US History

The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago

brittany — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

During the 1920s, a rash of killings rocked Chicago. The murderers were young women who drank, and most killed their lovers. Most were white and all-male juries that refused to believe women were capable of cold-blooded murder released most of them. During this time, the crimes were reported in the newspapers by “sob sisters,” female reporters who were able to interview female inmates and victim’s family members.

The Girls of Murder City is about this period in time, two killers in particular, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, and a female reporter, Maurine Watkins. Beulah and Belva both killed their lovers after the men threatened to leave them. Both were beautiful, rich, white, and relatively young. The newspapers gave both women a chance to be famous, and both used it to their advantage.

Maurine Watkins was a hardworking, pious Christian who came to Chicago with the plan to use her column to show the evils of the world. Her sarcastic, strong-willed writing was often the only counterpoint to the sob sisters’ tales of woe in the papers. She would eventually use her stories to write the play Chicago, which would become the long-running musical.

The book tells an interesting story about the rise of the “girl gunners” and the creation of Chicago. The problem is that the story feels a bit unfocused. Maurine is not the main focus of the book, but neither are Belva and Beulah (or Chicago characters Velma and Roxie, if you will). The book explores their cases and delves into the lives of the other women in jail with them, but then switches to focus on Maurine. As a result, the story feels a bit shallow. I wanted more from both of the stories. Other narratives, like the story of the murder of Bobby Franks by teenaged killers Leopold and Loeb, are shoehorned into the story and feel tacked on.

Most importantly, the book is very poorly cited. For a while, I did not know if I was reading a non-fiction book or a “non-fiction” fiction book like In Cold Blood. Douglas Perry included details he seemingly could not know unless he had been there. There is an extensive note section in the back of the back of the book, but without explanation as to where each note belonged, reading them was slow going. More confusingly, there are footnotes in the book, but not to the main facts. They function more as author asides. Actual footnotes would have made the book much better, and given it much more authority.

I enjoyed The Girls of Murder City, but it could have been much better.

Written by: Taylor Rhodes, April 12th 2011

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States

brittany — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Kay Whitlock, Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie

Beacon Press

In their near-exhaustive catalogue of violence, discrimination, and systematic abuse of LGBT people in the United States, Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock outline the specific ways that the criminalization of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgendered people has perpetuated inequalities not only based on sexual identity but also within the complex interplay of race, class, and gender. While many leading texts in LGBT studies have argued that the policing of gender leads to toxic consequences for all members of society, this book reveals just how pervasive such policing of gender is and just how complicit we are in maintaining these systems of inequality. Most centrally, Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock argue that decriminalizing queerness has been sidelined by efforts to merely remove legal sanctions—a problem that fails to address the basic assumptions of queer deviance at play in our legal system.

Queer (In)Justice dispenses a legal history of LGBT oppression that spans hundreds of years, beginning with a sweeping review of the history of gender policing—indigenous abuse, constructions of African people as hypersexual, “contaminating” immigrant bodies, and even Biblical ideas about sodomy—and moving through a range of topics that collectively provide the most complete picture of LGBT criminalization I have ever encountered. Addressing queer criminal archetypes (e.g., the queer killer, sexually degraded predator, disease spreader, and queer security threat) early in the book, the authors then move to three stellar chapters on legal policing of gender in clubs and public spaces, courtroom battles about queer identity (where gender bending and violence are discursively linked), and, finally, the queering of prisons. This last chapter on prisons provides a haunting account of prison guards ignoring sexual identity-based violence, refusing care for HIV/AIDS prisoners, and constructing queer inmates as perverse. The authors conclude (in one of only a few hopeful moments of the book) that anti-police-brutality, the building of safe communities, prison solidarity, and community organizing must occur in order to tease apart the conflation of queerness and criminality.

At times devastating, provocative, explicit, and horrifying, this book will make you deeply sad, deeply angry, and more fully aware of how far we really are from full equality for sexual minorities. The authors argue, essentially, that cases like Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena are not isolated incidents of violent, hateful oppression, but rather, engendered by the very system that supposedly protects queer subjects. From senseless police brutality to justifying death penalty sentences based on sexual identity, from the fetishization of “lesbian killer” Aileen Wuornos to prison guards who allow continued sexual assault against “willing” gay men in prison, hatred of queerness exists at the heart of our criminal justice system. The question becomes: What legal, discursive, social, and institutional changes can we enact that more radically and permanently divides queerness from criminality? What stories must we tell (or learn) to communicate and understand the histories of violence lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people have endured? And, finally, what kind of queer justice should we seek?

