History in the Margins

Anya Jabour has been studying, researching, teaching, and writing about US women’s history for more than three decades. Her latest book, Matters of Sex: Katharine Bement Davis and America’s First Sexual Revolution, is forthcoming from NYU Press in Fall 2026. You can learn more about her and her work at her website.

Take it away, Anya!

In your biography of Sophonisba Breckinridge and in your forthcoming “Matters of Sex”: Katharine Bement Davis and America’s First Sexual Revolution you write about women who were social reformers in the Progressive Era whose stories have been underreported.  When did you first become interested in this period and these women?  What sparked that interest?

My interest in the Progressive Era originated with my teaching. My early research and publications centered on the Old South, but the more I taught about the Progressive Era in my two-semester survey of US women’s history, the more intrigued I became by the incredible array of reform activity American women undertook and how much they accomplished, mostly without voting rights—and, of course, by how their passion for reform led many of them to advocate for women’s suffrage.

My interest in both Sophonisba Breckinridge and Katharine Bement Davis, while related to my interest in the Progressive Era, came about a bit differently. All of my book projects have, in one way or another, come out of the preceding book project. In the case of Breckinridge, after spending so much time with “southern schoolgirls” for my book Scarlett’s Sisters, I wanted to learn more about southern schoolteachers. I stumbled across Breckinridge while doing preliminary research for that potential project, and I was so struck by how she went from being a schoolteacher to a social reformer that I just had to know more. Since Breckinridge, the daughter of a Confederate officer, ultimately became a civil rights advocate in Chicago, this project also shifted my focus from the South to the North.

My Breckinridge biography then led to the Davis book. A Davis descendent, Francie Pepper, had found a treasure trove of primary sources—including Davis’s unfinished, unpublished biography—and was looking for a scholar with expertise on women in the Progressive Era who might be interested in undertaking a biography of her. My work on Breckinridge—who, like Davis, pursued a graduate degree in the social sciences at the University of Chicago—meant that I fit the bill.  It was great timing, too, since COVID curtailed my ability to go on traditional research trips. Instead, for many months, I welcomed regular “history care packages” of photocopied materials from Francie’s personal collection of Davis sources, which gave me the starting point for the book.

I was especially excited to work on this project. I had taught about Davis’s pioneering sex study, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women (1929) in that same women’s history survey, but like many other women’s historians, I knew of her, but I knew very little about her. I think of this book as a sort of “Where’s Waldo?” project, since Davis is everywhere—a Google search brings up thousands of hits—and yet there’s not (yet) a full-scale biography of her. (Mine is forthcoming from NYU Press in Fall 2026.)

What is your favorite research tip for people who want to write about relatively obscure historical women?

One of my favorite essays on biographical research is Sherry Katz’s “Researching Around Our Subjects,” in the Journal of Women’s History (Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 168-186). In this essay, Katz explains the importance of focusing not just on the person’s own records, but also looking at all the surrounding people, organizations, and so forth. This “researching around” approach was really important for the Davis project, because there is no formal collection of Davis papers. While I had the great good fortune of having exclusive access to a family collection of Davis materials—which includes her unpublished autobiography as well as correspondence, clippings, and memorabilia—I supplemented these materials with a lot of “researching around” Davis.

For me, this meant tracing the people and places she mentioned and examining materials related to the many institutions, movements, and organizations with which she was affiliated.  For instance, to learn about her experiences as a college student, I examined student scrapbooks and other materials at Vassar College, including the letters and diaries of some of her classmates. To learn about her work as the superintendent of Bedford Reformatory, I not only read the official annual reports and extensive coverage in period publications,  but also the oral histories of an African American inmate, Mabel Hampton, at the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

To learn about her work at the Bureau of Social Hygiene, which sponsored her pioneering study of women’s sexuality, I consulted several collections at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC). Importantly, this meant going beyond the “hits” I got from catalog-level or finding-aid descriptions. Because I knew she was involved with the Committee for Maternal Health, for instance, I examined that collection at the RAC; even though her name was not indexed in that collection, it turned out to consist almost entirely of her extensive correspondence with the committee’s founder, progressive gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson, which yielded some great insights.

To learn more about responses to her sex study, I found Google Books and HathiTrust enormously helpful, leading me to numerous advertisements for and reviews of her pathbreaking book. Finally, I found some otherwise invisible Davis-related materials at the Kinsey Institute by tracking footnotes in books by Donna Drucker (The Classification of Sex) and Joanne Passet (Sex Variant Woman), which allowed me to document just how influential her study was.

In part because of COVID-related shutdowns, I also relied heavily on research librarians, who I want to recognize as the superheroes of historical research. Research librarians at Smith College helped me to gain access to materials from the College Settlement Association, shedding light on Davis’s time leading a Philadelphia Settlement House. The diaries and photographs of Rochester resident and family friend May Bragdon, held and digitized at the University of Rochester, gave me greater insight into Davis’s family dynamics and personal life, and the research librarian there also provided me with additional materials from that collection. Finally, research librarians at Schlesinger Library helped me conduct more sophisticated keyword searches of thousands upon thousands of digitized materials held there, which expanded my understanding of Davis’s feminist activism on a variety of fronts.

In addition to teaching and writing, you work as a public historian.  What does that encompass? 

My introduction to public history came through a totally unexpected, but completely wonderful, opportunity to work as a historical consultant for the PBS Civil War docudrama, Mercy Street—for which you wrote the companion volume, Heroines of Mercy Street! [Pamela here: Women’s history is a small world!] In addition to my behind-the-scenes work, I had the opportunity to contribute to the show’s blog post series, “Mercy Street Revealed.” I found I really enjoyed writing short, accessible pieces on historical topics—and I loved the idea of reaching a bigger audience than I could ever hope to reach, even in decades of classroom teaching.

Thus, when I was working first on the Breckinridge book and then on the Davis study, I sought out new venues to write public-facing but deeply-researched pieces. The timing of the Breckinridge biography meant that a lot of these were op-eds for the Washington Post, which was then the host of the “Made By History” series (now at Time), since there were many striking parallels between Breckinridge’s work on behalf of meatpacking workers and recent immigrants and then-current events.

Some of my short pieces on Davis also have had tie-ins to contemporary politics, like a piece about the role ostensibly childless women have played in “maternalist” politics.  But a lot of them have been more lighthearted pieces, including one about single women’s vacation homes in the Georgian Bay,  and another about how bicycles liberated Victorian women.

A question from Anya: With so many great books coming out all the time, how do you decide what should be next on your TBR list?

I’m not sure that “decide” or “next” actually describe my approach to what gets read when.

I buy books that catch my imagination, and add them to the shelves, with no sense of when they will be read. I pull books off my shelf or order them because they feel related in some way to a project I’m working on, (A whole stack of women’s history that is adjacent to the proposal I’m working is sitting on the floor next to the reading chair in my office as I write this. I’ve been dipping in and out of them as and when one calls my name.) Other books track me down after years of sitting on my shelves—Lord Macartney’s journal of his embassy to China in the mid eighteenth century recently ambushed me and has joined the pile of books next to the reading chair downstairs. I read them in little bites.

In short, it is all pretty random. And I’m fine with that. It doesn’t hurt to have a little randomness in what is otherwise a pretty regimented orderly life.

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Come back tomorrow for a lot of questions and an answer with Allison Tyra, host of the podcast Infinite Women.