american history

Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America

mandy — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Sara Dubow navigates the complexities of an impassioned and divisive issue in Ourselves Unborn. She takes a calculated historical look at how Americans have interpreted the fetus and pregnancy throughout ever-shifting political realities. Her thesis: Americans have cast their social and cultural anxieties onto the fetus, which often results in abortion-related policies that serve ulterior motives.

Dubow explains that, for centuries, Americans’ insecurities about racial, social, and economic issues were projected onto the bodies of pregnant women. In the nineteenth century, for example, when White Americans were consumed with taking over western territories, abortion politics became paramount. Women were urged to reproduce in order to populate the expanding country, and the fetus became not a private symbol of a growing family, but a social symbol of a growing nation. Racial tensions about the decreasing fertility rate among White Protestant women were played out on the fetus, and women’s role as mothers became even more of a national imperative.

I’m glad the author points out that these biased sentiments are not linked to one historical moment; instead, she writes that this theme resonates in recent Islamophobic statements about the need for Christian women to increase their fertility rates to match those of Muslim women.

Dubow explains the many ways in which otherwise inexplicable phenomena were projected onto the fetus. Unsure about the scientific and medical aspects of human development, social ills were found to be rooted in pregnancy. Dubow shares information about how social problems from drunkenness to criminality were traced back to mothers’ emotional states during pregnancy. The mother was always the culprit.

Stretching into the twentieth century, Ourselves Unborn is punctuated by cases where pregnant women were considered medically incompetent. These cases highlight how the medical and legal professions painted pregnancy as a mysterious state where the fetus takes precedent and a woman becomes simply a vessel for new life. Dubow describes how the “fetal pain” and “abortion trauma” mantras of the 1980s played into this narrative.

Dubow ends her discussion with the 2007 Gonzalez v. Carhart case, a 5-4 decision that upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act without an exception for the health of the woman. The decision portrays Dubow's points with stark clarity, as Justice Kennedy supports his decision is by claiming the Court is protecting women from a decision they would later regret. Readers can understand that Kennedy is not concerned with the unborn, but with the proper place of women in society. That proper place, as dictated by centuries of policy, is a child-bearer.

Using Dubow’s lens, today’s abortion controversies relate to larger questions about the interplay of race and gender in American politics. This can be seen in the GOP’s recent attacks on Planned Parenthood and state laws that curtail abortion rights. Dubow’s theories illustrate how these and similar anti-abortion efforts stem more from policymakers' discomfort with women’s agency in making their own medical choices rather than from a sincere desire to protect fetuses.

Written by: Andrea Gittleman, April 7th 2011

The Girls’ History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century

mandy — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell, Leslie Paris

University of Illinois Press

The Girls’ History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century is an anthology of influential essays written by top scholars that have defined the field of American girls’ history and culture over the last thirty years. Girl-centered research is considered a relatively new and dynamic field of investigation that is believed to be critical for gaining a deeper understanding of women and gender, and a fuller appreciation of how generation influences American culture and society. Edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell and Leslie Paris, The Girls’ History and Culture Reader addresses twentieth century forces such as fashion, consumerism, immigration, civil rights, music, leisure and labor and how these factors impacted the lives of girls.

The twentieth century was marked by increased choice and freedom for women, which translated into change, albeit not identical, for their younger counterparts. With more opportunities in society, girls took part in sports, went to camp, pursued higher learning in greater numbers, became consumers and members of the labor force, and participated in pop culture like never before. However, their greater independence also meant increased scrutiny by older generations. Girls were still seen as innocents requiring protection in an increasingly predatory world, while their sexual curiosity and independence induced considerable anxiety.

For those of you who thought you had a good handle on the events that influenced women’s history in the twentieth century, you might glean some interesting new information from this book. I certainly did. For instance, menstruation was taught to girls in the 1900s devoid of any instruction on fertility. Instead, teachings were from a purely hygienic point of view, and unsurprisingly, had strong backing from companies manufacturing disposable sanitary napkins. Equally surprising was the fact that single mothers in the Los Angeles area were known to initiate juvenile court proceedings to bring their wayward daughters and their much-needed incomes home. However, the most astounding in this collection was the essay on mid-century psychoanalysis, which posited that a healthy Oedipal relationship between daughter and father was the pre-eminent path to sexual maturity. At its limits, it appeared to condone incest as an expression of a girl’s own desires.

My personal favourite in the collection was an essay by Susan J. Douglas on the acceptance of Black music in the 1960s, and how girls groups gave a voice to the struggles of young women and showed them the potential for strength in numbers. For all those fans of Nancy Drew, there is also a great essay on our favourite sleuth. Ilana Nash convincingly shows that while our heroine was a model of intelligence, independence and empowerment, her stories also reinforced patriarchal privilege and conservative gender ideology.

