About

Shirley J. Yee is Professor Emerita in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Her training is as a historian specializing in gender, women, race, and ethnicity in the United States. She has been a member of the faculty since 1988 and served as Chair of the department from 1995 to 2001. Her research focuses on African American history, race and ethnicity, social change, urban studies, and women, with particular attention to women of color. Yee's scholarly work includes examining interethnic and interracial encounters, socioeconomic relations between Chinese and non-Chinese communities in New York City, and Black women's activism and community-building in Ontario. She has contributed to the understanding of women's history, Black abolitionism, and the history of racial and ethnic community formation. Her teaching connects with topics such as gender and sport, social history of American women, and feminist formations, reflecting her broad engagement with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and social change.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Gender studies
• Economics
• Art history
• Management
• Economic history
• Criminology
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Medicine
• History

Selected publications

• <i>Maria W. Stewart: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Black Abolitionist.</i> By Douglas A. Jones

  The New England Quarterly · 2025-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Douglas A. Jones' collection of Maria W. Stewart's speeches and writings provides a broader context for the world in which she moved as a free Black woman. The selections spotlight her daily experiences, as well as her meditations on antebellum race and gender politics. Like other free-born Blacks at the time, Stewart risked enslavement regardless of where she resided, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. To shed greater light on the debates over race and gender that ignited the early national period, Jones includes excerpts from Black and white writers, further illuminating Stewart's words.Jones organizes the book into three parts: Gender Theory, Racial Ethics, and Literary Productions. Each section includes selections from Stewart's archives, preceded by several essays by prominent individuals commenting on race and gender politics during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He leads the volume with excerpts from Thomas Jefferson's thoughts on Black intellectual ability in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). The voices of notable Black and white abolitionists, including Angelina Grimké and Hiram Mattison, illustrate the rise of radical rhetoric that contested dominant notions of Black inferiority. Well-known Black activists and educators represented here include the Reverend Alexander Crummell, Anna Julia Cooper, David Walker, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Hosea Easton, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Jarena Lee, William J. Wilson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Charlotte Forten. Each writer provides insight into the lived experiences of enslaved and free Black women and men in the United States. A common thread is their reliance on a deep Christian faith and belief in the superiority of western civilization. As was typical of many abolitionist writers, they cited the heroism of notable women in the Bible as exemplifying the potential for the advancement of women in the United States.Maria Stewart's speeches, however, remind us of the tension between rhetoric and action. Female activists during this period, regardless of race or class, frequently faced strong resistance to their efforts to speak and write publicly on political topics, especially if they directly criticized male leadership or dared to point out deficiencies in the Black community. While some Black female activists like Sarah Mapps Douglass of Philadelphia preferred to write within acceptable norms of womanhood, others such as Stewart and Cary did not shy away from confrontation. Douglass and Cary were firmly rooted in the Philadelphia free Black community and had grown up in relative economic stability. Stewart did not enjoy the same status in Boston's free Black community. Stewart left Boston in 1833, at the age of thirty, after facing relentless hostility to her public addresses. Like most free Black women, Stewart lived on the edge of poverty and the threat of enslavement, especially once she headed south.Stewart was an outspoken free Black abolitionist woman, and Jones' book offers a refreshing approach that restores her to her rightful historical prominence. Stewart's public speeches illustrate her willingness to defy contemporary expectations of proper womanhood. Jones' most significant contribution to the fields of Black studies, history, and women's history is to supply readers with the opportunity to access Stewart's speeches in a single volume.At the same time, Jones' collection feels incomplete. The limits of space require authors and editors to consider carefully the selection of appropriate contributors. So we are left to wonder why Jones chose these writers to accompany and provide context to Stewart's work. Why not include, for example, relevant essays by Frederick Douglass or William Lloyd Garrison, who also supported women's rights? Why not include a selection by Sarah Grimké? Jones' volume would have benefited greatly from a more extensive rationale behind the choice of writings that accompany Stewart's work. In addition, a conclusion tying together the major themes of the book would remind readers of the collection's purpose. Readers who are familiar with Stewart and the abolitionist movement will recognize the significance of Jones' selection of authors, but others may need guidance. Readers should attend closely to Jones' footnotes; they are thorough and meticulous, rich with a range of sources and explanatory material, demonstrating the depth and breadth of Jones’ research. It is in the footnotes where one can find hints to Jones' thinking, if not in the design of the text itself.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Undertaking Pittsburgh: The Makings of the Casket Industry in the Steel City, 1865–1910

