gender Archives - Not Even Past

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World By Jessica Marie Johnson (2020)

Many recent studies on chattel slavery in the Atlantic World have decentered the voices of the colonizers in an effort to creatively reimagine the inner lives of Black people, both enslaved and “free.” However, narrating the complex ways race, gender, and sexuality played out in a colonial setting beyond violence has proven difficult due to the brutal, inhumane conditions of enslavement. At the same time, the drastic imbalance of power raises questions about consent within sexual and intimate relationships. While most scholars of slavery have tended to shy away from such a contentious and messy topic, historian Jessica Marie Johnson presents a compelling analysis of how African women and women of African descent used intimacy and kinship to construct and live out freedom in the eighteenth century.

She demonstrates how the legal status of free, manumission from bondage, or escape from slavery did not protect Black women from “colonial masculinities and imperial desires for black flesh” that rendered African women as “lecherous, wicked, and monstrous” (14). Slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials attempted to exploit Black women’s bodies (enslaved or legally free) for labor. In return, Johnson argues, Black women defined freedom on their own terms through the intimate and kinship ties they formed.

Focusing on Black women in New Orleans, Wicked Flesh takes readers from the coast of Senegal to French Saint-Domingue and from Spanish Cuba to the US Gulf Coast areas in order to tell the varying experiences of Black women across the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival material written in multiple languages dispersed across three continents and uses a method that historian Marisa Fuentes describes as “reading along the bias grain” to offer an ethical historical analysis of her texts. Although the majority of sources Johnson utilizes were produced by colonial officials and slaveholding men, this methodology allows Johnson to carefully and innovatively piece together archival fragments, providing readers insight into the everyday intimate lives of Black women during this era. Intimacy, as Johnson explores, encompassed the “corporeal, carnal, quotidian encounters of flesh and fluid” and was the very thing that tied Black women to white and Black men. It was through these connections that women of African descent simultaneously endured violence and resisted colonial agendas. Wicked Flesh seriously consider the ways Black women fostered hospitable and pleasurable spaces on both sides of the Atlantic.

Johnson begins her narrative in West Africa between the geographical region of the Senegal River (north) and the Gambia River (south), also known as Senegambia. Senegal’s Atlantic coast saw Portuguese-Dutch-French-Wolof trade alliances and their struggle for power, but by 1659, the French drove out the Dutch from the northern area and founded the comptoir (administrative outpost of Saint-Louis. It is in this locale, comptoir, that Johnson introduces readers to free African women like Seignora Catti, Anne Gusban, and Marie Baude, who all actively engaged in networks with European and African men.

Throughout chapters one and two, Johnson demonstrates the different ways free African women cultivated freedom in efforts to seek safety and security. This included participating in grand gestures of hospitality for French officials or marring European men, but rejecting their Catholic practices. These practices impacted three groups, free African women who has intimate ties with European and African men, captifs du case (enslaved people who belonged to comptoir residents), and Africans forced onboard of slaved ships set to travel to the Americas. Chapter three examines the latter, including Black women’s and girl’s horrific experiences on the long middle passage and how this forced migration produced a “predatory network of exchanges” that attempted to “dismantle their womanhood, girlhood, and humanity” (123).

Chapters four and five shifts to the Gulf Coast region and encourages readers to reconceptualize the price of manumission for people of African descent that extended beyond the material world. Through the lives of figures like Suzanne, the wife of a New Orleans “negro executioner,” Johnson further illustrates just how bound Black women’s freedom was to their intimate relations and kinship ties with men in power who were acting on behalf of the French colonial regime. When Suzanne’s husband, Louis Congo, initially entered in a contractual obligation with slaveowners or Company officials, he requested freedom for Suzanne too. However, French colonists rejected his demand and instead, only allowed Suzanne to live with her husband, if Louis agreed to grant the Company full use of his wife when the Company needed her. While one scholar may read this account as an example of a Black woman gaining her freedom through her husband’s occupation, Johnson critically assess Suzanne’s lack of control over her own body and movement.

