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Motherhood, Patriotism and Enfranchisement: How Mexican Catholic Women Defined Womanhood in the Mid-Twentieth Century

My thesis focused on tracing and analyzing the complicated political conversations within the women’s division of the Mexican Catholic Action, specifically regarding women’s suffrage from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. My work revealed a layered set of beliefs that defy these women’s simple classification into feminist or antifeminist categories. Their complex reconciliation of conservative views with more progressive ones is a trend that has also been found in the historiography of international Christian women’s organizations through various time periods.[1] In a relatively recent article, Mexican historian Pedro Espinoza Meléndez also identifies seemingly opposing currents of thought present in ACM women’s publications.[2] In this way, my research builds on new scholarship to suggest the need for frameworks that avoid the feminist/antifeminist binary we may be inclined to apply. We should especially be careful if Western interpretations of these terms are being used to explain phenomena in non-Western regions.

Mexican women did not obtain the right to vote in federal elections until 1953, although there were important antecedents to this final victory dating back at least to the Revolution. One of the reasons for this was the fear that they would infuse national politics with more conservative ideas. Some primary sources provide evidence not necessarily for the validity of these fears, but definitely for their existence and influence in the 1930s. For example, in a speech given at the first National Women’s Congress in 1936, activist Esther Chapa said that many believed “woman is influenced by the most conservative and reactionary currents, and can therefore tip the general politics of the country to the right.”^[3]

It is significant also that Chapa declared this fear, rather than other, more overtly misogynistic ideas (which she also discussed) to be the excuse “that is most energetically used by certain enemies of women’s votes.”^[4] Of course, she vehemently denies that these concerns should be taken seriously. Based on other sources, historians have also generally agreed that the precarious political establishment at the time feared that women’s participation would derail them from a progressive political path.^[5] For example, one of the first historians of women’s fight for suffrage in Mexico, Ward M. Morton from the University of Florida, cited the enfranchisement of Spanish women in 1933—which resulted on a rightward swing in Spanish politics—as one of the key causes for hesitation on the part of left-leaning or centrist Mexican officials in the 1930s.^[6]

photo of Elvia Carrillo Puerto — *Elvia Carrillo Puerto, one of the first women representatives in the country in 1923, alongside Beatriz Peniche Ponce and Raquel Dzib Cicero. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

There is value in this explanation, but the extent to which these fears were founded is difficult to assert. What is clear, however, is that these ideas were significant at the time, and have permeated into the historiography. In my opinion, one way of getting closer to a nuanced view of the issue is to refrain from treating women as a monolithic group in Mexican society, especially in such a crucial moment of development for the nation’s democracy and larger political apparatus. Because the women of the Mexican Catholic Action promoted ideas from both the right and the left, the study of their beliefs is particularly useful in this endeavor.

When looking at Catholic women’s opinions on the vote, it is crucial to define the elements that made the struggle singularly complex in Mexico. First, due to the wording of the Mexican Constitution, women’s political rights always included two related, but distinct goals—the right to vote and the right to get elected. Inextricably connected, these were fought for and obtained simultaneously in Mexico, unlike in many other countries. This may appear to be a trivial difference. Its significance becomes clear, however, when remembering the previously-explained fear of a women-led hit to progressive political parties and policies. With both ballot boxes and federal offices opening up to women, these fears would have reasonably been amplified.

I should also note that due to their reputed conservatism, it was traditional, Catholic women—such as those in the Mexican Catholic Action—who were the most blamed for the potential setbacks that would come from women’s enfranchisement. As I will demonstrate, while they did hold some conservative ideas, these were paired with more left-leaning attitudes, eventually including unequivocal support for suffrage. The study of their point of view is therefore especially interesting and significant. Gendered conceptions of citizenship responsibilities further compounded the challenges women faced in the fight for political rights.^[7]

Logo for Mexican Catholic Action.

At least three additional contextual factors must be explained prior to any exploration of Catholic women’s political views from the 1930s to the 1950s. The first is the emergence and promotion of Catholic social doctrine in Rome starting in the late 1800s. Generally speaking, Catholic social doctrine was the church’s ideological response to significant events such as industrialization, the rise of communism, and large-scale warfare, conceived largely to maintain relevance in the face of these and other global trends. Some of its principles included the right to own private property, a condemnation of communism as well as unfettered capitalism (a debate that would become especially relevant post-WWII), and the basic dignity of human beings. As will be detailed later, Mexican women actively interpreted Catholic social doctrine, using it as basis for their political goals, including obtaining the right to vote.

The second important background event is the Mexican Revolution. On the one hand, revolutionary characters and ideals—including the expansion of democracy—proved to be of extreme value for many post-Revolution political factions. Indeed, the party that would command the executive branch of government from 1929 to the year 2000, was the National Revolutionary Party (later named the Institutional Revolutionary Party). By the late 1940s, Catholic women would adduce revolutionary principles to explain why granting them political rights was in line with the perceived promises of the revolution.

photo of a scene from The Mexican Revolution. — *The Mexican Revolution. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Third, we must understand the nature of church-state relations in Mexico. The Cristero War (1926-1929) brought the tensions between the church and the post-Revolutionary Mexican state to the battlefield. As the war ended, various Catholic lay organizations that had previously engaged with national politics merged to form The Mexican Catholic Action (ACM) in 1929, during the papacy of Pius XI. Although most members of the ACM were from the middle and upper classes, they also had growing peasants’ divisions and chapters across the country. Some historians have argued that the incorporation of many Catholic lay organizations translated into a general decrease in their political involvement, as Catholic Action groups worldwide were directly under clerical authority.^[8] Other historians, such as Kristina Boylan, have found that female members—who were the majority—actually retained and fostered the political streak of earlier Catholic lay groups in Mexico.^[9]

Catholic social doctrine, especially papal encyclicals associated with its theory, was widely discussed and promoted in ACM circles. Pope Leo XIII’s famous Rerum Novarum encyclical in 1891 is widely regarded as one of the founding documents of Catholic social doctrine.^[10] In it, the church proposed it as a way to inter-class harmony, emphasizing Christian charity.^[11] In the ACM, this particular encyclical and a few others were especially celebrated. For example, in a report from the co-secretary of the ACM’s central committee from June 25th, 1939, one of the forms outlined discussed plans for the formation of study circles for social education, in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the Rerum Novarum.^[12] Later, Popes Pius XI and Pius XII cited and expanded its philosophy. Aside from his additions to Catholic social doctrine, Pope Pius XI actively encouraged the foundation of Catholic Action groups around the world.

photo of Pius XI, by Nicola Perscheid, circa 1922 — *Pius XI, by Nicola Perscheid, circa 1922. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Building on Boylan’s research on ACM women’s activism, I proposed that although the women of the Mexican Catholic Action enthusiastically followed the pope and were heavily influenced by Catholic social doctrine, they also actively interpreted, modified, and spread messages from Rome according to their interests. For example, while Rerum Novarum suggested that a woman was “by nature fitted for home-work” in order to raise children, the ACM adopted a wider interpretation of this role.^[13] A 1938 article titled “Prepare Yourself for our Assembly,” meant to be read prior to that year’s national assembly of the young woman’s division, argued that all women have social duties, “whether it falls upon them to become mothers or…whether their maternity is purely spiritual.”^[14]

By this perception, women should act as mothers towards their own children, but also to anyone who needs a mother, and towards the Mexican nation. Introducing a spiritual maternity into the lexicon reflects how these women managed to marry conservative political views, such as their opposition to divorce and critiques of certain media, with more liberal ones, like their support for suffrage and women’s ability to take up professional roles. The adoption of these seemingly adversary attitudes demonstrates that rather than passively obeying papal precepts, Catholic women actively shaped their meaning. Eventually, and especially as church-state relations became less combative, ideas such as these would become part of the basis for their support of suffrage.

