Joan Neuberger, Author at Not Even Past

Slavery in America: Back in the Headlines

By Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas at Austin

(This article was originally published on The Conversation)

People think they know everything about slavery in the United States, but they don’t. They think the majority of African slaves came to the American colonies, but they didn’t. They talk about 400 hundred years of slavery, but it wasn’t. They claim all Southerners owned slaves, but they didn’t. Some argue it was a long time ago, but it wasn’t.

Slavery has been in the news a lot lately. Perhaps it’s because of the increase in human trafficking on American soil or the headlines about income inequality, the mass incarceration of African Americans or discussions about reparations to the descendants of slaves. Several publications have fueled these conversations: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations in The Atlantic Monthly, French economist Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century, historian Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and The Making of American Capitalism, and law professor Bryan A. Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.

As a scholar of slavery at the University of Texas at Austin, I welcome the public debates and connections the American people are making with history. However, there are still many misconceptions about slavery.

I’ve spent my career dispelling myths about “the peculiar institution.” The goal in my courses is not to victimize one group and celebrate another. Instead, we trace the history of slavery in all its forms to make sense of the origins of wealth inequality and the roots of discrimination today. The history of slavery provides deep context to contemporary conversations and counters the distorted facts, internet hoaxes and poor scholarship I caution my students against.

Four myths about slavery

Myth One: The majority of African captives came to what became the United States.

Truth: Only 380,000 or 4-6% came to the United States. The majority of enslaved Africans went to Brazil, followed by the Caribbean. A significant number of enslaved Africans arrived in the American colonies by way of the Caribbean where they were “seasoned” and mentored into slave life. They spent months or years recovering from the harsh realities of the Middle Passage. Once they were forcibly accustomed to slave labor, many were then brought to plantations on American soil.

Myth Two: Slavery lasted for 400 years.

Popular culture is rich with references to 400 years of oppression. There seems to be confusion between the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1440-1888) and the institution of slavery, confusion only reinforced by the Bible, Genesis 15:13:

Then the Lord said to him, ‘Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there.’

Listen to Lupe Fiasco – just one Hip Hop artist to refer to the 400 years – in his 2011 imagining of America without slavery, “All Black Everything”:

[Hook]
You would never know
If you could ever be
If you never try
You would never see
Stayed in Africa
We ain’t never leave
So there were no slaves in our history
Were no slave ships, were no misery, call me crazy, or isn’t he
See I fell asleep and I had a dream, it was all black everything
[Verse 1]
Uh, and we ain’t get exploited
White man ain’t feared so he did not destroy it
We ain’t work for free, see they had to employ it
Built it up together so we equally appointed
First 400 years, see we actually enjoyed it

A plantation owner with his slaves. (National Media Museum from UK)

Truth: Slavery was not unique to the United States; it is a part of almost every nation’s history from Greek and Roman civilizations to contemporary forms of human trafficking. The American part of the story lasted fewer than 400 years.

How do we calculate it? Most historians use 1619 as a starting point: 20 Africans referred to as ”servants” arrived in Jamestown, VA on a Dutch ship. It’s important to note, however, that they were not the first Africans on American soil. Africans first arrived in America in the late 16th century not as slaves but as explorers together with Spanish and Portuguese explorers. One of the best known of these African “conquistadors” was Estevancio who traveled throughout the southeast from present day Florida to Texas. As far as the institution of chattel slavery – the treatment of slaves as property – in the United States, if we use 1619 as the beginning and the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment as its end then it lasted 246 years, not 400.

Myth Three: All Southerners owned slaves.

Truth: Roughly 25% of all southerners owned slaves. The fact that one quarter of the Southern population were slaveholders is still shocking to many. This truth brings historical insight to modern conversations about the Occupy Movement, its challenge to the inequality gap and its slogan “we are the 99%.”

Take the case of Texas. When it established statehood, the Lone Star State had a shorter period of Anglo-American chattel slavery than other Southern states – only 1845 to 1865 – because Spain and Mexico had occupied the region for almost one half of the 19th century with policies that either abolished or limited slavery. Still, the number of people impacted by wealth and income inequality is staggering. By 1860, the Texas enslaved population was 182,566, but slaveholders represented 27% of the population, controlled 68% of the government positions and 73% of the wealth. Shocking figures but today’s income gap in Texas is arguably more stark with 10% of tax filers taking home 50% of the income.

Myth Four: Slavery was a long time ago.

