Gender & Sexuality: Collected Works from Not Even Past

By Alina Scott

The study of gender continues to evolve and push the discipline of history forward. Over the years, Not Even Past has published a wide range of pieces on the topic. The articles, podcasts, book reviews, and teaching materials span the globe.

This collection features articles and books about gender, the way it is performed, and the myriad of ways it manifests in our day to day lives. This is an index of our articles on gender, sexuality, family, protest, and beyond. It includes film, play, and book reviews, oral histories, discussions with historians of gender, and useful resources for teaching histories of gender in the classroom. 

Articles

UNITED STATES

• “Black Women’s History in the US: Past & Present” by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
• “Black Women in Black Power” by Ashley Farmer
• “White Women and the Economy of Slavery” by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers – In an article based on her groundbreaking book They Were Her Property, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers describes the ways White women willingly engaged in enslavement and benefitted from the labor of enslaved Africans. For example, women typically received slaves from their parents after their death and enslaved women often served as nurses. As Jones-Rogers points out, “white parents raised their daughters with particular expectations related to owning slaves and taught them how to be effective slave masters. These lessons played a formative role in how white women conceptualized their personal relationships to human property, imagined the powers that they would possess once they became slave owners in their own right, and shaped their techniques of slave control.” (Jones-Rogers, 2019)
• “Voting Rights Still Threatened 100 Years After the 19th Amendment” by Laurie Green
• “Remembering the Tex-Son Strike: Legacies of Latina-led Labor Activism in San Antonio, Texas” by Micaela Valadez – On the 60th anniversary of the Tex-Son strike, Micaela Valadez historicizes its legacy and draws our attention to the importance of Latina leadership in Texas labor activism.
• “Historians on Marriage and Sexuality in the United States” by Alex Taft
• “Goddess of Anarchy: Lucy Parsons, American Radical” by Jacqueline Jones
• “Ordinary Yet Infamous: Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso” by by Kali Nicole Gross
• “Cynthia Attaquin and a Wampanoag Network of Petitioners” by Alina Scott–Petitioning significant part in mobilizing Indigenous communities. Alina Scott describes two nineteenth-century petition drives, the networks of Indigenous petitioners that emerged to support them, and a historical legacy of petitioning by and for Indigenous people.
• “The Austin Women Activists Oral History Project” by Laurie Green
• The Day the Gridiron Turned Pink by Seth Franco and Dylan Gill (Cedar Bayou Junior School, Junior Division, Group Exhibit)
• “Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity” by Laurie Green
• “Missing Signatures: The Archives at First Glance” by Alina Scott

EUROPE & ASIA

• “Confucian Patriarchy and the Allure of Communism in China” by Alan Roberts
• “Kusumoto Ine: A Remarkable Woman in Meiji Restoration Japan” by Mark Ravina
• “A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore” by Sandy Chang– Sandy Chang describes her journey in the National Library of Singapore looking for “traces of Chinese migrant women who sailed across the South Seas and settled in British Malaya in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” (Chang, 2017) In “A Historian’s Gaze” Chang recounts the myriad of ways women’s voices appeared, disappeared, and then reappeared in the colonial archive.
• “American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream” by Julia L. Mickenberg
• “Turbo-folk: Pop Music in the Crucible of Balkan History” by Vladislav Beronja
• “Podcasting Migration: Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes“

LATIN AMERICA

• “The Politics of a Handkerchief: Personal Thoughts on the Motif of Female Activism in Argentina” by Paula O’Donnell

 

 

Reviews

• Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019)
• The Drama of Celebrity by Sharon Marcus (2019)
• Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran by Negar Mottahedeh (2019)
• Monroe by Lisa B. Thompson (2018) – Tiana Wilson reviews Lisa B. Thompson’s Monroe, a story of how African Americans navigated life in the Jim Crow era, but more importantly presents rich ideas about “blackness as it pertains to the body, spirituality, cultural traditions, imagined spaces, and racial terror.” (Wilson, 2018).
• Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan. By Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci (2018)
• The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Dir: Desiree Akhavan, 2018)
• A Brief History of Feminism by Patu (illustrations) and Antje Schrupp and translated by Sophie Lewis (2017)
• Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (2016)
• Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Clare Sears (2015)
• The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter (2011)
• Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico by Shirley Boteler Mock (2010)
• Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba (2010)
• Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí by Jane Mangan (2005)
• Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey (2005)
• State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State by Ulrike Strasser (2004)
• Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia, By Douglas Northrup (2003)
• Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973, by Heidi Tinsman (2002)
• Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (2000)
• From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, by Barbara Newman (1995)
• Five Sisters: Women Against The Tsar | Faculty Recommendation Series

