Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa by Allen Wells (2009)

In October 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered his troops to slaughter Haitians living in the Dominican frontier and the Cibao.The horrific violence left as many as 15,000 dead. Trujillo apologists managed to justify the action nationally, but the massacre created an international public relations nightmare for the regime. Newspapers cited Trujillo’s ruthlessness and compared him to Hitler and Mussolini. Trujillo quickly moved to restore his credentials as an anti-fascist ally of the United States by offering refuge to 100,000 European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. In Tropical Zion, Allen Wells tells the story of the establishment and decline of the small Jewish agricultural colony at Sosúa in the Dominican Republic and illustrates the significance of the colony in the international sphere. While only a handful of Jews migrated to the Dominican Republic during the Holocaust, Wells argues that ultimately, Sosúa saved lives and that its history uncovers the complex intersection of Zionism, U.S.-Dominican relations, American and Europe anti-Semitism, and the racism of the Trujillo regime.

In 1938, following the violent attacks on Jews throughout Germany and parts of Austria that came to be known as Kristallnacht, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt organized a conference at Évian-les-Bains, France in hopes of developing a strategy to handle the massive Jewish flight from Germany and Austria. However, American and European anti-Semitism prevented the United States, England, France, and many other countries from offering Jews a place of refuge. Moreover, they refused to consider Palestine as a resettlement site. At Évian, Trujillo’s brother Virgilio, stepped into the gap and offered Jewish refugees a safe haven in the Dominican Republic. Wells emphasizes that although Trujillo sought to use the offer to repair his image after the massacre and as a means of whitening the Dominican population, he remained the only one to volunteer his country for Jewish resettlement. Conference participants considered and rejected a variety of locations, including Angola and British Guiana, but in the end the Dominican Republic emerged as the only settlement site. Wells details the immigrant selection process, the immigrants’ movement from countries of transit to the Dominican Republic, and the complicated process of community formation after their arrival. While the settlement faced several difficulties from the outset, the biggest source of contention remained the nature of the colony – would it be a temporary place to await the end of the war or a true farming community? Although Jewish-American philanthropists, the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA), and Trujillo imagined the colony as an agricultural settlement, DORSA approved the migration of settlers and non-settlers alike. Non-settlers expressed little interest in farming, preferring a town existence dependent on DORSA stipends that diverted the colony’s funds from its growing dairy industry. This became a major source of tension between settlers and non-settlers. As the war came to an end, non-settlers, derisively referred to as “America-Leavers,” quickly moved to secure U.S. visas and leave the Dominican Republic. This initiated the colony’s decline, which worsened as dairy farmers also left the island for the United States in order to provide a better future for their children.

Wells demonstrates that Trujillo used the practice of gift-giving and highly ritualized public ceremonies to create circuits of exchange between himself, the Roosevelt administration, DORSA, and the colony at Sosúa. First, Trujillo’s Évian offer presented a solution for President Roosevelt who faced critiques from powerful Jewish-Americans regarding the U.S.’s strict immigration policies and the rising tide of U.S. anti-Semitism. Second, Trujillo, who owned the prospective Sosúa settlement site, generously donated the property to the colony in a symbolic act of friendship that would cement patron-client ties between himself, DORSA, and the Jewish settlers. The regime then hosted a large public ceremony to celebrate the signing of a contract between the Dominican government and DORSA that guaranteed settlers religious freedom and civil and legal rights. Wells argues that as clients of Trujillo, DORSA and Jewish settlers were expected to support the regime by lobbying the Roosevelt administration on Trujillo’s behalf, participating in state rituals, and refraining from criticism. These actions helped confer legitimacy on the dictatorship and minimize Trujillo’s reputation for brutality. Moreover, he suggests that Trujillo’s offer and the lobbying of DORSA officials helped create an environment conducive to the renegotiation of the U.S. receivership of Dominican customs and allowed Trujillo to re-establish Dominican financial independence. The successful re-institution of Dominican control over its customs receipts remains one of the hallmarks of the Trujillo regime.

The son of Sosúa settler Heinrich Wasservogel, Wells has intimate knowledge of life in the small tropical sanctuary. His masterful narrative is a must read for those interested in the Jewish Diaspora, dictatorship in Latin America and the Caribbean, and U.S.-Dominican relations during the Trujillo era.

Photo credits:

Harris & Ewing, “Gen. Trujillo given luncheon at Capitol. Visiting Washington on a goodwill tour is former Dominican Republic President Gen. Rafael Trujillo. The general was accorded a luncheon today at the Capitol by Sen. Theodore Green Rhode Island. Avidly talking to the General, who speaks no English, are Senators Green and Guy Gillette while Minister Andres[?] Pastoriza rapidly interprets. Left to right: Trujillo, Sen. Green, Pastoriza, Sen. Gillette,” Washington, DC, 7 July 1939.