Written by: Breanne Fahs, February 12th 2011

The Curious Case of the Communist Jell-O Box: The Execution of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg

gwen — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Michael Hoerger, Mia Partlow

Microcosm Publishing

What could possibly be the connection between imitation raspberry Jell-O, communism, and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? I was intrigued. After all, what self-respecting leftist would not be interested in the case of the Rosenbergs, who at the height of the Red Scare were convicted of smuggling secrets to the Russians? The Curious Case of the Communist Jell-O Box (CCCJB) is a political zine by Michael Hoerger and Mia Partlow, which folds out into a full-sized poster, but for maximum enjoyment you have to read it as you unfold. In other words, the story unfolds as you do.

The authors use the theme of the Jell-O box to great effect. This seemingly innocuous product and its unlikely association with communism initially lighten the darker themes of espionage and subsequent execution. The ubiquitous gelatin dessert box then takes on a more sinister significance when presented at trial as a sophisticated communications device. Yet this evidence, which was central to the prosecution’s case, was never recovered, and unsurprisingly when shown a replica under cross-examination and asked whether they recognized the box, the witnesses all answered “yes.”

In CCCJB, Hoerger and Partlow write that the show trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were used to fuel public paranoia about communists and lefties in order to give the FBI and its leader, J. Edgar Hoover, greater powers to infiltrate and use extralegal means to quell any real or apparent leftist threat. If you read closely, you’ll see that the writers do raise the possibility of our late-defendants’ guilt, but it seems there’s a larger message in this zine—the unnecessary demonizing of the left or anyone who dares to raise the virtues of truth and justice.

Your inner geek will be tickled pink with reproductions of the now-declassified transcripts from the 1950 Grand Jury trial and a declassified CIA memo that supplies background material on how to counter pro-Rosenberg propaganda. The collage of period newspaper clippings and sensational headlines from both sides of the political spectrum with their scratchy and at times illegible letters give the zine a genuine 1950s look and feel.

CCCJB left me wanting to find out more about the Rosenbergs and the two children they left behind, and a link to further reading about the case would have been appreciated. But overall this was a well-planned undertaking and a lot of entertainment for just two bucks. I checked out the authors’ website, and they have other food-related political zines with their own declassified documents… excellent… excellent!

Written by: Heather Leighton, December 21st 2010

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade

gwen — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Justin Spring

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Who was Sam Steward? Influential professor, ballet enthusiast, S/M practitioner, author of paperback pornos and serious novels, and tattoo artist are just a few of the roles he played in his life. Among his friends were many important cultural and literary figures of the time including Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Thorton Wilder, Ed Hardy, and Alfred Kinsey, yet he remains virtually unknown today. Justin Spring brings to light Steward’s story for the first time, drawing on his many letters and obsessively detailed records of his sexual encounters kept on index cards known as the “Stud File.” Steward dabbled in many professions and lifestyles, managing to be very talented at many things but never exceptional at anything.

The great tragedy of Steward’s life is that he could almost taste the fame and fortune in front of him, but could never quite reach out and grasp them. Most of his big plans fall through—he is rejected by the Navy and loses his dream of becoming a sailor, he is forced to give up his teaching position when his tattoo parlor and homosexual activities are discovered, and his memoirs remained unpublished at the time of his death.

Yet despite his failures, Spring makes a strong case for Steward’s significance in early American homosexual history. Steward was decades ahead of most in his views on pride in gay identity. He was not ashamed of his sexuality, and had a great disdain for those that insisted homosexuality was a disease. He displayed male pornography in his apartments and held “daisy chain” parties where many men would have sex together at a time when discovery of these activities would have resulted in imprisonment. A combination of self-destructive tendencies, sexual desire, and earnest rebellion fueled his search for sex in dangerous places with dangerous men. He nearly avoids death multiple times, and is repeatedly raped, robbed, and beaten up by men he seeks sexual encounters with. He has many pleasurable sexual encounters, however, including a memorable elevator experience with movie star Rock Hudson before he was famous.

