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Not Even Past

Resources for Teaching Women’s History

March 22, 2022

From the editors: To mark Women’s History Month in 2022, we have collected a range of Not Even Past articles and reviews into one resources page organized around seven topics. These articles highlight groundbreaking research but they are also intended as a concrete resource for teachers.

Compiled by Gabrielle Esparza

Topics
  1. Black Women’s History
  2. Suffrage
  3. History of Reproduction
  4. Women’s Activism
  5. Important Figures
  6. Recommended Reading
  7. Recorded Talks and Podcasts

Black Women’s History

  • Beauty Shop Politics by Tiffany Gill
  • Black Women in Black Power by Ashley Farmer

One has to only look at a few headlines to see that many view black women organizers as important figures in combating today’s most pressing problems. Articles urging mainstream America to “support black women” or “trust black women” such as the founders of the Black Lives Matter Movement are popular. Publications, such as Time, laud black women’s political leadership—particularly when they mount a challenge to the status quo such as Stacey Abrams’ victory in the Georgia Democratic Governor primary. At the core of these sentiments is the recognition that black women have developed and sustained a liberal democratic politics that is conscious of and responsive to the interconnected effects of racism, capitalism, and sexism and that their approach can offer insight into current socio-political issues. The media often frames these and other women’s efforts as a manifestation of the current political moment divorced from the longer tradition of black women agitators and organizers to which they belong. Many of the black women making headlines today for their work in advancing civil rights and social justice ideals draw from these earlier traditions, including from the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s.

Ashley Farmer
  • Black is Beautiful – And Profitable by Tiffany Gill
  • Black Women’s History in the U.S.: Past and Present by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
  • Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso by Kali Nicole Gross
  • Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones (2020), reviewed by Tiana Wilson
  • Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World By Jessica Marie Johnson (2020), reviewed by Tiana Wilson
  • Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico by Shirley Boteler Mock (2010), reviewed by Micaela Valadez

Suffrage

  • “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You: Have You Paid That Poll Tax?” by Rachel Gunter

In the Austin History Center, there is a curious poster that demands the attention of “WOMEN!” in red, all-capital letters. Below this, a pair of eyes peer out beneath furrowed eyebrows warning “The Eyes of Texas are Upon You: Have You Paid That Poll Tax?” At the bottom of the poster is the instantly recognizable façade of the Alamo, just above the name of the group responsible for the ad, Texas League of Women Voters, Georgetown, Texas.

The poster is in the Jane McCallum collection. After Texas ratified the 19th Amendment in June 1919, the Texas Equal Suffrage Association became the state chapter of the League of Women Voters, and the local suffrage clubs were encouraged to make that transition as well. McCallum was an Austin-area suffragist who went on to spearhead publicity campaigns for the League of Women voters, lead the Women’s Joint Legislative Council, and serve as Texas Secretary of State under two governors. It is likely she had a hand in this particular poster, but we can’t be sure. In fact, there isn’t even a date on the poster, which scholars and archivists have only dated as being from the early 1920s. Both the Texas Equal Suffrage Associations and the League used maternal appeals to get women to pay the poll tax. They argued that this is how Texas funded public schools, and that “90% of Texas educators are women and need a living wage.” The poster is in line with the WWI-era appeals to women to do their duty as citizens.

Rachel Gunter
  • Voting Rights Still Threatened 100 Years After the 19th Amendment by Laurie Green
  • Citizens at Last: Texas Women Fight for the Vote by Nancy Schiesari and Ellen Temple

History of Reproduction

  • Contraception – Letters from French Women, 1960s-70s by Judith Coffin

Listeners wanted to discuss any number of issues: work, housing (in short supply as the economy expanded), credit and debt, the struggles of family businesses, and everything having to do with sex. They asked about sexual dilemmas and crises, pregnancy, family life, parents or in-laws (helpful intrusive, or both), and children, but contraception and abortion topped the list of women’s concerns. (Men wrote as well: they, too, were and are implicated in fertility and reproduction.) In 1967, the same year that Grégoire began broadcasting, the Neuwirth law made it legal for the first time, to discuss contraception in public – and cautiously opened the door to approving the sale of selected oral contraceptives, IUDs, and diaphragms. 

Judith Coffin
  • Dead Babies in Boxes: Dealing with the Consequences of Interrupted Reproduction by Julie Hardwick
  • Parenting in Hard Times: Child Abandonment in Early Modern Europe by Julie Hardwick
  • Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America by Linda Gordon (1976), reviewed by Megan Seaholm
  • Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan by Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2018), reviewed by Kellianne King
  • Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019), reviewed by Jesse Ritner

Women’s Activism

  • Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas by Micaela Valadez
  • The Politics of a Handkerchief: Personal Thoughts on the Motif of Female Activism in Argentina by Paula O’Donnell
  • La Mujer Unidad: Cynthia Orozco (UT History Honors Graduate ‘80) by Nikki Lopez
  • Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity by Laurie Green

Internal tensions are par for the course in the history of marches on Washington, whether they involved racial justice, women’s rights, or political protest. The several thousand women who paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, were not as unified as they might have appeared. Participants included immigrant women sweatshop workers, who linked the right to vote to their movement to organize against deadly factory conditions and piecework wages. But noticeably absent from the front of the march were black women’s organizations, who supported the effort but whose participation was spurned by the militant young suffragist Alice Paul, who feared it would jeopardize support from Southern white women. These African American women ended up participating, but they were required to march behind all the other women. All the women who marched down Pennsylvania Avenue stood up to jeers and violence, but they themselves were divided by an ugly racism rooted in political pragmatism.

Laurie Green
  • The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project by Laurie Green
  • Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000 by Laurie Green
  • Why I Ban the Word “Feminism” from My Classes by Jacqueline Jones
  • Women Shaping Texas in the Twentieth Century by Cristina Metz
  • Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners by Alina Scott
  • Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran by Negar Mottahedeh (2019), reviewed by Denise Gomez

Important Figures

  • My Life on the Road, by Gloria Steinem (2015), reviewed by Megan Seaholm
  • Lady Bird Johnson interviewed by Michael Gillette
  • Lady Bird Johnson, In Her Own Words by Michael Gillette
  • Liz Carpenter: Texan by Michael Gillette

Liz’s family tree sprouted strong, adventurous women equal to the men.  A great aunt, Louella Robertson Fulmore, eloquently advocated educational equality for women. Another great aunt, the prominent suffragist, Birdie Johnson, became the first Democratic national committeewoman from Texas. As she exhorted women to organize to make their influence felt at the polls, she declared that it was “our first step” in the exercise of “direct political power.”  No wonder Liz believed that she had inherited her feminist genes.

She was not blind to the shortcomings of her ancestors, whose reputations bore the stain of enslavement and the tragic folly of secession. Nor did her rich Texas legacy confer a sense of privilege or birthright. Instead, it affirmed her belief that ordinary people can overcome adversity to accomplish extraordinary things.  It also instilled a love of Texas history and a respect for its historians, which is why [the Liz Carpenter] award meant so much to her.  Finally, it inspired one of greatest political zingers of all time. When John Connally threw his support to the Republican incumbent President in 1972 and formed a group called “Democrats for Nixon,”  Liz declared that if Connally had been at the Alamo, he would have organized “Texans for Santa Anna.”

Michael Gillette
  • Dolores del Río: Beauty in Light and Shade, By Linda B. Hall (2013), reviewed by Ann Twinam
  • Goddess of Anarchy: Lucy Parsons, American Radical by Jacqueline Jones
  • An Intimate History of the Twentieth Century by Judith Coffin
  • Miss O’Keeffe by Nathan Stone
  • Carrie Marcus Neiman – A Pioneer in Ready to Wear by Lynn Mally

Recommended Reading

  • Great Books on Women’s History: Crossing Borders
  • Great Books on Women’s History: Asia
  • Great Books on Women’s History: Europe
  • Great Books on Women’s History: United States
  • Great Books on Women in US History by Megan Seaholm
  • Great Books on African American Beauty Culture by Tiffany Gill
  • New Books in Women’s History (2013)
  • On Women and Nation in India by Indrani Chatterjee
  • American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream by Julia L. Mickenberg

Recorded Talks and Podcasts

  • IHS Book Talk: “Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage,” by Lauren Jae Gutterman, University of Texas at Austin (History Faculty New Book Talk)
  • IHS Book Talk: “Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789,” by Julie Hardwick
  • IHS Book Talk: “Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir” by Judith G. Coffin, University of Texas at Austin (History Faculty New Book Talk)
  • Podcasting Migration: Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes with Sandy Chang
  • 15 Minute History, Episode 50: White Women of the Harlem Renaissance with Carla Kaplan
  • 15 Minute History, Episode 83: Simone de Beauvoir and ‘The Second Sex’ with Judith Coffin
  • 15 Minute History, Episode 93: Women and the Tamil Epics with Andrea Gutierrez
  • 15 Minute History, Episode 120: Slave-Owning Women in the Antebellum U.S. with Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
  • 15 Minute History, Episode 121: The Case for Women’s History with Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Dr. Lisa G. Materson 

US Survey Course: US Women’s History

August 7, 2016

During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

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We start with Kali Nicole Gross‘s feature article Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, a tale of race, sex and violence in America.,

Gross-Tabbs1-1-750x420

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To mark Women’s History month in 2016 we asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books in the field. The response was overwhelming. Here are some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in the United States:

wonder blue tatt

Penne Restad recommends:

Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014).

A lively, often surprising, narrative history that chronicles the adventures of Wonder Woman, the comic strip devoted to her prowess, and Marston, the man who imagined her, in the center of the struggle for women’s rights in the U.S.

Erika Bsumek recommends:

Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (2011).