Harris & Ewing via The Library of Congress

Colin Rose, “Jewish Museum in Sosua,” 24 December 2006

Author’s own via Flickr Creative Commons

Flickr user muckster, “Sosua Jewish Museum: Children of Immigrants,” 9 February 2007

Author’s own via Flickr Creative Commons

You may also like:

This interview, conducted in May 2011, with General Imbert, one of the men who assassinated Rafael Trujillo in 1961. (BBC News)

Adrian Masters’ review of The Doubtful Strait, Ernesto Cardenal’s poem chronicling the history of Nicaragua from colonial discovery to the Somoza dictatorship.

Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South by Hannah Rosen (2008)

by Cristina Metz

To say that the US Civil War (1861-65) was tragic and destabilizing is a glaring understatement. Hundreds of thousands died or were wounded in combat, entire cities were destroyed, and afterwards, the large segment of the nation that had seceded had to be reincorporated into the national body, and a new citizen-subject remained to be embraced by post-bellum societies. Hannah Rosen’s Terror in the Heart of Freedom analyzes the experiences of recently freed blacks, released from the bonds of slavery and plantation life, who sought to create new lives as freedmen and women. Many headed to cities as part of a “mass exodus from slavery.” The city of Memphis, Tennessee became one such “city of refuge” where freedpersons practiced their freshly conferred citizenship. They established new communities, built churches, opened their own schools, and formed African American benevolence societies that sponsored community events. In short, freedpersons in Reconstruction Memphis, as in many other cities, catalyzed changes in the socio-spatial boundaries of urban spaces that had previously been closed to them.

These changes did not come without tensions, which the continued occupation of southern cities by federal troops exacerbated. White society had also undergone transformations in the wake of the Civil War. In Memphis, working-class white immigrants filled a political vacuum left by the outmigration of the city’s antebellum commercial and political elite. These immigrants lived primarily in South Memphis, a region of the city that also happened to be a major destination for recently arriving freedpeople. Not only did the emerging white elites have to contend with a federal force that undermined their hegemony, they also encountered an expanding entrepreneurial and professional Black elite that they viewed as another threat to their political and economic ascendance. These tensions came to a head on Tuesday, May 1, 1866 in what is known as the Memphis Riot.

On this day, black Union soldiers that had been the primary federal force occupying Memphis turned in their weapons as part of their very public discharge. Because of the public nature of their de-armament, Rosen believes that the city police and white civilians chose this day to act. Over the course of three days, white rioters killed 48 African Americans, wounded 70 to 80, and set fire to 91 homes, four black churches, and 12 black schools. The rioters also raped several freedwomen. What started as a clash between black Union soldiers and Memphis police soon came to affect many more people and to symbolize much more.

Recently, historians have found that the Memphis Riot was not entirely spontaneous, random, or anarchic. It was “well-orchestrated” and the assailants made a “clear political expression.” What historians have missed in previous studies, Rosen argues, is the symbolic weight of the sexual assaults that African American women suffered during the riot. In the wake of the riots, a series of Congressional hearings were convened in Memphis with the aim of clarifying what had happened in Memphis that May. Rosen goes back into the records of the congressional investigating committees that took freedpeople’s testimonies in Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, as well as the records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to uncover the “coherent symbolic order” demonstrated in the riot. This order was the “nexus of racial and gendered meanings…performed and rearticulated through [rape].”

Why did freed people testify? Rosen’s close analysis of the meanings and discourses embedded in their testimony about the rapes suggests that for freedmen and women, testifying was an act intended to claim the right of all citizens “to live free of violence.” Freedom for formerly enslaved persons meant more than “to be free.” It also meant “to be a citizen,” which presupposed the same rights and protections for all citizens (in law and practice, however, citizen typically signified adult male). Women who described acts of rape had to “find the words to narrate and record” what they had witnessed or experienced. Many of the testimonies of freedwomen who the white rioters raped described the men as having acted very nonchalantly before the sexual assault. Rosen interprets this as stemming from a mentality that saw black women as occupying a position so low on the socio-sexual hierarchy that they simply did not have the choice to refuse a sexual act. Several women recalled having asserted their free status to no avail. Quite convincingly, Rosen contends that by ignoring freedwomen’s freedom claims “the assailants thereby asserted, through their words and gestures, that emancipation was of no significance and that black women continued to be different from white women…who were…protected from sexual exploitation by patriarchal family structures and the rights of citizens.”