The Mexican Revolution and the fervent patriotism that followed it also underpinned the ACM’s gradual embrace of enfranchisement. In 1947, women in Mexico finally received voting rights, albeit limited to local elections. That same year, the ACM disseminated a bulletin titled My Vote as a Mexican Catholic Woman. It was written by Emma Galán, who had served as president of the ACM’s young women’s division and had thus been part of the ACM’s Central Committee. In the publication, Galán devoted a whole section to “the aggrandizement of Mexico” and declared that voting was “a moral duty in the face of love for the Motherland.”^[15] Invoking the Mexican Revolution, the document also reveals that women viewed enfranchisement as the achievement of its goals, supporting the expansion of suffrage to include voting in federal elections as well. To Galán, it was anti-revolutionary and anti-patriotic to abstain from voting or to oppose suffrage.

A column by Hermila Galindo published in a 1917 issue of the magazine Mujer Moderna (Modern Woman). In it, she announced her candidacy for localrepresentative. She also outlined her agenda, which included “defending the interests of [all] mothers,” “matrimonial hygiene,” and “procuring everything which would contribute to her dignity.” It was followed by a short editorial note clarifying that women did not have the right to vote in Mexico. Source: Wikimedia Commons {PD-US-expired}

Galán also offers that not voting was also anti-Catholic. The ACM first adopted this position around 1939, though initially, they didn’t explicitly include women.^[16] Eventually, though, political circumstances led to women’s incorporation. The ACM was vocally against the secularization of schools, for example, and since education issues were traditionally viewed as part of women’s realm, they became assets in this political fight. Bringing women into the fold through the vote would, therefore, advance their political goals, goals that would at the same time bring about a Mexico that was in line with Catholic social doctrine. Beyond secularization in schools and other such concerns, there was a persistent belief that unfettered capitalism, and most especially communism, were preventing the ACM’s idealized, Catholic Mexico—one that reflected Catholic social doctrine as they saw it—from flourishing. In this way, giving pious women the right to vote was not against Catholic social doctrine, but a benefit to its spread.

The new version of the Mexican one thousand peso bill includes the image of three revolutionary figures: Carmen Serdán (left), Hermila Galindo (center), and Francisco I. Madero (right). Serdán was known for her support of Madero, and her participation in the revolution as a writer and member of a revolutionary junta. Galindo was an early supporter of both divorce and suffrage, and served as Venustiano Carranza’s secretary for some time. According to historian Gabriela Cano, she even ran for office before she had that right explicitly in 1917, at least in part to protest this constitutional restriction. The bill has been in circulation since the end of 2020, as per the Mexican Central Bank. The photo was taken by one of the author’s family members.

Overall, I hope my investigation of Catholic women’s discourse surrounding suffrage contributes to the perspective that different groups of women throughout history have defined their role and purpose differently, drawing from multiple theories and doctrines. It is hard, therefore, to apply or even find a general rule that defines all women in a given time period. Instead of attempting to do so, I have carefully analyzed the views of a limited sample—those of the women in the Mexican Catholic Action, who themselves embody a complex intermingling of ideas. These women incorporated both national and international considerations—such as papal precepts, and the revolution’s legacy—into their political consciousness, and in doing so they were denoting the meaning of femininity. Their support for suffrage and women’s work outside the domestic sphere was accompanied by some conservative ideals, especially when it came to divorce, sexuality, and general impropriety, as Espinoza Meléndez found.^[17]

They viewed the vote as an essential tool to bring about a very specific version of Mexico, one in which neither unfettered capitalism nor communism took root, as generally validated by Catholic social doctrine. In the context of the Cold War and the unstable post-revolutionary political landscape, these views had important implications. Needless to say, ACM activists’ vision of Mexico was different than that imagined by other political groups. By recognizing these complexities, we can begin to understand and humanize historical subjects more fully. Considering a diversity of historical opinions, especially those expressed by women, can get us closer to answering questions that historians have asked for decades. I also suggest that the study and characterization of their brand of patriotism, as well as their views of modernity should continue to be researched.

Daniela Roscero Cervantes graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2023, receiving degrees in history and journalism. This article is based on her history thesis, Conservative “feminists”: Women’s Citizenship, Suffrage and Political Representation I Mexican Catholic Discourse, 1940-1953. She is currently enrolled at the University of Chicago to complete a master’s in social sciences with a concentration in history. Her research interests focus on modern Mexico, as well as the history of the borderlands, Mexican-Americans, and U.S.-Mexico relations.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Benson Latin American Library Rare Books collection, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas.
Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, accessed December 7, 2023, Vatican.va.

Mexican Bulletins Collection. UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico.

Mexican Catholic Action Collection. Iberoamerican University, Mexico City, Mexico. Mexican Bulletins Collection. UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico.

Secondary Sources

Bard, Christine. “L’apotre Sociale et L’ange du Foyer: les Femmes et la C. F. T. C. a Travers Le Nord Social (1920-1936).” Le Mouvement Social no. 165, (1993): 23-41

Barry, Carolina and Enriqueta Tuñón Pablos. “Capítulo 9: Las Sufragistas Mexicanas y su Lucha por el Voto,” In Sufragio Femenino: Prácticas y Debates Políticos, Religiosos y Culturales En Argentina y América edited by Carolina Barry, 250-278. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, 2011.

Blasco Herranz, Inmaculada. “Citizenship and Female Catholic Militancy in 1920s Spain.” Gender & History 19, no. 3 (2007): 441-466.

Boylan, Kristina A. “Gendering the Faith and Altering the Nation: Mexican Catholic Women’s Activism 1917-1940.” In Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, edited by Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, Gabriela Cano, 199-222. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007.

Boyle, Joseph. “Rerum Novarum.” In Catholic Social Teaching: A Volume of Scholarly Essays, edited by Gerard V. Bradley and E. Christian Brugger, 69–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Cano, Gabriela. “Mexico: The Long Road to Women’s Suffrage.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Women’s Political Rights, edited by Susan Franceschet, Mona Lena Krook, Netina Tan, 115-127. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Ceballos Ramírez, Manuel. “Historia De Rerum Novarum en Mexico (1891).” In El Catolicismo Social: un tercero en discordia, Rerum Novarum, la “cuestión social” y la movilización de los católicos mexicanos (1891-1911). Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1987.

Dau Novelli, Cecilia. Società, chiesa e associazionismo femminile: l’Unione fra le donne cattoliche d’Italia (1902-1919). Rome: AVE, 1988.

Espinoza Meléndez, Pedro. “Antifeminismo y feminismo católico en México: La Unión Femenina Católica Mexicana y la revista Acción Femenina, 1933-1958.” Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Género de El Colegio de México 6, no. 6 (2020). http:// dx.doi.org/10.24201/eg.v6i0.381.