In 1851, the 13 year old Oatman was part of a Mormon family traveling west. She was captured by the Yavapai Indians and then traded to the Mohave, who adopted her. The book tells her story and provides some valuable context on the various Mormon sects, the tensions and troubles faced by American Indians in the face of American expansion, and how one young woman experienced it all.

mexrosaglass

Laurie Green recommends:

Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. (2013)

Think you know who Rosa Parks was? Jeanne Theoharis’s biography will change your understanding of the woman who became famous for triggering the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 when she was “too tired” to relinquish her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The book tells you the real story of Parks’s militant activism from the 1930s to the 1990s and her frustration with being recognized as a symbol, not a leader.

Emilio Zamora recommends:

Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed; The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (2009)

The book is a re-examination of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the longest running Mexican American civil rights organizations.  Orozco is a well-known historian who incorporates women and gender in her histories of Mexican Americans.  In this instance, women are placed at center stage in the cause for equal rights and dignity.

Jackie Jones recommends:

Ellen Fitzpatrick, The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (2016).

A great read and couldn’t be more timely! The book focuses on three women candidates for the presidency:  Victoria Woodhull (ran in 1872), Margaret Chase Smith (1964), and Shirley Chisholm (1972).

chainedbabylon

Daina Berry recommends:

Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2016)

From the UNC Press website:

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia’s prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women’s presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women’s lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

Charlotte Canning recommends:

Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008)

An award-winning cultural history of the African American women who were variety performers on chorus lines, in burlesques, cabarets, and vaudeville from 1890 to 1945. Despite the oppression they experienced, these women shaped an emerging urban popular culture. They pioneered social dances like the cakewalk and the Charleston. It is an ambitious view of popular culture and the ways in which women were integral to its definition.

 scimed

Bruce Hunt and Megan Raby recommend:

Kimberly Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America(2014)

While there is an enormous literature on the reception of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, this is the first book to examine the responses of women. This book is a lively account of how ideas about human evolution figured in debates over women’s rights in the late 19th century, by a recent UT American Studies PhD.

Megan Seaholm recommends:

Jennifer Nelson, More Than Medicine:  A History of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement (2015)

Nelson provides an excellent addition to the growing literature about the women’s health movement that began in the 1960s.  She concentrates on reproductive health and reproductive rights from abortion referral services organized before Roe v. Wade through the National Black Women’s Health Project organized in 1984.  This is a good read and an important contribution.

famfam

Mark Lawrence recommends:

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound:  American Families in the Cold War Era (1990)

Elaine Tyler May examines the resurgence of traditional gender roles in the years after the Second World War, arguing that a desire to enjoy postwar prosperity and to escape the dangers of the nuclear age drove Americans back to conventional norms.  The book brilliantly blends women’s, social, political, and international history.

Judith Coffin recommends:

Nancy Cott,  Public Vows : A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000)

The changing stakes of marriage for the nation and for men and women — gay and straight. Readable, smart, and connected to the present. Nancy Cott helped write several amicus (friend-of-the-court) briefs in the marriage cases before the Supreme Court.

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A number of people suggested books about crossing borders: about people traveling or emigrating to countries foreign to them or about people creating new hybrid identities in the places they lived. Many of these books focused on the USA and US citizens living across the world.

HsuVongbooks 

Madeline Hsu recommends:

Emma Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong (2013)

Teng traces mixed race Chinese-white families in a number of societies and political and social circumstances to complicate presumptions about racial hierarchies and the porosity of racial border-keeping in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  By tracking mobilities through north America, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Teng demonstrates that intermarriages occurred at higher rates than previously acknowledged, and that intermarriage with Chinese could be vehicles for upward, and not just downward, mobility depending on local circumstances.

Sam Vong recommends:

Lynn Fujiwara, Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform (2008)

Fujiwara’s study uncovers the detrimental effects that welfare reform in the 1990s had on immigrant women, particularly President Clinton’s authorization of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 that aimed to end welfare programs. This book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways welfare reform policies redefined immigrants as outsiders and how immigrant women resisted these attempts at denying their claims to U.S. citizenship and belonging.

suristoffbooks

Michael Stoff recommends:

Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation

 I’ve used this book in classes and like it a great deal. Here’s a blurb from Cornell University Press:

“In this fascinating portrait of Jewish immigrant wage earners, Susan A. Glenn weaves together several strands of social history to show the emergence of an ethnic version of what early twentieth-century Americans called the “New Womanhood.” She maintains that during an era when Americans perceived women as temporary workers interested ultimately in marriage and motherhood, these young Jewish women turned the garment industry upside down with a wave of militant strikes and shop-floor activism and helped build the two major clothing workers’ unions.”

Jeremi Suri recommends:

Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2014).

This deeply researched book artfully examines the interaction of race, sex, and gender in the conduct of American soldiers stationed in France and their interactions with French civilians during World War II.

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Over the past few years Megan Seaholm has shared a number of recommendations on women in US history:

  • Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon (Penguin, 1976)
  •  My Life on the Road, by Gloria Steinem (Random House, 2015)
  • Three Great Books on Women in US History.

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Texas:

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Anne M. Martínez recommends Boxing Shadows, by W.K. Stratton with Anissa “The Assassin” Zamarron (University of Texas Press, 2009)

Michael Gillette discusses Liz Carpenter: Texan

Cristina Metz explores the Women Shaping Texas in the Twentieth Century exhibition at the Texas State History Museum, which tells the history of Texas women who revolutionized key areas, such as healthcare, education, civil rights, the workforce, business, and the arts.

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On 15 Minute History:

White Women of the Harlem Renaissance

JosSchuyler-150x150During the explosion of African American cultural and political activity that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, a number of white women played significant roles. Their involvement with blacks as authors, patrons, supporters and participants challenged ideas about race and gender and proper behavior for both blacks and whites at the time.

Guest Carla Kaplan, author of Miss Anne in Harlem: White Women of the Harlem Renaissance, joins us to talk about the ways white women crossed both racial and gender lines during this period of black affirmation and political and cultural assertion.

Urban Slavery in the Antebellum United States

When most people think about slavery in the United States, they think of large agricultural plantations and picture slaves working in the fields harvesting crops. But for a significant number of slaves, their experience involved working in houses, factories, and on the docks of the South’s booming cities.  Urban slavery, as it has come to be known, is often overlooked in the annals of slave experience.

This week’s guests Daina Ramey Berry, from UT’s Department of History, and Leslie Harris, from Emory University, have spent the past year collaborating on a new study aimed at re-discovering this forgotten aspect of slave experience in the United States.

Eugenics

Eugenics_congress_logo-150x150Early in the twentieth century, governments all over the world thought they had found a rational, efficient, and scientific solution to the related problems of poverty, crime, and hereditary illness.  Scientists hoped they might be able to help societies control the social problems that arose from these phenomena. All over the world, the science-turned-social-policy known as eugenics became a base-line around which social services and welfare legislation were organized.

Philippa Levine, co-editor of a newly published book on the history of eugenics, explains the appeal and wide-reaching effects of the eugenics movement, which at its best inspired access to pre-natal care, access to clean water, and the eradication of harmful diseases, but at its worst led to compulsory sterilization laws, and the horrific experiments of the Nazi death camps.

Simone de Beauvoir and ‘The Second Sex’

SimoneSimone de Beauvoir was one of the most important intellectuals, feminists, and writers of the 20th century. Her life and writings defied the expectations of her birth into a middle class French family, and her philosophies inspired others, including Betty Friedan. Her seminal work, The Second Sex, is a dense two volume work that can be intimidating at first glance, combining philosophy and psychology, and her own observations.

Fortunately, Judith Coffin from UT’s Department of History, is here to help contextualize and parse out the context, influences, and impact of one of the 20th century’s greatest feminist works.

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Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

March 29, 2016

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we have been posting their suggestions throughout the month. This is our last set of book recommendations; this week we feature books on women and gender in East Asia and South Asia. 

chinese womens books

Huaiyin Li recommends:

Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (1999)

Focusing on the life stories of five prominent women activists in twentieth-century China, this book examines Chinese feminism in the Republican era and its fate under the socialist state.  Its depiction of the feminists’ pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation contrasts sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s master narrative of women’s liberation under its leadership.

Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011)

Based on interviews with 72 village women in Shaanxi province, this book shows how the Chinese Communist Party’s policy reshaped women’s agriculture work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting from the 1950s through the 1970s.  It also addresses the intriguing questions of how memories are gendered and how gender figured in the making of socialism in Chinese agriculture. (Reviewed on Not Even Past).

asia womens

Nancy Stalker recommends:

Jan Bardsley, Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan (2014)

(Bloomsbury, 2016) is an engaging new work that reveals gender roles and gender politics in the 1950s through close readings of diverse popular media.  Focusing on newsworthy events centered around women, such as the wedding of the imperial prince to a commoner and Japan’s first Miss Universe title, Bardsley reveals the media construction of the “housewife” embedded within discourses on postwar democracy, Cold War geopolitics, and US – Japan relations.

Cynthia Talbot recommends:

Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India (2012).

This book combines historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to track the fate of South India’s devadasis, originally Hindu temple dancers who came to be regarded as prostitutes as India was transformed by colonial modernity.  Typically unmarried and residing in quasi-matrilineal communities, devadasis often served as concubines or courtesans for elite men but came under increasing condemnation by social reformists beginning in the mid-nineteenth century; they were officially outlawed in 1947.  Soneji goes beyond the standard narrative of social change in colonial India by including an extensive examination of the role of dance in Indian royal courts and a sensitive exploration of the memories of ex-devadasis in this innovative, well-written work.

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For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Great Books (US)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations:  New Books on Women’s History

 

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Great Books on Women’s History: United States

March 22, 2016

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month. Here are some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in the United States.

wonder blue tatt

Penne Restad recommends:

Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014).

A lively, often surprising, narrative history that chronicles the adventures of Wonder Woman, the comic strip devoted to her prowess, and Marston, the man who imagined her, in the center of the struggle for women’s rights in the U.S.

Erika Bsumek recommends:

Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (2011).