Outside of sex, his life was mainly devoted to writing and teaching. He had numerous letter correspondences, the most moving of which was with Gertrude Stein. Steward was one of the first to have frank discussions with her about her lesbianism, and she doted on him like a son. Steward is forced to watch Stein and most of his friends die throughout his lifetime. In late life, he becomes very depressed and addicted to barbiturates. He dies almost all alone in the world, his life mostly a side note in the biographies of his celebrity friends.

Spring does a good job of chronicling Steward’s life, making him seem both interesting and endearing. The thoroughness of his biography is at once the book’s greatest asset and its greatest fault. While Spring is clearly passionate and dedicated to his subject matter, his work could have benefited from a lot of editing. For instance, it is not essential to know every time Steward gets diarrhea, or every brief love affair he has, but Spring includes everything. Nearly every page has a footnote, or several, with information that is not particularly vital to the story.

Overall, though, Secret Historian is a compelling homage to a man history has unjustly ignored. Steward may have not become famous in his lifetime but his writing, teaching, and friendships brought comfort to many other struggling writers and homosexuals in America and helped them to survive, and it is for this that Spring takes the time to give him the recognition he deserves.

Written by: Arielle Burgdorf, November 17th 2010

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future

gwen — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Robert B. Reich

Alfred A. Knopf

Many people shy away from trying to understand economics. They assume that because they don’t know much about tax or trade policies, or because they don’t understand what a derivative on Wall Street is and does, that economics is too complicated, and they leave the fate of the economy in the hands of the “experts”. The trouble with this is that the experts often have a vested interest in keeping everyone else in the dark in order to make a profit.

Enter Robert Reich. In his newest book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, the former US Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and currently professor at the University of California, Berkeley, manages to make a complicated topic digestible. He presents a thorough, yet easily accessible analysis of patterns in America’s economy since the Great Depression.

His underlying premise is that the American economy swings back and forth like a pendulum between times of economic contraction (to varying degrees) and times of economic growth and prosperity. He argues that in this pattern lies another pattern that provides the key to understanding why things went so horribly wrong in 2008 and have not gotten much better since: the concentration of income at the top and a flat growth of income for everyone else. Reich steps beyond the now common analyses that see the root of the economic crash in 2008 in the mortgage crisis or in the scrupulous behavior on Wall Street. He points out that while it is true that Wall Street’s strategy of betting against the American economy and making profits off of people losing their homes contributed to an accelerated downward spiral into the Great Recession, the real issue that led to the economic collapse has been the ongoing erosion of income for the vast majority of Americans.

Reich notes that in the year leading up to the crash in 2008, the top one percent of the American population earned twenty-three percent of the nation’s income. The last time income was so concentrated at the top in the US was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. He explains that the time of economic prosperity that the US experienced after 1945 was a result of macroeconomic policies that ensured a fairer distribution if income and wealth. The Social Security system, Medicare and Medicaid, regulation of the housing and loan market, increased power of labor unions to negotiate higher wages, and programs designed to create jobs were legacies of the New Deal that between 1947 and 1975 created a time where ordinary Americans earned enough money to consume the products they were producing. However, the pendulum swung back starting in the late 1970s. Reich points out that when it became increasingly difficult for American workers to be able to afford to consume, they turned to, and ultimately exhausted, three key coping mechanisms: women entering the workforce, working longer hours, and when that failed to generate enough income, borrowing against your house.

Reich puts the current Great Recession in political and historical perspective. He points out that the path toward the crash really started in the 1980s, when the emphasis on free-market economics and the linking of Wall Street and key decision-making position in politics made the pendulum swing away from a basic bargain that meant that average Americans could afford to live a decent life. He points out that the only way to really get out of the Great Recession is to reverse that trend and ensure that income is distributed more fairly to allow Americans to consume, which would trigger production of goods through increased demand, which in turn would trigger job growth.