Morton, Ward M. Woman Suffrage in Mexico. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1962.

^[1] Christine Bard, “L’apotre Sociale et L’ange du Foyer: les Femmes et la C. F. T. C. a Travers Le Nord Social (1920-1936),” Le Mouvement Social 165 (1993): 23-41.

Cecilia Dau Novelli, Società, chiesa e associazionismo femminile: l’Unione fra le donne cattoliche d’Italia (1902-1919) (AVE: 1988).

Inmaculada Blasco Herranz, “Citizenship and Female Catholic Militancy in 1920s Spain,” Gender & History Vol. 19, No. 3 (2007): 441-466.

^[2] Pedro Espinoza Meléndez, “Antifeminismo y feminismo católico en México. La Unión Femenina Católica Mexicana y la revista Acción Femenina, 1933 – 1958.” Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Género de El Colegio de México 6, no. 6 (2020) http://dx.doi.org/10.24201/eg.v6i0.381.

^[3] Esther Chapa, The right to vote for women, 1936, p.9, Benson Latin American Library Rare Books collection, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

^[4] Esther Chapa, The right to vote for women, 1936, p.9, Benson Latin American Library Rare Books collection, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

^[5] Carolina Barry and Enriqueta Tuñón Pablos, “Chapter 9: Mexican Suffragists and Their Fight to Obtain the Vote,” in Sufragio Femenino: Prácticas y Debates Políticos, Religiosos y Culturales En Argentina y América (Caseros, Argentina, Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, 2011), p. 261-265.

^[6] Ward M. Morton, Woman Suffrage in Mexico (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1962), p. 21-25.

^[7] Gabriela Cano, “Mexico: The Long Road to Women’s Suffrage,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Women’s Political Rights(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 119.

^[8] Manuel Ceballos Ramírez, “The Rerum Novarum Encyclical in Mexico (1891)” in El Catolicismo Social: un tercero en discordia, Rerum Novarum, la “cuestión social” y la movilización de los católicos mexicanos (1891-1911) (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1987), 51-67.

^[9] Kristina A. Boylan, “Gendering the Faith and Altering the Nation: Mexican Catholic Women’s Activism 1917-1940,” in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, Gabriela Cano (North Carolina: Duke University press, 2007), 210-234.

^[10] Joseph Boyle, “Rerum Novarum,” in Catholic Social Teaching: A Volume of Scholarly Essay, ed. Gerard V. Bradley and E. Christian Brigger, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 68-89.

^[11] Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 22, 24, 30, 61, 63.

^[12] Report of the co-secretary for June 25th 1939 Central Committee Meeting, 22 May 1939, 2.2.1.1 Sessions of the Central Committee 1930-1978 box 1, folder 2 1934-1939, Archivo ACM, Iberoamerican University, Mexico City, Mexico.

^[13] Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 42.

^[14] Anonymous, “Prepare Yourself for Our Assembly,” Juventud, September 1938, 16, Section 6-Publications, box 7, bound book starting 1938, Mexican Catholic Action Collection, Iberoamerican University Historical Archives, Iberoamerican University, Mexico City, Mexico.

^[15] E. Emma Galán G., bulletin titled “My Vote as a Mexican Catholic Woman,” 13, 35 Mexican Bulletins Collection, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico.

^[16] Notice number twenty-three from the Central Committee, ca. May 1939, 2.2.1.1 Sessions of the Central Committee 1930-1978 box 1, folder 2 1934-1939, Archivo ACM, Iberoamerican University, Mexico City, Mexico.

^[17] Pedro Espinoza Meléndez, “Antifeminismo y feminismo católico en México. La Unión Femenina Católica Mexicana y la revista Acción Femenina, 1933 – 1958.” Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios de Género de El Colegio de México 6, no. 6 (2020) http://dx.doi.org/10.24201/eg.v6i0.381.

Banner image via Pexels – Photo by Luis Ariza: https://www.pexels.com/photo/mexican-flag-on-flagpole-13808918/

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Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran by Negar Mottahedeh (2019)

by Denise Gomez

On March 7, 1979, just one day before International Women’s Day, the highly influential American feminist scholar, Kate Millet, appeared in Tehran, in the Iranian Revolution’s afterglow. Invited alongside other prominent feminist scholars and activists to speak at a demonstration organized by Iranian woman activists, Millet was accompanied by her partner and $1,200 worth of recording equipment, but without any working knowledge of Persian. Millett spent her days wandering around with tape recorder in hand, documenting her observations and capturing the voices of protesting Iranian women. After returning to the United States, Millet used her memories and the tapes’ contents to write her 1981 book, Going to Iran. As a result of Millet’s excursion and the subsequent publication of her book, the United States’ media wrongly embraced her as an authoritative figure regarding the Iranian revolution despite her understandable shortcomings as an ally and friend of Iranian women. Mottahedheh’s study of Millet’s visit in Whisper Tapes provides its readers with profound insight into Millet’s travels as an activist, as well as into the liberationist messages of the Iranian revolution.

Kate Millett’s Going to Iran (1982)

Whisper Tapes challenges established ideas about the relationship between Iranian women and their Revolution. Carefully separating the rise of the Islamic Republic and the popular revolutionary movement, Negar Mottahedeh works against the major assumptions of western scholarship, where the arrival of the Iranian Revolution and the arrival of the Islamic Republic happen simultaneously and are seen to be one and the same thing. In this western version, the Iranian Revolution is an inherently Islamic revolution, which insisted on an instant curtailment of women’s rights. Mottahedeh works against this assumption by demonstrating how Iranian women saw their demonstrations and protests as a continuation of the Iranian Revolution itself, as well as a continuation of the Revolution’s principles of freedom and resistance to oppression in all forms. Mottahedeh pushes back on portrayals of the revolution as happening overnight, of opposition to Mohammad Reza Phalavi as monolithic, and of an inherently patriarchal protesting populace who betrayed their feminine revolutionary counterparts.

To situate her book and its actors, Mottahedeh places the Iranian Revolution within the context of, and in solidarity with, the Third World, a geo-political concept that dominated the western intellectual thinking at the time of the revolution. Under this principle, revolutionary cultures and thought flourished, and various marginalized groups positioned themselves to defend each other against all forms of exploitation. Western intellectuals’ left-leaning politics naturally aligned them against Iran’s Shah, and similarly influenced the politics of the western feminist circles. Millet and her French contemporaries, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Monique Wittig, who initially declared their solidarity with the Iranian Revolution, were unsettled by the ensuing proclamations of compulsory veiling. As Iranian women took to the streets in protest against these proclamations, their calls to action were widely ignored by the men who stood by their side during the Anti-Shah demonstrations. As equal participants of the 1979 revolution, women were in a sense betrayed by their fellow revolutionaries. Millet and the French identified with the Iranian women in protest, and understood their revolts against Khomeini’s proclamations as a continuation of a larger struggle against the patriarchy.