In 1851, the 13 year old Oatman was part of a Mormon family traveling west. She was captured by the Yavapai Indians and then traded to the Mohave, who adopted her. The book tells her story and provides some valuable context on the various Mormon sects, the tensions and troubles faced by American Indians in the face of American expansion, and how one young woman experienced it all.

mexrosaglass

Laurie Green recommends:

Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. (2013)

Think you know who Rosa Parks was? Jeanne Theoharis’s biography will change your understanding of the woman who became famous for triggering the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 when she was “too tired” to relinquish her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The book tells you the real story of Parks’s militant activism from the 1930s to the 1990s and her frustration with being recognized as a symbol, not a leader.

Emilio Zamora recommends:

Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed; The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (2009)

The book is a re-examination of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the longest running Mexican American civil rights organizations.  Orozco is a well-known historian who incorporates women and gender in her histories of Mexican Americans.  In this instance, women are placed at center stage in the cause for equal rights and dignity.

Jackie Jones recommends:

Ellen Fitzpatrick, The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (2016).

A great read and couldn’t be more timely! The book focuses on three women candidates for the presidency:  Victoria Woodhull (ran in 1872), Margaret Chase Smith (1964), and Shirley Chisholm (1972).

chainedbabylon

Daina Berry recommends:

Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (2016)

From the UNC Press website:

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia’s prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women’s presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women’s lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

Charlotte Canning recommends:

Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008)

An award-winning cultural history of the African American women who were variety performers on chorus lines, in burlesques, cabarets, and vaudeville from 1890 to 1945. Despite the oppression they experienced, these women shaped an emerging urban popular culture. They pioneered social dances like the cakewalk and the Charleston. It is an ambitious view of popular culture and the ways in which women were integral to its definition.

 scimed

Bruce Hunt and Megan Raby recommend:

Kimberly Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (2014)

While there is an enormous literature on the reception of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, this is the first book to examine the responses of women. This book is a lively account of how ideas about human evolution figured in debates over women’s rights in the late 19th century, by a recent UT American Studies PhD.

Megan Seaholm recommends:

Jennifer Nelson, More Than Medicine:  A History of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement (2015)

Nelson provides an excellent addition to the growing literature about the women’s health movement that began in the 1960s.  She concentrates on reproductive health and reproductive rights from abortion referral services organized before Roe v. Wade through the National Black Women’s Health Project organized in 1984.  This is a good read and an important contribution.

famfam

Mark Lawrence recommends:

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound:  American Families in the Cold War Era (1990)

Elaine Tyler May examines the resurgence of traditional gender roles in the years after the Second World War, arguing that a desire to enjoy postwar prosperity and to escape the dangers of the nuclear age drove Americans back to conventional norms.  The book brilliantly blends women’s, social, political, and international history.

Judith Coffin recommends:

Nancy Cott,  Public Vows : A History of Marriage and the Nation (2000)

The changing stakes of marriage for the nation and for men and women — gay and straight. Readable, smart, and connected to the present. Nancy Cott helped write several amicus (friend-of-the-court) briefs in the marriage cases before the Supreme Court.

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For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations:  New Books on Women’s History

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Great Books on Women’s History: Crossing Borders

March 15, 2016

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books on women and gender for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month.

A number of people suggested books about crossing borders: about people traveling or emigrating to countries foreign to them or about people creating new hybrid identities in the places they lived. Since they don’t fit into our usual geographical categories –and raise interesting questions about those categories — we are lumping them together here in Crossing Borders.

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Madeline Hsu recommends:

Emma Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong (2013)

Teng traces mixed race Chinese-white families in a number of societies and political and social circumstances to complicate presumptions about racial hierarchies and the porosity of racial border-keeping in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  By tracking mobilities through north America, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Teng demonstrates that intermarriages occurred at higher rates than previously acknowledged, and that intermarriage with Chinese could be vehicles for upward, and not just downward, mobility depending on local circumstances.

Sam Vong recommends:

Lynn Fujiwara, Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform (2008)

Fujiwara’s study uncovers the detrimental effects that welfare reform in the 1990s had on immigrant women, particularly President Clinton’s authorization of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 that aimed to end welfare programs. This book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways welfare reform policies redefined immigrants as outsiders and how immigrant women resisted these attempts at denying their claims to U.S. citizenship and belonging.

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Michael Stoff recommends:

Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation

 I’ve used this book in classes and like it a great deal. Here’s a blurb from Cornell University Press:

“In this fascinating portrait of Jewish immigrant wage earners, Susan A. Glenn weaves together several strands of social history to show the emergence of an ethnic version of what early twentieth-century Americans called the “New Womanhood.” She maintains that during an era when Americans perceived women as temporary workers interested ultimately in marriage and motherhood, these young Jewish women turned the garment industry upside down with a wave of militant strikes and shop-floor activism and helped build the two major clothing workers’ unions.”

Jeremi Suri recommends:

Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2014).

This deeply researched book artfully examines the interaction of race, sex, and gender in the conduct of American soldiers stationed in France and their interactions with French civilians during World War II.

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Lina del Castillo recommends:

Magical sites: Women Travelers in 19th century Latin America, edited by Marjorie Agonsin and Julie Levison

This collection brings together several travel narratives written by women brave enough (and wealthy and educated enough) to travel through different parts of Latin America. Some of these writers, like Mary Caldecott Graham and Flora Tristan, found a measure of liberation from a feminine imperial mindset that justified their prescriptions for reform of the societies they encountered. Others, like Nancy Gardner Prince (a free born African American woman who traveled to Jamaica and Russia) tell their experiences from very different perspectives. The narratives these women wrote about the places they moved through show them as women who both threw off the chains of domesticity and convention and nevertheless, were in many ways still bound by them.

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For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations:  New Books on Women’s History

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Great Books on Women’s History: Europe

March 8, 2016

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month. Since today is International Women’s Day, a celebration that began in Europe, we will begin with some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in Europe.

In no particular order:

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Philippa Levine recommends:

Alison Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (2008)

In a brilliant reading of the great modernist novelist Virginia Woolf, Alison Light compares the absence of servants in Woolf’s published fiction with the constant references to them in her correspondence with friends and family.   Woolf was still employing servants at the moment when what had been a veritable army of available female domestic labour began to shrink as women rejected the constraints of such work and sought better paid and less intimate work elsewhere. In detailing Woolf’s fraught relationship with her long-time live-in servant, Nellie Boxall, with whom  she fought constantly, Light reveals the class and gender tensions that continued to shape British culture in the early twentieth century in elegant prose and with really sharp insights. A fantastic read!

Tracie Matysik and Yoav di Capua recommend:

Kate Evans, Red Rosa:  A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg (2015).

A compelling book, that introduces the reader to the passionate life and convictions of Rosa Luxemburg.  And the illustrations are beautiful, even moving.  Along the way, you’ll get a good glimpse of the aims and challenges of revolutionary thought in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.  

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Tatjana Lichtenstein recommends:

Janina Bauman, Beyond these Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto – Young Girl’s Story (2006).

In this book — part diary, part memoir — Janina Bauman tells the fascinating story of how three Jewish women escaped the Warsaw ghetto and, assisted by a small network of courageous and devoted Polish helpers on the “Aryan” side, survived the war in hiding and by passing as non-Jews.

Mary Neuburger recommends:

Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (2015)

This book traces both the fascinating phenomena of women’s role in the largest resistance movement in Europe during World War II, and women’s postwar memory of the changes in gender roles caused by the war and the communist period that followed.

Andy Villalon recommends: 

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth.

The most moving memoir (male or female) to come out of the Great War.  Highly readable and easily obtainable, this is the story of love and unfathomable loss by a woman who saw all of her close male friends, including her fiancé and her brother, slaughtered in the holocaust of 1914-18.  The book also sheds considerable light on the trials women faced in pursuing an education during the decades just before the conflict.  It is the story of the making of a great crusader for pacifism.  I have read Testament of Youth several times and have never been able to avoid crying at various passages.

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Miriam Bodion recommends:

Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (2007)

This thoughtful, often surprising work makes use of a broad array of sources, from theoretical works on gender to ancient and medieval rabbinic texts, to explore how medieval Jews thought about birth, infant care, and the raising of children.

Julie Hardwick recommends: 

Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (2006)

A leading medievalist takes a brilliant, lively, provocative, and very accessible look at the persistence of gender inequality and insists we can only understand that pattern by looking back — well back.  Her topics range from work to sexuality, and she makes a very important and compelling argument.

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New Books in Women’s History

March 1, 2013

We are celebrating Women’s History Month this year with recommendations of new books in Women’s History from some of our faculty and graduate students. From third-century North Africa to sixteenth-century Mexico to the twentieth-century in Russia and the US, and more…

Judy Coffin:

Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day, (2013).
A history of shame and changing social norms, of privacy and how a “right” to privacy was established, and of changes in what families will and will not confess — to themselves and to others. It’s bold, refreshing, and readable. (In fact it comes with Hilary Mantel’s endorsement.) Published in Great Britain in January, the book due out here at the beginning of April. You can read the introduction on the Amazon website, and pre-order. This is a book that everyone interested in gender, sexuality, and families will want to read.

Linda Greenhouse & Reva Seigel, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling, (2010).
Here’s another readable and important book. It reconstructs the everyday politics of contraception and abortion before Roe v. Wade, making it clear that the now landmark decision was one case among many, the justices’ reasoning was rather narrowly cast. This is not an all-roads-led-to-Roe story; it is much more interesting, unpredictable, and historical than that. Siegel is a professor at Yale Law School and Greenhouse covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times.

Lizeth Elizondo:

Catherine Ramirez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, (2009).
Catherine Ramirez illuminates the ways in which Mexican-American women rebelled and chose to express their individuality by joining the popular zoot suit movement of the 1940s. By focusing on the women behind the suit, Ramirez offers a revisionist interpretation of the involvement of women in the infamous Los Angeles Zoot Suit riots and the Sleepy Lagoon case of 1943.

