20th Century Archives - Page 6 of 19

Episode 119 – Beatlemania and the 55th Anniversary of the First Beatles Tour to the US

The Beatles arrived for their first concert in the United States on February 11, 1964, to rabid fanfare. Legions of screaming women greeted John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr at every stop of the U.S. tour, leading to observers dubbing the period “Beatlemania.” As one of the most commercially successful and influential musicians of all time, almost every pop music artist cites their influence over their music. Yet who were the Beatles? What was their music like? And why were they so popular?

Ph.D. student in history Eddie Watson and host Augusta Dell’Omo take us deep into the history of the Beatles’ first tour in the United States and reveal why we should understand these popular cultural movements. But, perhaps most importantly, Eddie tells us who is the best Beatle, reveals their greatest hits, and regales us of his own attempt at the Beatle bowl cut.

Episode 118: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity

Host: Christopher Rose, Department of History
Guest: Megan Raby, Department of History

Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research.

Megan Raby describes how, from these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American “tropical biologists” developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity.

“London is Drowning and I, I Live by the River”: The Clash’s London Calling at 40

By Edward Watson

On February 7, Seattle’s non-profit broadcaster KEXP headed to London for their seventh annual International Clash Day. In celebration of The Clash’s London Calling turning 40 in December 2019, KEXP organized a 4-day live broadcast in Seattle and London, featuring performances from contemporary bands and covers of The Clash’s songs. Their intention was to highlight the “enduring influence” of The Clash’s music as well as their “human rights message.” Released in the UK in December 1979 and in the US in January 1980, London Calling is widely recognized as one of the most influential albums of the twentieth century. Rolling Stone listed it as the eighth best album of all time, Q Magazine listed it at number 20, and the NME placed it at number 39.

The Clash are tied to punk’s emergence in 1976. After the band made its live debut supporting the Sex Pistols in Sheffield in 1976, The Clash became one of the key players in London’s punk scene. By January the following year, The Clash had signed with CBS Records for £100,000 and in April they released their self-titled debut album. The record deal was considered an astronomical fee by the music press and fans alike. Mark Perry, founder of influential punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue, claimed, “punk died the day The Clash signed to CBS.” Nonetheless, The Clash’s debut record was still recognizably a punk record. London Calling, however, reflected the band’s exploration into styles of music that transcended their punk origins, such as rock and roll, reggae, and ska. In spite of their substantial record deal, The Clash struggled financially. By 1979, The Clash was largely in debt and they were at war with their record company. They needed a commercial success and fast. London Calling delivered, selling around two million copies upon its release. In the UK, it was certified gold in December 1979 and in the US it peaked at number 27 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart.

Cover of the first edition of Sniffin’ Glue (via Wikipedia)

In addition to its diverse range of musical influences, London Calling’s success derived from its sociopolitical content. In the album’s title track, Joe Strummer declared, “we ain’t got no swing, ‘cept for the ring of that truncheon thing.” Strummer was referring to the collapse of what Time had labeled “Swinging” London in the 1960s, evoking police truncheons and riots in the city to elucidate a growing sense of turmoil in the 1970s. After the optimism of the 1960s, London seemed culturally and politically stagnant. But these changes were not just limited to the city of London. London Calling was released at a critical moment in Britain’s post-war history: unemployment was on the rise; there were frequent trade union strikes in 1973 and 1974; the British government sought a loan from the IMF in 1976; and ongoing disputes between James Callaghan’s Labour government and trade unions during the coldest winter for 16 years was dubbed the “Winter of Discontent” in 1978 and early 1979. Britain, once a manufacturing and imperial powerhouse on the global stage, was perceived to be in sociopolitical disarray. The overarching sense of doom and disorder was a large factor in Thatcher’s election in May 1979. Not only this, but the punk movement seemed to have lost its early momentum as an articulation of political and cultural discontent. “Phony Beatlemania” Strummer dubbed it, had “bitten the dust.”