Diving deeper into the intricate ways women of African descent navigated French colonial power in New Orleans, Johnson’s fifth chapter follows girls like Charlotte, the daughter of a French colonial officer, who demanded manumission for herself. It is in this section that Johnson introduces the concept of “black femme freedom” that “points to the deeply feminine, feminized, and femme practices of freedom engaged in by women and girls of African descent” (260). Scholars of Black and other women of color feminists use the term “femme” to describe a queer sexual identity that is gendered in performances of femininity. Johnson finds this term productive in the context of eighteenth-century New Orleans, because strands of resistive femininity and intimacy between women was present during this time. Black femme freedom details a type of liberation that went beyond masculine and imperial desires. It describes the importance of reading Black women’s intimate decisions to privilege themselves and each other in a world that violently privileged the position of slaveowners and husbands. An example of this Black femme freedom lies within Black women’s efforts to create spaces for pleasure, spirit, and celebration against French and later Spanish censorship of their behaviors. This included hosting night markets and wearing headwraps. The last chapter explores the shift in colonial powers and how free women of African descent used this change to claim kinship ties through registration of their wills and testaments.

Wicked Flesh is a well-researched, beautifully written text that is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections between Slavery, Gender, and Sexuality. Following in the tradition of historians like Stephanie Camp, Jennifer Morgan, and Marisa Fuentes, Johnson’s work is a superb addition to these groups of scholars who are shifting the field of Atlantic History to critically engage with definitions of freedom for enslaved and legally free women of African descent during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Graduate students including myself can (and likely will) use Johnson’s work as a model for problematizing white colonial sources, while ethically utilizing contemporary theoretical frameworks to imagine and retell the lives of those silenced by institutional archives.

Image credits

Banner image – Ndeté-Yalla, lingeer of Waalo, Gallica, bnf.fr – Réserve DT 549.2 B 67 M Atlas – planche n °5 – Notice n° : FRBNF38495418 – (Illustrations de Esquisses sénégalaises) Image from Wikimedia Commons

TIANA WILSON is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

Our New History Ph.D.s

For so many students this year, the cancellation of commencement meant the lack of an important milestone. And in this unsettling time, with it many demands on our attention, it’s possible to overlook the extraordinary accomplishment involved in completing a PhD in History. So we decided to take this opportunity to celebrate the 2019-2020 class of new UT Austin History PhDs and tell you a little about them and their work.

Each of these students completed at least two years of course work. They read hundreds of books and wrote dozens of papers to prepare for their comprehensive examinations. After that, they developed original research projects to answer questions no one had asked before. Then they did a year or so of research in libraries and archives, before sitting down to write their dissertations. They did all this while working, teaching, caring for their families, having at least a little fun, and, in some cases, writing for Not Even Past!

Here they are, with their dissertation titles (and abstracts, if we have them). CONGRATULATIONS DOCTORS!

Sandy Chang, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, University of Florida
“Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migrants in British Malaya, 1870s-1930s”

Across the South Seas explores the migration of Chinese women who embarked on border-crossing journeys, arriving in British Malaya as wives, domestic servants, and prostitutes. Between the 1870s and 1930s, hundreds of thousands of women traveled to the Peninsula at a time when modern migration control first emerged as a system of racial exclusion, curtailing Asian mobility into white settler colonies and nation-states. In colonial Malaya, however, Chinese women encountered a different set of racial, gender, and sexual politics at the border and beyond. Based on facilitation rather than exclusion, colonial immigration policies selectively encouraged Chinese female settlement across the Peninsula. Weaving together histories of colonial sexual economy, Chinese migration, and the globalization of border control, this study foregrounds the role of itinerant women during Asia’s mobility revolution. It argues that Chinese women’s intimate labor ultimately served as a crucial linchpin that sustained the Chinese overseas community in colonial Southeast Asia.

Sandy Chang on Not Even Past:
Podcasting Migration: Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes
A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair, c.1880s (Courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore).

Itay Eisinger
“The Dystopian Turn In Hebrew Literature”