Alison Frazier:

Thomas J. Heffernan, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, (2012).
In one volume, Heffernan presents the essential text and tools for readers to begin thinking through the unique and precious “prison diary” of Vibia Perpetua, the visionary young mother who led a mixed-gender group of Christians to martyrdom in early third-century North Africa.

Laurie Green:

Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson, (2012).
In contrast to the enormous attention paid to the acclaimed African American singer, actor, radical and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, his extraordinary wife, Eslanda “Essie” Robeson has remained in the historical shadows. For the first time, in Ransby’s biography, we can grasp her amazing lifework, including her intellectual career as an anthropologist and journalist, and her passionate involvement in women’s rights, racial justice and anti-colonialist movements on an international scale.

Janine Jones:

Fatima Mernissi, Dreams Of Trespass: Tales Of a Harem Girlhood, (1995).
Scholar and activist Fatima Mernissi’s captivating memoir of her childhood in a Moroccan harem during the end of the French Protectorate is not to be missed.

Halidé Edib, House with Wisteria: Memoirs of Turkey Old and New, 2nd ed., (2009).
Turkish journalist, novelist, and early feminist activist Halide Edib’s lyrical memoir of growing to adulthood during the chaotic collapse of the Ottoman Empire is filled with stories of tragedy, love, and strength.

Anne Martinez:

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas, (2012).
Schaeffer puts desire in the context of the global economy, class, and cultural citizenship in this book about transnational cyber-relationships since the 1990s. 

Joan Neuberger:

Marina Goldovskaya, Woman with a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker, (2006).
“I started school in 1948. In my class of more than forty children, I was the only one who had a father.” This memoir traces Marina Goldovskaya’s career in Soviet television and her emergence as Russia’s best known documentary film maker. Along the way, we get an inside look at the everyday politics of survival and success in two of late-twentieth-century Russia’s most interesting industries.

Megan Seaholm:

Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism:  Women and the Postwar Right, (2012).
The significant role that women played in the rise of conservatism from the 1950s through the 1964 presidential campaign.  This careful study of conservative women in southern California explains how “populist housewives” became impassioned activists who influenced the conservative agenda for decades.

Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring:  The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, (2011).
Fifty years after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, often credited with igniting the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, Professor Coontz examines this book and the impact it had on readers.

Susan J. Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism:  How Pop Culture Took Us From Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild, (2010).
Cultural historian Susan Douglas has written a perceptive and often humorous book about the way that icons of popular culture encouraged a generation of women (the “millennials”) to believe that feminism had accomplished its goals.

Ann Twinam and Susan Deans-Smith both recommend:

Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices, An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico, (2006).
The wonderfully readable and compelling book tells the story of Malintzin, the young Nahua woman who became Hernando Cortés’ translator and mistress during the conquest of Mexico. Townsend takes on the difficult task of giving voice to someone who, while typically vilified as a traitor and sexual siren, left no words of her own. The resulting portrait allows us to see Malintzin’s understanding of her situation and the difficult choices she made in a rapidly changing political landscape.

“Placenta (Human)”: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Women’s Work at Sea

December 2, 2022

by Julia Stryker

On March 27th, 1873, still more than 1,600 miles from New York and with Liverpool just as far behind, John Godbold, a steerage steward aboard the steamship SS Canada, made a telling discovery. While sweeping “after steerage,” he “found in the waterway of the single women’s quarters a placenta (human). After some investigation,” the ship’s Official Log states, “a single woman named Mary O’Connor admitted she had been confined the previous night, + as her child was stillborn she had thrown it overboard. She was at once put in the Hospital under the Surgeon’s care.”

This is the extent of Mary O’Connor’s story as told in the Official Log. It holds clues, but no answers, about her and her child. It also illuminates some oft-overlooked truths: far from being markers of desperation, dissolution, or recklessness, pregnancy and childbirth formed ordinary parts of life at sea. They were accompanied by danger and sometimes death, but these, too, were hardly unknown aboard ship, where life and death went hand in hand for crewmembers and migrants.

The experience of migration—the decisions behind it, its major demographics, its rewards and tolls both physical and emotional—has been well studied. In both scholarly and popular depictions, death during migration is also a key theme. Yet migrant women’s experiences of giving birth at sea have received less attention, and the issues of childbirth and sexuality for women who worked at sea—especially side by side with their partners or spouses—very little attention indeed.

What follows will begin to tell that story. It will also reveal some of unexpected nuances. Responses to seafaring pregnancy and its associated risks varied more across class than gender lines. For working women, self-care in the course of pregnancy and childbirth was often out of the question. Their survival depended on risking death—for themselves and their children—to make a living.

Life at Sea: Romance and Reality

At the end of the nineteenth century, as the Age of Sail wound down under the pressure of steam technology, an upswelling of nostalgia re-characterized the great old sailing ships as representatives and nurseries of a heroic—and very masculine—Golden Age. By contrast, steamships, with their catering departments and cosmopolitan, mixed-gender crews, carried forward a new kind of empire, supposedly more “civilized” than the one dominated by the rough-and-tumble iron men and wooden ships of the past. Steamships allowed the ferocity of modern weaponry, of engines impervious to nature, to coexist with things traditionally linked to the comforts of home: women, children, and servants.

Male crewmembers and female passengers pose together on a ship’s deck in this photograph by Alfred Lee Broadbent, ca. 1894–95. Source: Library of Congress.

Consider the example of the Canada, the ship on which Mary O’Connor’s story took place. The Canada was an iron-hulled National Line steamship of 4,276 gross tons, almost 400ft long, capable of carrying 100 first-class passengers and 750 steerage passengers (steerage offering the cheapest tickets, often purchased by emigrants). O’Connor would have been one among the millions crossing the Atlantic to escape poverty or persecution, to reunite with family, to start a new life. But if so, she was doing so without a spouse—at least on the ship—and while pregnant.

The record of O’Connor’s pregnancy locates her in a particular part of the ship: the steerage deck. In a nineteenth-century steamship, steerage was a lower deck, enclosed and densely populated, without private cabins. At best, it contained groups of berths, sometimes only nominally separated from other groups in the same section. Men and women shared space aboard ship, particularly “public” places like saloons and on more luxurious ships, promenade decks, but only families could buy berths together.  After 1850, the “after steerage”—the area towards the back of the ship where O’Connor’s placenta was found—almost always housed the single women.  Families would be amidships, and the single male travellers were berthed forward, towards the bow, as far away from the single women as possible.

The SS Canada, aboard which Mary O’Connor gave birth in 1873. At left is a profile of the ship; at right, a plan of the berths towards the stern. Source: Norway Heritage.

Vessels like the Canada defy the romantic narratives born of our assumptions about the Age of Sail. Those narratives tend to cast ships as homosocial heterotopias: worlds within worlds, intensely-experienced spaces inhabited by a single sex (in this case, men). According to sociologists like Erving Goffman, ships are also “total institutions” that restrict contact with the outside world, subject people to harsh, inflexible discipline, and place them under and constant surveillance. In places so crowded and so constantly watched, privacy is, at best, an illusion, and secrets—as, for example, the presence of a woman among the men—are impossible to keep.

To paraphrase German social theorist Heide Gerstenberger, it’s a shame Goffman ever read the work of Herman Melville, whose novels helped romanticize the supposed insularity of ships. Goffman’s analytical tools might be apt to describe some of the experiences of migrants and travellers at sea, but whether they hold true universally, especially for regular seafarers, is less clear. Romanticism overindulged in the idea of the heroic masculinity of the sailing ship, and self-regarding concepts of modernity overemphasized the fixed and immobile nature of society in the past. Ships were not as cut-off, as inescapably surveilled, or as single-sex as nostalgia described. While historians have long wrestled with these concepts, the payoff for throwing off the weight of nostalgia has only just begun. New fields of study, new sources, and new windows onto the seafaring past are complicating our ideas of about empire, society, and more in the modern era. Pregnancy at sea is one such window, revealing the complexity of sex, privacy, health, and risk as they weighed on the lives and choices of people of the past.

Women’s Health and Medical Practice

Technological change transformed life at sea during the late nineteenth century. Simultaneously, new ideas, practices, and discoveries transformed medical practice. Historians of medicine debate the effect of these changes on women: scholars like Ann Digby note that male medical practitioners began to find “biological” reasons for supporting subordinate social roles for women, binding them into a “biological straightjacket,” while others, like Clare Hanson, have argued that medical knowledge and social mores were intertwined, each affecting the development of the other. Medical practitioners interpreted many phenomena unique to female bodies, including menarche and menopause, as signs of weakness, indicators of inherent instability, and/or moments of particular vulnerability or frailty. 

Contemporary medical discourse continues to “medicalize” and “pathologize” women’s health in ways that limit women’s rights. Medical knowledge frequently overlooks health issues unique to women, including pregnancy. Women have fought back in various ways—they have, for example, tried to publicize the extent to which heart attack symptoms present differently in male and female bodies, and they have also called attention to cases in which new medications haven’t been tested on pregnant women. However, over-medicalization tends to limit women’s input into their own medical care. Serena Williams has famously opened up about her experience following the difficult birth of her child, pointing out that women in general, and especially women of color, are disproportionately disenfranchised in the management of their own reproductive health with potentially fatal and life-altering consequences.[1]

It hasn’t always been this way. During the nineteenth century, prior to the medicalization of women’s health, authors of medical books, in the words of Ornella Moscucci and Ann Oakley, “constructed a schema of pregnancy which systematized what was taken to be the everyday experience of women.” As Rachael Russell argues, many aspects of and approaches to pregnancy were still individualized and culturally informed—pregnancy was seen as natural and not necessarily “treatable” in the way an illness was, an attitude drastically different from that of today.