Truth: African-Americans have been free in this country for less time than they were enslaved. Do the math: Blacks have been free for 149 years which means that most Americans are two to three generations removed from slavery. However, former slaveholding families have built their legacies on the institution and generated wealth that African-Americans have not been privy to because enslaved labor was forced; segregation maintained wealth disparities; and overt and covert discrimination limited African-American recovery efforts.

The value of slaves

Economists and historians have examined detailed aspects of the enslaved experience for as long as slavery existed. Recent publications related to slavery and capitalism explore economic aspects of cotton production and offer commentary on the amount of wealth generated from enslaved labor.

My own work enters this conversation looking at the value of individual slaves and the ways enslaved people responded to being treated as a commodity. They were bought and sold just like we sell cars and cattle today. They were gifted, deeded and mortgaged the same way we sell houses today. They were itemized and insured the same way we manage our assets and protect our valuables.

Extensive Sale of Choice Slaves, New Orleans 1859, Girardey, C.E. (Natchez Trace Collection, Broadside Collection, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History)

Enslaved people were valued at every stage of their lives, from before birth until after death. Slaveholders examined women for their fertility and projected the value of their “future increase.” As they grew up, enslavers assessed their value through a rating system that quantified their work. An “A1 Prime hand” represented one term used for a “first rate” slave who could do the most work in a given day. Their values decreased on a quarter scale from three-fourths hands to one-fourth hands, to a rate of zero, which was typically reserved for elderly or differently abled bondpeople (another term for slaves.)

Guy and Andrew, two prime males sold at the largest auction in US History in 1859, commanded different prices. Although similar in “all marketable points in size, age, and skill,” Guy commanded $1240 while Andrew sold for $1040 because “he had lost his right eye.” A reporter from the New York Tribune noted “that the market value of the right eye in the Southern country is $240.” Enslaved bodies were reduced to monetary values assessed from year to year and sometimes from month to month for their entire lifespan and beyond. By today’s standards, Andrew and Guy would be worth about $33,000-$40,000.

Slavery was an extremely diverse economic institution; one that extrapolated unpaid labor out of people in a variety of settings from small single crop farms and plantations to urban universities. This diversity is also reflected in their prices. Enslaved people understood they were treated as commodities.

“I was sold away from mammy at three years old,” recalled Harriett Hill of Georgia. “I remembers it! It lack selling a calf from the cow,” she shared in a 1930s interview with the Works Progress Administration. “We are human beings” she told her interviewer. Those in bondage understood their status. Even though Harriet Hill “was too little to remember her price when she was three, she recalled being sold for $1400 at age 9 or 10, “I never could forget it.”

Slavery in popular culture

Slavery is part and parcel of American popular culture but for more than 30 years the television mini-series Roots was the primary visual representation of the institution except for a handful of independent (and not widely known) films such as Haile Gerima’s Sankofa or the Brazilian Quilombo. Today Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is a box office success, actress Azia Mira Dungey has a popular web series called Ask a Slave, and in Cash Crop sculptor Stephen Hayes compares the slave ships of the 18th century with third world sweatshops.

From the serious – PBS’s award-winning Many Rivers to Cross – and the interactive Slave Dwelling Project- whereby school aged children spend the night in slave cabins – to the comic at Saturday Night Live, slavery is today front and center.

The elephant that sits at the center of our history is coming into focus. American slavery happened — we are still living with its consequences.

Daina Ramey Berry receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a Public Voices Fellow with The Op-Ed Project.

Further reading:

Articles about slavery on Not Even Past

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Image credit – O’Sullivan, Timothy H, photographer. Five generations on Smith’s Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina. Beaufort South Carolina, 1862. [, Printed Later] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/98504449/.

Episode 56: The Pueblo Revolt of 1680

In the late 17th century, Native American groups living under Spanish rule in what is now New Mexico rebelled against colonial authorities and pushed them out of their territory. In many ways, however, the events that led up to the revolt reveal a more complex relationship between Spanish and Native American than traditional histories tell. Stories of cruelty and domination are interspersed with adaptation and mutual respect, until a prolonged famine changed the balance of power.

Guest Michelle Daneri helps us understand contemporary thinking about the ways that Spanish and Native Americans exchanged ideas, knowledge, and adapted to each others’ presence in the Southwest.

Slavery and Freedom in Savannah

By Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry

Slavery and Freedom in Savannah puts African Americans and slavery at the center of the history of a popular tourist destination. The Telfair Museum’s Owens-Thomas House is the most-visited house museum in Savannah. We worked with the museum staff to bring together the latest historical research on the role of African Americans in Savannah and the importance of slavery to the life of the city.