Even though historians such as Jim Tomlinson and Andy Beckett have argued that the doom and gloom of the 1970s tends to be exaggerated, The Clash spoke to genuine political discontent and a seemingly desolate socioeconomic climate. Their earliest songs were particularly scathing about the state of the world. “White Riot” expressed exasperation at the lack of white working-class struggle, claiming “all the power’s in the hands, of people rich enough to buy it, while we walk the street, too chicken to even try it.” “London’s Burning” reflected on cultural stagnation and crippling boredom and “I’m so Bored with the U.S.A.” critiqued American imperialism: “Yankee dollar talk, to the dictators of the world, in fact it’s giving orders, and they can’t afford to miss a word.” The Clash was one of the more overtly political punk bands, using punk’s fast-paced, urgent, and aggressive style to critique 1970s society from the left.

London Calling continued in this vein, with most of its songs predictably centered on London. “Jimmy Jazz” and “Guns of Brixton” tell the stories of fictional characters in the city’s criminal underbelly. “Rudie Can’t Fail,” a heavily ska-influenced song, documents how young first-generation immigrant men, known as “rude boys,” were often subject to scorn from the British white middle class. The Clash also described how young people often neglect their idealism and political views once they get older and more comfortable in “Clampdown.” In “Spanish Bombs” the band drew comparisons between the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and the rhetoric of Basque nationalists of the late 1970s. “Lost in the Supermarket,” offers a critique of consumerism as a key reason for political apathy and “Lovers Rock” endorses safe sex and family planning. Finally, the title track and album opener depicts a scene of rising unemployment, racial tensions, and drug use. London Calling is a scathing sociocultural commentary of the 1970s. This was reflected on International Clash Day when KEXP spotlighted various social justice organizations “because The Clash was anti-racist, anti-fear, pro-solidarity, pro-unity, pro-inclusion.”

But questions about whether The Clash had sold out never went away. To some, these doubts undermined the legacy of London Calling with regard to its political message. Others see a more complex history. American artist and activist, Mark Vallen, argued in 2002 that even though The Clash had sold out by allowing Jaguar to use “London Calling” to advertise cars, its original composition had been in keeping with the punk ethos. “When The Clash released London Calling,” he claimed, “the song was one of the band’s most chilling works. Ominous and dark, it foretold of the Western world collapsing in a spasm of war and out of control technologies, it addressed our fears of government repression.” Although some people in the punk movement believed The Clash had already sold out by this point, the initial excitement that London Calling generated was contingent on the authenticity of its political message.

London Calling’s continued popularity is largely down to a careful balancing act. The album could be called the greatest punk rock record of the era or it could be said that it is not a punk rock record at all. From a musical perspective, it is an amalgamation of various styles. Particularly, it pays homage to rock and roll. The album cover captures bassist Paul Simonon smashing his bass guitar on stage. This rock cliché is anchored by a logotype referencing Elvis Presley’s 1956 debut album. Musically, it was a nod to the past while incorporating an eclectic blend of contemporary styles. The three cover songs on the album emphasize this: “Wrong ‘em Boyo” and “Revolution Rock” were first recorded by reggae artists and the other was “Brand New Cadillac,” originally a rock and roll song from 1959. All three sound at home on the album next to the Clash’s original compositions.

London Calling undeniably helped bridge the divide between punk as music and punk as a historical moment. It normalized punk as a credible genre of music while articulating the sociopolitical grievances that British punks were reacting to: high unemployment, racial politics, and the sense that society around them was falling apart. The album has the feeling of a party during the apocalypse. From a historical perspective, even though The Clash had signed to a record label – a cardinal sin for a 70s punk rock band – their wide-ranging sociopolitical commentary encapsulated the cynical mood of the late 1970s. At the end of the title track there is a message in Morse code, created using Mick Jones’ guitar pickups, that spells out S-O-S. Amidst political crises in Westminster, London Calling’s apocalyptic tone is as relevant to Britain in 2019 as it was in the winter of 1979.

Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali

Nikita Khrushchev is one of the most important men of the last century. Moreover, he was the main protagonist of Soviet foreign policy during the most perilous period of the Cold War which climaxed with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. How dangerous was the Soviet Union to the West during Khrushchev’s term? Which factors contributed to sow distrust between the United States and the Soviet Union, and to what extent the Soviet menace was more bluff than real capabilities? Fursenko and Naftali answer these questions successfully by presenting an extensive and well-researched study that uncovers Soviet foreign policy during the Khrushchev’s Era.

In Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, the authors explore the complicated balance between cooperation with the West and competition for Third World support that undergirded the Soviet diplomatic strategy from 1955 to 1963.To understand these diplomatic maneuvers, Fursenko and Naftali focus on Khrushchev’s complex policies of building détente with his penchant for risky brinkmanship and coercive diplomacy which, he hoped, would yield substantive geopolitical gains. From the two Germanys question to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the final outcome of this dual diplomatic approach proved contradictory. The competition for Third World allies diverted scarce economic resources from domestic problems, and exacerbated tensions between the superpowers effectively undermining any sustainable opportunity for détente.

Fursenko and Naftali underline two elements that contributed to heightened tensions during the Cold War. The first one, perception in international politics, led to the frequent misreading of the adversary’s intentions, fostering a strong and lingering feeling of mistrust and deception. This atmosphere of misunderstanding transformed the years between 1958 and 1962 into the most dangerous period of the Cold War concluding with the perilous Cuban Crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

1960s poster with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev: “Long live the eternal, indestructible friendship and cooperation between the Soviet and Cuban peoples” (via Wikipedia)

The second element draws on the first, and involves the crucial role played by Third World leaders in aggravating the perceived threat that each superpower felt from the other. The authors do an excellent job in dispelling one of the greatest myths of the Cold War, the erroneous impression that the United States and the Soviet Union orchestrated and fully controlled events in Africa, Asia and Latin America. To the contrary, leaders like Fidel Castro and Gamal Nasser skillfully courted and played off the superpowers for their own gains. This perspective restores a great deal of agency to social and political actors that in other Cold War narratives have been relegated to the roles of mere pawns.

The authors conclude that Khrushchev’s foreign policy did much to preserve the boundaries of the Soviet empire but less in extracting considerable geopolitical concessions from the West. The inherent military weaknesses of the Soviet Union, coupled with limited economic resources, led Khrushchev to rely more on the appearance rather than the reality of Soviet power. However, his brinkmanship at least succeeded in deterring the United States from invading Cuba and in securing recognition for East Germany in the long run.

The book’s writing style is fluid with a clear prose, making it accessible to any audience. This is quite an achievement in a co-authored work. Fursenko and Naftali also succeed in providing an informative and compelling account of Soviet foreign policy under Khrushchev by relying mostly on declassified material from the Soviet Presidium. It is certainly a pertinent starting point for anyone interested in the intricacies of world affairs and foreign relations from the Soviet perspective.

From There to Here: Matthew Butler

Map of West Germany (in blue), where Dr. Butler was born (via Wikipedia)

I can’t claim to have a particularly fascinating or intrepid migrant story, just a slightly convoluted one: I came to the US from the UK in 2008, though I had not lived in “my” part of the UK, England, for five years before that because when I moved here, it was from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Even the “my” feels a bit elective, since I wasn’t born in England but in West Germany as the child of a British services family, and have spent a lot of time living in and studying Mexico. All of this is to say that people can have multiple and cumulative senses of belonging and that borders are often arbitrary things––just as that archaic-sounding phrase, “West Germany,” tells us. I came to Austin to work, then, pure and simple, but expecting that home would soon be where the heart is. Sometimes, actually, I think Texas claimed me long ago because I have always been fascinated by vaquero-culture; I still like the fact that a bus ride to UT down I-35 rolls along the Chisolm Trail. Really I came to Austin because UT has a brilliant Latin American History program with an incredible library and archive, the Benson Collection, largely focused on Mexico. And sunshine, which hasn’t been invented in England yet. I’ve stayed in Texas because I like it (mostly), because my son was born here, and because my students are always teaching me new things. Mexico is also our neighbor: for me it’s a privilege to work in a University that has such historic and actual ties with the country I study, and so many Mexican and latino students.