Kate Millett, 1977 (via Schlesinger Library)

Mottahedeh revitalizes this story by accessing what Millet could not due to her socially constructed state of “unknowledge” about Iran and its culture. As a result of her lack of knowledge, Millet cannot and does not fully see the movement materializing before her very eyes — but this does not make her experience a counterfeit one. Mottahedeh does not accuse Millet of playing the role of the arrogant westerner here, instead she is treated as a limited observer whose observations were skewed and incomplete. In so many ways, Mottahedeh, a researcher who focuses on various aspects of Iranian resistance and protest, has the expertise and knowledge for understanding the women’s protests that Kate Millet lacked. Mottahedeh’s Whisper Tapes is as much an expansion of her own research as it is an expansion of Millet’s Going to Iran. Mottahedeh’s work does not reject the material of the whisper tapes, it instead contextualizes and broadens Millet’s experience, observations, and recordings. To complete her project, Mottahedeh pulls from many theoretical works, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Mladen Dolar but she extracts the majority of her citations from the tapes themselves or Millet’s book about her experiences on the ground. Through this very narrow focus, Mottahedeh is able to remain within the context of the tapes’ spaces and interact with the content of Miller’s tapes more deeply.

When listening to Millet’s recordings Mottahedeh noticed a second, background narrative in the political chanting and hushed conversations in Persian, behind the obvious, intended narrative of Millet’s tapes. Describing these surrounding acoustics as an unconscious layer to Millet’s recordings –whisper tapes — Mottahedeh uses these background voices to frame and inform her analysis of Millet’s visit to Iran. These voices both contradict and clarify Millet’s observations and revive the protestors’ aspirations in a way that complicates mainstream ideas of feminist consciousness in post-revolutionary Iran. Instead of tracing Iranian feminist consciousness to individual (anti-)religious sentiments or as reactions to western influence, Mottahedeh suggests the women’s protests emerged as a continuation of the 1979 revolution that called for planetary freedom and justice.

Women and the Iranian Revolution (via BBC)

Whisper Tapes is organized according to the Farsi alphabet, with each “chapter” named after a theme or symbol of the revolution, such as Chapter V, “Servat,” (Wealth) or Chapter XIII “Zan,” (Woman). Although disorienting and disjointed at times, Mottahedeh’s chapters are informed by the tapes’ evidence, which was captured haphazardly and at the mercy of 1979’s technological limitations. However, for Mottahedeh the fragmentary nature of the tapes’ narrative evokes the feeling experienced by listening to the recordings’ “whispered background.” Furthermore, Mottahedeh inaugurates this account with a section entitled “A Revolutionary Timeline,” where she lays out the revolution’s key dates for a reader’s reference. The introduction and conclusion, titled “Overture” and “Coda,” flank her alphabetically-organized segments, and provide readers with the theoretical, historical, and personal background necessary for digesting the bulk of her content.

Few books resemble Whisper Tapes in its organization, and few studies of the Iranian Revolution so thoroughly and fairly challenge misconceptions born from well-intentioned actions of politically progressive circles. Mottahedeh’s method of listening to the accidental voices of Millet’s background is inventive and produces refreshing scholarship that can be enjoyed, understood, and appreciated by academics and non-specialists together. By revisiting Kate Millet, Mottahedeh accomplishes the elevation and centering of oft-ignored voices.

You might also like:
The Strength of Women in the Iranian Revolution
The Public Archive: Qahvehkhaneh, Reading Iranian Newspapers
A Brief History of Feminism by Patu (illustrations) and Antje Schrupp and translated by Sophie Lewis (2017)
Why I Ban the Word “Feminism” from My Classes

A Brief History of Feminism by Patu (illustrations) and Antje Schrupp and translated by Sophie Lewis (2017)

By Namrata B. Kanchan

“Let this really be brief!” was the first thought that crossed my mind as I read the title of Patu and Schrupp’s book. It was listed on the syllabus for a course on Gender and Decolonization and after some heavy reading on decolonization, I was less than enthusiastic about reading this book. I had not heard of it before and let’s be honest, we have come across “Brief Histories…” on foundational concepts (nationalism, existentialism, socialism or any -ism you would like to add here) that promise brevity but turn out to be 300+ pages of dense, jargon-filled exercises in theoretical name-dropping.

In retrospect this book signaled its difference right in its cover design. Instead of monochromatic colour schemes, sober font styles, and a black-and-white picture of a dead white lady proclaiming its seriousness, we see a quirky, multi-hued, animated cover with illustrations of key feminists. At this point, I thought the cover was off-beat but was still not prepared for the content, so you can imagine my shock, relief, and utter sense of joy when I found out the whole book was ILLUSTRATED! Yes, a comic book for feminism! Fans of Marjane Satrapi’s Persopolis series will discover parallels in this book that skillfully combines graphics, narrative, humor, and history to provide a powerful account of women’s lives, struggles, and victories.

Patu and Schrupp rescue feminist scholarship from academic confines and present it to a new generation of general readership in a way that is most palatable to them. The ascendance of Instagram, Snapchat, Anime and Marvel comics have elevated the status of images in our society. Millennials consume information as well as tell their stories increasingly through digital images or emojis. Mainstream sitcoms such as Blackish have tapped into this phenomenon and use graphics intermittently to present the dark side of Black history succinctly and with humor so that all Americans can comprehend the gravity of African-American experiences.

A page from A Brief History of Feminism (via Amazon)

A Short History of Feminism acknowledges these new trends and ushers feminism into contemporary focus by using graphics to treat feminist history not as a relic of the past trapped in a sea of words and theories that has no place in our present. Graphics woven masterfully with humor signal the contemporary relevance of this topic. This combination strikes the right balance between levity and gravitas and emerges as a medium with powerful immediacy. The book’s pictorial stories thus draw us into a continuum that connects our collective past, present, and future. Female characters are not busy enacting ‘history’ but occasionally look straight to the reader and address them as in the case of French philosopher, Marie de Guornay (1565-1645). These female voices are direct, contemplative and sometimes funny as they mouth our own contemporary concerns about equal pay or work-life balance. These women acknowledge us, talk to us and remind us that the struggle is not over.

One highlight of this book is that we really do get a brief run through of feminists from ancient to modern times. This book is also a great quick reference to various female figures, little known facts about them, and the social situations that gave birth to their individual struggles. From Mary Magdalene to Sappho, Sojourner Truth to Gloria Steinem, the book surfs deftly through all the waves of feminism. The authors cover topics ranging from workplace to marriage rights, suffrage to political participation to provide a broad introduction to all the areas in which women fought hard to win rights.

Flora Tristan’s (1803-1844) story struck me as particularly fascinating because the French-Peruvian fought not only for female rights but also rallied against slavery and class exploitation. She composed an important socialist treatise called The Worker’s Union in 1843, a full five years before Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto where she displayed crucial links between oppression of women and the proletariat. Yet, she is a marginal figure, which Patu and Schrupp demonstrate poignantly by showing Marx shushing Engels when the latter mentions Tristan’s name. Das Patriarchy, anyone?

Another highlight is that the authors do not assume universal sisterhood when it comes to feminist concerns. Feminism and its various iterations are constantly evoked to remind us that this concept is not ubiquitous, monolithic, and bourgeois but something that is in constant flux and assumes various forms. We get the varying concerns of proletariat and upper-class women as well as Black slave-women and socialist women. The display of a plurality of voices appears to be the main agenda of the book but despite the emergence of a multitude of voices, the book is predominantly the history of white, Christian, Western European and American feminists. It is not a history of feminism but western feminism, which frankly, as a South Asian woman left me feeling marginalized. One the one hand, western women have been an instrumental force in ushering global rights for women but their stories are not the only ones worth telling. If the authors are interested in presenting a wide range of stories, women from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have their own unique struggles and victories to recount Modern feminists such as Gayatri Spivak, Maria Lugones, Denise Noble, and Madina Tlostanova provide great insights into non-white, non-western women’s movements and their works deserve an illustrated book so that women from Central Asia to the Caribbean can see themselves reflected in a truly global and plural feminist movement.