Telfair Museums plans to build on this research by incorporating the history of slavery more fully into its interpretation of the history of the Owens-Thomas house and the people who lived and worked there. This project builds upon some twenty-plus years of collaboration among museum professionals, academic historians, and historical archeologists, enabling major landmarks and historic sites in this nation to begin to tell more fully the history of non-whites and non-elites.

Savannah is a prime location for understanding the centrality of slavery and race to the national and world economy, and the importance of the city to southern landscapes and the southern economy. Because of the great economic and social dominance of rural plantation-based slavery in the Americas, historians have long assumed that that slave labor was not suited to cities and therefore slavery in American cities was insignificant. But a re-examination of slavery in cities throughout the Atlantic World has demonstrated the importance of urban areas to the slave economy and the adaptability of slave labor and slave ownership to metropolitan regions, especially port cities such as Savannah.. Urban slavery was part of, not exceptional to, the slave-based economies of North America and the Atlantic world.

owensthomas19c — Unknown photographer. Late nineteenth-century image of the Owens-Thomas House. Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia

Urban communities such as Savannah incorporated slave labor into their economic, social and political frameworks, often from the very beginning of their existence. By the time the Georgia colony was founded in the first third of the eighteenth century, it was difficult for the colonists or the trustees to imagine a world without slavery. Although the trustees, led by James Edward Oglethorpe, instituted a ban on slavery in the colony’s early years, in fact those same founders also requested and received black enslaved laborers from South Carolina to help them construct the city. Despite their own use of slave labor, Oglethorpe and his fellow trustees vigorously opposed proslavery colonists during the 1730s and 1740s. But many colonial residents believed that slave labor was necessary to the success of the colony, and to their pursuit of wealth, and found ways to work around the ban, importing slaves for various uses. By the time the ban was officially lifted in 1751, there were already 400 slaves in Georgia.

Ch 7 Ph 27 — Going to Market- A Scene Near Savannah, Georgia. Harper’s Weekly, 1875 Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Miscellaneous Items in Hight Demand collection, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-102153

The slave population in Georgia grew rapidly after the ban on slavery was lifted in 1751. By the eve of the American Revolution, the colony held 16,000 slaves. Almost all of the forced migrants arrived in Georgia through the port of Savannah. Slave labor quickly became central to the economic success of the Georgia colony. Slaves were used to clear land, construct buildings, and cultivate rice and indigo.

Ch 5 Ph 18 — Olivia Alison, Owens-Thomas House Slave Quarters, West Façade Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia

The American Revolution and its aftermath was a time of great upheaval for the slave system in Georgia, and in the nation. For some, and particularly for enslaved blacks, it appeared that slavery might be on the verge of ending, even in the South. Despite the on-going struggle between slave-owning whites and blacks seeking freedom, the successful emergence of the slave-based cotton economy in the nineteenth-century in part guaranteed the continuation of slavery. Savannah grew to be the third-largest antebellum exporter of cotton in the South, behind New Orleans and Mobile. Rice and indigo were also important export crops that carried over from the eighteenth-century economy; rice reached its peak production in the region on the eve of the Civil War. Savannah flourished because of its location amid fertile coastal rice plantations, cotton plantations to the west, and Atlantic access to markets for raw materials, slaves, and finished products. The Savannah port also exported significant amounts of lumber and timber. The production of all of these goods involved the use of slave labor. Antebellum Savannah was one of the smaller southern cities by population, lagging far behind New Orleans, Baltimore and Charleston; only Norfolk, Virginia, was smaller in terms of major southern cities. But the enormous wealth produced by slaves is still evident in the gracious squares of the planned city.

1024px-Owens_thomas_house_savannah7323 — Owens-Thomas House today. Sloweking4 (via Wikimedia Commons)

On the eve of the Civil War, Savannah’s commitment to slavery was secure. But its economic success and political position in the south made its capture central to the Union army’s plan to crush the slaveholding republic. Although the city’s beautiful architecture was largely preserved, Sherman’s troops destroyed slavery and, temporarily at least, reordered the relationships between blacks and whites. Following the war, and in the face of strong and sometimes violent white opposition, blacks briefly gained access to the vote and political office, and expanded on antebellum institutions such as churches and schools. For the next forty years, blacks sought to negotiate their new roles as members of a wage-earning working class, hoping to carve a space in which to exercise their full rights as citizens. But by 1900, the gains blacks had made during Reconstruction had been replaced by legal segregation. Whites limited blacks’ access to the political realm, employment, and a host of other rights and privileges of citizenship. In response, Savannah’s blacks became active members of regional and national efforts to continue the march toward freedom and autonomy for African Americans, work that would not see fruition until the mid-1950s, when a series of Supreme Court decisions struck down legal segregation.