Others in this series

From There to Here: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Map of Ecuador (via Wikimedia)

I arrived in the Unites States 30 years ago, penniless but wide-eyed. I did not come to be a graduate student. I came as a migrant, fleeing war. I was fortunate. I met my first wife in Ecuador and she was a US citizen, I therefore did not come undocumented. Since I had only a smattering of English and everything in this country was wholly unknown to me, it took me months to find a job as a dishwasher. It was not easy: I had been trained as a medical doctor. I originally applied to a degree in Neurophysiology but Tufts turned me down. Then, one day, I serendipitously found in Madison courses on Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus. I immediately applied to the History of Science and got in without funding. I waited a year to establish residency. In the meantime, I learned to speak and write in English. I kept on working as a minimum wage, fast-food cook for five years while taking seminars and doing research. Graduate school was a mixture of homesickness, material hardship, and intellectual feasting. I loved every minute.

Others in this series

From There to Here: Indrani Chatterjee

In 1947, when British India was carved into two states of India and Pakistan, many Hindu families relocated from eastern Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971) to Indian Bengal. My parents came from two such families. My father was deeply curious about the world, and bought various Readers Digest and National Geographic publications on a meager rupee-based salary, earned as a doctor in the postcolonial Indian army. My youth was shaped by his predicament, balancing between his own ‘outsider’ status in the complex social-political world of postcolonial India, and the straining to flee these complexities for a world conjured up by books, theater, film.

In the 1980s, when I wanted to pursue research in history, funds were scarce. I worked as an adjunct at various women’s colleges for some years, learning to teach neo-literate young girls about distant places and long-ago events in Hindi when necessary. I met my partner, another historian, at a teacher’s strike for better wages during one such stint. Five years later, a scholarship to pursue research in School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, finally gave me the chance to belong to the land of books my parents had taught me to love.

The wealth of records in the SOAS Library, British Library and the British Museum convinced me to remain in the field of teaching and research, and to make these gains available to others in the country of my origin. But the country of my birth-origin had moved on by the late 1990s. Though I resigned my tenured job of teaching in a college of Delhi University, and moved to a full-time research position in my mother’s beloved city, Calcutta, the ethnic-linguistic and religious sectarianisms of the closing years of the millennium also narrowed research agendas. The Indian elections of 1998 were decisive in that regard. My life in research, as distinct from my partner’s, was over if we did not relocate. By 2000, we had both begun another version of ‘outsider’ lives, this time in the North American academe, he as a chair-holding professor, and me as a spouse on a visa that disallowed paid employment! Then began the struggle to secure work-authorization and the green card (resident status), learning the rituals of professional belonging – the job-search, from letter-writing to securing letter-writers for one’s own research, the social codes undergirding the profession. Mercifully, there were the Journal of Higher Education, various web-sites for applicants, and more than a little help from my friends. With all these tools, a brave Black feminist Chair heading a search at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ and an inheritance of survivorship, I entered the academic workforce in 2001. And here I am, a citizen, learning my way through the delightful open stacks of the Perry Castañeda Library, willing to do whatever it takes to preserve this new country of mine for the perpetually curious.

Others in this series

Photography, Film Criticism, and Left Politics

By Jessica Werneke

Each year, a group of artists, art historians, and visual theorists meet at a conference to discuss the intersections of the visual, art, aesthetics, activism, and politics. Among many other important contributions, the conference is designed to involve individuals from a variety of institutions and backgrounds to unite scholars whose critical approach to photography, cinema and film is from “the Left.” As a historian of photography, I attended this conference for the first time this year. While there were many valuable and insightful presentations, several stood out not only for their original contributions, but also for the contemporary relevance of their ongoing artistic and research projects.