Reich ends his book with a series of suggestions for how to achieve this: a reverse income tax, where those earning less than $20,000-$30,000 annually receive wage subsidies rather than paying income tax, higher marginal tax rates for the wealthy, a carbon tax, school vouchers that are based on family income, college loans linked to subsequent income, Medicare for all, and a delinking of money/corporate interests and politics. While this plan sounds utopian, especially given the current trend toward electing politicians who run on an even more drastic deregulation and anti-government platform, Reich makes it very clear that unless we make the pendulum swing toward fair distribution of income again, which can only be done through government action, the Great Recession is here to stay and might, ultimately, undermine the social and political peace in America.

We can’t afford to not understand this. We can’t afford to not understand economics.

Written by: Annette Przygoda, November 12th 2010

Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant

tina — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Susan Supernaw

University of Nebraska Press

On the surface, Susan Supernaw’s memoir Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant is a story about an unlikely Miss Oklahoma winner and her trip to the 1971 Miss America pageant. The true story, however, is Supernaw’s struggle to escape a childhood marred by extreme poverty and violence and earn the Native American name revealed to her during a near death experience.

While reading the memoir, it was hard to keep in mind that Muscogee Daughter wasn’t a work of fiction. Supernaw’s struggles haunted me long after I finished reading the book, especially the image of her dying grandmother sharing a bed with Supernaw as an ill and abandoned infant.

Supernaw was the fourth daughter in a poor family and her birth was a major disappointment to her father. When she was just a baby her parents left her in the care of her elderly grandparents on a farm in rural Oklahoma so that her father could go back to college. It’s never made clear why her parents took the older girls and left their newborn, but whatever the reason it was ill conceived. By the time she was six months old, Supernaw’s grandmother had died and her mother returned to collect her.

Months of being confined to her grandmother’s bed and being fed cow’s milk and coffee by her inexperienced grandfather landed her in the hospital for many weeks. That would be the first of a handful of close calls in Supernaw’s life and each time she believed she was about to die, a beautiful woman appeared to comfort her. Supernaw believed she was a manifestation of the Corn Mother.

The second time the woman appeared she brought a small dancing bear, a personification of Supernaw’s Native American name. A community elder came to Supernaw’s bed side and advised her to follow her destined path in order to earn the right to her name and earning that name became her primary goal. Paralyzed after a horse riding accident, Supernaw fought to walk again and eventually, she became an athletic high school cheerleader, a Presidential scholar, an accidental beauty queen, and a unifying figure for the eastern and western tribes of Oklahoma.

Supernaw memoir reveals many painful and personal details about her life. We learn of the abusive father who left the family bereft and who was replaced by an even more tyrannical and dangerous step-father, though initially the four girls were happy to have him provide more than the ketchup sandwiches they had been accustomed to eating for dinner.

Supernaw seems to understand that her family’s story is representative of a piece of American history—one that is too often untold; however, it feels like too much was left unsaid. Though she was an anthropology major concerned with human rights, her attitude towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is puzzling. Supernaw says that it gave her white boyfriend “an unfair disadvantage and made me feel like I’d been given an unfair advantage.” In later pages she reveals that she “felt a lot of confusion over minority preference,” yet she also felt the sting of racism from her boyfriend who believed her Presidential award was the result of her being a minority. There were was also the cheerleaders’ parents who did not allow her in their homes; the Miss America pageant that treated her like an oddity; and the media that used offensive stereotypes to describe her.

Muscogee Daughter was both fascinating and frustrating. As a reader I wanted to know more about her family and her experience as a woman of color living between white and Native worlds. The importance of earning her Native American name is clear, but the significance of the milestone is not. Nevertheless, Susan Supernaw’s memoir is essential in the narrative of American history.

Written by: Stephanie Sylverne, October 29th 2010

Birth Control on Main Street: Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916-1939

beth — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Cathy Moran Hajo

University of Illinois Press

This past May, the birth control pill celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. News outlets all over the country covered the story, yet the early years of the birth control movement were seldom mentioned. A lack of academic research has led to the history of the early birth control movement being plagued by misinformation, myth, and appropriation by the right, particularly regarding the history of the movement’s founder, Margaret Sanger.

Birth Control on Main Street by Cathy Moran Hajo seeks to shed light on the history of a movement that was so successful that contraceptive access is something most Americans, even those on the right, take for granted.