White northerners viewed the Memphis Riot as evidence of the continued need to take a hardline in the reintegration of former Confederate states. One of the most polemical Reconstruction Acts, which set the terms for the reincorporation of the seceded states, was the 14t Amendment. Southern states debated the issue of universal citizenship rights and their extension to former slaves in a series of Constitutional Conventions. Rosen examines one such convention held in Little Rock, Arkansas, in January 1868 to uncover the meanings ascribed to masculinity and femininity that contributed to the “racist terror” that continued unabated from 1865 to 1876 even though Congress and the northern press publicized the riot and the testimonies of freedpeople.

What is so powerful about Rosen’s study is that it shows the hope that freedpersons had for their future, their trust that government institutions would protect their rights as citizens, and the mentalité that “impinged on their ability to claim their rights as citizens.” The subject matter is not light, but Rosen offers a study of the post-bellum period that helps us interpret the violence against African Americans that was to come and it proposes a way of “reading” rape that has relevance to studies of violence against women used as a political weapon, both past and present.

Photo credits:

Alfred R. Waud, “Scenes in Memphis, Tennessee, during the riot,” 1866.
Harper’s Weekly via The Library of Congress

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000

by Laurie Green

Fifteen years ago, Alexander Street Press, in conjunction with the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York, Binghamton, launched Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000, an online database edited by historians Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin. What began as a classroom project designed by Sklar to give undergraduate students the opportunity to collect, edit, analyze – and get excited about – historical documents, went live in December 1997 after being developed into a full-blown documentary database by Sklar and Dublin.

Newly enfranchised women registering to vote, Seattle c.1910 (Wikimedia commons)

The “Documentary Projects,” in particular, will interest Not Even Past readers. Scholars pose a historical question, write an introduction with background information, and offer up a set of documents. In How Did African American Women Shape the Civil Rights Movement and What Challenges Did They Face?, created by Gail S. Murray, a December 1963 letter from Septima Clark to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. conveys Clark’s critique of members of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, King’s organization, for being more interested in the “glamor” of direct action movements (involving civil disobedience and news headlines), than the day-to-day work of voter education that she believes will bring lasting change to the region. And in Judith N. McArthur’s How Did Texas Women Win Partial Suffrage in a One-Party Southern State in 1918?, correspondence offers evidence of how a group of savvy Texas suffragists negotiated the specific historical context of World War I, Prohibition, and the election of Governor Hobby to procure the vote in advance of the federal 19th Amendment, at least for American-born white women.

I love this database. It allows me to introduce students to primary sources, and allows them to get their feet wet in historical research and encourage them to come up with their own interpretations of documents. In the “Scholar’s Edition” (available through university libraries by subscription), the primary sources are organized by movement, so one can explore controversies related to such topics as the birth control movement, women’s suffrage, anti-lynching campaigns, and union organizing by immigrant women. The “Scholar’s Editon” site also includes a full run of issues of The Ladder: A Lesbian Review (1956-1972) and papers of the civil liberties exponent Elizabeth Glendower Evans, who championed the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti.

WASM has grown exponentially since 1997, adding thousands of new documents a year and growing such features as a book review section, outlines for classroom projects based on the documents, and a monthly online journal that combines standard fare of academic journals with new documentary projects and full-text documents. As has been true with most projects documenting women’s history, Sklar and Dublin’s venture has resembled a social movement in itself; they sought out scholars, wrote emails and hosted conference luncheons not only to publicize the site but to convince scholars of women and social movements to place on line a set of documents they have used in their research. They now have new horizons. Alexander Street Press has just launched Women and Social Movements – International.

Photo credits:

Warren K. Leffler, “Crowds surrounding the Reflecting Pool, during the 1963 March on Washington,” 28 August, 1963

U.S. News and World Report via The Library of Congress

Harris & Ewing, “No rest for a weary filibuster. Washington, D.C., Jan. 27. Senator Claude A. Pepper, Democrat of Florida who spoke for 11 hours during the current filibuster against the Anti-lynching bill, points out to pretty Mrs. Pepper the interesting sections of his long winded talk as he printed in the Congressional Record,” Washington, DC, 27 January 1938

Harris & Ewing via The Library of Congress

Tips on How to Navigate the Women and Social Movements Website

Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment by David J. Weber (2005)

by Zachary Carmichael

This book is a wide-ranging study of the relationship between Bourbon Spain, its New World possessions, and the native peoples living on the borderlands of the Spanish empire who had not been brought under imperial political domination. Subjugating and Christianizing these unincorporated indigenous peoples, called bárbaros (translated as “savages”) were major objectives of late eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms. David Weber concludes that “pragmatism and power usually prevailed over ideas,” with Bourbon policy usually favoring a realistic approach to dealing with these native groups, alternatively using armed conflict or negotiation when each seemed most useful. The Spanish crown was only one of several interest groups—including Bourbon officials, the military, and the colonial bureaucracy—competing for the loyalty of indigenous peoples. Indians from geographically disparate Spanish borderland regions had more in common socially and culturally with each other than with the inhabitants of nearby colonial centers, like Mexico City or Lima. Weber justifies the range of his study by contending that others have looked at Spanish and native relations only from a local perspective, failing to account for the diverse challenges these groups posed for Bourbon rulers.