Dr. Nela Milic’s (University of the Arts, London) Materialising Site, was a description of her ongoing research cum artistic project visualizing the political awakening of Serbia in 1996 through visualizations of Belgrade. Melic’s personal experience of the uprisings against Milosevic, with nearly 200,000 protesters on a daily basis, was the initial impetus for her project. Yet, in her early research she found that Western European discourses not only misrepresent the scale of events of 1996, but have a tendency to outright ignore historical events. Similarly, those who participated in the uprising expressed a sense of shame that their efforts were unsuccessful, and no individual had ever attempted to archive the many visual and artistic materials associated with the protests. Her response is an innovative endeavor that seeks to activate Belgrade’s memory through participatory mapping of the city – conducting interviews, collecting images, posters, coupons, and photographs that function as public art artifacts in a collaboration between artist(s) and citizens. This project has existed in several forms and iterations before Milic decided on its current format.

In her presentation, Brigitte Thorsen Vislev (PhD-fellow affiliated with SMK, the National Gallery of Denmark, the Danish Film Institute and the University of Copenhagen) explored ABCinema, a socialist amateur film collective founded in Denmark in 1968. The group wanted to construct an alternative to the established film industry and desired to create a new alphabet, language and vocabulary for art film. They worked primarily with handheld Super 8 cameras, and their philosophy of film did not require theatricality or even a script, and incorporated long takes (essentially until the film reel ran out), real time situations, and editing “in the camera”; that is editing while shooting rather than afterwards. The collective included about 30 artists, experimental filmmakers, and intellectuals, including Per Kirkeby, Bjørn Nørgaard, and Ole John, whose philosophy and style later influenced the more renowned Danish Dogma Movement of the 1990s. According to Vislev, “The Danish film movement of the 1960s was ideologically founded on left-wing, Danish social-democratic Marxist ideas, and that cameras were pens and weapons used to revolutionize social hierarchies and to question who had the rights and access to the means of production.” Though the group dissolved in 1971, ABCinema was instrumental in changing legislation on film financing. New state funds were set aside for art film, which allowed individuals to apply for funding based on their ideas, rather than a completed script. In 1972, a new law was ratified which set aside funding to exclusively support experimental films. See this link for an example of ABCinema’s work.

In “Picturing the Predator: Subverting the Military Sublime,” Paul Lowe (Photographer and Reader in Documentary Photography at University of the Arts, London) explained how modern warfare, particularly the use of drones for surveillance and targeting “enemies of the state,” poses a challenge of representation for photographers. The sanitized and depersonalized nature of drone warfare has led photographers to find alternative means of expressing and depicting the consequences of invisible weapons systems. Contrary to the depictions of drones on government military websites and corporate purveyors of military technology that sanitize this technology (despite civilian casualties and the significant loss of life), photographers like James Bridle have tried to reclaim some measure of depicting the realities of war. In his works Drone Shadows and “Dronestagram,” Bridle attempts to render the invisibility of drone warfare visible. Importantly, Lowe, who built his career on photographing conflict, demonstrates the difficulty and complexities of how to represent the contemporary military state and modern warfare.

James Bridle, Drone Shadow 004, Washington D.C., 2013 (via Dezeen)

Dr. Sigrid Lien’s (University of Bergen, Norway) presentation “The Politics of Silence in Marja Helander’s Photography – and Video Production” investigates Marja Helander’s body of work and its connection to her Sámi heritage. The Sámi are an indigenous people inhabiting Sápmi, which includes parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Murmansk region of the Russian Federation, whose language, culture and land have been, and in some ways, continue to be, threatened by adverse government policies in Scandinavia and Russia. As Lein demonstrates, Silence – Jaskes eatnamat, as well as Helander’s previous photographic series such as Modern Nomad and Darkness, need to be understood in terms of the Sámi people’s relationship to their ancestry, the present, and their spiritual connection to the Sápmi landscape. Silence depicts industrial landscapes and wastelands devoid of humans, but obviously bear traces of human activity, in order explore the aftermath of colonization in Sápmi. Lein also attempted to explain how various aspects of Helander’s work pay homage to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, though I was not wholly convinced by this argument. In a way, Silence falls into the category of “aftermath” photography, recording the trace of an event or series of events. As a whole, however, Helander’s body of work expresses the artist’s and the Sámi people’s conflicted sense of belonging.