A Short History of Feminism is a compelling, funny, and thoroughly enjoyable book. It contains universal appeal that demystifies western feminism and can easily be enjoyed as leisure reading or an introductory book in a college freshman class. My only appeal, and I believe a lot of readers would agree, is that may we have second part to this collection please!

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.

La Mujer Unidad: Cynthia Orozco (UT History Honors Graduate ‘80)

By Nikki Lopez

“I think I drew it in my apartment, I drew a lot of posters for organizations from Austin to San Marcos,” Cynthia Orozco answered when I asked about the origins of the poster. Orozco further explained to me that feminist consciousness groups like this one were popular in the late 1970s. “It was just a place where we talked about sexism on campus with around ten Chicanas. It was a group where we felt safe.” Cynthia Orozco’s life was filled with many such posters, little moments of struggle that combined to make a difference in her life and the lives of the Chicanas who followed her at UT.

I interviewed Dr. Cynthia Orozco about her upbringing and her time at UT. Orozco grew up in Cuero, Texas, in a low-income, working-class family. Her mother, Aurora, passionately advocated for educational access for minorities and had been involved with the Mexican American civil rights movement since the 1950s. “My mother attended a segregated school. ‘Mexicans are stupid people’ was a phrase she heard frequently.” Aurora’s primary motivation behind her advocacy work was racial discrimination in Cuero schools that directly affected her own children. Later all seven of her children, including Aurora, would go on to attend The University of Texas at Austin. Orozco would continue to pursue her family tradition of activism. During her high school graduation speech, Orozco called for the school system to stop ignoring women and minorities and forcing boys to cut their hair. In retaliation, the school fired her from her student council position. “We knew that it was possibly illegal what they did, but at that time we really couldn’t do anything.”

Orozco found new opportunities and challenges at UT. Following a two-year stint at Southwest Texas University (now Texas State), Orozco enrolled at UT in 1978. During her time at UT, Orozco was able to experience first-hand how sexism and racism intertwined and left her out of place in the Chicano organizations. The underlying sexism in the movement was perpetuated by the idea of La Familia, which reinforced traditional, paternalistic patterns, and marginalized women and women’s issues in the Chicano movement. “I have learned that the Chicano movement is just that, a ChicanO movement which uses women as workers, sucks our life blood and does not return our due benefits,” Orozco wrote in an editorial for La Gente in 1981. For many in the Chicano movement, the needs of Chicanas were not important and sexism was normalized subconsciously. Discussions at group meetings focused on addressing racism and not sexism.

Letter from Cynthia Orozco

Throughout her life Cynthia Orozco spoke out against institutions that tried to suppress her and held firm to her beliefs. Orozco was constantly silenced and seen as a burden due to her vocalizing the need for Chicana representation during student-led meetings and conferences. Orozco recalled in her editorial for La Gente that during an organizing meeting for an event in 1979, she “was told by an activist that one woman was already included in the schedule” and there was no need for any more. The rationalization behind excluding women-centered sessions was that issues pertaining to police brutality and farmworkers’ rights were more important. Students in the group (including women) voted against the crucial inclusion of Chicana voices. Angry with Chicano groups, Orozco wrote an article called “On Chicana Unity” for The Daily Texan. She criticized her “brothers” for their lack of flexibility when considering the role Chicanas in the movement and prefered that their “sisters” remain home as mothers. Once while she was studying, Orozco received multiple calls from the UT Chicano Community leader screaming at her that she was causing the movement to be divisive and continuing to invalidate her Chicana identity. In a letter to a fellow feminist, Orozco wrote that “while I am still basically a feminist and believe in helping all people, my main area of concern is Women of Color.” Following in the tradition of radical feminists who came before her, Orozco established a feminist collective called the Chicana Consciousness Group. The collective met every Monday and became a home for many students on campus. Members were able to breathe and share their thoughts that they felt scared to share in other organizations.

Despite the struggles she faced, Orozco felt that UT was “one of the most academically, enriching universities out there.” UT helped her think outside the box and pushed her to take on an active role in writing and research. Beyond the Chicana Consciousness Group, Orozco used her position in student leadership roles to help other students learn from scholars. Orozco was Chair of the Chicano Culture Committee to invite women to share their research. “There was always something going on campus! I attended workshops and enjoyed the ones I planned as well.”

Despite our separation in time and space, I can see myself in Cynthia’s poster. During our interview Orozco mentioned that she began to have an identity crisis at UT. The feeling of not being Mexican or American enough is a struggle that I shared. Unlike Orozco I’ve had the privilege to take classes that are Chicana-centered. These classes were designed for people like Orozco and me.. They taught me that my feelings were valid and that my identity was seen. Orozco had to do this on her own with the resources she had. She advocated and created a space even though the work was exhausting. Thanks to her advocacy students like me have been able to navigate UT better.

Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States
Women Shaping Texas in the Twentieth Century

Why I Ban the Word “Feminism” from My Classes

by Jacqueline Jones

In each of my graduate seminars, at the beginning of the semester, I caution students not to use certain words I consider problematic; these words can actually hinder our understanding of a complex past. Commonly used—or rather, overused—in everyday conversation as well as academic discourse, the banned words include “power,” “freedom,” and “race.” I tell my students that these words are imprecise—they had different meanings depending upon the times and places in which they were used– and that today we tend to invoke them too casually and even thoughtlessly.

Oh yes, and there is another word I ask my students to avoid—“feminism.” Students often greet this particular injunction with surprise and dismay. Does it mean that their instructor believes that women should stay at home and not venture into the paid labor force? If so, why is she standing in front of a classroom now? So I have to be sure to make a case about the pitfalls related to the use of the word. Even the broadest possible definition is problematic, as we shall see.

Protesters at the 2017 Women’s March (via Wikimedia Commons).

The purpose of the massive march on Washington held on January 21, the day after President Trump’s inauguration, was to protest his election. It was called the “Women’s March,” and as we all know, sister marches took place all over the country and the world the same day. A group of women initiated the idea of the protest, and took care of all the logistics; many participants wore pink “pussy hats” to call attention to the President’s demeaning remarks about grabbing women’s genitals captured on the infamous Access Hollywood videotape. The hand-held signs at the rally covered a whole range of issues, including abortion and reproductive rights, equal pay, sexual harassment, Black Lives Matter, protection for undocumented immigrants, public education, and women’s struggles for fair treatment and equality generally. Presumably, Trump’s election had prompted an historic level of anger and frustration among women. Many news outlets, participants, and observers suggested that the march represented a remarkable display of re-energized, twenty-first century feminism, with the word itself suggesting a kind of transcendent womanhood bringing together women of various ages, races, classes, and ethnicity.

Protesters at a sister rally in 2017 (via Pixabay).

