.S. gay/lesbian history to the young adult series on gay topics launched by Chelsea House. I was engrossed in my research but attracted to the idea, but then right-wing agitation against the series sent the project down the drain. But the fiasco led me to write A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America, my first attempt to make queer history accessible.
And then Verta and I ran into Sushi, the Key West drag queen who is now featured every New Year's Eve on CNN inside a giant red high-heeled slipper dangling above Duval Street, ready to drop down at the stroke of midnight. Our first encounter with the drag show at the 801 Cabaret led to our book, Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret. It was a first for me, writing about the present instead of the past.
My new book, Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women, grew out of a class I teach by the same name and is also indebted to my involvement in the world history program at Ohio State. It an audacious project: a global history, from the beginning of time to the present, of love, desire, and sex between women, in an accessible style. It brings together my feminism, lesbianism, and commitment to a global vision.
