Sarah Eppler Janda – författare

Student radicals and hippies - in Oklahoma? Though most scholarship about 1960s-era student activism and the counterculture focuses on the East and West Coasts, Oklahoma's college campuses did see significant activism and ""dropping out."" In Prairie Power, Sarah Eppler Janda fills a gap in the historical record by connecting the activism of Oklahoma students and the experience of hippies to a state and a national history from which they have been absent.Janda shows that participants in both student activism and retreat from conformist society sought connections to Oklahoma's past while forging new paths for themselves. She shows that Oklahoma students linked their activism with the grassroots socialist radicalism and World War I-era anti-draft protest of their grandparents' generation, citing Woody Guthrie, Oscar Ameringer, and the Wobblies as role models. Many movement organizers in Oklahoma, especially those in the University of Oklahoma's chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and the anti-war movement, fit into a larger midwestern and southwestern activist mentality of ""prairie power"": a blend of free-speech advocacy, countercultural expression, and anarchist tendencies that set them apart from most East Coast student activists. Janda also reveals the vehemence with which state officials sought to repress campus ""agitators,"" and discusses Oklahomans who chose to retreat from the mainstream rather than fight to change it. Like their student activist counterparts, Oklahoma hippies sought inspiration from older precedents, including the back-to-the-land movement and the search for authenticity, but also Christian evangelicalism and traditional gender roles.Drawing on underground newspapers and declassified FBI documents, as well as interviews the author conducted with former activists and government officials, Prairie Power will appeal to those interested in Oklahoma's history and the counterculture and political dissent in the 1960s.

Since well before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 secured their right to vote, women in Oklahoma have sought to change and uplift their communities through political activism. This Land Is Herland brings together the stories of thirteen women activists and explores their varied experiences from the territorial period to the present. Organized chronologically, the essays discuss Progressive reformer Kate Barnard, educator and civil rights leader Clara Luper, and Comanche leader and activist LaDonna Harris, as well as lesser-known individuals such as Cherokee historian and educator Rachel Caroline Eaton, entrepreneur and NAACP organizer California M. Taylor, and Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) champion Wanda Jo Peltier Stapleton.Edited by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin, the collection connects Oklahoma women’s individual and collective endeavors to the larger themes of intersectionality, suffrage, politics, motherhood, and civil rights in the American West and the United States. The historians explore how race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and political power shaped-and were shaped by-these women’s efforts to improve their local, state, and national communities.Underscoring the diversity of women’s experiences, the editors and contributors provide fresh and engaging perspectives on the western roots of gendered activism in Oklahoma. This volume expands and enhances our understanding of the complexities of western women’s history.

In an era when minorities struggled for recognition, LaDonna Harris and Wilma Mankiller furthered the interests of Native Americans and forged a new place for women in politics by astutely playing accepted notions about ethnicity and gender to their own advantage. In Beloved Women, historian Sarah Eppler Janda examines the public identity these two women created for themselves and how, in turn, their respective identities shaped their political fortunes.Moving beyond the conventional role of a 1950s U.S. senator's wife, Harris discovered opportunities to call attention to the inequalities facing Native Americans. A Comanche, Harris founded activist organizations, testified at congressional hearings, and served on scores of federal committees concerning both women and Native Americans. At the same time, by attributing her humanitarian efforts to tribal values, Harris asserted the relevance of Indian beliefs and customs in modern society.During the heyday of the women's rights movement, Mankiller linked feminist ideas to Cherokee tradition. Indian culture, she asserted, esteems women, as proven by the legendary Beloved Woman who fulfills familial expectations yet also assumes political duties. Mankiller adopted this role when she became the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1985, a position she held for a decade.Harris and Mankiller became national leaders, Janda concludes, in large part because their complex persona—Indian and woman—enabled them to challenge social and political norms.