Featured image: Owens -Thomas House, Savannah, via Flickr by Denisbin

Here are Berry’s and Harris’s suggested further readings on urban slavery

Episode 55: Witch Hunting in Early Modern Europe

Stories of witches and witch-hunting in early modern Europe have captivated us for centuries. During the early modern period of European history, stretching from roughly 1450 to about 1750, about 100,000 people—most of them women—were tried for the crime of witchcraft. About half of these people were executed, in most cases by burning at the stake. But witchcraft is more than just a Halloween story–for the men and women involved it was a very real, very frightening aspect of daily life.

Guest Brian Levack explains that, at its heart, medieval accusations of witchcraft and sorcery are not supernatural at all, but instead based in the all too human need to explain the ordinary cycles of birth, death, sickness, wellness, and the constant struggle between rich and poor.

The Holland Family: An American Story

by Nicholas Roland

Today — September 29 — is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War battle of Chaffin’s Farm. The battle is significant because Milton Holland, a mixed race native of Texas was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during the battle. He was one of sixteen black soldiers awarded the Medal of Honor during the Civil War.

Holland’s mother, brother, and white father are all buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Austin. His father was killed while serving in the Confederate Army in April 1864. Milton’s brother, William, served in the Union Army and was later elected to the Texas Legislature. William helped found the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Institute for Colored Youth (which merged with Texas School for the Deaf in 1965 and integrated in 1966) as well as Prairie View A&M University.

Milton Holland is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Black and white photograph of Milton Holland wearing his Medal of Honor — Milton Holland wearing his Medal of Honor

For more on this fascinating story, read this amply illustrated blog by Elyce Feliz.

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.

Episode 54: Urban Slavery in the Antebellum U.S.

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.

Listen to (or read a transcript of) this episode here

Episode 54: Urban Slavery in the Antebellum United States

Guests: Daina Ramey Berry, Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin, and Leslie Harris, Associate Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta

Host: Joan Neuberger, Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin

Episode 54: Urban Slavery in the Antebellum United States

Civility and Speech in the Modern University, 200 Years Ago in Germany

by Matthew Bunn

Civility may appear in short supply in today’s political environment, but “civility” as a standard for policing speech is currently in the headlines. For U.S. universities, the turmoil in recent years over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has renewed calls for civility, not as a voluntary norm of speech, but as a criterion for punishing speakers. As Ali Abunimah writes, “civility crackdowns are now breaking out across the country.”

On September 9, Inside Higher Education reported that a memo from UC-Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks had incited outrage both among the faculty and online commentators for suggesting that free speech was contingent upon its “civility.” As Dirks said, “simply put, courteousness and respect in words and deeds are basic preconditions to any meaningful exchange of ideas.” For critics of Dirks, it is not that civility is undesirable so much as the implication that uncivil speech forfeits free speech protections that has them upset.

Dirks issued his call for civility in light of the controversy that erupted when UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise rescinded a tenured job offer to Prof. Steven Salaita. As word of Salaita’s case spread through academia, a growing chorus of voices denounced the firing as a violation of academic freedom. At issue were a series of tweets, in which Salaita expressed hostility to Israeli military actions in Gaza that some critics denounced as anti-Semitic.

As Wise’s recent statements have revealed, she acted under pressure from major donors to UIUC who protested Salaita’s hiring, and the Board of Trustees notified Wise they would not approve the hiring, even as such approval is normally pro forma. Pressured on the other side by academic boycotts and letters from prominent scholars, Wise eventually forwarded the appointment to the Trustees, who voted 8-1 on September 11 to reject Salaita’s appointment.

L’affaire Salaita has reignited debates about the role of academic freedom, employers’ power to police employees’ speech, and the status accorded social media communication. Yet as relevant as new platforms like Twitter are to contemporary cases, conflict over the rights and responsibilities of academics’ public speech are as old as the modern research university itself. In fact, looking back two centuries ago and a continent away sheds surprising light on current issues.

Historians generally agree that the modern research oriented university originated in Germany in the early nineteenth century. The University of Berlin, now known as Humboldt University, was the first to require the defense of a piece of original research—the dissertation—to grant Ph.D degrees. Along the way, German universities pioneered research seminars, methods of primary source research, and other features of the modern research institution. German methods spread internationally once German universities became magnets for foreign, especially American students.