Although there is a focus on White middle glass girls, which the editors acknowledge, The Girls’ History and Culture Reader also contains compelling essays on the double bind of Mexican, Chinese, and Italian-American girls, who had to deal not only with the cultural constraints of their own homes but also with those of American society at large. While there is an essay on Black girls and the institutionalization of double dutch, the book falls short in providing an idea of how Black girls’ lives changed throughout the twentieth century.

This book is a great resource for anyone wanting to research the lives of girls in a specific decade of the twentieth century, as each essay ends with an extensive bibliography. This is also a great reference for fledgling authors wanting to create an accurate depiction of the lives of girls in the twentieth century. After reading this book, I came away thinking that twentieth century history should be revised to reflect the changes experienced by girls, an area thus far ignored.

Written by: Heather Leighton, March 27th 2011

Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities

annette — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

SUNY Press

I learned a lot about Black Greek-letter organizations while reading Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities, specifically about the title sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA). The author, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, does a good job of laying out the socio-political arena in which the members lived, from the importance of stepping to the brown paper bag (skin hue) test to the members’ activism in the public sphere.

Disciplining Women is split into five chapters and includes copious endnotes for the dedicated reader. Whaley introduces us to Black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) generally in the first chapter by referencing the recent movie Stomp the Yard and Spike Lee’s School Daze. She notes, however, that neither film is historically complex and both are about men’s organizations, not women’s, which creates kind of a vacancy in popular imagination about the specifics and importance of Black sororities. The first chapter is a stepping point from BGLOs by and large to AKA in particular.

The second chapter focuses on placing AKA and, by extension, other BGLOs into a historical context by connecting the sorority to other culturally significant events: everything from anti-lynching activism at the turn of the last century to1990s AIDS activism and all the way up to the present. Whaley duly notes AKA’s members’ good deeds but also mentions with caution that the sorority’s “politics of respectability and reform ventures” may actually have hurt (and continue to hurt) Black Americans as a whole. One step forward, two steps back, it seems.

The third chapter was the most interesting and informative to me because it covered stepping, something I’ve been interested in since I learned about it in college. (My school had no historically Black sororities or fraternities, but the Black Student Union often hosted groups from other schools, many of which included step performers.) Whaley briefly analyzes stepping by centering it in the step performances of the African diaspora and then centers on how stepping has evolved on college campuses and how young women reproduce and recreate gender, sexual identity, and ethnic loyalties through public ritual. Though other publications have covered stepping more thoroughly, Disciplining Women expands upon Black women’s contributions to discussions of femininity and sexuality.

In the fourth chapter, from which the title of the book is taken, Whaley tackles the minefield that is hazing in a BGLO (or any Greek-letter organization). The primary AKA case study about unofficial pledge activities that resulted in a criminal trial in Kent, Ohio, provided a dark, complicated look into sorority initiation rites.

In the last chapter, AKA sisters and alumnae comment on the future of BGLOs and raise three main points of concern: “class, gender, and racial struggle; regrets and mistakes pertaining to pledging and hazing; and maintaining hope through action in the Black public sphere.” Including the voices of women in AKA proved to be an important point for Whaley; she lets the reader draw his or her own conclusions by setting historical narrative and present-day socio-political and cultural discussion side by side for review.

Disciplining Women does not work well as an introduction to Black Greek-letter organizations and seems more easily approached as a case study of one such organization, Alpha Kappa Alpha, so long as the reader already has some background knowledge of Black fraternities and sororities, stepping, and/or hazing on college campuses. The reading is verbose and intense; more than once I had to reread a sentence to understand what it really meant. Essentially, it’s an academic text rather than a popular history or easy-to-read guide. Any one of the chapters could have been exponentially expanded and, when I was able to follow the author, I often wanted it to; the discussion, when I understood it, was all too brief for my taste. Disciplining Women provides a lot of great information, but make sure you’re prepared to focus and engage in the reading without interruptions or distractions.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, December 5th 2010

The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers Are Transforming America

admin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:00:00 +0000

By Shirley Sagawa

Jossey-Bass

Mom. Apple pie. Service. In The American Way to Change, Shirley Sagawa convincingly argues that volunteering is both deeply rooted in American history, as well as a creative solution to modern societal challenges. Sagawa argues that service can be used to impact many entrenched social ills, including an ineffective public education system, an aging population with fewer family support systems, environmental degradation, and poverty. Service—whether through a national program like AmeriCorps or through individuals working at volunteer-run organizations like Citizen Schools—is a critical component to a functioning civil society, according to Sagawa, and fill gaps between programs offered by the government, businesses, and nonprofits.

Over nine concise chapters, Sagawa outlines American volunteer service and its impact on the people serving, the communities being served, and the nation at large. This impact is not just due to the net social good that's being enacted through these programs, but also through the innovations that result from passionate people dealing with real challenges with limited resources. She also describes the people who serve, who are mostly people in transition: college graduates, retirees, and the recently jobless, among others.