It is the suffrage movement that is seen by feminists as the early movement to idealize, yet as Hajo points out, in reality, the birth control movement led to much more meaningful reforms. The birth control movement more directly allowed women to pursue careers and personal goals, greatly improved the health of countless women, increased women’s longevity, and led to societal sexual enlightenment, further equal rights, and allowed women to enhance their roles as mothers and partners.

While Birth Control on Main Street is about the movement as a whole (covering years 1916 to 1939), Hajo recognized the importance of providing a fact-based analysis of Margaret Sanger’s career to give a proper foundation for the rest of the movement’s history. As associate editor at NYU’s Margaret Sanger Papers Project, Hajo is the perfect expert to provide such an exploration.

What is perhaps most important for women to know about the history of the early birth control movement is that it was begun and maintained almost exclusively by laywomen activists. Men dominated the medical establishment at the time and were unsupportive of reforms that would encourage women to have fewer children. Control of the clinics remained with female activists for the first decades of the movement, despite their strong desire to work with medical professionals.

No comprehensive history of the birth control movement would be complete without a frank discussion of eugenics, and Hajo does a great job exploring both the realities of the eugenics movement itself and the actual ideologies that brought some birth control activists to involve themselves with eugenicists, including Sanger. Despite what some radicals on the right may say, for Sanger and most of her colleagues, the eugenic question of what made a woman “fit” to bear children was a question of environment, not race.

According to Hajo, the notion that early birth control activists were concerned with reducing the black population is highly misleading. In reality, states Hajo, the true shortcoming of the movement was neglect of the black population. Instead, the true study and focus should be on the unwillingness of early clinic activists to work with black communities at all. As is now well known, this was a conflict eventually overcome and the women’s movement became the most inclusive of social movements in U.S. history.

If there is one thing that is unknown about the early birth control movement, it is the actual work that went on inside the clinics. Hajo devotes a large part of the book to exploring the exact work, interactions between activists and patients, interactions between activists and birth professionals, the demographics of patients, the attitudes and ideologies of activists, admission requirements, and conflicts between local and national leaders. Birth Control on Main Street is the perfect read for any enthusiast, as well as any feminist activist who wants to know more about the collected history we share with our foremothers.

Written by: Janice Formichella, September 29th 2010

Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968

admin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Michael P. Bibler

University of Virginia Press

As Michael Bibler mentions in the introduction to Cotton’s Queer Relations, it seems impossible that there could be enough material out there to serve as the basis for such depth of criticism on an incredibly narrow topic. There are a few notable classics that have homoerotic undertones and even some more overt mentions of homosexual encounters that are discussed in works like The Confessions of Nat Turner, but these queer moments seem like blips in what appears to be an otherwise overtly heterosexual literary scape. Is Bibler reading too much into plantation literature? Are his examples only the result of the passionate desire to find queer meaning in texts where none exists? The answer to both questions seems to be no.

Bibler’s arguments are focused and supported with strong evidence from the texts and the work of other critics. But the argument by Bibler is more complex than a simple acknowledgment of the existence of queerness in plantation literature; he argues that the queer subtexts in plantation literature expose wider social injustices in plantation life, and that queer relations also move racial inequality and sexism to the forefront.

Bibler wants to make it clear that same-sex relations here do not necessarily mean homosexual relations. I will allow the reader of Cotton’s Queer Relations to delve more deeply into the complex reasoning behind his assertion; but in a nutshell, he essentially pleads that the closeness of same-sex relations in the textual examples he uses stand in such conflict of the heterosexualized and paternalistic structure of the plantation that they can be defined as queer even if they are not directly homosexual. It is an interesting take, and one that may initially sound like a bit of a stretch.

Terminology notwithstanding, Bibler offers fresh readings of literary classics like Absalom, Absalom! and gives contemporary insight to controversial texts like Styron’s Nat Turner. He digs deep into Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and is able to juxtapose Big Daddy’s simultaneous tolerance of homosexuality with his unabashed lack of respect toward the black servants he employs, effectively layering new meaning on a well-worn text. He picks apart the relationships of white women and their black servants in the works of Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Margaret Walker, describing them as “romances”—and supports his logic—even though none of the women in the stories share an erotic lesbian moment, or even a kiss. While there are a few minor stretches here and there in Bibler’s text, he overall pleads his case. He certainly does not appear to be afraid of stirring controversy, and does a remarkable job of defending his arguments while he discusses each point.