 

Podcasts on Gender, Sexuality, and the Family

• Episode 50: White Women of the Harlem Renaissance with Carla Kaplan– 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.
• Episode 83: Simone de Beauvoir and ‘The Second Sex’ with Judith Coffin – Simone 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. 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.
• Episode 88: The Search for Family Lost in Slavery with Heather Andrea Williams– One of the most callous and tragic aspects of slavery in the United States was the slave owners’ practice of dividing families: children were taken from parents, husbands and wives were separated, brothers and sisters too. Our guest, Heather Williams, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a moving book about on the subject, Help Me Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery.
• Episode 91: The History of the Family with Steven Mintz – Steven Mintz (UT History Department) has long been interested in the transformations of family life through the ages and, in this episode, talks about how nearly everything we think we know about family life would be unrecognizable even a century ago.
• Episode 93: Women and the Tamil Epics with Andrea Gutierrez – Guest Andrea Gutierrez introduces us to epic South Asian poems from the beginning of the first millennium that past the Bechdel test, when women’s narrative critiqued, cajoled, narrated, and provided guidance for the devout.
• Episode 102: The “Servant Girl Annihilator” with Dr. Lauren Henley – In 1885, the world’s attention was focused on a series of grisly murders that took place in the otherwise quiet town of Austin, Texas. Several African-American women were murdered in the middle of the night, leading the press to dub the unknown assailant “the Servant-Girl Annihilator.” Some even went so far as to speculate that Jack the Ripper was the same person. Lauren Henley describes the events of 1884-85, but also discusses how these murders tell us something about the uneasy racial history of the postbellum south, and also asks what drives our fascination with serial killers and unsolved mysteries.
• Episode 108: A History of the U.S. Marine Corp with Aaron O’Connell– In the early part of the 20th century, the Marine Corp was the poorest funded and least respected branch of the military, and at the end of World War Two there was actually a movement to shut them down. How, then, did this transformation from relative unpopularity to the most prestigious armed service in the United States occur? Aaron O’Connell, a history professor at UT Austin, joins us today to describe how, as the Cold War heated up, Marines utilized their own internal culture to win power and influence throughout U.S. political and social circles.
• Episode 112: Harvey Milk, Forty Years Later with Lisa L. Moore – Harvey Milk was one of the first openly gay politicians in California, and his short political career was not only emblematic of the wider gay liberation movement at the time, but his death and legacy inspired a new generation of activism which was seen not only during the 1980s AIDS crisis, but has lingering impacts four decades later. In this episode, we are joined by Lisa L. Moore from the University of Texas’s English Department and incoming chair of the new LGBTQ Studies portfolio program, to discuss the legacy of Harvey Milk on the 40th anniversary of his assassination.
• Episode 120: Slave-Owning Women in the Antebellum U.S. with Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers– Historians have long assumed that white women in the U.S. south benefited only indirectly from the ownership of enslaved people. Historians have neglected these women because their behavior didn’t conform to the picture we have of the patriarchal culture of the 18-19 century marriage. In an extraordinary new book, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers shows that “slave owning women not only witnessed the most brutal features of slavery, they took part in them, they profited from them, and they defended them.” Prof. Jones-Rogers joins us today to talk about the narratives of formerly enslaved people, whose testimony changes the way we view those white women and the lives of the enslaved in the U.S.
• Episode 121: The Case for Women’s History with Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Dr. Lisa G. Materson – Both editors of the Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History, Hartigan O’Connor and Matterson, professors of history at the University of California, Davis, join us to discuss the field of women’s studies, which as they’ve argued in the introduction to the book, is not an esoteric topic at all, but actually quite critical to our understanding of American history.
• Episode 122: The History of Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy in the U.S. with Chris Babits– Sexual orientation conversion therapy, the attempt to change one’s sexual orientation through psychological or therapeutic practice, has now been banned in 17 American states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, three Canadian provinces, one state in Australia and several nations in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Beyond the merits of sexual orientation conversion therapy as a medical practice, however, lies a social importance of what the practice represents for a segment of American society.Chris Babits, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where he researches the history of the practice and why so many people still support it, even in the face of opposition from medical and psychological professionals.

Additional episodes available on 15MinuteHistory.org

 

 

Teaching Materials

• US Survey Course: US Women’s History
• Great Books on Women’s History: Asia
• Great Books on Women’s History: United States
• Great Books on Women’s History: Europe
• Great Books on Women’s History: Crossing Borders
• On Women and Nation in India
• New Books in Women’s History (2013)

Related Collections on Not Even Past:

• Black Resistance and Resilience: Collected Works From Not Even Past
• Slavery World Wide: Collected Works from Not Even Past

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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.