Any idea takes time to disseminate, and medical attitudes towards pregnancy were no different. Treatment varied by class, and likewise, class and especially the privation that came with poverty affected both fertility rates and infant mortality. Many women could expect to spend a significant amount of their lives pregnant. In her study of nausea and vomiting, Russell, based on studies by Judith Lewis and many others, estimates that “many women could have spent around two years of their lives suffering from [morning sickness].” For middle- and upper-class women, pregnancy could mean more doctor’s visits, restriction of activity, and forced rest, but for working class women, pregnancy and work went hand in hand.

Agnes Tapley and her infant child Della appear on the deck of a ship in this undated photograph. Tapley and her husband sailed aboard the bark St. James in the late nineteenth century. Source: National Parks Service.

Being at sea—working, traveling, migrating, or in any other capacity— meant having the potential to be or become pregnant at sea. Before pregnancy became a fully medicalized condition, however, it was handled differently by different women, according to their social and cultural contexts. People who were pregnant were able to have a greater say in their own treatment; they also relied more heavily on their own knowledge and on knowledge produced within their own communities. But as a result, class politics played an important role in shaping individual pregnancies

Working Women, Maritime Marriages, and Pregnancy at Sea

Anyone who able to afford the tickets could embark on a transatlantic voyage; the same was true of anyone who could find work during the voyage. Women had always worked aboard ships in unrecognized or “unofficial” capacities, but at the start of the nineteenth century more and more women worked in the “official” position of stewardess. Single women, both unmarried and widowed, did work as stewardesses, though doing so would become increasingly scandalous as the century wore on. In time, mores hardened against the intermingling of the sexes, and the acknowledgement of sexuality—particularly as related to women’s sexuality or sexual desires—became more taboo.

Convict transportation in the eighteenth century had established the vulnerability of single women on ships, and especially in service on ships, to sexual exploitation. Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, in their study of the formation of the “criminal Atlantic,” share a story recorded by a grammar school master who, in 1757, crossed the ocean with his family to take up a position at the College of William and Mary: “Do you remember how this tadpole of [a] captain promised that my wife could have one of the she-thieves to serve her whilst at sea? One of them is here in the cabin, but it was to serve this husband’s penis, and not to wait upon my wife, that she was brought here.”

Growing disapproval of such behaviour would result in a legal requirement for the separation of the sexes by mid-century. Even so, many captains preferred to pursue the less morally risky and more economical option of hiring married couples: the husbands as cooks, stewards, or in another positions aboard, and wives as stewardesses.

Captains, their wives, and two female tourists sit together aboard ship in this photograph by Alfred Lee Broadbent. The photograph dates from the late nineteenth century, possibly 1897. Source: Library of Congress.

As Julia Bonham argues, the decision to travel or to migrate wasn’t always dependent on the man’s decision or the pressure of need on the family. Women were often active participants making choices, though their choices were complicated by a number of factors. Bonham describes them in terms of a paradox: on the one hand, wives bucked convention in insisting on engaging in life at sea, while on the other, they fulfilled the domestic ideal of staying with and supporting their husbands. Though seafaring women often picked up critical technical skills and experience, they were not usually considered “workers” aboard ship. Nevertheless, wives could feel hemmed in by labor-related concerns: the need to make money, provide for the family, and maintain employment on the one hand and by various risks—including risks arising from pregnancy—on the other.

One faithful helpmeet—a Mrs. Stephens (no first name recorded), who sailed as stewardess on the Evening Star, where her husband worked as a cook—experienced the paradoxes of life at sea first hand. She became ill on July 28th, 1868 while the Evening Star was docked in New Liverpool, Quebec. With the ship readying to leave port on August 2nd, she remained ill. The captain consulted with her husband, offering to pay them and let them off the ship, but “she refused to be left behind and wished to be kept on board and carried away to sea saying she would rather risk the dying on the passage the Captain then concluded to go to sea in the morning put one man (Charles Worrell, A.B.) in the galley to cook so that Stephens may attend to the wants of his wife.” By August 18, she was well enough that they could both resume their former stations, but such an act of generosity – taking someone aboard who was too sick to work and also allowing their companion off work to tend to them – was rare in the cutthroat world of merchant shipping.

Birth, Life, and Death Aboard Ship: Telling Women’s Stories

Since her voyage was only 10 days long, Mary O’Connor likely boarded the Canada either visibly or knowingly pregnant. However, what she or anyone else thought about the risks involved cannot be clearly connected to the decision to sail. As Alison Clarke has shown, some migrant women believed that the sea voyage would ease pregnancy and childbirth, but such feelings were far from universal. Going to sea may have, in some cases, increased pregnant women’s access to medical care, as any ships carrying over 100 persons—and all ships headed to Australia—were required to carried qualified surgeons. Notably, however, merchant ships generally were not (and are not) required to carry a surgeon, leaving women working aboard potentially on their own.

Ocean voyages were known to place infants at risk, too. Also on the Canada, just four days before the discovery of O’Connor’s placenta, Matze van Peyl, the two-month-old infant son of Guard and Nedge Van Peyl, died of “deficient vitality” and was “committed to the deep.” Sailing so soon after Matze’s birth, Guard and Nedge may have been waiting for Nedge’s pregnancy to pass before beginning their journey. Had they been sailing to Australia, the surgeon superintending the voyage might not have let them board with Matze, as regulators and medical professionals had already determined that young children were the most likely to die on emigrant voyages. Australia-bound ships therefore limited each family to not more than 2 children under the age of seven to lower mortality rates. On the comparatively less-regulated North Atlantic crossing, the risk devolved upon the parents. It was, potentially, safer to board pregnant, and hope not to have the child before landing, than to take even a young child on a long sea voyage.

Photographer Frances John Benjamin took this snapshot of female emigrants and children from Eastern Europe aboard the SS Amsterdam in 1899. Source: Library of Congress.

Domesticity, however, could create an uneasy situation aboard ship by technically sanctifying sexual activity, of which childbirth was the inevitable proof. This was less true in the “family” sections of ships, where no suspicion would arise from even an unexpected birth even as single women faced intense social scrutiny. The situation was more ambiguous, however, for women working aboard ship—even if they were working with their husbands.

In one case from 1872, a married woman may have feigned illness to hide a pregnancy. H. J. Williams and his wife signed on the Henry Pelham as steward and stewardess while the ship was navigating the St. Lawrence River on July 1st. On July 10th, Mrs. Williams briefly stopped working, telling the mate that she was “homesick.” The next day, the log records that the stewardess told either the master or the mate’s wife that “she was sick with the monthlys and was afraid she was going to have a miscarriage.” On July 13th, Mrs. Williams took time off again, ostensibly due to pain in her back and head; the officers record that they offered her whatever medicines were wanted. Both the stewardess and her husband are recorded confessing that she might be “in the family way” on July 24th, and almost daily updates on her health—when and if she got up, whether she was moving about the galley, how she was feeling, and whether she took medicine—appear in the ship’s through August 4th. While not unprecedented, the detail and regularity of these logged updates possess an unusual solicitousness for what is usually a dry, sparse, official record of a limited number of events. One of the last log entries reported that “with fine weather at 8Am stewardess was not up asked the steward if she was sick he said she was not very well I told him that my wife had panes (x not very well) but felt better to get up and go on deck and no doubt but his wife would feel better she got up at 8:30 Am and was about the galley all the remainder of the day with her husband.” Such minute observations of daily activity, and unsolicited personal accounts and stories, are extremely unusual, and make the ultimate lack of resolution the more puzzling and dissatisfying. The log does not report a miscarriage, and offers no further detail once the stewardess reports she is “well again.”

Pregnancy posed risks in addition to the average risks of life at sea, particularly to stewardesses, though this does not seem to have deterred them from joining a ship’s company. Pregnancy could occur before and during voyages, but it wasn’t always identified correctly, and if it was, it wasn’t always reported to the master to be logged as such. Emma Dorsey, sailing on the Jesse Morris, went into premature labour and delivered a stillborn male at sea on May 18th, 1873. She was logged as “recovering slowly” on the 21st, and went back to work the 26th. May Ann Thomson, 34, of Aberdeen, boarded the Marco Polo on February 4th, 1859, and gave birth to a boy on September 13th, with no stoppage of work; she may not have known she was pregnant when she boarded, but surely would have noticed during the voyage.[2]

Even everything appeared “safe”—even when a stewardess was securely married and secure in her position—pregnancy would be kept secret. Such was true in the case of Grace Frank, a married woman hired to look after the pregnant wife of Norval Smith, master of the Birdie. The Birdie’s log records that, on December 12th, 1865, in Montevideo, Frank “resigned work . . . without any provocation whatever for which I stop pay”—stoppage of work often equaled a stoppage of pay—and “to this date she remaining [sic.] on board idle.” Once the ship was at sea, on February 13th, 1866, Frank took sick, with the captain applying a variety of curatives including calomel and quinine with a light diet. At noon on March 1st, “still bad” and attended by her husband (most likely the boatswain John Frank), she had a miscarriage.

On the 14th, Norval Smith’s wife Margaret, the woman whose presence aboard the Birdie had led to Grace Frank’s employment, gave birth to a boy named Fernando. Grace Frank died at sea that same day.

Did Grace Frank board knowing she was pregnant? She and John joined in September 1865; it seems more likely she became pregnant during the voyage. Once her pregnancy made it too difficult to work, she stopped. Perhaps she did not know at the time that she was pregnant, or perhaps sickness seemed like a more appropriate, acceptable, or responsible reason to stop working than pregnancy. 

Many of the women who crossed the Atlantic while pregnant survived the voyage, as did many of their children – but many others didn’t. Mortality rates for pregnant women and for young children were both higher at sea than on land, despite help often being closer at hand on ships, which were very early on required to have surgeons aboard. Frank kept her secret, and died; the long dance of inquiry and demurral on the Henry Pelham may or may not have been to preserve conjugal privacy, or just economic security. The Van Peyls made a choice which cost them dearly. Perhaps Mary O’Connor did as well: a single woman in close company would be under intense scrutiny, and her behaviour aboard could affect her prospects on land. The Log only records that she reported the child stillborn, but perhaps her pregnancy wasn’t the secret she had been so eager to keep. Short of finding her own account, we can only guess; the Official Log, on which the whole weight of social authority and approval rested, which would be returned to the government and preserved for more than a hundred years, is an unreliable witness.