Written by: Emily S. Dunster, July 16th 2010

Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Evelyn Nakano Glenn

Harvard University Press

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a professor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley and author of Forced to Care. Perhaps because of her vocation, the book has a bit of a textbook flavor to it, but as it progresses, she lets go and begins to fill it out with a more humanistic view.

Forced to Care begins with a look at those who are responsible for the lion’s share of caregiving in America. Glenn’s findings basically confirm what most of us know already: in most cases, women of color, women at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, and illegal immigrants are the ones caring for our nation’s young, disabled, and elderly.

The author then takes her inquiries one step further by tracing the roots of caregiving back to colonial America in an effort to discover why such a disproportionate amount of paid and unpaid caretaking falls to these individuals. Glenn does a terrific job of leading the reader through the individual events that occurred politically, socially, industrially, and economically to reinforce the notion that it is a woman’s duty to take care of needy family members. Following the shift from an agricultural, self-sustaining, family-based society to a market economy, Glenn shows just why gender divisions still remain with respect to these types of jobs. She illustrates, through the use of an amazing amount of research, just exactly how American women with very few other choices have been coerced into providing care for others to the detriment of their own needs for centuries. Our society’s continued devaluation of these kinds of “homemaking” services serves to perpetuate the problem.

It is clear that the author encourages a sea change with respect to both paid and unpaid caregiving, but she refrains from demonizing any particular groups or individuals, instead offering a clear, concise look at how we got ourselves here, and why we need to get out of this mess while we still can.

Glenn advocates for both care providers and those receiving care and uses her vast knowledge of the history and foundation of the problems to offer concrete solutions to the difficulties both face as our aging society pushes us closer to a crisis in the fastest growing segment of healthcare in America.

Before picking up this book, I was nearly certain that I would be called upon to care for elderly family members at some point in my life, although hopefully not until my children are grown and gone. Despite my fears of being able to do so with grace and love versus resentment and frustration, it was nonetheless something I didn’t see a way out of. I can’t say that Forced to Care allayed my fears in any way, but I gained a tremendous amount of insight as to how and why I might be called upon to provide such care and how, if I am so inclined, I might join in efforts to increase the availability of resources and respect for caregivers as a whole.

While the book is not an easy read—I didn't settle down with it in my lounge chair next to the pool—it is an absolutely eye-opening look at something many of us take for granted; that we as women will eventually be called upon to care for those family members who cannot do it for themselves.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, July 10th 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

Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Mark Garrett Cooper

University of Illinois Press

In Universal Women, Professor Cooper launches a multidisciplinary investigation into the mystery of why it was that Universal Film Manufacturing Company broadly supported women directors during the 1910s before abruptly reversing the policy. Drawing on philosophical, sociological, historical and structuralist interpretations of gender, culture, power, and institutions, Cooper’s study is positioned to show the interrelationship between art and the development of social norms, aesthetics, and political upheaval, and culture and epistemology in the United States.

However, readers looking for a narrative account of women director’s success and subsequent exile from Universal should look elsewhere. Cooper sets up his project by describing a confluence of events and personalities, some of which appear to be only distantly related, that played varying roles in this drama of gender. Some of these are not clearly explained, as when Professor Cooper explains the etymology of a word but does not clearly tie his explanation to the relationship he is trying to describe and defend.

His definitions and explanations take the following pattern: first, Cooper defines a word like “institution” or “organization” with an appeal to the Oxford English Dictionary. He appeals to the historical use of words to explore the concepts that fall under the definition and to point to a kind of etymological necessity: the word organization brings with it an inheritance from biology and so organizations are implicitly naturalized. Then he describes the word in its social development and practical usage. In the case of “organization” Cooper describes different sociological invocations of the word-concept.

Although in the next section, Professor Cooper describes the bi-coastal organization of Universal Film Manufacturing Company, he does not tie this historical description to the linguistic, historical and sociological discussion that preceded it. It seems that the reader is meant to intuit his purposes in such places and to develop the claims herself. I am not opposed to writing styles that foster critical thinking. But Cooper doesn’t make clear his purposes in so defining and explaining (for example). That is to say, I can look up definitions. I have access to the OED. I can read Durkheim and Weber. But I can’t get inside Cooper’s head to figure out what it is he intends by these things.