“The Thinkers’ Club (1819). A famous caricature refers to the Carlsbad Decrees, which were implemented at the behest of Clemens Prince von Metternich. The decrees suppressed nationalist, liberal student fraternities and imposed tight restrictions on freedom of expression. The sign reads: “Important question to be considered in today’s meeting: How long will we be allowed to think?”

Yet this period of German intellectual flowering also coincided with significant tension between the universities and the monarchical states. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the princes of central Europe set about stabilizing their power after decades of war and revolution. Universities were hotbeds of political, religious, and intellectual ferment. Student fraternities, often mentored by radical professors, became leading exponents of the cause of German national unity and constitutional government. Since all German professors were government employees, though, they faced grave risks to their careers for supporting the political opposition. A generation of scholars was blacklisted from German universities in the 1820s, while others labored under constant police supervision and censorship.

German governments had a hard time disciplining their unruly professors for many of the same reasons that modern university administrators like those at UIUC do: organized pushback from the faculty and allies in the press. When Wise withdrew Salaita’s offer, she faced withering criticism, including multiple no confidence votes from university faculty. Similarly, when Duke Ernst August fired seven professors at the University of Göttingen in 1837 for publishing a letter critical of his violation of the constitution, the German public sphere erupted in protest. Both causes galvanized supporters following the cases in the press, drawing the focus away from the content of the speech and towards the rights of academics to express unpopular or inconvenient ideas.

When it came to policing speech, German governments had a difficult time making hard and fast rules. For that reason, they tended to issue general guidelines about what writers could not attack—the security of the state, the Christian religion, and the personal honor of state officials—and left it to censors to decide what to allow, alter, or ban outright.

Left to their own devices, censors struggled to justify their decisions on the basis of laws or specific textual references. In many cases, censors banned works not only on the basis of content, but also the manner of presentation, which they called its “tendency”—essentially the tone of the work.

Here we see the affinity with contemporary demands for “civility.” Censors latched onto the idea of censoring tone because of how tricky it is to specify just which words or ideas are off limits. With reason, censors believed that passion, emotion, and humor made ideas more powerful to readers, and thus more dangerous. Appropriate writing was dry, objective, even-handed—“civil” in a bloodless sort of way. Anger and mockery, irrespective of the validity or merit of the argument, were to be discouraged.

The problem for censors, though, is that judging a writer’s tone is more subjective than simply looking for forbidden words or ideas. Authors like Heinrich Heine made a name for themselves by mocking the follies of authorities through sophisticated literary tactics. Moreover, censors—like modern day college administrators—were condemned for allowing their own personal judgments and prejudices to color their decision making.

Heinrich Heine (1837)

Critics of censorship seized upon this subjectivity to argue that censorship was unworkable and intrinsically unfair, simply a way for powerful people to silence speech they personally did not like. Critics like the radical author Gustav Struve argued that censors simply cut anything well-written enough to become popular with the public, while philosopher Arnold Ruge lamented that censors would cut in one moment what they permit in another, all on the basis of personal whim.

In nineteenth-century Germany, ideas of universal rights of free speech were new and not widespread, but among professors and university-educated elites, the defense of academic freedom was better known and more widely supported. As a result, the cause of professors and scholars was often the mostly loudly trumpeted when it came to challenging censorship.

Facing criticism from an increasingly active public sphere, German governments protested that they respected academic freedom and the freedom of speech, but only within limits. Here again, tone and civility were key for justifying censorship. When the Prussian government issued revised censorship regulations in 1842, Karl Marx immediately attacked them, in his first published writing no less, as “pseudo-liberalism.”

Karl Marx (1875)

Demanding that scholarly writings be “earnest and modest,” the Prussian government in Marx’s view imposed on scholars’ work conditions that had nothing whatsoever to do with truth. The tone of a work, Marx noted, is dictated by the nature of the subject—ridiculous things ought not be taken seriously, serious injustices not protested modestly.

Civility as a conversational virtue has much to recommend it. The enforcement of civility, however, especially among classes like academics particularly inclined to advance challenging ideas, should make us recall how the use of “tone” as a criteria for controlling discussion works. As the example of nineteenth-century German intellectuals suggests, what may appear an effort to reign in abusive language can quickly become a powerful tool for the suppression of speech. Let us all be civil—and accepting of a little incivility too.

