Methods of Cataloguing

100 Political Buttons
Subject: Women

For this project, I decided to focus on political buttons, specifically those related to women. I gathered a collection of 100 political buttons featuring women from Harvard Library.

To organize and analyze these buttons, I used three methods:

Methods that I choose to work with are

1. Classifying by color
2. Classifying by content
3. Classifying by context

After this initial classification, I tried on a creative experiment involving two techniques:

1. (Re)drawing selected buttons with vibrant, modern colors to give them a fresh and contemporary look.
2. Hijacking some buttons with new fonts by using Google Fonts to create a unique twist.

After getting some helpful feedback about adding more depth to the redrawings, I decided to dive into research during the second week. My focus was on exploring the background and significance of certain buttons that are linked to significant feminist movements.

• Non-profit & non-governmental
• Active in 37 countries.
• Aim: bring together women of different backgrounds and study the means of war and work for a permanent peace.

• Battling Bella
• She was an American lawyer, politician, and women’s rights activist.
  known for her distinctive wide-brimmed hats and strong feminist activism.
• Served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing New York for 6 years.
• Co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus.

• Largest feminist organization in the US. With approximately 500,000 members
• Advocating for gender equality, constitutional rights, economic justice, reproductive rights, racial justice, and combating violence against women within the current political framework.

• Protests persistent wage gap between men and women.
• In 1960s and 70s US, women working full time earned, on average, 59 cents for every dollar a man earned.

• Supports case, brought by a group of women called the Cornell Eleven accused Cornell University of academic sex-biased evaluation and hiring procedures.

A proposed amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal legal rights regardless of sex.

• Introduced in 1923, it aims to eliminate discrimination based on gender, ensuring that women have the same constitutional protections as men.
• 38 States have ratified the ERA, but it hasn’t still ratified nationally and added to the constitution.

American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse.

• Sanger popularized the term “birth control”, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States,
• Established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
• She funded the first research and invention of the first contraceptive pill.

Reproductive rights activist who operated women’s health clinics and initiated several legal cases to secure women’s rights to contraception and abortion.

• Baird’s 1967 arrest and conviction for distributing contraception at an event at Boston University resulted in the 1972 Supreme Court case Eisenstadt v. Baird, which legalized contraception for all women.

• Non-conforming Catholic organization that supports abortion rights.
• Their opposition to Church doctrine on abortion resulted in disciplinary actions taken against some of the priests and nuns who supported their cause.
• CFC has actively campaigned for abortion rights both nationally and internationally.

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Many remarkable individuals and organizations courageously fought for women’s freedom and equal rights a century ago, giving their all in the battle.

Fast forward to today in the United States, and it’s disheartening to realize that progress has been slow over the past 70 years. In the current landscape, women in the US are confronted with an unusual human rights crisis. In 21 states, abortion is either banned or restricted far earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe v. Wade, a landmark ruling that governed reproductive rights for nearly half a century until it was overturned by the Supreme Court last year.

As a result, approximately 22 million women and girls of reproductive age now reside in states where access to abortion is severely limited or, in many cases, completely unavailable.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the challenging situations in the United States, which prompted my curiosity about the global picture. Unfortunately, the numbers are even more troubling.

Almost half of the world’s women live in 125 countries with severe abortion restrictions. Shockingly, 45% of these abortions are unsafe, lacking proper methods and trained professionals. Notably, 97% of these unsafe abortions happen in developing countries.

Illegal abortion forces women to resort to dangerous methods, including ingesting poisons or self-inflicting harm, particularly in poorer regions. In the past, wire hangers were commonly used for such procedures, which is deeply unsettling.

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I decided to recreate some buttons with troubling numbers and facts.

There were suggestions to physically produce the buttons, so after the presentation, I printed them as stickers and adorned my laptop with them.