Well, not exactly. Although only 6 percent of African American women voted for Trump, 53 percent of white women did. We can safely assume, then, that many white women not only stayed away from the march, but also objected to it in principle: the pink-pussy-hat contingent did not speak for them. So we might ask, which groups of women did not march? Here is a possible, partial list: devout Catholic women who believe that birth control, abortion, and gay marriage are sins against God; former factory workers who were fired from their jobs when their plants were shipped overseas; the wives and daughters and mothers of unemployed coal miners; anti-immigrant activists; women of color who saw the march as dominated by white women; and pro-gun rights supporters. Missing too were probably women who found Mr. Trump’s video sex-talk disgusting but chose not to see this as the defining issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign–just as some liberal women might have disapproved of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky but did not let that affair diminish their support for him when he was president. In both these cases, the pro-Trump and pro-Clinton supporters expressed less solidarity with the men’s victims and more support for other elements of the men’s politics. In other words, these women eschewed any putative “sisterhood” in favor of other political issues.

Suffragists parade down Fifth Avenue, 1917 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Another way of looking at this issue is to challenge the view that feminists had as their greatest priority a woman president. How many self-identified feminists were eager to see Sarah Palin run for president in 2012? Again, for many women, their overriding concern is not womanhood per se but a wide range of political beliefs and commitments. As we learned soon after U. S. women got the right to vote in 1919, different groups of women have different politics; in the 1920s, the suffragists were astonished to find that women tended to vote the way their husbands did, according to a matrix of ethnic and class factors.

Delegation of officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1917 (US National Archives via Flickr).

The example of the Women’s March suggests that, for all the talk today of “intersectionality” (the interconnectedness of certain social signifiers such as class, religion, “race,” and gender) “feminism” promotes a very specific political agenda, one that does not necessarily reflect the priorities and lived experience of a substantial portion of the female population. In essence, the word “feminism” is too vague to have much meaning within a society where women have multiple forms of identity, and gender might or might not be the defining one at any particular time. Even the broadest possible definition—feminists are people who seek to advance the interests or the equal rights of women—has its limitations.

As an historian, I would suggest several reasons why students should avoid the use of the word “feminism”–unless they encounter the word in a primary text; then they should try to figure out what the user meant by it.

The word itself did not appear in common usage until the 1920s. Therefore it would be a mistake to apply it to people before that time, or to people since who themselves have not embraced the label; otherwise we risk imposing a term on historical actors who might or might not have used it to describe themselves.

Throughout history, various waves of the so-called “women’s” or “feminist” movement were actually riven by intense conflicts among women. Around the turn of the twentieth century, leading white suffragists went out of their way to denigrate their black counterparts and express contempt for immigrant and working class men and women. The early organizers of the National Organization for Women feared that association with lesbians and militant black women would taint their drive for respectability. Organizers of the 2017 Women’s march debated whether or not anti-abortion women could or should be included in the protest: could one be a feminist and at the same time oppose reproductive rights for women?

Two Lowell mill workers, ca. 1840 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Often in history when we find solidarity among women it is not because these groups of women sought to advocate better working conditions or the right to vote for all women; rather, their reference group consisted of women like themselves. In the 1840s, Lowell textile mill workers walked off the job and went on strike not as “feminists,” but as young white Protestant women from middling households—in other words, as women who had much in common with each other. Religion, ethnicity, lineage, and “race” have all been significant sources of identity for women; when a particular group of women advocates for itself, it is not necessarily advocating for all other women.

Similarly, we are often tempted to label those strong women we find in history as “feminists,” on the assumption that they spoke and acted on behalf of all women. Yet they might have believed they had more in common with their male counterparts than with other groups of women. Female labor-union organizers probably felt more affinity with their male co-workers than with wealthy women who had no experience with wage work. In other words, the transcendent sisterhood that feminism presupposes is often a myth, a chimera.

The word not only lacks a precise definition, it also carries with it a great deal of baggage. Indeed, some people have a visceral, negative reaction to the sound of it. It is difficult to use a term with such varied and fluid meanings. And feminism meant something different to women of the 1960s, when they could not open a credit-card account in their own name or aspire to certain “men’s jobs,” when they debated the social division of labor in the paid workplace and in the home, compared to young women today, who at times see feminism through the prism of music lyrics, movies, fashion, and celebrity culture: Is the talented, fabulously wealthy Taylor Swift a feminist?

Finally, a personal note: In the 1960s, I was a college student and caught up in what was then called the “feminist movement” as shaped by Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique and the newly formed National Organization for Women. My mother disapproved of my emerging priorities in life; she had gotten married right after World War II, and she believed (rightly, as it turned out) that the movement denigrated her choice to stay home full-time with her children. I was puzzled and distressed that my mother could not appreciate my choices; but now I am also puzzled and distressed that the movement could not appreciate her choices. Coming of age during the war, she feared that she would never marry and have a family, and when she finally had that opportunity, she was happy—for the most part—to embrace it, despite the considerable financial sacrifice for the household that her choice entailed.

Women’s March 2017 (Backbone Campaign via Flickr).

Perhaps, with very few exceptions—equal pay for equal work?—there are few issues on which all women everywhere can agree. My own view is that, we can pursue social justice in ways that advance the interests of large numbers of men as well as women, without having to defend the dubious proposition that “feminism” as constructed today speaks to and for all women. It doesn’t. For the historian, that fact means that we have to come up with other, more creative ways of discussing forms of women’s activism and personal self-advancement that took place in the past, and, in altered form, continue today.

Also by Jacqueline Jones on Not Even Past:

The Works of Stephen Hahn.
On the Myth of Race in America.
History in a “Post-Truth” Era.

Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity

Originally posted on the blog of The American Prospect, January 6, 2017.

By Laurie Green

For those who believe Donald Trump’s election has further legitimized hatred and even violence, a “Women’s March on Washington” scheduled for January 21 offers an outlet to demonstrate mass solidarity across lines of race, religion, age, gender, national identity, and sexual orientation.

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (The Center for Jewish History via Flickr)

The idea of such a march first ricocheted across social media just hours after the TV networks called the election for Trump, when a grandmother in Hawaii suggested it to fellow Facebook friends on the private, pro-Hillary Clinton group page known as Pantsuit Nation. Millions of postings later, the D.C. march has mushroomed to include parallel events in 41 states and 21 cities outside the United States. An independent national organizing committee has stepped in to articulate a clear mission and take over logistics. And thousands of local organizations, many of them formed just in the last month, have already chartered buses to bring demonstrators to the National Mall region, where the march is scheduled to kick off at 10 a.m. at the intersection of Independence Avenue and 3rd Street SW.

Despite its “Women’s March” moniker, the national organizing committee’s striking diversity signals an increasing emphasis on defending “human rights, dignity, and justice,” as the event’s official website states, by unifying across difference. The organizing committee includes four national co-chairwomen—Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour, and Bob Bland—who are African American, Latina, Palestinian American, and white, and who all have extensive backgrounds as social justice organizers and professionals with local, national, and global experience.

Linda Sarsour, Carmen Perez, and Tamika Mallory serve on the Women’s March national organizing committee (via Huffington Post).