Sagawa, who has been called "the mother of the modern service movement," is a very credible author, and The American Way to Change isn't pure conjecture about the impact volunteers and service organizations could have on the big issues facing America. She describes, at length, the impact of the volunteer-based programs that are presently working in prose both matter-of-fact and moving. For instance, one successful venture is the Prisoner Entrepreneurship Program, which combats recidivism through teaching basic business skills to the incarcerated. Founded by a former Wall Street investor, the program has a return-to-prison rate of less than ten percent, and an employment rate of eighty percent within thirty days of release. This is one of literally dozens of programs that Sagawa profiles that are both very successful and have concrete results that help solve some of America's biggest challenges.

In this fast-moving book, Sagawa makes a strong case for service no longer being considered something "nice" done to pad a resume or pass an afternoon, but an absolutely necessity in changing the United States for the better. Buy it if you're passionate about service, looking for organizations to volunteer with that are making a substantial difference, or simply in need of inspiration about the power of human potential.

Written by: Catherine Nicotera, August 16th 2010

Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:02:00 +0000

By Thaisa Way

University of Virginia Press

Female hands are all over America's landscape; you just need to know where to look for them. In Unbounded Practice, author Thaisa Way can direct your eye.

Look to the Memorial Quadrangle at Yale, the grounds of Princeton, or a number of botanical gardens and astronomical observatories to see the legacy of Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959). Recall a youthful American pilgrimage to Disneyland—if you are among the number who has made one—to know the work of Ruth Shellhorn (1909-2005). Stroll past any working or middle-class apartment complex designed with a central, neatly-gardened courtyard to see the lasting influence of Marjorie Sewell Cautley (1891-1954), who designed such courtyards with the needs of family members—particularly mothers—in mind; not only can natural beauty be observed from every dwelling, but so can children at play.

Way's concern in Unbounded Practice is not just that significant contributions to landscape architecture have been made by women, but that these contributions have been largely forgotten by current practitioners and require a restorative historical account. An irony that emerges in Way's recounting of women's contribution to the formation of the discipline—critical in its early stages—is that the public conceptions of womanhood were both an inlet for women to practice the discipline and an impetus for them to be disassociated from it. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, pursuits associated with horticulture, such as gardening and botany, were considered appropriate for the sex viewed as intrinsically closer to the earth than its masculine counterpart. This allowed women to enter the discipline with minimal, or no public rebuke, pursuing architectural approaches to design as well as employing acquired botanical knowledge often superior to that of their male peers. As landscape architecture moved towards an alignment with architecture at the expense of being associated with the "craft" of gardening, women were marginalized in the discipline.

Way's history is both a history of women and a history of the formation of a discipline—the key of the book's strength—and her passion as a scholar is evident in the pains she takes in detailing both. A lay reader, or perhaps even a beginning student, may benefit from reading Way's conclusion before embarking on the book proper. There, Way's passion is evident in tone as well as content, and the relatively brief reflection on a hefty scholarly endeavor reads as an accessible orientation to the modern challenges the discipline has faced.

Ten color plates are featured in the book, as well as a wealth of illuminating photographs of work by women pioneering practitioners, slides from lectures delivered by women, period advertisements, and—thrillingly—meticulous plans and client sketches drafted by the women Way profiles. While Unbounded Practice could easily be sourced for perspective on American history, women's history, class structure, ecology, urban studies, fine arts, architecture, and education, one can't help but imagine Way writing this book thinking of the reader who would crack the spine at one such architectural-botanical plan, magnifying glass in hand, connecting back to one of the women who would draft herself a practice.

Written by: Kaja Katamay, July 9th 2010

500 Years of Indigenous Resistance

admin — Fri, 21 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Gord Hill

PM Press

We are all familiar with the smiling happy portrayals of pilgrims sitting down to dinner with Native Americans, or perhaps the slightly more critical viewpoint from many of our high school history books of the Indigenous people being simply helpless victims to European colonization. However, neither of these views is, in reality, very accurate.

500 Years of Indigenous Resistance was originally published in 1992 by Gord Hill, the native artist, activist, and at the time, member of the revolutionary Indigenous newspaper, OH-TOH-KIN. The book is in a pamphlet style with artwork throughout its pages. It starts with the arrival of Columbus in the Americas and goes up through history to chronicle native resistance in North and South America until after WWII, even up through the 1960s. It was originally published just before the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico in 1994, and so was extremely relevant and insightful both then and now.

Even though I was aware that the history of the Americas many of us were taught growing up was very skewed towards celebrating white European colonialism, I hadn’t read anything, until this, that so clearly shows all the various Native American resistance movements that have existed. Lacking from most of written American history of the past 500 years is a detailed exploration of the resistance of native peoples and how they influenced and limited the colonialism to which they struggled against. 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance fills in this gap in an extensive way. It also records all the horrendous and calculating strategies of colonization employed to destroy native people, wipe out whole cultures, and steal land.