Weber argues that Spanish imperial policy concerning unassimilated native populations changed for two reasons—Enlightenment thinking about the responsibilities that colonizers had toward indigenous subjects and Bourbon political restructuring. This fusion of Enlightenment philosophy and imperial directive is evident in the state-sponsored voyage of scientist Alejandro Malaspina along the west coast of Spanish America in 1789. Malaspina encountered numerous native groups and created a method to scientifically identify which groups were “savages.” As the Spanish explored and settled these borderland regions in the late eighteenth century, theworld of native groups changed permanently, and many resisted. Weber analyzes these Indian societies based on how they defended their independence, rather than grouping them by geography. Yet, on the imperial periphery, cooperation and integration often came before conflict. Weber contends that the incompatibility between Spaniard and native was not as pronounced as other scholars have claimed. One successful tactic the Bourbons used to integrate native populations without open conflict was by taking over the independent missionaries, especially Jesuits, that operated in many peripheral areas. The book concludes by tracing the story of the indios bárbaros into the national period, a time in which the leaders of the new republics abandoned old Bourbon policies of negotiation. They came to regard independent natives as inferior peoples, and, in Argentina, the most radical case, actively exterminated the indigenous population.

Weber succeeds in portraying the various strategies employed to deal with these semi-autonomous native groups, integrating diverse perspectives and geographic areas. The lengthy and detailed notes include annotations, translations, and a wealth of material that supplements the main text. Excellent maps included in the body of the book give the reader a geographic foundation to follow the many indigenous groups and frontier areas discussed. Weber could have integrated more local or native perspectives, but, in a book about government policy, this might prove distracting. Bárbaros is a groundbreaking study of Spanish and native relations. It has a well-defined scope, excellent research, and successfully defends the argument for Bourbon rulers’ pragmatic approach to dealing with unincorporated indigenous populations.

Photo credits:

Pedro Alonso O’Crouley, “Yndios Barbaros,” 1774

Biblioteca Nacional via the University of Illinois Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese

The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China by Jay Taylor (2009)

by James Hudson

For many historians of China and even for many Chinese, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of China’s Nationalist Party and then founder of the Republic of China in Taiwan, was a classic “bad guy” of history. He was incompetent and ruthless. He cared little for the Chinese people or for those who worked under him. In popular history such interpretations of Chiang abound, but Jay Taylor’s biography casts the General in a different light, crediting Chiang with establishing and strengthening a faltering economy during a period of intense political and social turmoil. Taylor also observes that, while “Chiang could be heartless and sometimes ruthless, but he lacked the pathological megalomania and the absolutist ideology of a totalitarian dictator,” and regarding the potential of his own ideas was “more self-delusional than hypocritical.”

Chiang’s collaboration and subsequent rivalry with the Allied Commander in China during World War II, General Joseph Stilwell, was chronicled by Barbara Tuchman in her famous book, Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-45. Although Tuchman portrays Stilwell as one of the most brilliant military minds of his generation, she often paints Chiang as nothing more than an inept tyrant, whom Stilwell affectionately referred to as “peanut.”

But Taylor provides Chiang’s side of the story, noting that the American general bore just as much responsibility for the nationalists’ failure to engage the Japanese and eventually defeat the communists, and that in the end Stilwell’s deep animosity for Chiang “clouded his judgment.” In this regard one also wonders if Taylor reaches too far. For instance, although he accounts for Stilwell’s impulsive character, he does not address the fact that all of the American commanders who worked with Chiang — Joseph Stilwell, Albert Wedemeyer, and even George Marshall, who eventually became Secretary of State—found him difficult to deal with. Some other leaders, such as Gandhi, Franklin Roosevelt, and commander of the Flying Tigers, Claire Chennault, found Chiang personable and charming. Such appeal was no doubt augmented by the influence of his wife. Educated in the United States and fluent in English, Madame Chiang Kai-shek remained her husband’s constant advocate throughout the war with Japan, representing the Nationalist Party abroad, even becoming the first woman to ever testify before Congress, pressing the continued need for American aid during World War II.