Still, neither the march, scheduled for the day after Trump’s inauguration, nor its organizers can pretend to possess perfect harmony and clarity on the direction of this nascent movement. For example, the initial organizers dropped the original moniker, the “Million Women March,” in response to criticism that it was disrespectful to African American women who had participated in a Philadelphia march by that same name in 1997. The latter had taken place two years after the iconic Million Man March. This year’s initial organizers also faced criticism that the name “March on Washington” failed to show deference to the historic role of black activists in the 1963 March on Washington, recognized as a high point of the civil rights movement. The new national committee explicitly describes its mission as one that builds on earlier movements for social justice.

Women in attendance at The Million Woman March on October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennyslvania.

Women in attendance at The Million Woman March on October 25, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (via Idealistic Ambitions).

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

By contrast, some historic marches on the Capitol demonstrated racial unity against all odds. The largest convergence on Washington prior to 1963 was the 1932 Bonus Army March, which brought together World War I veterans at the height of the Great Depression. In 1924, these veterans had been honored with the promise of an old-age “bonus” redeemable in 1945. But times were desperate, and the men wanted their bonuses early. An estimated 20,000 unemployed veterans hopped freight trains, caravanned in automobiles, or walked to the capital from as far away as California, and vowed to stay put until the government delivered. Their protests placed them in a direct confrontation with President Herbert Hoover. Things came to a head on July 28, 1932, when General Douglas MacArthur ordered soldiers wielding machine guns, bayonets, and tear gas to evict the veterans from their encampment and torch their tents. The debacle, which featured news coverage of government troops attacking unarmed veterans, is thought to have helped Franklin Roosevelt beat Hoover by a landslide that November.

Bonus marchers in 1932 (via Wikimedia Commons).

On the surface, the Bonus Army March may appear to have little relevance for organizers of this month’s march. But the gathering was actually a show of unity that brought together both men and women, both whites and blacks. In 1932, not only the veterans but also their wives and children poured into Washington, forming a genuine community. And despite the fact that the U.S. military had maintained racially segregated units during World War I, white and black veterans caravanned to the capital together. For two months, they and their families squeezed in beside one another as their children played between the rows of tents. They experienced MacArthur’s onslaught together, an early demonstration of racial and gender solidarity not unlike what the Women’s March expects to deliver this year.

The Bonus March was still fresh in the minds of another group of protesters, this time comprised only of African Americans, who used the threat of a mass demonstration to pressure the government for racial justice in 1941. It was the eve of the nation’s entry into World War II, and a labor organization known as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters initiated a March on Washington Movement that threatened to bring 100,000 African American protesters to the capital on July 1 unless President Roosevelt moved to desegregate the military and order an end to racial discrimination in the burgeoning defense industry. Anxious that reports of racial injustice would damage his credibility with the Allies, Roosevelt blinked on June 25, and this march never took place. In the end, Roosevelt failed to desegregate the military; but he did prohibit discrimination by defense contractors, and established a Fair Employment Practices Committee to mediate disputes.

After Roosevelt desegregated the armed forces, Howard Perry became the first African American US Marine Corps recruit in 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The role of women in this World War II–era movement holds a lesson for the women rising up to oppose Trump’s presidency today. It may be widely known that the 1941 protest was a direct precursor of the 1963 March on Washington. But less well-known is that the full, official name of black union in question, led by A. Philip Randolph, was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. The avid participation of maids, as well as of the union’s Ladies’ Auxiliary, which included porters’ wives, enabled Randolph to up his original participation projection from 10,000 in January of 1941 to 100,000 just a few months later.

Just as significantly, even though Randolph ended up canceling the demonstration, it spawned a March on Washington Movement, with chapters across the country, that persisted until 1946. Women continued as leaders in both the local and national organizations, and drew particular attention to discrimination against black females in the defense industry and other employment sectors. Women organizing this month’s demonstration at both the local and national levels are drawing on the historic organizing role of women—even those who have been forgotten—to create a lasting movement.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman (via Hamline University).

Perhaps the most famous march on Washington in the 20th century took place in August of 1963, when a quarter of a million people united to demand black civil rights. The march brought together white liberals who turned out to support African Americans, as well as Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans, in an extraordinary show of unity against racial oppression.

Nevertheless, yearly commemorations of this historic march fail to note unsettling backstories involving women leaders, whose important roles have been largely forgotten. Its top organizers, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, did not invite a single woman to speak, not even Rosa Parks—despite strong criticism from prominent black female civil rights advocates, including the one woman on the central organizing committee, Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Ultimately, organizers did arrange for six women, including Parks, to sit on the dais and be honored as women. But as the program shows, none of the ten keynote addresses heard that day was delivered by a woman.

Most Americans remember only one: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Often forgotten is the full name of the event: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Photographs of the event show hundreds of women bearing signs calling for everything from higher wages and jobs for all to better schools and voting rights. Many are union members. Female domestic and agricultural workers, the backbone of Southern activism since the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, also marched, at a time when federal law excluded them from minimum wages, Social Security, and from union-organizing protections.

Those photographs are testament to the role of women workers in organizing public protests. One thread running through all of these major 20th-century marches is the way civil justice issues involving race, gender, jobs, wage equity, and immigration all tended to intertwine. In the wake of the bitter election of 2016, post-election analyses have focused disproportionately on “the white blue-collar worker,” “the middle class,” or “the 1 percent.” Overlooked are the economic security and job concerns of Latina, black, and other women who toil in service, agricultural, and manufacturing jobs, at wages so low they qualify for food stamps. Such women would be devastated by the social-services restructuring proposed by GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin.

As women and men march on Washington once again, the demonstrations of 1913, 1932, 1941, and 1963 hold important lessons. The outward show of “unity” at the Woman Suffrage Procession masked its racism. The 1932 Bonus Army March speaks to the potential for diverse groups to come together in the face of extreme adversity—just as progressives are unifying today in the face of Trump. The 1941 march illustrated how organizing for a demonstration can plant the seeds for a sustained movement. And the solidarity celebrated in 1963 hid the relegation of women leaders to second-class citizenship. Ideally, the Women’s March on Washington will both avoid some of these pitfalls and help women forge new alliances that will last well beyond the event itself.

More by Laurie Green on Not Even Past:
1863 in 1963.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000.

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George Forgie discusses the work the Emancipation Proclamation left undone.

Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia, By Douglas Northrup (2003)

By Natalie Cincotta

When the Soviets launched their campaign, known as the hujum, against the veil in Uzbekistan in 1927, their goal was not just to liberate women. Without a class framework or a working class to build socialism in Uzbekistan, Soviet activists instead attempted to transform society through the liberation of women. Northrop argues that a woman’s behavior and dress, expressed namely through the veil, came to symbolize all social values and, as such, became a battleground between Uzbek national identity and the socialist project. According to Northrop, the battle over the veil thus came to represent a process of mutual self-definition.

Northrop’s main aim is to explain the unfolding of Soviet policy in Central Asia through the lens of gender relations and policy. Rooted in a colonial studies framework, Northrop argues that the campaign to unveil women began only after the isolation of Muslim clerics and landowners as class enemies failed to win the rest of the population to their side. Only then did Soviet activists initiate the “liberation” of women as the means to build socialism, through bringing profound changes to Uzbek society, culture, and everyday life. In 1927, these Soviet activists launched a campaign, or hujum, to liberate Muslim women from seclusion and oppression through mass unveiling, which they hoped would dismantle the traditional patriarchal structure of everyday life.