Secrecy and scrutiny, along with poverty, amplified the dangers of pregnancy at sea. In some cases, it killed pregnant women and their children.


Sources and More Information

Archival sources:

The Crew Lists and Logbooks Collection at the Maritime History Archives, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada.

Secondary sources:

Bonham, Julia C. “Feminist and Victorian: The Paradox of the American Seafaring Woman of the Nineteenth Century.” The American Neptune 37, no. 3 (1977): 203–18.

Digby A., ‘Women’s Biological Straitjacket’, in Mendus S. and Rendall J. (eds), Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 192-220.

Gerstenberger, Heide. “Men Apart: The Concept of ‘Total Institution’ and the Analysis of Seafaring.” International Journal of Maritime History 8: 1 (June 1996): 173–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/084387149600800110.

Hanson C., A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750-2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Lewis J.S., In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy, 1760-1860 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986).

Morgan, Gwenda and Peter Rushton, Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: the Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).

Moscucci O., The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Oakley A., The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd., 1984).

Russell, Rachael. “Nausea and Vomiting: A History of Signs, Symptoms and Sickness in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Ph.D., The University of Manchester (United Kingdom). Accessed July 27, 2022. https://www.proquest.com/docview/1774234326/abstract/9F3608E0CC194381PQ/1.


[1] Rob Haskell of Vogue interviewed Williams about her experience, but she has given multiple interviews about her experience: https://www.vogue.com/article/serena-williams-vogue-cover-interview-february-2018

[2] The father was listed on the agreement only by first name, “William,” but the only William Thompson apparent on the agreement was a seaman who deserted in Melbourne in July of that year; Ann was discharged with “very good” ratings in Liverpool in October. While this could be a case of abandonment, it seems more likely that the stewardess was a passenger given free passage in exchange for her work, but in this case, the lack of last name for the father would be unusual.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Los huecos de la Historia: una entrevista con Nathaly Rodríguez Sánchez / The Spaces of History: An Interview with Nathaly Rodríguez Sánchez

October 14, 2022

By Timothy Vilgiate

La Dra. Nathaly Rodríguez Sánchez estudia la historia feminista de género, con un interés específico en la heteronormatividad y las intersecciones entre teoría política e historia. Investigando ese tema en contextos modernos y coloniales, ella se describe como una “migrante entre siglos, buscando entender la construcción de las estructuras de pensamiento en torno a los cuerpos y los deseos modelados sobre el largo y mediano tiempo de la historia.” Formada como politóloga en Colombia, se apasionó con la historia mientras trabajaba con investigadores especializados en la violencia política en su país, una experiencia que además de llevarla a los archivos también le reveló la ausencia de mujeres en la producción de conocimiento y en las narrativas históricas, las cuales parecían ocultar constantemente a las mujeres bajo la idea de lo general, lo común, o lo masivo. Después de recibir su doctorado en historia por El Colegio de México, empezó a trabajar como Académica Investigadora en el Departamento de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla. Su primer libro, De sedientes seres, abordó la historia del homoerotismo masculino en la Ciudad de México entre 1917 y 1952. En la conferencia magistral que dará para cerrar la XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México (Austin, 30 de octubre-2 de noviembre), elucidará las dinámicas de la hegemonía de género y la heteronormatividad en México y en la mirada de la Historia, destacando la capacidad de maniobra de los actores y sus espacios para la resistencia. 

Nathaly Rodríguez Sánchez

La formación que recibió en la facultad de Ciencias Políticas de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia tenía su fuerte en la teoría política, pero como notó la Dra. Rodríguez Sánchez en nuestra entrevista, generalmente las investigaciones politológicas se enfocan en el presente o en las décadas más recientes, y enfatizan las acciones del gobierno. En su caso, al terminar su carrera tuvo la oportunidad de trabajar como asistente de investigación para académicos especializados en el asunto de la violencia política y también en cuestiones teóricas. Fue esta introducción al trabajo archivístico la que le motivó a interesarse “por las fibras, los hilos que constituyen mundos sociales en nuestro presente, que tal vez pueden sorprendernos por su complejidad.” La experiencia de revisar material archivístico del siglo XIX y XX con el lente de la teoría política, le mostró la capacidad que tiene la Historia para ayudarnos a entender los problemas de “nuestro presente. Pues la historia nos pueda ayudar a salvaguardar dignidades, y también animar espíritus, a dar sentido a la finalidad de las actividades educativas, para ver sus dimensiones políticas.” En la Historia descubrió una herramienta para aumentar y profundizar el entendimiento de cuestiones pertinentes del presente, dando profundidad a las estructuras analíticas ya establecidas en la Ciencia Política. 

En el curso de sus investigaciones históricas, la Dra. Rodríguez Sánchez empezó a notar una gran ausencia de mujeres en las reconstrucciones históricas de su país. Aparecían en algunas historias de la vida cotidiana, o se representaban como “una masa anónima de víctimas” en la literatura sobre las guerras civiles de Colombia, pero aún “parecían muy pocas, y entonces empiezo a buscarlas, a buscar cómo hacer esa historia.” La minimización de la presencia femenina en la literatura histórica también la interpeló a revisar sus propias experiencias educativas—en su formación como politóloga, solo tuvo una profesora, y la mayoría de las lecturas fueron escritas por hombres. Mientras tomaba conciencia de esta invisibilización de las mujeres en la historia, la teoría política, y la producción del conocimiento, leía más ampliamente en las Ciencias Sociales y las Humanidades, incluyendo a autoras feministas internacionales, y fue en esa búsqueda que encontró la producción académica de El Colegio de México. Allí conectó con investigadores e investigadoras interesados en asuntos similares, y decidió aplicar para el programa doctoral. Esta institución le atrajo no solamente por sus fuerzas académicas, sino también por su influencia en la opinión pública, y su legado histórico como un lugar de refugio para intelectuales exiliados de países autoritarios. 

Partiendo de este interés en “recuperar la historia de las mujeres,” en el curso de sus estudios doctorales notó que las historiadoras feministas de género habían enfatizado las experiencias de mujeres, sin investigar demasiado la estructura más amplia de género—por ejemplo, la masculinidad, los homoerotismos o las experiencias de personas no-binarias y transexuales. Además, percibió que la literatura aun cuando entendía el deseo como parte fundamental de esta estructura hegemónica, tendía a analizarlo solamente en torno a las relaciones entre hombres y mujeres. Este acercamiento heteronormativo había borrado la existencia de otras formas de deseo y de amor. La falta de estudios sobre estos aspectos de la historia refuerza un mito—popular entre sectores reaccionarios—según el cual las personas queer no existían en el pasado, o si bien existían, escapan siempre a los historiadores. Ella me explicó que, “quería rescatar las experiencias de muchos que han sido excluidos o permanecen así, y demostrar que existía una tradición falsa que decía que la ‘buena tradición de las familias en México’, del amor de parejas en México, era solamente de la forma heterosexual.” Cuando empezó a trabajar este tema, la mayoría de los estudios históricos ya existentes se concentraban en dos eventos—el Baile de los 41, evento de 1901 que provocó un escándalo y formó parte de una leyenda urbana durante décadas, y el movimiento para la liberación sexogenérica de la década de los 1970. Enfrentando este espacio ambiguo en la literatura, ella se esforzó a entender cómo la comunidad LGBT transita desde el Baile de los 41 en los inicios del siglo XX a la conformación del movimiento en tiempos más recientes.

 
Portada de Magazine de Policía (21 de abril de 1947), año 9, no. 434 (Hemeroteca Nacional de México)/ Cover of Police Magazine (April 21, 1947), year 9, no. 434 (Hemeroteca Nacional de México).

Perderse en los archivos era toparse con muchos mitos y narrativas simplistas. Por ejemplo, muchos historiadores y periodistas habían contado que se encarcelaba a los hombres homosexuales en México, tal y como se hacía en los EEUU o el Reino Unido; pero cuando ella consultó los fondos documentales de las cárceles encontró que la homosexualidad no fue criminalizada de esta manera, por lo menos no en la Ciudad de México. Ella atribuyó este hecho a los impulsos de secularización que se dieron en México a finales del siglo XIX y durante la posrevolución, impulsos que reforzaron una distinción entre los actos inmorales (pensados desde una perspectiva religiosa) y los delitos. Encontró que los hombres con deseos homoeróticos llegaban a la cárcel por otros delitos y no por sus prácticas homoeróticas. En todo caso, las autoridades los separaban de otras poblaciones encarceladas designándolos como “pederastas,” término que, a principios del siglo XX en México, no tenía el significado actual en lo que se refiere a relaciones entre adultos y menores de edad. Ella notó entonces las diversas capas de significados que puede tener un término, y los simbolismos que se van sedimentando en ellos. Dar con esta terminología legal y científica le permitió ir tras otras fuentes históricas—a partir de allí, pudo identificar a personas específicas y localizar los lugares que frecuentaban sus actores históricos, un acercamiento microhistórico informado por el trabajo del Carlo Ginsburg. Este trabajo resultó en su primer libro, De sedientos seres, publicado en 2020, con su título que retoma un verso de un poema homoerótico del escritor mexicano Xavier Villaurrutia.