From its inception in Europe during the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement promoted, leveraged and drove forward a utopian plan for a Jewish national revival, in the biblical Land of Israel, and in essence framed these plans as a pseudo divine right of the Jewish people. Numerous intellectual, cultural and literary historians therefore have focused on the role of utopian thinking in the shaping of Zionist ideology and Hebrew literature. By way of contrast, this dissertation focuses on the transformation, or evolution, of dystopian poetics within the realm of modern Hebrew literature. … Recent scholarship argues that while early “totalitarian” dystopias tended to focus on the dangers of the all-powerful state, tyranny, and global isolation as the main sources of collective danger to a prosperous and peaceful future, more recently published dystopias – both in the West and in Israel – have moved their focus to other topics and hazards, such as catastrophic ecological or climate disasters, patriarchy, sexism and misogyny, and the rise of surveillance and the integration of the intelligence community into the all-powerful well-oiled capitalist machine. While I do not disavow such arguments completely, I argue that most Israeli dystopias are still driven primarily by the traditional depiction of an authoritarian-fascist regime run amok – in alignment with the Huxley-Orwell model – while at the same time, explore creatively a vision of Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s prediction in 1967 that the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinians would inevitably force Israel to become a “police state.” … I examine the common themes found in these novels, including the dystopian depiction of an instrumentalization of the Shoah and manipulative abuse of the memory of the Holocaust in order to promote political agendas, allusions to the nakba, the over-militarism and nationalism of the state, the effects of the Occupation on Israeli society, and Israel’s neoliberal revolution…. By examining these novels from this perspective, and creating a dialogue between these works and different critical scholars, this dissertation aims to contribute to the study of Israel by rethinking its history – through the prism of dystopia.

Itay Eisinger on Not Even Past:
Rabin’s Assassination Twenty Years Later

Carl Forsberg, 2019-2020 Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, 2020-2021 Postdoctoral Fellow with Yale’s International Security Studies Program and the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy.
“A Diplomatic Counterrevolution: The Transformation Of The US-Middle East Alliance System In The 1970s”

This dissertation charts the agency of Arab, Iranian, and US elites in transforming the structure of Middle Eastern regional politics and constructing a coalition that persists to the present. In the decade after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the regimes of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, King Faisal in Saudi Arabia, and Shah Mohamad Reza Pahlavi in Iran set out to overturn the legacy of Nasserism and Arab socialism. Animated by a common fear that their internal opposition gained strength from a nexus of Soviet subversion and the transnational left, these regimes collaboratively forged a new regional order built around the primacy of state interests and the security of authoritarian rule. They instrumentally manipulated a range of US-led peace processes, including Arab-Israeli negotiations, US-Soviet détente, and conciliation between Iran and its Arab neighbors to advance their diplomatic counter-revolution. US administrations at times resisted these efforts because they read the region through the polarities of the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the 1973 War, however, the opportunity to marginalize Soviet influence in the region proved too enticing for US officials to ignore. My project deploys multi-lingual research conducted in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, the UK, and the US. To overcome the lack of open state archives in Arab countries, the dissertation examines US, British, Iranian, and Israeli records of discussions with Arab leaders, as well as memoirs, periodicals, and speeches in Farsi and Arabic, to triangulate the strategies and covert negotiations of Arab regimes.

Celeste Ward Gventer, Post-doc, The Albritton Center for Grand Strategy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.
“Defense Reorganization For Unity: The Unified Combatant Command System, The 1958 Defense Reorganization Act And The Sixty-Year Drive For Unity In Grand Strategy And Military Doctrine”

Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles at the White House in 1956

This dissertation seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: why, in 1958 and as part of the Defense Reorganization Act (DRA) passed that year, did U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower remove the chiefs of the military services from the chain of operational command and instead empower the so-called “unified combatant commands” to lead American military forces in war? The answer, this dissertation will argue, is that Eisenhower had found himself competing with his military service chiefs for his entire first administration and the first half of his second over national (grand) strategy and military doctrine. Taking those service chiefs out of the chain of operational command would, in effect, diminish the role of those officers. Eisenhower had found that simply getting rid of refractory officers was insufficient to quiet their rebellion: only by suppressing their role permanently in the bureaucracy did he hope to unify American strategy- and policy-making. This interpretation is at odds with the few accounts of the 1958 DRA that do exist, which tend to take Eisenhower’s stated purposes—to enhance “unity of command”—at face value. The circumstances that led Eisenhower to take this step were decades, if not longer, in the making. … The situation resulted from the inherent pluralism in American military policy making … it was also a product of the decades that preceded Eisenhower’s administration during which the American military was consistently forced to “fill in the blanks” of national strategy. What drove matters to a head in the 1950s was the steady growth of American power after the 1898 Spanish-American War and, especially, after the Second World War. It is necessary to also appreciate several legacies Eisenhower confronted and that colored his own views: the history of American military thinking about command and about civilian control; the creation of military staffs and the process of reform and professionalization inside the military services during the twentieth century; and the development of independent service doctrines. … This work will trace these conceptual threads over the sixty-year rise of the United States to a global power, culminating in Eisenhower’s standoff with his service chiefs in the 1950s.