Marja Helander, from the Series Silence – Jaskes eatnamat, 2016 (via Sami Center for Contemporary Art)

Marja Helander, from the Series Darkness, 2010 (via Marja Helander)

Jessie Bond (Freelance writer, editor, and research student at University of the Arts London) explored Susan Meiselas’ 1981 photobook Nicaragua, which was intended to create a “multi-layered and multi-voiced narrative” about the Nicaraguan Revolution and the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1978-1979. As one of the only American documentary photographers present during the initial Sandinista uprising, her photographs were published frequently in the press and the photobook Nicaragua was Meisela’s attempt at creating a more comprehensive narrative of the revolution. At the time of its publication Nicaragua was criticized for a variety of reasons, ranging from Meiselas’ lack of subjectivity to the separation of text and images in the book itself. Crucially, however, this separation of text and image allows the reader or viewer some fluidity in interpreting Meiselas’ narrative, but the order of the images themselves provides a sort of contextual chronology from unrest and protests to open insurrection. Similarly, Bond showed that Nicaragua was not Meiselas’ first project that avoided overarching strict or set narratives. Meiselas herself recognized her work was subjective and, according to Bond, the fluid narrative and structure of the book perhaps provides a closer visual representation of the experience of revolution than other, similar publications. Isabel Stein’s (The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) presentation “Molotov-Click: The Domestication of Weapons” also discussed Susan Meiselas’ work in Nicaragua, primarily her iconic image “Molotov Man.”

Susan Meiselas, Molotov Man, 1979 (via Wikipedia)

These presentations provide us with a variety of new ways to think about and study the history of photography. The range of topics and the interdisciplinarity of their approaches to visual culture also offer us tools for thinking about the photographs that we see every day and the roles they play in society and our everyday lives.

Each year, this conference is hosted by the Faculty of Beles Artes of the University of Lisbon. (this year 9-10 November,). I would like to thank Alise Tifentale (PhD Candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York), for suggesting I attend.

Jessica Werneke (UT History PhD, 2015) is a Newton International Fellow of the British Academy and Lecturer in History at Loughborough University (UK) and former Postdoctoral Researcher at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Her research explores the aftermath of Stalinist cultural policies in photography and visual culture, and the impact of the unique political and cultural context of the “Thaw” on photojournalism and amateur photography. You can read more of her essays on photography on her blog, Sovetskoe Foto Blog.

From There to Here: Lina de Castillo

By Lina de Castillo

Map of Columbia (via Wikipedia)

In September of 1980, my mother took a calculated risk. As a talented singer with perfect pitch frustrated by a broken marriage and limiting law career, my mom left Bogotá, Colombia to pursue her dream of opera singing. My father, already starting his second family, agreed that my brother and I needed to go with her. My maternal grandparents followed us to the United States soon thereafter. While my mother worked hard to win first prize at international lyric-opera competitions with the help of a renowned voice coach, my brother and I worked hard to learn English and excel in school with the help of caring teachers, our grandparents, and kind friends. We both were inspired by our mother’s tremendous efforts and her willingness to take risks. Although my daily life during the school year took place in Westchester County, New York, an important part of my childhood also took place in Bogotá, where I spent many summers and occasional winter breaks with my Colombian family. I yearned to learn more about the place of my birth. I also missed my family terribly when I wasn’t with them. At the same time, I appreciated the security, opportunities, and friendships I found in the United States.