While many people, including myself, could probably not give names of more than a few tribes, this book speaks of all the millions of indigenous people there were 500 years ago, an estimated 70 to 100 million people. Even now after hundreds of years of colonization there are still an estimated forty million indigenous people. The book chronicles the various resistance strategies that native peoples utilized: demonstrations, festivals, violent uprisings, the creation of alliances with other tribes or nations, protests, occupations, road blocks, forming organizations to oppose governmental policies, and most recently, organizing around international bodies.

In a country that still has offensive caricatures of Native Americans on display for sports team mascots, it is easy to get discouraged that there will be any real recognition of the magnitude of the American Indian Holocaust, the mass genocide of Native peoples that has run rampant the past 500 years and continues on today. But books such as 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance which don't glorify, romanticize, or just plain omit all the horrors that abound throughout this history of colonization, stand to give us some hope. For they just give us the facts, but, more importantly, the ones we most likely have never heard before.

It would be an amazing thing to make copies of this work and slip into every school in America and slide it into every history book for children to read. Well, it is no less crucial and eye-opening a book for existing simply on its own. It is a rare event to read books that really have the potential to change the way that you think about things, that help you unlearn many lies and find yourself faced with honest truths. It always gives me the chills to read something from a new perspective and to know that this information is being let loose in the world, seeking to help us to open our eyes, to learn from the past, and to ultimately change for the better.

Written by: Lesley Kartali, May 21st 2010

Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Catherine Adams, Elizabeth H. Pleck

Oxford University Press

That the past is never past is nowhere more apparent than in recent debates over efforts to celebrate “Confederate History Month.” Happily, critics responded to the omission of slavery and the suffering it wrought from the latest official commemorations, still and perhaps forevermore marinated in the intoxicating rhetorical liquor of the “Lost Cause.” And so the sobering scholarship of archival scholars such as Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal records, family papers, genealogical studies, and often on the recorded words of enslaved people themselves is an urgently needed remedy.

Love of Freedom is grounded in two observations: that slavery was certainly not exclusively southern—that New England, too, had a terrible legacy of enslaving African people, although the circumstances of slavery in this region were distinctive in many respects. The second starting point is that while the people kidnapped and enslaved in New England were disproportionately male, African women’s experience of slavery and of the complicated legacies of African and colonial American patriarchy were similarly distinctive and should be studied independently.

Foremost, Love of Freedom is a thick description of the legal and social status of slavery in the northeastern American colonies and, as such, will serve as an important resource for anyone doing research in the field. The authors point out that the first kidnapped African people were taken to Boston only six years after its founding. Only five years later, in 1641, the Massachussetts Bay colony had the dubious distinction of becoming the first British colony to codify slavery legally. By 1700, the authors estimate a black population of one thousand, half living in Massachusetts. Fortunately for historians, the legal status of enslaved people, particularly women, seems to have been a source of continual legal challenge. The result is that we have a surprisingly rich record of direct testimony from enslaved women.

Directly from the voices of women such as Hagar Blackmore we get an account of being kidnapped away from her family in Angola, transported to Barbardos, and sold to a wealthy merchant in Cambridge. From this woman we learn of the vulnerability of enslaved women to rape, and we get some sense of what it meant to be a survivor. The authors point out that the principle of coverture, a convention of English common law in which women’s legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands, further guaranteed the absence of any sort of reasonable legal protection for enslaved women—or even for free married black women.

As a part of laying to rest the myth of slavery in the north as a benign institution, the book illustrates one manifestation of the idea of coverture. A wife’s killing her husband was, because of established notions of hierarchy, worse than ordinary murder and was, in fact, given a special designation: “petit treason,” for which burning to death was the punishment. Killing a husband—or a master, in the case of enslaved people, was almost—if not quite—on the scale of regicide and was punished accordingly. The book lays out the grim details of human suffering: the archaeological evidence showing widespread malnutrition among black children in the region; the spinal deformations evident among women forced to do laundry, ironing, and household heavy lifting; the forced breeding.

Among the most important archival sources is the record of “freedom suits,” women “seeking possession of their liberty” through manumission or some sort of legal process. Through the testimony extant in these cases, the reader gets a powerful sense of exactly what freedom meant to these women—and what slavery meant. As the authors conclude from these records, “Being stolen from kin and homeland was the central wrong African men and women cited time and again.” And to rectify this crime entailed the re-possession of the self by its rightful owner.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 28th 2010

Incivilities

admin — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 01:02:00 +0000

By Barbara Claire Freeman

Counterpath Press

With her first collection of poetry, Incivilities, literature and theory professor-turned-poet Barbara Claire Freeman excavates the vagaries of an American narrative—“how it became, what it began,” as one of her poems says. Like men counting bodies on a battlefield, exploding the absurd order of the data they have collected, Freeman’s poems rebel against the aftermath of the atrocities (the title puts it mildly) they insist on recognizing. It’s that rebellion that makes them so compelling. It is also the playful way in which they confuse the manufactured order of a manufactured history.