  Pennsylvania History A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • History

  ABSTRACT For more than a century, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has enjoyed the well-deserved reputation for its leading role in US steel production as well as iron, glass, and coal mining. The names Carnegie, Frick, and Westinghouse still resonate in the public imagination and in popular and academic writing. Less well known are businesses that either did not carry long-term name recognition or eventually moved out of the Pittsburgh area yet were important materially and culturally at particular historical moments. One example is the casket industry. The idea of consolidating large casket-manufacturing firms into a single corporate entity originated in Pittsburgh. This article explores the central role the Steel City played in the modernization of the funeral industry between 1865 and 1910, the formative years of the move toward corporatization.

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnic Feminicide

  Journal of Student Research · 2021

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This paper explores the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls epidemic in Washington State and how the state has failed to address the issue, underlining its complicity and impunity. It takes into account that this epidemic is part of a global crisis of femicide, drawing specifically on the Latin American term, feminicidios, or feminicide, the gender-based murders of women and the state’s impunity in these cases. This paper then names another form of femicide, ethnic feminicde, arguing that the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls epidemic falls under this crisis because of the underlying systemic racism and sexism in state institutions. This paper uses the indigenous methodologies of reframing and intervention, as described by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, to explore this epidemic, reframing it into a transnational feminist issue, not just and indigenous issue, and asking how Washington state, and America as a whole, can intervene, with indigenous leaders taking charge.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gender Ideology and Black Women as Community-Builders in Ontario, 1850–70

  Canadian Historical Review · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Newton E. Morton (1929–2018)

  The American Journal of Human Genetics · 2018-06-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cary, Mary Ann Shadd

  African American Studies Center · 2013-03-15

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• <i>Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America</i> by Beth A. Salerno

  Gender & History · 2008-03-07

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation. Ed. by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xxiv, 385 pp. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-300-11593-2.)

  Journal of American History · 2008-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation charts new ground by situating women's rights and the antislavery movement in a transnational context. The book is a collection of essays that explore the concepts of feminism, slavery, and freedom in a comparative framework. Each essay examines how the writings and organizational efforts of abolitionist women on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean defined those terms and how they linked them together in the struggle for women's rights. The result is a work that encourages scholars of feminism, slavery, and antislavery to take account of national political cultures and systems when analyzing the scope, strategies, and goals of women's rights activism and its relationship to antislavery. Doing so allows historians greater insight into why, for example, British feminists could ally themselves more closely to the U.S. antislavery cause and to the community of black and white abolitionists than French or German women could.

  PublisherDOI

• Dependency and Opportunity

  Journal of Urban History · 2006-12-11

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores the work environment as a site for interactions between Chinese and non-Chinese in New York City between 1870 and 1943. A gendered and racially stratified paid labor force, shaped by federal immigration restriction laws, migration and settlement patterns to and within New York City, state occupational restrictions, and the development of a skilled white male urban working class, created the economic conditions within which the Chinese and non-Chinese struggled to survive during the exclusion period (1882-1943). Mutually dependent relationships often developed out of these phenomena. The survival of Chinese communities depended upon whites as well as Chinese and the skills and services offered by men of European descent. In turn, white men in trades and small businesses depended upon Chinese customers and fellow merchants. Chinese/white relations during this period provide a glimpse into how both groups created livelihoods and in the process built ethnic and cross-cultural urban communities.

  PublisherDOI

• Feminism, Women's Studies and Engineering: Opportunities and Obstacles

  Women in Engineering ProActive Network · 2006-11-07

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Newton E. Morton

  4 shared

• Ruth Lew

  4 shared

• H. W. Goedde

  Universität Hamburg

  2 shared

• Wendy Hamand Venet

  2 shared

• Angela B. Ginorio

  2 shared

• Frankie Hutton

  2 shared

• Banu Subramaniam

  2 shared

• G. Beckman

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Royalty Research Grant, University of Washington (2000-2001)
• Senior Society of Scholars Program, Center for Humanities, U…
• Humanities Alumni Award of Distinction, Ohio State Universit…
• National Women's Studies Association, Annual Conference (201…
• Research: Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 18…