Lauren Henley, Assistant Professor, University of Richmond
“Constructing Clementine: Murder, Terror, and the (Un)Making of Community in the Rural South, 1900-1930”

Deirdre Lannon, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Texas State University
“Ruth Mary Reynolds And The Fight For Puerto Rico’s Independence”

Ruth Mary Reynolds (Women in Peace)

This dissertation is a biography of Ruth Mary Reynolds, a pacifist from the Black Hills of South Dakota who after moving to New York City became involved in the movement for Puerto Rico’s independence…. She bucked the social norms of her conservative hometown to join the Harlem Ashram…. Her work within the Ashram connected her to the web of leftist coalition activism launched by the Popular Front era of the 1930s and 1940s, and to A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement for black equality. She became involved with organized pacifism, most notably through her membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and her close friendship with its U.S. leader, Dutch-born theologian A.J. Muste. In 1944, Ruth decided to make the issue of Puerto Rico’s independence her own. She helped form a short-lived organization, the American League for Puerto Rico’s Independence, which was supported by Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck among others. She became close friends with Pedro Albizu Campos and his family, as well as other Puerto Rican independence activists. She traveled to Puerto Rico, and in 1950 found herself swept into the violence that erupted between the government and Albizu Campos’s followers. Her experiences in New York and Puerto Rico offer a unique lens into the ways in which the Puerto Rican independence movement functioned, and how it was quashed through governmental repressions. Her friendship with Pedro Albizu Campos, the fiery independentista who remains a figurehead of Puerto Rican identity and pride, helps to humanize the man behind the mission. Ruth never abandoned her friend, or their shared cause. She fought for Albizu Campos to be freed, bucking the climate of repression during McCarthyism. This dissertation traces her efforts until 1965, when Albizu Campos died. She remained an active part of the Puerto Rican independence movement until her own death in 1989.

Holly McCarthy
“The Iraq Petroleum Company In Revolutionary Times”

Signe Fourmy, Visiting Research Affiliate, Institute for Historical Studies and Education Consultant, Humanities Texas.
“They Chose Death Over Slavery: Enslaved Women and Infanticide in the Antebellum South”

“They Chose Death Over Slavery,” … examines enslaved women’s acts of infanticide as maternal resistance. Enslaved women occupied a unique position within the slaveholding household. As re/productive laborers, enslavers profited from work women performed in the fields and house, but also from the children they birthed and raised. I argue that enslaved women’s acts of maternal violence bear particular meaning as a rejection of enslavers’ authority over their reproduction and a reflection of the trauma of enslavement. This dissertation identifies and analyzes incidents of infanticide, in Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri. Using a comparative approach to consider geographic location and household size—factors that shaped the lived experiences of the enslaved—I ask what, if any, patterns existed? What social, economic, and political considerations influenced pivotal legal determinations—including decisions to prosecute, punish, or pardon these women? Expanding on the work of Laura Edwards and Paul Finkelman, I argue that public prosecution and legal outcomes balanced community socio-legal interests in enforcing the law while simultaneously protecting slaveowners profiting from their (re)productive labor. The existing scholarship on slavery, resistance, and reproduction shows that enslaved women were prosecuted for infanticide, yet the only book-length studies of enslaved women and infanticide center on one sensationalized case involving Margaret Garner. Infanticide was more prevalent than the secondary literature suggests. Building upon the work of historians Darlene Clark Hine and Jennifer L. Morgan, I explore how enslaved women re-appropriated their reproductive capacity as a means of resistance. In conversation with Nikki M. Taylor, Sasha Turner, and Marisa Fuentes, I ask what this particular type of violence reveals about the interiority of enslaved women’s lives. Additionally, I explore what these acts of maternal violence reveal about enslaved motherhood—or more specifically an enslaved woman’s decision not to mother her child.