“One Down, Seven to Go,” for instance, hints at the emptiness of narrated traditions, from the fanfare of presidential elections to the sanitized nursery school tale of the first Thanksgiving: we shrink from responsibility for both yet beam proudly at their trappings. (Meanwhile, in the poem, a still-lit supermarket has already cleared of shoppers, and an onlooker imagines charming scenes inside.) The poem observes:

...We forgot

the narrative was supposed to make us whole. The main thing was to tell the story.

Freeman’s reassembled American history is one of stock trading, gold mining, Louisiana Purchases, slaves, the revolutionaries who kept them slaves, shoddy intelligence and the ways in which we seek to forget. It is told through fragments of George Washington’s speeches and descriptions of newspaper photographs of staged townscapes.

These poems’ heterogeneous forms suggest that poems, too, are artifacts to be referenced in other pages. The denser, longer ones move in cadences and sentence fragments that recall Lyn Hejinian; the sudden spaces and surprising inversions of the narrower ones gasp elegiacally around the textbook-ready rhetorical platitudes they try to dismantle. All of them shudder at the brutality of infrastructure (“Most of the ideas we’re talking about are bridges and roads”), the permanence of debt (“America will not let/her children deleverage”), the complicity of the poet and the caprice of communication:

_...   if now you cannot hear me_

it is because the sound of this night no one will remember no one else.

Written by: Samantha Schulz, February 20th 2010

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

admin — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Gail Collins

Little Brown and Company

Oh, Gail Collins, you had me at New York Times columnist. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived away from New York for so long now and have to read it online most of the year, but holding printed and bound words from a witty Times writer in a book that I can dip into for a few minutes, or a hour, whenever I like is brainy self-indulgence that I can say yes to.

My mother grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and I’ve always had a thing for vintage and retro pop culture. If this is you, too, you’ll quickly find yourself on board as well, Times fetish or no. The ‘New Yorkness’ of Collins’ writing style is so readable that the broad range of subjects covered in its 405 pages are cohesive and coherent. As for the title of the book, it had me thinking immediately—I had a mini-epiphany before even cracking the cover—of course, then it all changed.

When Everything Changed contains facts I should have known, such as the shock-value of women wearing trousers, archaic divorce laws with state-by-state variations that virtually trapped women in marriage, and the ‘speed-dating’ approach many women took to college in the '60s, using higher learning as a way to find a husband. The chronicles pivotal moments in our recent feminist history—from things that seem simple, like adhesive maxi pads, to nation-altering events, like the Equal Rights Amendment.

Readers of all ages will enjoy finding their decade in the chronology. The conclusions Collins draws about each era are deft, trustworthy and cogent. It is interesting to see Collins assert that that we are a part of living history, and that these changes, while feeling slow, have been swift in the grand scheme of things. This book is hard to stop reading even if you meant to leave some for later. It flows so well and is written in such a conversational style that I found it easy to carry on for a few more chapters.

The picture section seemed unnecessary to me. I wanted big, iconic illustrations throughout, or none at all, but that’s a small criticism for a largely excellent read. This book is a primer, of sorts, but I felt that the way the images were presented was more cursory than inspiring. The words alone are enough to encourage readers to find out more. Should gender studies, or women’s history be offered as a high school module or elective, I’d recommend this book, or extracts from it as an introductory text.

Based on my enjoyment of When Everything Changed, I’m also interested in tracking down Collins’ precursor to this book: America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. This is a more mainstream feminist text than I’ve read in a while, and I was almost put off by the schmaltzy tone of the book jacket, which I interpreted as lauding Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign as a symbol for the be all and end all of women’s equality. This tone continues in the final chapter itself, which I found to be a dissatisfying gloss over of the achievements of all American women, rather than just the privileged few in mainstream politics. Moreover, the stylistically vague 'gloss' of American women can be interpreted as a very real slight, considering the minimal representation of women not from the U.S.

Most interesting to me is the epilogue section. While some of it is depressing, the fates of some of the figures mentioned in the book are quite uplifting. There’s even a witty bit about Barbie dolls. Overall, the book is enjoyable and informative. It serves as an inspiring reminder of not only when it all changed, but how it all changed.

Written by: Chella Quint, February 17th 2010

Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Valerie Rohy

SUNY Press

Valerie Rohy’s exploration of the efforts to define both queer and Black identities and their subsequent intersections is as interesting as it is illuminating, as presented in Anachronism and Its Others, whether it is a discussion of the temporal implications of Frederick Douglass’ thought presented in his autobiography or demystifying the nebulous concepts of "queer time." Anachronism and Its Others also investigates how the modern field of sexology has recently made a connection between homosexuality and blackness, often for the negative purpose of justifying homophobic and/or racist socioeconomic worldviews.

One of Rohy’s strongest observations in Anachronism and Its Others is the split between "queer" and "straight time" as she notes within the initial chapters of the book. The idea of straight time as a historical metanarrative told through the evolution of American culture as defined by the goals of majoritarian interests is revelatory. As Rohy states, straight time is "promoted as the best form of progress and the only 'real temporality.'" The author illustrates an important connection to scientific racism as it forms the grounding of those seeking to connect homosexuality and Blackness with threats to the White family, to its perceived superior vitality, fecundity, and ability to function as the carriage of the national society. Rohy’s weaving of modern constructions of ethnic and sexual identity, the connection of contemporary sexology with scientific racism and the attempt to negate any alternatives to a Caucasian heteronormative national paradigm are brilliant.