Reading Cooper’s book is a bit like watching someone’s film depicting a movie being made: it is interesting to see all the “extras” around the set–the camera crew, the lighting, the onlookers, the caterers, the director and producers and the landscape behind the backdrops and facades–but it is difficult to follow the plot of the movie being made.

The book is directed toward an academic audience; readers should be advised to plant their pinkies in the endnotes for quick reference. It will be most intelligible to those trained in film studies or who are such avid consumers of early Hollywood films and trivia that the characters are familiar–I had a hard time keeping track of names. The study is an interesting one, stressing the role that Universal played in interpreting and then enforcing what it means to be gendered as a man or as a woman. It would be interesting to see a slightly more narrative treatment of the subject–even a narrative that made clear the difficulties of narrative for such a diffuse phenomenon as the shifting meanings of gender–in order to appeal to more non-specialists.

Written by: kristina grob, July 6th 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

The Gospel of Hip Hop: The First Instrument

admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By KRS-ONE

powerHouse Books

Just as jazz is a uniquely American phenomenon whose sentiment and message resonate with people the world round, so is hip-hop. Hip-hop began as a means by which to illustrate the experiences of people living their daily lives in the ‘hoods of New York. Although the originators of hip-hop, such as the Sugar Hill Gang were instrumental in shedding light on teen pregnancy, drug addiction, and violence it wasn’t until the era of KRS-One that hip-hop evolved to the status of Cultural Revolution. KRS-One, best known as Teacha, brought hip-hop to the mainstream. Although in his early days his work with Boogie Down Productions (BDP) was more violent in nature, after the tragic loss of his BDP partner, DJ Scott LaRock, his work evolved into a peaceable lyrical style that called the masses to confront social ills head on. With his politically savvy, multicultural take on what he was witnessing in his environs he touched upon that longing within us all to be free. Hip-hop is, at its core, about freedom.

Yet, freedom is not free and it is the struggle that is highlighted in The Gospel of Hip Hop. True to its name, the Gospel of hip-hop provides the reader with a good word about the value garnered only by overcoming obstacles. Hip-hop, although invented in America, has become an internationally appreciated musical form because it is more than just music. In this tome KRS-One provides the reader with plenty of teaching on peace and love which breaks down barriers, removes prejudice, and reconciles injustice.

For example, in the opening section, of this book the Teacha states: "But as for us, as for our group commonly known in the World as 'Hip Hop,' this gospel acknowledges and celebrates the Love that has saved OUR people from self destruction. It is time to repent and grow up! Rapping about crime and murder may sound good amongst those who have never committed such acts, but for those of us who are REAL IN THE FIELD, we send this message to our young people—YOU DON’T REALLY WANT IT!"

And on the following page: "For with this first instrument we remember GOD and how we were rescued by unseen forces more powerful than any government on Earth. For when all seemed hopeless and oppression seemed permanent; a caring, protective, nurturing creative force independent of all the World’s political, business, educational and religious institutions, swept through our hearts and homes and we were rescued from sickness, hatred, ignorance and poverty with a behavior that we eventually began to call 'Hip Hop.' And we must NEVER forget this.”

Hip-hop is life, hip-hop is freedom, hip-hop is revolution. KRS-One has brought to light the cure for what ails us all: heart sickness, the residual effect of the subjugation of one group of people by another group of people. Whether those groups are divided by gender, race, religion, socio-economic status, age, or educational attainment they are all expressions of hatred and ignorance. The only solution for which is love. As Al Green so eloquently stated “Love is the message and the message is love”.

Written by: Susan G. Reyes Vasquez, January 20th 2010

Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent

admin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:18:00 +0000

By William H. Thomas Jr.