Mientras terminaba su primer libro, veía que en México era casi nulo el trabajo histórico sobre el homoerotismo femenino. Como ella me explicó, la mitología heteronormativa, que ha oscurecido la presencia del homoerotismo o las identidades de género fuera del binarismo estricto entre mujer y hombre, funciona como “sentido común” para muchas personas hasta el presente. Para llegar a este punto, una idea necesita pasar “por siglos de socialización, por muchas bocas de párrocos, de educadores de infancia que lo han repetido al punto de no ser siquiera pensado como sentido de actuación.” Este hecho la compeló a desviar su mirada hacia el periodo colonial. Utilizando fuentes de la Inquisición y otros archivos de Puebla, ha buscado casos que hacen constar la imposición que tiene lugar en la transmisión de ideologías hispánicas de género y de sexualidades. Su estudio actual se enfoca en comunidades mestizas en Puebla con poblaciones altamente blanqueadas, considerando no solamente las dinámicas de la imposición comentada sino también los “espacios ciegos” y lugares donde se permitía hacer resistencia. Este trabajo entrará en diálogo con otras obras en la historiografía latinoamericana, como Gay Indians in Brazil: Untold Stories of the Colonization of Indigenous Sexualities por Estevão Rafael Fernandes y Barbara Arisi; y Femestizajes: cuerpos y sexualidades racializados de ladinas-mestizas por Yolanda Aguilar. Ella basará su primer discurso al Congreso este octubre en esta investigación, atravesando los conceptos e ideas que había perseguido desde su formación doctoral sobre la hegemonía del género y los elementos disidentes que habían resistido la heteronormatividad desde los tiempos de la Nueva España. 

En su trabajo en el Departamento de las Ciencias Sociales en la Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla, la Dra. Rodríguez Sánchez colabora con otros colegas para formar una “ecosistema de formación en los estudios críticos de género.” Este ecosistema promueve acercamientos que no solamente repiten las teorías de género “canónicas”, sino que son aproximaciones “situadas” que puedan profundizar y aumentar el entendimiento del género y la sexualidad como estructuradores de desigualdad social y por ende como ámbitos para seguir pensando la transformación social en nuestros contextos—los del Sur global—. Sin embargo, su labor como historiadora y politóloga nunca ha sido crear conocimiento solamente para especialistas—quiere que su trabajo ayude a enfrentar problemas sociales urgentes, como la violencia contra mujeres o personas LGBTQ+. Consciente de la importancia que tienen los espacios de socialización y pedagogía para la formación de nuevos conceptos sociales, ella ha contribuido a los esfuerzos institucionales para crear espacios seguros para mujeres y personas de la diversidad sexogenérica, abogando al mismo tiempo contra las estructuras institucionalizadas en los planes de estudios y en la producción de conocimientos que fomentan la violencia basada en el género. En esta área, me contó que, “la universidad ha estado con oídos abiertos para entender que los espacios educativos también reproducen violencias con base en el género y que tenemos que cambiar nuestros modelos educativos para fijarnos en ello.” Estos temas tienen una resonancia con las dinámicas actuales en Austin, capital de Texas y lugar del congreso donde va hablar sobre su trabajo, ya que el gobierno estatal ha implementado políticas contra la comunidad LGBTQ+ y contra los derechos de las mujeres a la autodeterminación corporal. Es de esperar que sus ideas y teorizaciones interesen a un público diverso, no limitado solamente a los historiadores de México.

Nathaly Rodríguez Sánchez dará la conferencia magistral, “Entre chantajes policiales y capacidad disruptiva: geografía homoerótica masculina en la Ciudad de México de la posrevolución (1917-1952),” en la XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México, Austin. Programa e informes: https://xvireunion.utexas.edu/programa/

Entrevista: Timothy Vilgiate (estudiante de doctorado, UT-Austin)


The Spaces of History: An Interview with Nathaly Rodríguez Sánchez

Dr. Nathaly Rodríguez Sánchez studies feminist gender history, with a specific interest in heteronormativity and the intersections between political theory and history. Researching that topic in modern and colonial contexts, she describes herself as a “migrant between centuries, seeking to understand the construction of thought structures around bodies and desires that have been modeled over the long and medium term of history.” Trained as a political scientist in Colombia, she became passionate about history while working with researchers specializing in political violence in the country of her birth, an experience that besides leading her to the archives also revealed to her the absence of women in knowledge production and in the historical narrative, where women were constantly hidden under the idea of a general, common, or mass history. After receiving her PhD in history from El Colegio de México, she began working as a Research Scholar in the Department of Social Sciences at the Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla. Her first book, De sedientes seres, dealt with the history of male homoeroticism in Mexico City between 1917 and 1952. In the keynote lecture she will give to close the XVI Meeting of International Historians of Mexico (Austin, October 30-November 2), she will elucidate the dynamics of gender hegemony and heteronormativity both in Mexico and in the gaze of History, highlighting the maneuverability of the historical actors and their scope for resistance.

The training she received at the Political Science Faculty of the National University of Colombia had its forte in political theory, but as Dr. Rodríguez Sánchez noted in our interview, generally political science research focuses on the present or on more recent decades, and emphasizes the actions of government. In her case, after finishing her degree she had the opportunity to work as a research assistant for academics specializing in the issue of political violence and also in theoretical issues. It was this introduction to archival work that motivated her to become interested “in the fibers, the threads that constitute social worlds in our present, which can perhaps surprise us by their complexity.” The experience of seeing 19th and 20th century archival material through the lens of political theory showed her the capacity of history to help us understand the problems of “our present. For history can help us to safeguard human dignity, and also to enliven spirits, to give meaning to educational activities, to see their political dimensions.” In History she discovered a tool to increase and deepen the understanding of the issues of the present, giving depth to the analytical structures already established in Political Science.

In the course of her historical research, Dr. Rodríguez Sánchez began to notice a great absence of women in the historical reconstructions of her country. They appeared in some histories of daily life, or were represented as “an anonymous mass of victims” in the literature on Colombia’s civil wars, but still “they seemed very few, and so I begin to look for them, to look for how to write their history.” The minimization of the female presence in the historical literature also challenged her to review her own educational experiences––in her training as a political scientist, she only had one female professor, and most of the readings were written by men. As she became aware of this invisibilization of women in history, political theory, and knowledge production, she read more widely in the Social Sciences and Humanities, including international feminist authors, and it was in that search that she encountered the work of El Colegio de México. There she connected with researchers interested in similar issues, and decided to apply for the doctoral program. This institution attracted her not only for its academic strengths, but also for its influence on public opinion and its historical legacy as a place of refuge for intellectuals exiled from authoritarian countries.

Building on this interest in “recovering women’s history,” in the course of her doctoral studies she noticed that feminist gender historians had emphasized women’s experiences, but without much investigation into the broader structure of gender––for example, masculinity, homoeroticisms, or the experiences of non-binary and transgender people. Moreover, she perceived that the literature, while understanding desire as a fundamental part of this hegemonic structure, tended to analyze it only in terms of male-female relationships. This heteronormative approach had erased the existence of other forms of desire and love. The lack of studies on these aspects of history reinforced a myth––popular among reactionary sectors––that queer people did not exist in the past, or if they did, that they would always escape historians. She explained to me that “I wanted to recover the experiences of many who have been excluded or remain so, and to show that there was a false tradition that said that the ‘good tradition of families in Mexico,’ of love between couples in Mexico, was only found in the heterosexual form.” When she began working on this topic, most of the extant historical studies focused on two events––the Baile de los 41 (“Dance of the 41”), a 1901 event that provoked a scandal and formed part of an urban legend for decades, and the sex-gender liberation movement of the 1970s. Confronting this ambiguous space in the literature, she strove to understand how it was that the LGBT community transitioned from the Dance of the 41 in the early twentieth century to the changing movement of more recent times.

José Posada, “Los 41 maricones encontrados en un baile de la Calle de la Paz el 20 de Noviembre de 1901.” / A print by José Posada depicting the “Dance of the 41.” Fuente / Source: Wikimedia Commons / Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To become immersed in the archives was to encounter many myths and simplistic narratives. For example, many historians and journalists had said that homosexual men were imprisoned in Mexico, just as they were in the US or the UK; but when she consulted prison records she found that homosexuality was not criminalized in this way, at least not in Mexico City. She attributed this fact to the secularization impulses that were felt in Mexico in the late 19th century and during the post-revolution, impulses that reinforced a distinction between immoral acts (as considered from a religious perspective) and crimes. She found that men with homoerotic desires went to jail for other crimes and not for their homoerotic practices. In any case, the authorities separated them from other incarcerated populations by designating them as “pederastas” (pedarasts) a term that, in early twentieth-century Mexico, did not have today’s meaning denoting relationships between adults and minors. She then noted the many layers of meanings that historical terms can have, and the symbolisms that become sedimented in them. Mastering this legal and scientific terminology allowed her to go after other historical sources––from here, she was able to identify specific historical actors and locate the places that they frequented, a microhistorical approach informed by the work of Carlo Ginsburg. This work resulted in her first book, De sedientos seres, published in 2020, its title borrowing a line from a homoerotic poem by Mexican writer Xavier Villaurrutia.

As she was finishing her first book, she saw that in Mexico there was almost no historical work on female homoeroticism. As she explained to me, heteronormative mythology, which has obscured the presence of homoeroticism or gender identities outside the strict binarism between woman and man, functions as “common sense” for many people to this day. To get to this point, an idea needs to pass “through centuries of socialization, through the mouths of many parish priests and childhood educators who have repeated it to the point where it is not even thought of as intentional speech.” This fact compelled her to divert her gaze to the colonial period. Using sources from the Inquisition and other archives in Puebla, she searched for cases that show the imposition occurring through the transmission of Hispanic ideologies of gender and sexuality. Her current study focuses on mestizo communities in Puebla with highly whitened populations, considering not only the dynamics of the imposition discussed above but also the “blind spots” and places where resistance was allowed. This work will dialogue with other works in Latin American historiography, such as Gay Indians in Brazil: Untold Stories of the Colonization of Indigenous Sexualities by Estevão Rafael Fernandes and Barbara Arisi; and Femestizajes: racialized bodies and sexualities of ladina-mestizas by Yolanda Aguilar. She will base her first address to the Congress this October on this research, outlining the concepts and ideas she has pursued since her doctoral training on gender hegemony and the dissident elements that had resisted heteronormativity since the times of New Spain.