Such connections and observations lead one to an important question: How does one combat attempts to frame progress and time itself as concepts in opposition to the existential utility of sexual and ethnic minorities within a particular society? As threats to the forward movement of that society? Rohy’s argument against the idea of "straight time" and other justifications of a narrowly defined national culture and destiny are made through the intellectual dismantling of its philosophical buttresses: contemporary sexology and its cousin scientific racism appear to be one large step toward answering such a daunting challenge.

Written by: Brandon Copeland, February 12th 2010

The Cuban Revolution (1959-2009): Relations with Spain, the European Union, and the United States

admin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Joaquín Roy

Palgrave MacMillan

Joaquín Roy’s study is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive attempt to define Cuba’s relationship to the Western World (Europe and the U.S.) in the past fifty years. There is no question of its timely publication—to coincide with the fifty year anniversary of the Cuban Revolution (1959-2009). Indeed, this is a moment when the world is questioning the ability of this small island nation to remain independent and politically isolated while in permanent conflict with the most powerful nation in the world and only 90 miles from its coast. How on earth did Castro’s Cuba survive? Why hasn’t it, like many other Latin American nations fallen prey to either an insidious or explicit United-States sponsored decline? In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas certainly did (1990), and in Chile, Salvador Allende did, almost twenty years before (1973). What specifically makes Cuba exceptional?

Roy is very well placed to deal with these questions since he is the author of more than thirty books on the European Union (EU), Cuba, and the U.S.’ diplomatic relations and policies. His study Cuba, the United States, and the Helms-Burton Doctrine: International Reactions previously explored some of the larger points that he develops in this more recent tome.

At a time when left-leaning governments are being elected in many Latin American countries and seemingly coming together, Roy’s analysis is precious. It details the ebb and flow of an ever-shifting diplomacy in great detail, ranging from the specifics of economic aid from individual countries or from the EU, to the intricate rapport between high level officials, the “butterfly-effects” of diplomacy—if ever there was one in the political sphere.

Roy’s study reviews the notorious aspects of the Cuban diplomacy, such as the Helms-Burton Law (Cuban embargo, or “blockade” [bloqueo] as the Cubans call it), and adds detail to this bigger picture. Because Cuba’s independence is such a novelty (it was the last Latin American colony to achieve sovereignty in 1898 after more than four centuries of colonial rule), the analysis goes back to the beginning of the island, providing much detail on the rocky foundations of the autonomous country, a period which lasted about 50 years before the Revolution. Roy also delves into more complex aspects of Cuba’s relations with Spain after the signing of the Treaty of Paris and the “end” of the Spanish Empire, navigating the contrasts and parallels between the Franco and post-Franco relations.

Of course, Roy’s attempt to separate the analyses of each country in individual chapters is futile since the aforementioned “butterfly effect” makes all diplomacy unavoidably intertwined. Many decisions are entangled and, especially in recent years, reactions to any statement are instantaneous. The rotating presidency of the EU is one of the most convoluted examples of this; each country has its diplomacy, and the EU has its own relations, but since the presidency is revolving, this provokes knotting and redundancies. Yet, while reading Roy’s text, one is never lost in his analysis and this despite the detail it contains. Because it synthesizes many different points of view, this work is essential to anyone endeavoring to understand just why the Cuban Revolution is still alive. Of course, Roy doesn’t provide us with the answer to that question, but then again, neither does (or can?) anyone else.

Written by: Sophie M. Lavoie, February 2nd 2010

Science on the Home Front: American Women Scientists in World War II

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Jordynn Jack

University of Illinois Press

Science on the Home Front is an introduction to the lives and tasks of specific women scientists involved in the war effort, from Marie Curie to Margaret Mead. These women come from a variety of backgrounds and pursuits in science. A professor, Jack focuses on the fields of psychology, anthropology, physics and nutrition to elaborate on the women involved who played a specific role in the war. By delineating aspects of these scientists, the author demonstrates the subordination of the women who performed important roles in the war. The range of responsibility spans years and experiences. Jack's main objective in developing this book holds true to be a study of the rhetoric involved regarding feminist rhetoric as well as scientific rhetoric, and she argues that the culture of science is what held women back in their roles played in the war.

To appreciate this book, one must be willing to make time to read it; its academic sense assumes the reader is both interested in science and in the concept of rhetoric as it pertains to both the science field and the feminist field. As a book, Science on the Home Front requires a decent amount of science; however, the author takes the time to elaborate on definition and overall goal of her book. In her introduction, she clarifies each chapter for the reader; each chapter focuses on one or two female scientists in that specific field. To create an overall sense of that specific scientist in several ways, Jack examines studies of that scientist, tracks certain exchanges with superiors, details journal entries, and surmises what that scientist brought to the public through writings and other research. In presenting this information, Jack demonstrates an overall image of each scientist. Taking her research another step further, Jack discusses the rhetoric of each field, and places this into each chapter to prove her point that the regendering of science is clearly necessary for women in all fields of science.