Perception of the seeming luxurious lifestyle of Chiang and his wife both at home and abroad at times strengthened and at times weakened the nationalist cause. But although the comforts enjoyed by Asia’s most influential couple may seem extravagant today, Taylor concludes that “luxury and constant attendance by personal servants, however, do not necessarily ruin prospects for a serious life. [Winston] Churchill all his life was dressed and undressed by someone else.”

For both popular as well as academic audiences, this book stands as a thorough and engaging read of a complex man and his leadership of China in the early twentieth century.

Photo credits:

Roberts, “Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt are shown on the White House lawn February 24, 1943 during the former’s visit to the Capitol,” 24 February 1943

U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black & White Photographs via The Library of Congress

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Peter Hamilton’s review of Pearl Buck’s classic, Nobel Prize-winning book – and the first paperback bestseller – A Good Earth.

Making History: Takkara Brunson

Interviewed by Zach Doleshal

In the sixth installation of our new series, “Making History,” Zach Doleshal speaks with Takkara Brunson about her research on Afro-Cuban women in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Brunson’s research experiences in Cuba, and stories of the fascinating women who form the core of her research offer a taste not only of life and work in a place few Americans get to visit, but also a window into the making of a social and cultural historian.

Brunson’s dissertation, “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba, 1902-1958,” is the first full-length treatment of the formation of a modern Cuban identity that examines race and gender as complementary and conflicting forces in the lives of women rather than as distinct categories of analysis.

This dissertation explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals—from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families—established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations. The dissertation’s chapters—on patriarchal discourses of racial progress, photographic representations, la mujer negra (the black woman), and feminist, communist, and labor movements—probe how patriarchy and assumptions of black racial inferiority simultaneously informed discourses of citizenship within a society that sought to project itself as a white masculine nation. Additionally, the dissertation examines how Afro-Cuban women’s writings and social activism shaped legal reforms, perceptions of cubanidad (Cuban identity), and Afro-Cuban community formation. The study utilizes a variety of sources: organizational records, letters from women to politicians, photographic representations, periodicals, literature, and labor and education statistics. Engaging the fields of Latin American history, African diaspora studies, gender studies, and visual culture studies, the dissertation maintains that an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nation is integral to developing a nuanced understanding of the prerevolutionary era.

Takkara Brunson received her PhD in the history department from the University of Texas in 2011. She specializes in modern Latin American history with a particular focus on race and gender, citizenship, and national identity. She currently holds a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and Africa-American Studies at the University of Rochester.

Photo credits:

“Advertisement for Pomada ‘Mora,'” 15 December, 1914

Minerva via “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba, 1902-1958.”

You may also like:

Our book recommendations for readings on Afro-Cubans and Afro-Americans.

Hear UT Professor of History – and Takkara Brunson’s dissertation supervisor – Frank Guridy talk about his new, award-winning book “Forging the Transnational Diaspora” in our recent monthly feature interview.

And read Professor Guridy’s review of two recent movies about the figures behind the Cuban Revolution.

Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America by Linda Gordon (1976)

By Megan Seaholm

In 1873, the US Congress passed an “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles for Immoral Use.” The “Articles for Immoral Use” were devices and potions for contraception or abortion. Commonly called the Comstock Law after Anthony Comstock, one of the founders of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and a major proponent of the legislation, by 1900, over twenty states including Connecticut had state “Comstock Laws” that made the distribution of birth control illegal. It was decades before birth control was fully decriminalized. When, in 1965, Justice William O. Douglas wrote the majority decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, he identified a “right of privacy” implicit in the Fourth Amendment that guaranteed the right of couples to receive birth control information, devices, or prescriptions from physicians. After subsequent decisions extended this right to non-married people, a woman’s right to prevent pregnancy seemed secure. Since birth control is in the news again, a look at one of the best histories of the birth control movement in the U.S. is timely.

Linda Gordon, the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University, published Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America in 1976. In 2002, she published a revised and updated version of that book under a new title: The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. Gordon’s analysis of the history of birth control politics is not an uncritical tale of the heroic triumph of birth control advocates. Her central argument is that crusades for reproductive rights must be evaluated in their particular political context: “Reproduction control brings into play not only the gender system but also the race and class system, the structure of medicine and prescription drug development and reproduction, the welfare system, the education system, foreign aid, and the question of gay rights and minors’ rights.” Gordon’s account is a multi-dimensional exploration.

She begins with a discussion of Victorian sexual ideology and the work of late-nineteenth century birth control entrepreneurs. She then traces a complex history of birth control movements to demonstrate that “neo-Malthusianism, voluntary motherhood, Planned Parenthood, race suicide, birth control, population control, control over one’s own body,… were not merely different slogans for the same thing but helped construct different activities, purposes, and meanings.” The campaign for legal access to birth control included individuals and organizations with diverse and often contradictory goals.

