Christina Simmons

Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies
Graduate Faculty

Ph.D. American Civilization, Brown University, 1982
M.A., American Civilization, Brown University, 1975
Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass. 1970-71
A.B., mcl, English History and Literature, Radcliffe College, 1970

2174 Chrysler Hall North
University of Windsor
Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4
tel. 519-253-3000 ext. 2327

simmonc@uwindsor.ca

Research & Teaching Interests

Women’s and gender history, history of sexuality, black history – all predominantly U.S. and Canada

Current Projects

I am researching a series of conferences on marriage held in the 1940s at the segregated North Carolina College for Negroes, where black community leaders were working with white social scientists to promote a more modern form of marriage, including birth control. I am exploring how they saw this effort as part of a broader civil rights strategy in the context of their struggles for integration in education and employment.

Selected Publications

Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), co-edited with Kathy Peiss and Robert Padgug

"African Americans and Sexual Victorianism in the Social Hygiene Movement, 1910-40," Journal of the History of Sexuality 4 (July 1993), 51-75

Making Marriage Modern: Women’s Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Recent Graduate Students Supervised

Dustin Quick, "White People Can Be Saved:  Elijah Muhammad, the 1970s, and a Reassessment of 'Whiteness," 2010.

Sarah Kantarzhi, "'Wealth! Class! Clout!':  Economic Growth and the Visual Representations of Women, Sexuality, and Power in the Vogue Magazine, 1971-1988,"  2010.

Candace Nast, "We worked at everything:" Childbirth and Women's Work on Pelee Island, 1940-1960, 2009.

Carla Marano, “‘Rising Strongly and Rapidly’: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in Canada, 1919-1940,” 2008.

Karis Hurst, “Voluntary Motherhood: The Birth Control Movement in Windsor, Ontario, during the 1930s,” 2008.

Courses Taught