Utterly straightforward, Science on the Home Front explores the rhetorical factors of subordination with a smattering of women who made a difference in the science world, specifically during WWII. Language remains a very large obstacle to women "getting ahead" in the sciences. Ongoing questions exist: How do we reorganize and strategize around the feminism in the sciences as well as the gender of scientific language? By investigating the rhetoric about women in science, we come up with some answers; in conclusion, Jack makes steps toward "'regendering' scientific institutions" to make these scientific institutions more acceptable toward women, and overall, in any scientific field. Including notes on each chapter and over ten pages of bibliography, Jack gives a nice amount of substance to further research. Present and future studies must continue in order to make a concrete step toward the integration of women into the sciences at a more equal pace.

With this book in hand, further research may be done to pursue individual female scientists' work; however, this volume offers a great starting point to introduce the many women who impacted World War II in the scientific field.

Written by: Carolyn Espe, January 28th 2010

Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:33:00 +0000

By Edlie L. Wong

New York University Press

In this superb book, Edlie Wong analyzes the territorialization of freedom and slavery in the antebellum Atlantic. While reading it, I frequently recalled Martin Luther King, Jr.’s warning that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Yet Wong’s work also suggests the converse is true: the existence of free blacks threatened institutionalized slavery on practical and moral grounds, while the continuation of legal slavery in any jurisdiction challenged core notions of freedom, including freedom of movement and travel. This conflict played out in courtrooms and the court of public opinion as slaves sued for legal emancipation—a strategy fraught with its own contradictions.

Wong considers not only American struggles, but also how freedom on European soil and slavery in the West Indies influenced and was influenced by American slavery. Slave narratives, novels, popular press, and legal documents are the material from which Wong makes a dialectical critique of pro- and anti-slavery thought as it crystallized around legal cases. As befits her topic, she organizes the book locally rather than chronologically.

Chapter one deals with nationalistic British abolitionism, which championed freedom while confining it within British borders. Chapter two moves across the Atlantic to northern American free states, which offered southern slaves traveling there a choice: sever social ties and gain individual freedom, or return to home and slavery. Chapter three focuses on the Dred Scott decision and examines legal emancipation in the southwest U.S. Chapter five and the concluding chapter again take a transatlantic standpoint. The former examines the criminalization and de facto enslavement of free blacks—both American and foreign-born—who traveled into southern slave states as sailors. The latter briefly treats the question of American citizenship after emancipation and travel abroad.

Throughout, Wong sharply analyzes the rhetoric of pro- and anti-slavery literature. Whites on both sides generally acceded to the “chattel principle” that slaves are an extension of their masters' wills. Thus, unlike fugitive slaves, American slaves brought by their masters onto free soil might sue for their freedom precisely because the masters had made the decision, effectively consenting to their emancipation. Paradoxically, the movement onto free soil instilled slaves—now to be considered free agents—with their own wills, and any who returned with their masters to slave territory were argued to have chosen re-enslavement. Slaveholders, thus, saw their slaves as will-less objects, at the same time considering their enslaved status was the slaves' own choice. On the other side, White abolitionists constructed a rescue narrative in which they heroically spoke for slavery's helpless victims. Slaves whose active resistance challenged this gallantry were censored in the liberal media, or left out altogether.

Not surprisingly, Wong finds this paternalist viewpoint particularly strong where Black children and women are concerned. In the case of six-year-old Med, both lawyers claimed to speak for the girl, one presuming her desire to remain in free Massachusetts while the other argued her best interest was returning to Louisiana and her enslaved mother. Slaveholders vilified abolitionists for tearing apart families whose members were not all emancipated, while abolitionist literature suppressed the difficult decision of emancipated or escaping slaves to leave still-enslaved kin.

Wong seeks to restore the Black actors missing from these accounts. Some slaves turned the legal principle partus sequitur matrem (“the offspring follow the mother”) to establish emancipation for themselves and their children. Harriet Scott, for instance, wife of Dred, simultaneously sued for her own freedom and in so doing also established the legal emancipation of her two daughters. Thus matrilinear arguments could subvert paternalistic slave laws.

A foreknowledge of antebellum history and law would be helpful to the reader, but isn’t prerequisite. Including a timeline might have been useful, but that hardly detracts from the intelligence of the argument and the important recovery of overlooked source material. Though Wong refrains from drawing explicit connections to modern racial profiling, incarceration, migration, and an evermore tightly entwined global economy, the parallels lie on the page for any modern reader to draw.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, October 26th 2009

Feisty First Ladies and Other Unforgettable White House Women

admin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:25:00 +0000

By Autumn Stephens

Viva Editions

If the front book cover of Jacqueline Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, and Nancy Reagan in silver one-pieces doing the cancan is the craziest thing you have ever seen, wait until you open the book. In Feisty First Ladies and Other Unforgettable White House Women, Autumn Stephens reveals stories about the United States First Ladies that you never learned in history class. Besides the information on the First Ladies, Stephens also talks about some of the infamous White House women who spiced up the United States' history.