Gordon explains that early twentieth-century “birth controllers” were radical reformers—feminists, socialists, and liberals—who hoped to aid the working class in their struggle with capitalism by helping women limit family size. Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger initially found support for birth control among socialists and sex radicals but by 1915, she abandoned socialist organizing and focused on the single issue of birth control. Gordon analyzes the work of Sanger’s first birth control clinic in New York City, her creation of the American Birth Control League, her civil disobedience, her strategic cultivation of moneyed and influential allies, her attraction to eugenic arguments for birth control, her effective consolidation of once-rival organizations in 1938 into the Birth Control Federation of America, and that organization’s emergence as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) in 1942. But Sanger’s work is not the only narrative that Gordon provides. Gordon’s account of the birth control movement includes nuanced discussions of how the medical profession, the New Deal, the Roman Catholic Church, and the social conservatism of the 1940s and 1950s influenced birth control politics. For example, the PPFA and the medicalization of birth control brought needed attention to women’s health. At the same time, in its first two decades, the PPFA projected a defense of traditional marriage and, too often, “isolate[d] sexual and reproductive problems from women’s overall subordination.”

Gordon’s treatment of birth control politics and the larger issue of reproductive rights in the last half of the twentieth century lacks the comprehensive and critical attention that she provides for the late 19^th century through the early 1960s. She briefly traces the abortion rights movement and the rise of antiabortion activism. She concludes this chapter presciently when she writes that “No one issue dramatizes the basic cultural/political fissures in the United States at this time more than abortion does—although there is competition from gay rights, gun control, and religion in the schools.”

Gordon writes about the Women’s Health Movement and notes that it positively influenced gynecological practice. She also writes about problems with the first generation of oral contraceptives, the notorious Dalkon Shield IUD, the salutary changes among “population control” advocates, and the scandal of sterilization abuse among women of color. Gordon suspects a racial subtext to the 1980s alarm about the rising rate of teenage pregnancies; and she makes the commonsense observation that while the U.S. has a higher teenage pregnancy rate than twenty-seven other industrialized countries, it is also the case that U.S. teenagers are less likely to use contraception that those in comparable countries.

She notes, but does not investigate, the conflicts between women’s rights activists. Mainstream, white and middle-class feminists were slow to recognize the particular concerns of women of color—concerns about forced sterilization, the availability of pre-natal care, and the persistent racism that motivated some birth control activists. In addition, Black Nationalists condemned birth control as a genocidal plot. Black women who hoped for a larger understanding of reproductive rights as well as access to birth control and abortion struggled both within their communities and with white women’s organizations. Gordon’s comprehensive and astute analysis of the first many decades of birth control advocacy encourage the reader to want more of the same about the last several decades. Still, Gordon’s book remains a superb examination of birth control politics.

Photo credit:

Unknown photographer, “Ms. Margaret Sanger,”

Bains News Service via The Library of Congress

Warren K. Leffler, “Demonstration protesting anti-abortion candidate Ellen McCormack at the Democratic National Convention, New York City,” 14 July 1976

Photographer’s own via The Library of Congress

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Harvard University Professor of History Jill Lepore’s article on Planned Parenthood in a November 2011 issue of The New Yorker.

Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905–1960 by Ann Farnsworth-Alvear (2000)

by Lizeth Elizondo

Dulcinea in the Factory presents a gendered historical analysis of the boom in the textiles industry in Medellín that goes beyond the typical economic analysis of industry-based modernity. It places gender in the context of the roles of the church and the paternalistic factory owners as well as the memories of the workers, to tell this history of forgotten myths and morals in the workplace. Dulcinea in the Factory shows that male factory owners, managers, and church officials saw themselves as Don Quixotes protecting fragile, virginal Dulcineas –their female employees. However, as Farnsworth-Alvear reveals, the real Dulcineas, the mujeres obreras (working women) found clever ways of coping with such fervent guardianship.

Farnsworth-Alvear offers a synopsis of the evolution of industrial work in Medellín by examining the modernizing projects pushed by the technocrat elites who established the first textile factories. As the title implies, this industrial project was an experiment that merged modernity and religion on the factory floor. Housing, recreational facilities, and company-sponsored activities simultaneously monopolized control and granted factory owners opportunities for public display of their protective and affectionate nature toward the female workforce. In the same vein, Catholic rhetoric depicting a vulnerable, virginal, working woman influenced factory guidelines aimed at protecting women from arduous factory work and sexually precarious situations. As the author emphasizes, the close relationship between the factory and religious rhetoric is an important component to consider when evaluating the shifts in factory policy in Medellín.