University of Wisconsin Press

Even the preface to Unsafe for Democracy makes William H. Thomas Jr.’s political stances abundantly clear, but impressively, his political leanings have no negative effect on either his literary voice or his scholarship. Unsafe for Democracy is a straightforward historical tract, delineating the disturbing specifics of a very specific time in history. Thomas uses only the preface to tie the events of the early twentieth century to the problems America faced in subsequent eras, from the actions of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s secretive, legally questionable “counterintelligence program” to spy on, disrupt and often destroy dissident political organizations in the mid-twentieth century, to those of the Bush Administration; the body of the book allows the reader to draw her own conclusions, a model of thorough research and admirable self-restraint.

Using the Espionage Act of 1917 as its legal base and the general paranoid wartime climate as its ethical base, the United States Justice Department committed innumerable violations of the civil rights of German-Americans, members of the Socialist Party, and many other American citizens under the umbrella of protecting American safety and security during World War I. Thomas skillfully depicts the anger and frustration present in the social climate at that time, and uses it to draw us into stories of the Justice Department’s behavior, each more shocking than the last, and the behavior it inspired in ordinary American citizens. The book ends with the startling chapter “Vigilantism,” describing many shocking incidents not commonly known and the Justice Department’s notable lack of focused response. The details of the book are fascinating and often terrifying.

More than many historical tracts, Unsafe for Democracy demonstrates the value of straightforward storytelling. Thomas makes no attempt to shock his readers or to beat them over the head with parallels to other periods of history or contemporary government. Rather, he tells us what happened, offers his compelling evidence that this was, indeed, the way it happened, and leaves us to frame the value of the story as we see fit. Even if the stories in Unsafe for Democracy were not so chilling, this skill would make the book worthwhile, and the stories themselves are stories that every American should understand in as much depth as possible.

Written by: Gemma Cooper-Novack, November 2nd 2009

Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:38:00 +0000

By Jennifer Ring

University of Illinois Press

Stolen Bases is as intelligent and powerful as any professional U.S. women’s baseball team would be, should be, and could be...if any were supported enough to exist. The book is a concise 180 pages, an assertive objection to the current status of baseball in the United States in its exclusion of women, and a worthwhile read for those who find themselves in the middle of the Venn diagram of athletes, spectators, and feminists.

Judging a book by its cover, it’s serious: red, white, and blue varsity-style lettering covers an action photograph of real women playing real baseball. I like that casual bookstore browsers may take in this positive representation as they walk by, and I’d encourage readers to pick it up.

The book’s subject matter is framed by author and political science professor Jennifer Ring’s personal love of baseball, and she uses the prologue and epilogue to recount her family’s attempts to make baseball more inclusive for her daughter. This, in turn, makes the issues feel more urgent and tangible. The reader is also drawn in by the humor inherent in the chapter headings, and even by small details like the author’s parenthetical inclusion of her friends’ and mentors’ favorite baseball teams in the acknowledgments.

The heart of the book, though, is a harder read. It is well-paced, informative, and is evidently well researched and supported. Baseball’s history is explained, almost decade by decade, and then systematically deconstructed to identify the choices, conditions, and decisions that have almost always led to the exclusion of women on all but the most amateur levels.

The book’s pace eerily echoes the history of baseball’s treatment of women. Again and again, Ring’s narrative excites and includes the reader, only for another obstacle to interrupt what could have been an amazing victory for female players and fans of what is culturally asserted to be a “national pastime.” Stark facts and their interpretations could make for depressing reading, but Ring’s skill as a storyteller is to weave her own wry asides into the account, acting as a guide the reader can identify with during the bleaker eras in women’s baseball history, and as a comrade when celebrating women’s baseball successes.

Stolen Bases most certainly supports feminist values, and is also particularly inclusive of race and class in its arguments. It does not, however, go into any depth regarding lesbian players (other than a cursory mention of ‘lesbianism’ being one of the feared outcomes offered up by those who opposed pro-ball for women). It also assumes the reader defines gender as a binary concept for the purposes of the arguments contained in the book.

By the end of Stolen Bases, many readers will feel spurred into action. Ring would have done well to include a model for grassroots supporters and a practical outline for baseball professionals and governing bodies, perhaps in appendices.

A few weeks ago, a girl named Mackenzie Brown in Bayonne, New Jersey hit a perfect little league game. Thanks to Stolen Bases, I’m much more able to appreciate what a fantastic achievement this is, and how much work still needs to be done to further promote women’s inclusion in baseball.

Written by: Chella Quint, June 26th 2009