Curiously, although Latin America was often included in the content of our social studies textbooks, we rarely got the chance to actually study the region. As an undergraduate student at Cornell University, I finally found courses that began to teach me about Latin America, including a course on US-Latino literature (the gendered sensitivity evoked by “Latinx” had yet to be imagined). For the spring semester of my junior year, I decided to ‘study abroad’ at home in Colombia. Doing so proved to be one of the most eye-opening and academically satisfying experiences of my life up to that point. The international relations seminar I took with Juan Gabriel Tokatlian at la Universidad de los Andes helped me see more clearly the problems that come with treating a public health crisis (drug addiction) through militarization and strategies of war. At the Javeriana University, I signed up for a graduate-level seminar on the Annales school, a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century that stresses long-term social history. A fellow student openly revealed his Marxist leanings and offered memorable critiques of our readings. These conversations for the first time allowed me to realize that there could be different schools of thought when it came time to develop historical analyses. Upon graduation, I decided to return to Colombia, where I taught a version of the US-Latino literature course at the university level, but only until my supervisor required that I teach the 19th-Century Colombian History survey. These experiences, together with the friendships I made with colleagues at la Javeriana and los Andes made one thing clear: if I wanted to be serious about teaching and researching at the university level, I needed to pursue graduate study in the United States. At the end of the day, the only career track that would allow me to bi-locate between my two beloved homes, the United States and Colombia, was the historical profession.

Also in this series:

Tatjana Lichtenstein
Julie Hardwick
Toyin Falola
Yoac Di-Capua
Susan Deans-Smith

Confucian Patriarchy and the Allure of Communism in China

By Alan Roberts

Former flag of the communist part of China (via Wikipedia)

Despite a growing tolerance for socialism, “communism” is still a dirty word for most Americans. Many point to Stalin’s Gulag, the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, and the repressive Kim dynasty in Korea as they preface the question how could communism ever appeal to anyone? For each country, there are myriad answers to that question, but it is useful to consider the historical situation in each nation before they embraced communism.

In China, for instance, there were political, economic, and nationalistic reasons for the popularity of communism, but interestingly, Chairman Mao Zedong’s movement found broad popular support in part because of his explicit efforts to enforce gender equality. It was he, after all, who proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky.”^[1] Compared with China’s Confucian patriarchal system that had oppressed women for so long, many saw this as a welcome change. Nevertheless, part of what makes patriarchy so insidious is its ability to trick whole generations of people—including women—into propagating an oppressive system rather than overthrowing it.

Judith Bennett’s History Matters analyzes patriarchy in a medieval European context, but her theoretical claims could also be applied to pre-communist Chinese society in general, and Confucianism in particular. Bennett points out that it is problematic to broadly assume that men alone are the perpetrators of patriarchy and that women are their passive victims. While the institution of patriarchy certainly privileges the masculine over the feminine, Bennett also states that patriarchy has harmed individual men just as it has benefitted individual women. Indeed, certain women have not only benefited from it, but have also served as active “agents of patriarchy.”^[2]

Portrait of Confucius, painted by Wu Daozi, 685-7 58 (via Wikipedia)

Confucius lived circa 500 BCE, but it was not until the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) that Confucianism became the official state ideology. Since then, Confucianism was not simply a “main character” in Chinese society but also the stage, set, and scenery upon which the play of Chinese daily life unfolded. Central to Confucian philosophy is the doctrine of filial piety. This principle teaches that universal harmony is maintained when everyone shows proper respect to their elders because the organization of the family is a microcosm patterned after the organization of the state. A filial son honors his father, but filial piety also articulates the rules of conduct between friends, elder and younger brothers, husbands and wives, subjects and emperors. In this way, society is hierarchically structured with men ruling over women and the old ruling over the young, all the way from the lowliest peasant granddaughter to the imperial Son of Heaven.

At the apex of the Confucian philosophical pantheon sits Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi. Writing almost four-hundred years after the fact, the Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang (79-8 BCE) compiled a biography of 125 women who each exemplified Han feminine virtues. One of these women was the mother of Mencius, who, according to Liu, taught her son that a woman’s duties are to cook the five grains, heat the wine, look after her parents-in-law, make clothes, and that is all! This means that a woman’s duty is not to control or to take charge. Instead she must follow the ‘three submissions.’ When she is young, she must submit to her parents. After her marriage, she must submit to her husband. When she is widowed, she must submit to her son. These are the rules of propriety.^[3]

It is worth pointing out that although this quote is attributed to the mother of Mencius, it was actually written centuries later by a man whose intention was to reinforce the patriarchal order by projecting stereotypical female attitudes into the mouth of an authoritative woman whose own gravitas is enhanced by the respected tradition surrounding her son. However, Liu Xiang laid the foundation for others to buttress the Confucian patriarchy.