Yet, these imaginary threats to chastity, painted by the church and reinforced by factory rules, were often challenged by those women who did not consider themselves in need of protection. The author’s interviews reveal that some women were far from afraid of their workingmen counterparts and they often spoke out defending themselves in a variety of ways. Farnsworth-Alvear brilliantly utilizes a combination of statistical sources and oral history that together reveal the ideologies, challenges, and lived experiences of the workers. Oral interviews uncover the secret ways in which both women and men obstructed severe factory regimens: courtships, secret marriages, pregnancies, and even abortions occurred under this strict paternalism.

By focusing on gender relations and by comparing statistical and archival material with interviews of workers, the book offers a rich history of labor, gender, and class relations in Medellín. What emerges in Dulcinea in the Factory illuminates the experiences of those involved in the Medellín modernizing project. For sixty years, workers – whatever their gender and social stratum – had significant power in negotiating their own fate. This book offers an important contribution to the study of labor and gender. More importantly, it effectively incorporates the often-neglected social and cultural component into our understanding of industrial modernity.

Photo credits:

Dmitri Kessel, “Overhead view of housing project for workers,” Medellin, Colombia, July 1947

LIFE Magazine via Flickr Creative Commons

Dmitri Kessel, “Worker sorting leaves in a tobacco factory,” Medellin, Colombia, July 1947

LIFE Magazine via Flickr Creative Commons

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Michelle Reeves’ review of Hal Brands’ Latin America’s Cold War.

Yarico’s Story

by Jessica Wolcott Luther

The original story of Yarico is from Richard Ligon’s 1657, A True and Exact History of Barbados:

This Indian dwelling neer the Sea-coast, upon the Main, an English ship put in to a Bay, and sent some of her men a shoar, to try what victualls or water they could finde, for in some distresse they were:

But the Indians perceiving them to go up so far into the Country, as they were sure they could not make a safe retreat, intercepted them in their return, and fell upon them, chasing them into a Wood, and being dispersed there, some were taken, and some kill’d:

but a young man amongst them stragling from the rest, was met by this Indian Maid, who upon the first sight fell in love with him, and hid him close from her Countrymen (the Indians) in a Cave, and there fed him, till they could safely go down to the shoar, where the ship lay at anchor, expecting the return of their friends.

But at last, seeing them upon the shoar, sent the long-Boat for them, took them aboard, and brought them away. But the youth, when he came ashoar in the Barbadoes, forgot the kindnesse of the poor maid, that had ventured her life for his safety, and sold her for a slave, who was as free born as he: And so poor Yarico for her love, lost her liberty.

Ligon’s work was the only comprehensive text published about the English Caribbean throughout the entire seventeenth century. His text was widely read and often quoted. There is no indication from Ligon’s text if his account of Yarico is based on actual people or simply an allegory for how the English treated the native Carib people on Barbados.

Richard Steele, an author and editor of the daily publication The Spectator, picked up the story in 1711 (issue 11 on March 13, 1711). He expanded and elaborated it into the version that became popular during the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.

In his version, he names the Englishman Inkle and describes him as a 20-year-old who was schooled by his father early in life in the “love of gain.” The ship, on its way to Barbados, came under some distress and “put into a Creek on the Main in America, in search of provisions.” There, he met Yarico.

They appeared mutually agreeable to each other. If the European was highly charmed with the Limbs, Features, and wild Graces of the Naked American; the American was no less taken with the Dress, Complexion, and Shape of an European, covered from Head to Foot. The Indian grew immediately enamoured of him, and consequently solicitous for his Preservation.

She hid him and cared for him. “In this manner did the Lovers pass away their Time, till they had learn’d a Language of their own.” They lived this way for a few months. Then Yarico, instructed by Inkle, flagged down a shipped on the coast. When they found out it was traveling to Barbados, Inkle was ecstatic.

It ends thusly:

To be short, Mr. Thomas Inkle, now coming into English territories, began seriously to reflect upon his loss of Time, and to weigh with himself how many Days Interest of his Mony he had lost during his stay with Yarico. This Thought made the Young Man very pensive, and careful what Account he should be able to give his Friends of his Voyage. Upon which considerations, the prudent and frugal young Man sold Yarico to a Barbadian merchant; notwithstanding that the poor Girl, to incline him to commiserate her Condition, told him that she was with Child be him: But he only made use of that Information, to rise in his Demands upon the Purchaser.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, at least 60 versions of the story were published and there were a number of translations (according to Frank Felsenstein). It was made into an opera, a play, rendered in the form of a poem, and was retold many, many times.