In her work in the Department of Social Sciences at the Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla, Dr. Rodriguez Sanchez collaborates with other colleagues to form a “training ecosystem in critical gender studies.” This ecosystem promotes approaches that do not just repeat “canonical” gender theories, but are “situated” approaches designed to deepen and increase the understanding of gender and sexuality as framers of social inequality and thus as arenas for thinking about social transformation in wider contexts––those of the global South. However, her work as a historian and political scientist has never been about creating knowledge only for specialists––she wants her work to help address urgent social problems, such as violence against women or LGBTQ+ people. Aware of the importance of spaces of socialization and pedagogy for the development of new social concepts, she has contributed to institutional efforts to create safe spaces for women and gender-diverse people, while advocating against institutionalized structures in the curriculum and knowledge production that foster gender-based violence. In this area, she told me that, “the university has been listening, in an effort to understand that educational spaces also reproduce gender-based violence and that we have to change our educational models and focus on that.” These themes resonate with current dynamics in Austin, the capital of Texas and site of the conference where she will be speaking about her work, as the state government has implemented policies against the LGBTQ+ community and against women’s rights to bodily self-determination. Hopefully, her ideas and theorizations will interest a diverse audience, not limited only to historians of Mexico.

Nathaly Rodríguez Sánchez will give the keynote lecture, “Entre chantajes policiales y capacidad disruptiva: geografía homoerótica masculina en la Ciudad de México de la posrevolución (1917-1952),” at the XVI International Meeting of Historians of Mexico, Austin. Program and reports: https://xvireunion.utexas.edu/programa/   

Interview: Timothy Vilgiate (Ph.D. student, UT-Austin)

Black Women’s History in the US: Past & Present

May 17, 2021

Black Women’s History in the US: Past & Present

From the Editors: Not Even Past Second Editions update and republish some of our most important and widely read articles. Since the original publication of this article in April 2020, A Black Women’s History of the United States, authored by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, has enjoyed remarkable success including numerous accolades. It was nominated for a 2021 NAACP Image Award: Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction; was recognized as one of The Best Black History Books of 2020 by the African American Intellectual History Society and was a nominee for Goodreads Best of History and Biography 2020. The book was one of Kirkus Best Books of 2020: Black Life in America as well as a Kirkus Best-Big Picture History Books of 2020. Most recently, the Organization of American Historians recognized A Black Women’s History of the United States with an Honorable Mention for the Darlene Clark Hine Award for best book in African American women’s and gender history. The citation noted that “this comprehensive analysis of African American women from their African precolonial beginnings to the millennium’s first years will soon serve as the definitive work on Black women and their foundational contributions to the history of the United States.” Finally, the book was just awarded the Susan Koppelman award for the best anthology, multi-authored, or edited book in feminist studies in popular and American culture by the Popular Culture Association. A Black Women’s History of the United States will be translated into Chinese and published by Horizon Press in 2023. We congratulate Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross on the incredible success of their book and are honored to republish a second edition of their article below.

By Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

A few years ago, we were approached by Beacon Press to write a history of Black women in the United States. We felt both honored and overwhelmed by the task.  Before we began, we needed to first take a survey of the field and understand our place in it.

Anna Julia Cooper sits for portrait. Her arm rests next to a pile of books and she holds a pen.
Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964). Source: Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, 1892.

The field of Black women’s history has generated a plethora of scholarship for more than a century.  Anna Julia Cooper, the first African American woman to receive her PhD in History and Romance Languages (University of Paris, the Sorbonne, 1925) was part of a small group of early historians. Cooper is widely regarded as one of the first writers of Black feminist thought.[1] In the 1940s several Black women received their PhDs in History including Marion Thompson Wright who was the first to earn a PhD in the United States (Columbia University). Over the last fifty years, female scholars have published numerous works on Black women including anthologies, encyclopedias, primary document readers, biographies, and thematic studies of women in the diaspora.

Black women’s history emerged as a unique field in the early 1970s, in the heart of the women’s rights movement, at a time when colleges and universities established women’s studies programs and courses. In 1970, Toni Cade published the anthology, The Black Woman, as one of the first seminal collections of writings about Black women.[2] Two years later, Gerda Lerner released a primary document reader, Black Women in White America, a book filled with evidence of Black women’s contributions to American history. Adopted for classroom use, Lerner’s book served as the first compilation of document driven histories of Black women in America. Following her, historians Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn published The Afro-American Woman: Struggles & Images (1978).[3]  These volumes served as starting points for the field.

Four black women march beneath a sign reading "women's liberation". In the background, a smaller sign reads: "Free our sisters, free ourselves."
“Women’s Liberation” meant addressing specific challenges for black women in the 1960s. (David Fenton/Getty Images via Timeline/Medium)

Many of these early writers were activists in the classroom and in their communities. The scholarship they produced in the 1970s evolved in a period of activism where women fought to be recognized in society, at colleges and universities, and in historical scholarship. Such activism, particularly among Black lesbian women who attended the Combahee River Collective in 1974, forced mainstream scholars to consider the diversity of Black women’s experiences in America. Women at Combahee illustrated how their experiences intersected along multiple categories including race, class, and sexuality, offering experiences that Kimberlee Crenshaw a decade later called “intersectionality.”[4]  They also prompted a proliferation of texts that addressed how Black women lived, worked, and loved at these intersections.

Women's War Relief Club. A group of Black women are photographed in uniform.
Women’s War Relief Club, Syracuse, New York c.1914. Source: Jesse Alexander Photograph Collection NYPL/Schomburg Center

The 1980s marked the first significant increase in publications in the field of Black women’s history. So, it is not a surprise that the nascent field welcomed Angela Davis’s, Women, Race, & Class (1981) as writers began to consider the dynamic nature of Black womanhood, again, prior to having a term to describe it. Like their foremothers a decade earlier, writers in this decade also published primary document anthologies such as Dorothy Sterling’s We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (1984).

The eighties also produced books that provided overviews of Black women’s experiences such as Paula Giddings’s groundbreaking study, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984). A year later, Deborah Gray White answered Angela Davis’s call to explore the experiences of enslaved women with Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985) and Jacqueline Jones examined Black women’s experience with unpaid and paid work in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985).

A woman hangs quilts on a clothing line.
The women of Gee’s Bend—a small Black community in Alabama—have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. Source : Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers

By the 1990s the field had been in full force for about twenty years with a growing national organization. The Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), founded in 1979, became the professional and professionalizing steward of the field. Pioneering historians of the previous two decades mentored students and kept publishing work in the field. Darlene Clark Hine, an institution building scholar, helped push the field in several directions by publishing books, reference works, and anthologies.[5] After decades of work, she would receive recognition from President Barack Obama in 2013 with the National Humanities Medal. Along with Giddings’ When and Where I Enter  in the 1980s, Hine and Kathleen Thompson’s A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (1998) served as foundational texts for the field for next two decades. These books shaped and fueled an abundance of scholarship in the nineties, including work by the founders of ABWH and others who pioneered defining theoretical approaches to Black women’s history and confirmed that we have a clear canon. These included but were not limited to Hines’ “culture of dissemblance,” Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s “politics of respectability,” and Ula Y. Taylor’s “community feminism,” among others.[6]

Scholarship from the turn of the century in 2000 until today has witnessed a dynamic boom as three generations of historians are publishing work on a variety of themes. We are at a profound moment where many of the founders of Black Women’s History are still alive and continue to publish books, articles, and anthologies. These pioneers are able to witness, shape, and support multiple generations of historians. This also means that we have a pipeline of scholars and scholarship that is building on these foundations and creating new histories that bring Black women into all aspects of American and diasporic history. The 2015 Cross Generational Dialogues in Black Women’s History conference at Michigan State University brought these scholars together to pay homage to those who created the field and those who are the future of it. Scholars of the first generation of Black women historians sent their students out to produce more work for this field. They offered studies of Black women and slavery, reconstruction, convict leasing, civil rights, Black power, and a host of other topics and time periods.

A number of those founding scholars, as well as their students, generously read and advised us on how we might proceed in writing a newer survey. In 2019, we held a historic manuscript workshop at Rutgers University. For the better part of day, ten Black women historians from across the country, met to read and critique early drafts and outlines. It was an extraordinary event that compelled us to find meaningful ways to build on vital existing scholarship, while adding new histories and experiences into the historical record. We include everyday and elite Black women, enslaved and free, artists and activists, poets and athletes, Black queer women, politicians and incarcerated women. Our work, A Black Woman’s History of the United States, serves as the current generation’s study even as we have paid homage to the scholars who paved the way for us. Our hope is that this contribution will make an impact on this field and the wider reading audience.


LISTEN to Berry and Gross discuss their work in an interview by UT History graduate student, Tiana Wilson, here on the podcast “Cite Black Women”.

And read more about Tiana Wilson’s interview on the “Cite Black Women” blog.

LISTEN to Berry and Gross discuss their work and the legacies of Black women’s activism, resistance, and entrepreneurship with journalists Maria Hinojosa and Julio Ricardo Varela on the In The Thick podcast.

LISTEN to Berry and Gross profile history-making Black women on WHYY Radio Times.


Banner image credit: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “White House Conference Group of the National Women’s Council (Mary McLeod Bethune, center; Mary Church Terrell, to her right)” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1938.

[1] Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South: By A Black Woman of the South (Xenia, Ohio: The Aldine Printing House, 1892).

[2] Toni Cade, ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: New American Library, 1970).

[3] Dorothy Porter, “Forward,” in Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., The Afro-American Woman: Struggles & Images (1978. Reprint. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1997), viii.

[4] Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989, Article 8. Available at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8

[5] Selected single authored and co-authored books by Darlene Clark Hine include Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989); Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1994); and A Shining Thread of Hope: A History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1998). Edited and co-edited reference works and anthologies include Black Women in United States History: 16 volumes, plus the guide (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1990); Black Women in America (1994; Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible (1995); and Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

[6] Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 912-20; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Ula Y. Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

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