Images via Wikimedia Commons

Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt

by Elizabeth O’Brien

Gender was central to nation-state formation and working-class politics under the Popular Front governments that ruled Chile between 1938 and 1952, preceding Salvador Allende’s socialist regime (1970-1973). The Popular Front sought to industrialize the economy, create an educated and compliant working class, construct a modern welfare state, and solidify the nuclear family as the base of a unified nation.

The Popular Fronts struck compromises between the national leaders and the growing socialist and communist movements in Chile. One of Karin Rosemblatt’s main contributions is to show that the Popular Front enjoyed the support of various subaltern groups such as the National Labor Confederation (CTCh) and, initially, the feminist group Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena (MEMCh). Focusing on political structures and elite ideology, she analyzes the politics of gender in state policy, and leftist and feminist struggle. The author’s use of oral histories as well as government archival sources helps her paint a complex historical narrative that shows that political and ideological diversity strengthened the Popular Front coalition instead of weakening it.

State officials and employers sought to transform working class men into disciplined and economically stable husbands. With the support of CTCh, they passed the Family Wage Act in 1952, which paid married men more than single workers and reinforced male authority in the family by institutionalizing the notion that men should be primary breadwinners. But in some industries such as mining, employers discriminated against married workers to avoid increasing their pay, and this often prompted married men to claim their status as single. She also shows that although base wages rose overall in masculinized fields like mining, construction, and transportation, they stagnated in the female-dominated realms of hotel service, domestic work, and sewing factories. Feminists in MEMCh called for equal pay between genders and denounced the Family Wage Act, claiming that it excluded women from workforce. Nevertheless, most working-class women supported the family wage system, and National Labor Confederation pamphlets promoted the idea that women belonged in the home.

Rosemblatt traces other conflicts between Communists, progressive feminists, and MEMCHistas, some of whom were politically conservative. MEMCh began in close affiliation with the Communist Party, but many men in the Party rejected the feminists as snobbish and disruptive. Despite a lack of support from the Communist Party, MEMCh succeeded in organizing 58 grassroots committees that lobbied for mothers’ centers, education, healthcare, housing, state funded daycares, increased access to birth control, reform of marriage laws that subordinated women, and legalization of divorce.

As the political climate turned rightward under President Gónzalez Videla (1946-1952), MEMCh did as well. Rosemblatt shows that moderate feminists used close alliances with the state to wrest control of women’s committees from Communists and radicals, and that conservative feminists even helped to suppress Communist organizing among housewives and common women. Cross-class feminist organizing strengthened and promoted the compromise state and the bourgeois-democratic alliance, but feminist success was limited due to the popularity of normative gender ideologies (even on the Left), and feminists’ failure to win over the working class.

Workers march in support of Allende in 1964

Leftists, like the state, wanted to regulate working class life and re-define normative masculinity, but they pursued a socialist brand of discipline and morality. By examining leftist publications and oral histories, Rosemblatt shows that moral prescriptions unified the left and defined its boundaries. Socialists did not place much emphasis on virginity and honor: instead, they valued restraint, morality, and class unity. Although their parents often disagreed, Communist youth therefore felt that they did not have to wait for marriage to have sex. Socialist masculine norms focused on abstention from alcohol and marital fidelity, although many labor leaders engaged in adulterous affairs. Although socialists claimed that an alternative economic system would eliminate patriarchy, Rosemblatt concludes that leftist organizations ultimately reinscribed class and gender hierarchies. Furthermore, socialists and feminists alike appropriated and abrogated working class women’s struggles.

The Popular Front governments gave rise to important social debates about patriarchy and capitalism in modern Chile, and set the stage for Salvador Allende’s peaceful socialist revolution. None of these mid-twentieth century regimes were able to institutionalize gender equality. However, they were certainly preferable to the brutal military dictator Augusto Pinochet, who came into power after the 1973 U.S.-supported coup on Allende’s democratically elected government and enacted widespread human rights abuses during his seventeen-year rule (1973-1990).

Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950

Slavery in America: Back in the Headlines

Four myths about slavery

The value of slaves

Slavery in popular culture

Episode 56: The Pueblo Revolt of 1680

More to Read on Urban Slavery

Slavery and Freedom in Savannah

Episode 55: Witch Hunting in Early Modern Europe

The Holland Family: An American Story

Episode 54: Urban Slavery in the Antebellum U.S.

Episode 54: Urban Slavery in the Antebellum United States

Civility and Speech in the Modern University, 200 Years Ago in Germany

Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt

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