While we will never know the veracity of this particular story about this particular indigenous woman (though it’s fair to say that Steele’s additions were fictitious), it does tell us a lot about how the British thought about hierarchy, gender, and the fraught relationship between the British and the people that they enslaved. Yarico shows that from some of the earliest decades of English settlement, there was an uneasiness about the exploitation of other people and the easy slippage between “free” and “enslaved.”

Also, it draws attention specifically to the plight of enslaved women. Yarico’s tale shows how complicated personal relationships were (and are) in a society were power is so unequally distributed. One cannot doubt that there would have been many an enslaved African or indigenous woman sold into slavery by men who had shown them affection, even love. Steele’s version in particular lays bare the almost unimaginable reality in the life of an enslaved woman: her dual role of producer and re-producer, her value was as much in her ability to do the work of a male slave as in the ability of her body to reproduce the next generation of slaves.

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Zach Doleshal’s podcast interview with Jessica Luther

The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics by Bruce J. Schulman (2001)

Bruce J. Schulman, in his 2001 work The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, surveys the history of an overlooked decade. Defining the “long 1970s” as the period between Richard Nixon’s entrance in the White House in 1969 and Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection in 1984, Schulman counters popular conceptions that the decade was seemingly forgettable and unimportant. Instead, he argues that during the 1970s, the United States experienced a transformation in multiple facets of its character that helped shape our current time.

Schulman’s narrative weaves together politics, economics, social developments, and cultural trends to illustrate the significance of this decade. The author asserts that the 1960s effectively ended with the turbulent events of 1968, and when the “Great American Ride,” or booming postwar economy, finally ran its course. During the 1970s, political power in the United States shifted from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and Southwest, the so-called Sunbelt, as Americans, jobs, and federal dollars flocked to these warmer and more business-friendly regions. Politicians such as Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan hailed from Sunbelt states, and recognized such political trends. Indeed, the author suggests that the United States encountered no less than a “southernization” of American life in the decade.

"'No Gas" Signs Were a Common Sight in Oregon During the Fall of 1973, Such as at This Station in Lincoln City Along the Coast — An October 1973 photograph by David Falconer: “‘No Gas” Signs Were a Common Sight in Oregon During the Fall of 1973, Such as at This Station in Lincoln City Along the Coast. Many Stations Closed Earlier, Opened Later and Shut Down on the Weekends 10/1973.” Image courtesy of the author via the National Archives.

Americans experienced significant changes in their attitudes during these years. The tragedy of Vietnam and the trauma of Watergate created much skepticism toward government. People looked to the private sphere and its potential for solving economic and societal problems, a key theme of the later 1980s. Yet while conservatism toward government grew amongst the populace in the 1970s, social and cultural legacies from the 1960s became more mainstream. Many Americans, even southerners, began to accept the immorality of formal, explicit racial segregation and disfranchisement. Long hair and outrageous clothing became the norm for Americans of all political and social backgrounds, while sexuality outside of traditional marriage became widely practiced and accepted, especially amongst the younger generation. Schulman contends that personal liberation and rebellion against authority became key themes of the 1970s, as Americans sought individualism through new outlooks on religion, popular culture, and sexuality.

"Hitchhiker with His Dog, "Tripper", on U.S. 66. U.S. 66 Crosses The Colorado River At Topock — A May 1972 photograph by Charles O’Rear: “Hitchhiker with His Dog, “Tripper”, on U.S. 66. U.S. 66 Crosses The Colorado River At Topock: 05/1972.” Image courtesy of the author via the National Archives.

Although such tendencies developed, not all Americans welcomed them. The author notes that by the late 1970s, the New Right emerged as a powerful force in politics. Religious conservatives, most notably Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, decried social excesses, while anti-feminists, such as Phyllis Schlafly, organized against the Equal Rights Amendment. Affirmative Action and racial busing divided Americans. Economic conservatives railed against taxes. Cold Warriors disillusioned with détente and the outcome of the Vietnam War theorized a new foreign policy, based on American international power and aggressiveness toward the Soviet Union, known as neoconservatism. Schulman proposes that such groups played a major role in Ronald Reagan’s election and reelection to the presidency through exploiting American anxiety. The author commendably illustrates how the 1970s, rather than being an uneventful and lackluster decade, critically affected the course of United States history. The Seventies will prove insightful reading for anyone wishing to reflect upon this transformative time in our nation’s recent past.

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[The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) project, Documerica, a collection of photographs taken by freelance photographers from 1971-77 that capture moments related to environmental problems, EPA activities, and everyday life in the 1970s.]

Dolph Briscoe IV’s review of Sean Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan: A History.

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