Stephens provides an in-depth look at all the women who have lived in the White House, and some of the mischief that ensued. Did you know that Dolly Madison, who famously saved the portrait of George Washington when the British army burned the White House during the War of 1812, also saved a portrait of herself? And that Alice Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt's daughter, used to have a pet snake and raise hell in Washington, D.C.?

This is one of those books that you cannot put down until you are finished reading. Starting with Martha Washington and ending with Michelle Obama, Stephens covers every fact about these amazing women. Feisty First Ladies and Other Unforgettable White House Women is definitely a feminist book. Stephens points out the feminist tendencies in some of these women, as well as advancements they made for other women. Even though President Obama was only in office for a few months when this book came out, Stephens included a rave review of Michelle Obama.

Of all of the profiles, Eleanor Roosevelt's stood out the most for me. I have always been a fan of hers, but this book pointed out even more what a strong woman she was. Feisty First Ladies and Other Unforgettable White House Women is a book that I have lent to the strong women in my family, and they love it just as much as I do.

Written by: Elizabeth Stannard Gromisch, October 24th 2009

The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal

admin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:55:00 +0000

By Mark Ribowsky

Da Capo Press

Mark Ribowsky did not interview singer Diana Ross or Berry Gordy, the founder and iron-fisted ruler of Motown Records, for this unauthorized look at The Supremes’ rise and fall. That said, his copious research makes the book—all 440 pages—a fascinating assessment of both music trends and the gender and race politics that have governed the industry since the late 1950s.

The Supremes' story, as traditionally put forward, channels the American Dream: high-school-aged girls living in the Detroit projects with nothing but their voices find one another and miraculously rise to stardom. Reality, of course, is far less dramatic. Indeed, the “girls” did come from the projects, but their families were intact. From the start there were tensions—competition between singers, four at first and then three, over who would be showcased most prominently. Despite the fact that Florence Ballard created the group, Berry Gordy was smitten by the demure, and ultra-feminine, Diane Ernestine Ross. As he pushed her into the lead, the other young women were reduced to backup roles, and over the course of several years Diane morphed into Diana and became a diva extraordinaire. Not surprisingly, this riled the others and Ribowsky goes to great lengths to document bitter catfights and rivalries.

He also documents Gordy’s managerial immorality, his legendary refusal to pay much of anything to performers hungry for fame. His descriptions of the company’s tenacious stranglehold on performers like the Jackson 5, Four Tops, Temptations, Stevie Wonder, and Supremes is astonishing, especially since Gordy was largely unschooled in either business or music promotion. In fact, before starting Motown, he was a never-do-well who was literally reduced to begging his financially savvy family for $800 to start the company. Call it right place, right time, right instincts, and you pretty much have Berry Gordy’s ascension in a nutshell: He pulled together a winning mix of talented writers, musicians, singers and promoters, forged a unique sound, and worked feverishly to get radio airplay and stage time for Motown acts.

While Motown is front and center in The Supremes, Ribowsky simultaneously focuses on Diana Ross, Florence Ballard, and Mary Wilson, the three singers responsible for the group’s twelve number one singles and ten additional Top Ten hits. Throughout, his portrait is devoid of feminist sisterhood, and makes clear that the singers were more interested in racking up personal accolades than in promoting the group. Take Florence Ballard’s accelerating alcoholism and self-destruction as an example. Despite ample evidence of her decline, neither Ross nor Wilson intervened to help her; instead, they allowed Gordy to fire her.

Still, no one in the book is wholly demonized. For example, Ribowsky reports on Ross’ periodic generosity, mentioning that when Ballard died of heart disease at the age of thirty-two—after being booted out of the group—Ross set up trust funds for each of Ballard’s three children. Yet, he also makes clear that everything Ross did—from love affairs with the married Smokey Robinson and Gordy himself, to kind social gestures—was on her terms.

The Supremes were Gordy’s answer to the social turmoil of the 1960s, a way to hang on to the propriety of earlier decades. The “girls” were always stylishly coiffed and wore only the best designer gowns and cocktail dresses. The message was simple—they were not hippies, but ladies. What’s more, they didn’t address the Vietnam War and ignored the civil rights movement until Martin Luther King’s assassination. Unlike militant Black musicians-slash-activists, they represented the status quo and were rewarded handsomely for the reassuring image they presented to an oft-worried Caucasian mainstream.

Was this image a calculated business decision on Gordy’s part? Probably. But if it’s true, it makes The Supremes an even more interesting look at U.S. social politics and mores. In the end, apolitical beauty sells, even when it is manufactured.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, October 6th 2009