Photo of He Zhen (via Wikipedia)

Almost a hundred years after Liu Xiang, Ban Zhao, China’s first female historian, wrote a book titled Admonitions for Women. Her work condemns spousal abuse, but this text would certainly qualify Ban Zhao as one of Bennett’s “agents of patriarchy”:

On the third day after the birth of a girl…lay the baby below the bed [to] plainly indicate that she [is] lowly and humble and should regard it as a prime duty to submit to others…give her a spindle with which to play [signifying] that she should accustom herself to labor and consider it a prime duty to be industrious. Let a woman modestly yield to others; let her put others first, herself last. Should she do something good, let her not mention it; should she do something bad, let her not deny it. Let her bear contempt; let her even endure when others speak or do evil to her. Always let her seem to tremble and to fear.^[4]

A thousand years later, Confucian patriarchy would intersect gender and class by adding foot binding to its repertoire of female suppression. While women of the upper class suffered the debilitating pain and immobility of having bound feet, women of the lower classes without bound feet suffered socially from diminished marriage prospects and public humiliation. However, prior to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, bowing to society’s unrealistic beauty standards, all classes of Chinese women were binding their feet. Roughly half of all Chinese women had bound feet, although the percentage rose significantly among the upper classes. Although many Chinese emperors and administrators tried to outlaw the practice, only the communists were successful at doing so because of their superior organizational tactics and relentless campaigning.^[5]

In 1907, an expatriated Chinese woman named He Zhen published a series of articles on feminism and equal rights. Although she preceded the Chinese Communist Party by over a decade, and although she was not widely read by the Chinese public, her essays did influence a number of important social agitators whose movements helped bring the Communist Party to power. She begins her essay, “Women’s Revenge,” by outlining the patriarchal injustices that Chinese women have suffered. She then asks “how did this poison fill the entire world? It can be traced to the doctrines of Ban Zhao.” She continues by labelling Ban a traitor to her sex, a dupe of Confucian misogyny, and a willing agent of patriarchy.^[6] He’s intention, however, is not simply to lay the axe at the root of patriarchal Confucianism, but to actively promote communism as the treatment for China’s nineteenth and twentieth century social ills.

In another essay, He declares that starvation is the strongest tool of sexual oppression in Chinese society. By controlling the food (i.e. the products of labor), men control the labor of women. He argues that just so they can eat, women generally fall into one of three categories: either they are slaves to their husbands; they work in factories for slave wages; or else they become prostitutes and enslave themselves to their pimps. He proclaims that the problem for Confucian women is that they are dependent on others, and “as long as you depend on others, you cannot be free. I have a good idea that will exempt you from relying on others while still finding food naturally. How? By practicing communism.” Whether or not a twenty-first century Westerner agrees with He’s assessment, it should at least be understandable why so many oppressed Chinese women agreed with Mao and He that because women hold up half the sky, “if we only unite together, with [communism] we can naturally have a good future. As we say colloquially, ‘the good times are coming.’”^[7]

(Alan Roberts is an alumnus of the Defense Language Institute’s Chinese language program. He is currently a graduate student in history at Utah State University where he is writing his Master’s thesis on performative elements of gender in Chinese Communist propaganda.)

^[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/world/asia/holding-up-half-the-sky.html?_r=0

^[2] Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 59.

^[3] Xiang Liu, “Women’s Virtues and Vices,” in Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook, 2^nd Ed, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey (New York: The Free Press, 1981, 1993), 73.

^[4] Zhao Ban, “Admonitions for Women,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 1, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 821, 822.

^[5] Louisa Lim, “Painful Memories for China’s Footbinding Survivors,” National Public Radio, March 19, 2007, accessed May 2, 2018, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8966942.

^[6] Zhen He, “Women’s Revenge,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 2, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 394.

^[7] Zhen He, “What Women Should Know About Communism,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 2, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 390-2.

« Previous Page

Recent Posts