Woman wearing a traditional paranja in Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan) circa 1910 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Northrop highlights the limits to Soviet power through a thought-provoking consideration of Uzbek responses to this new drive to unveil women. For the most part Uzbeks resisted Soviet policies simply by non-compliance. Others learned to work the system or subvert Soviet language and logic, but wearing the veil became the primary symbolic assertion of anti-Soviet sentiment. Apart from expressing anti-Soviet sentiment, however, exactly how opposition to the hujum fostered Uzbek identity beyond preserving traditional cultural and societal structures remains an elusive aspect of the book.

Northrop’s use of gender as an analytical framework is arguably the most valuable contribution of Veiled Empire. He masterfully considers the way the Uzbek woman’s body became conflated with a social purpose by both Uzbeks and Soviet policy makers, as women’s behavior and dress came to represent practices in everyday life and social values in communities and in the nation as a whole. Northrop shows that unveiling did not necessarily spell out “liberation” for Uzbek women because western notions of feminism, gender, and patriarchy are not universal. For example, veils were not necessarily associated with oppression in Uzbek society, evident in the fact that the Uzbek Zhenotdel (Women’s Bureau) did not make it a chief concern before 1926. Northrop’s consideration of gender relations from both a Soviet and an Uzbek perspective thus allows him to understand the complexity of underlying tensions during the hujum and connect the gender project to broader Soviet goals. It is unfortunate, however, that women’s experiences are largely absent from this account, due to a lack of sources, as their voices would help further illuminate these tensions and complexities.

urging_peasants_to_speed_up_cotton_production_-_russian_and_uzbek_tashkent_1920s_mardjani

Soviet propaganda poster urging Uzbek peasants to speed up cotton production. Islamic clerics are depicted disparagingly (via Wikimedia Commons).

Overall, Veiled Empire is an admirable work that illuminates the limits of Soviet power in Central Asia. Using gender as an analytical framework, Northrop highlights how the Soviets attempted to use the “liberation” of women as a means to meeting a broader goal of building socialism. On both the Soviet and Uzbek sides, the veil was made to represent an entire identity and was conflated with social utility. As such, Northrop highlights the ways “oppression” and “liberation” are not as straightforward as Soviet activists hoped they were.

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Janine Jones reviews The Politics of the Veil, by Joan Wallach Scott and Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood (2004).
Christopher Rose recalls Exploring the Silk Route in Uzbekistan.

Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman (1992)

By Augusta Dell’Omo

For Judith Herman, “to study psychological trauma means bearing witness to horrible events.” A professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School and a founding member of the Women’s Mental Health Collective, Herman is best known for her research on complex post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly with victims of sexual and domestic violence. In her own words, Trauma and Recovery is a book about “restoring connections” between individuals and communities and reconstructing history in the face of a public discourse that did not want to address the horrors of sexual and domestic violence. Herman begins her work by situating it in the feminist movement and the “forgotten history” of traumatic disorders, describing the cultural and political factors that have continually prevented psychological trauma from being recognized effectively by the public. From there, she enumerates not only the symptoms of traumatic disorders, but argues that only by renaming sexual, domestic, and violence traumas as “complex post-traumatic stress disorders,” and treating victims as suffering from this specific disorder, can victims truly “recover.”

Trauma and Recovery has been recognized as a groundbreaking psychological and historical work because it forces the reader to come to terms with the underlying traumas that permeate society and the ways in which a culture of oppression furthers the protection of the perpetrators. While Trauma and Recovery is over two decades old, its argument seems particularly fresh in the context of current national conversations on the status of victims of sexual assault, particularly in university settings, and their treatment in society. A close reading of Trauma and Recovery forces us to examine our own biases and the historical precedents that have colored our treatment of victims today.

hqdefault — Judith Herman in a 2002 interview (via YouTube).

Herman argues that the study of psychological trauma is not governed by consistency, but rather “episodic amnesia,” in which the stories of the victims became public for brief periods of time before diminishing into the background. She points to three key moments: the treatment of “hysterical women” in late nineteenth-century France, the treatment of shell shocked soldiers in England and the United States after the First World War, and finally, the public awareness of sexual and domestic violence that took place during the feminist movement in Western Europe and North America. For Herman, one of the consistent elements in all three cases was a culture of societal neglect, in which the victim is rendered invisible and discredited, a horrifying tendency that seems to have continued into American society today.

nach_gasangriff_1917 — British soldiers after a German chemical weapon attack in 1917 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Herman follows with a description of trauma, stating that it overwhelms the victim, removing control, connection, and meaning. Individuals display hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction, sometimes at levels so extreme they force an alternative state of consciousness to form, so that the victim can actually cope with their reality. This alternative state of consciousness, Herman argues can manifest in a variety of ways including multiple personality disorder, amnesia, and “sleep walking.” One of the most persistent elements Herman describes is “intrusion,” in which traumatized individuals cannot resume the normal condition of their lives due to the repeated interruption of the trauma. These symptoms occur because of a rupturing of the “inner schemata.” This is paramount for understanding both individual and societal trauma: for the individual, their trauma disrupts their inner schemata of safety, protection, and trust in the outside world.

Throughout Trauma and Recovery, Herman delineates the ways in which the societal context can affirm and protect the victims by giving voice to the disempowered, but can also deny the victims through silencing and rejection. Indeed, Herman states that denial is often the default state of society, in which the active process of “bearing witness” instead “gives way to the active process of forgetting.” These ideas of “bearing witness,” and forcing vocalization of events are similar to the work of religious, ethnic, and racial minorities in the face of traumatic genocide, oppression, and destruction. The active construction of a truthful narrative helps survivors to “re-create the flow” of memory, transform the recollection, and mourn that traumatic loss. In Herman’s final section, the emphasis on “truth” becomes paramount: only through a truthful understanding and representation of events can individuals and society come to an understanding of psychological trauma.

5827890190_26a0466f91_b — A culture of victim-blaming still shapes the experience of trauma (via Richard Potts).

Herman’s Trauma and Recovery was a groundbreaking work that forced society to reckon with the nature of trauma and proved how understanding trauma can help us comprehend some of the most damaged groups in society. Herman’s research is critical in the historical understanding of how to bring truth to individuals and groups that societies have passively or actively chosen to repress. Furthermore, she raised interesting questions about constructing historical narrative when dealing with both perpetrators and victims and she showed how the collective memory of a society can hide atrocities that have been committed. Herman states in her afterword, that she sees the culture of victim blaming and repression of the heinous crimes of sexual violence as disappearing. However, lawsuits against universities about willful ignorance and discrediting of sexual assault survivors’ testimonies exposes Herman’s final claims as too optimistic. If nothing else, her work inspires historians to pursue a more active understanding of painful truths and charges us to side with the victims of violence to establish truth and justice, for which, she says, there “can be no greater honor.”

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992)

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Emily Whalen reviews John Mack’s psychological profile of T.E. Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder (1976).
Jack Loveridge recommends Robert Graves’ iconic war memoir, Goodbye to All That (1929).
Jimena Perry explores violence and historical memory in Colombia’s museums.

Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

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

Huaiyin Li recommends:

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

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

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

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

Nancy Stalker recommends:

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

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

Cynthia Talbot recommends:

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

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

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Great Books (US)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

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

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