Signe Fourmy on Not Even Past:
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor

Sean Killen
“South Asians and the Creation of International Legal Order, c. 1850-c. 1920: Global Political Thought and Imperial Legal Politics”

This dissertation argues that South Asians used international legal discourse both for ideological disputation and to mount political challenges to the domination and subjugation that accompanied British imperial rule between roughly 1850 and 1920. South Asians instigated political and legal disputes in India and Britain, throughout the empire, and overseas, and gained promises and partial concessions to Indian opinions and demands that limited British options in imperial and international relations. In so doing, they compelled the British state to alter the ideology, the policies, and the practices of the state, in India and in its relations with other states both within and outside the empire. Britain’s power, ultimately, meant that South Asians’ argumentation and actions shaped the contours of global order after the First World War….Traditional histories of international law argue that international law originated in Europe and regulated European states’ relations until colonized states were granted international legal recognition at the time of decolonization. Recent revisionist scholarship argues that the existence and experience of empire and colonial rule shaped the development of international law and global order throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dissertation approaches empire in a way that emphasizes the global exchange of ideas and the active connections between colonizers and the colonized. Elite, English-speaking South Asians acted as cultural translators or intermediaries. They engaged in debates as public intellectuals, and they carved out spaces for themselves in the social and political communities that created public opinion. Consequently, South Asians’ ideas about relations among different peoples and between states, and South Asians’ mobilization of these ideas throughout the empire and overseas to make political claims about the obligations of the imperial state and the rights of imperial subjects shaped ideas about global order and the structure of international legal relations.

Jimena Perry, Teaching Instructor, East Carolina University
“Trying to Remember: Museums, Exhibitions, and Memories of Violence in Colombia, 2000-2014”

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia.

Since the turn of the century, not only museum professionals but grassroots community leaders have undertaken the challenge of memorializing the Colombian armed conflict of the 1980s to the early 2000s. In an attempt to confront the horrors of the massacres, forced displacement, bombings, and disappearances, museums and exhibitions have become one of the tools used to represent and remember the brutalities endured. To demonstrate how historical memories are informed by cultural diversity, my dissertation examines how Colombians remember the brutalities committed by the Army, guerrillas, and paramilitaries during the countryʼs internal war. The chapters of this work delve into four case studies. The first highlights the selections of what not to remember and represent at the National Museum of the country. The second focuses on the well-received memories at the same institution by examining a display made to commemorate the assassination of a demobilized guerrilla fighter. The third discusses how a rural marginal community decided to vividly remember the attacks they experienced by creating a display hall to aid in their collective and individual healing. Lastly, the fourth, also about a rural peripheric community, discusses their particular way of remembering, which emphasizes their peasant oral traditions through a traveling venue. Bringing violence, memory, and museum studies together, my work contributes to our understanding of how social groups severely impacted by atrocities recreate and remember their violent experiences. In addition, my case studies exemplify why it is necessary to hear the multiple voices of conflict survivors, especially in a country with a long history of violence like Colombia. Drawing on displays, newspapers, interviews, catalogs, and oral histories, I study how museums and exhibitions in Colombia become politically active subjects in the acts of reflection and mourning, and how they foster new relationships between the state and society. My work also analyzes museums and displays as arbiters of social memory. It asks how representations of violence serve in processes of transitional justice and promotion of human rights for societies that have been racked by decades of violence.

Jimena Perry on Not Even Past:
When Answers Are Not Enough: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
More Than Archives: Dealing with Unfinished History
Too Much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellin, Colombia
Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory, 2000-2014
My Cocaine Museum by Michael Taussig
History Museums: The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogatá, Colombia
History Museums: The Hall of Never Again

Christina Villareal, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, The University of Texas at El Paso
“Resisting Colonial Subjugation: The Search for Refuge in the Texas-Louisiana Borderlands, 1714-1803”

This dissertation is a history of the Spanish borderlands from the perspectives of subjugated people in the Gulf Coast. Based on colonial, military, and civil manuscript sources from archives in the United States, Mexico, Spain, and France, it traces the physical movement of Native Americans, soldiers, and African and indigenous slaves who fled conscription, reduction to Catholic missions, or enslavement in the Texas-Louisiana borderlands of the eighteenth century. It reconstructs geographies of resistance to understand how challenges to colonial oppression shaped imperial territory and created alternative spaces for asylum. While the overarching focus of the dissertation is political space-making at the ground-level, the pivotal change occasioned by the Treaty of Paris (1763) serves as the central arc of the dissertation. The treaty, in which Spain acquired Louisiana from France, signified a major imperial transformation of the Gulf Coast. Initiated “from above,” this geopolitical transition expanded the Spanish borderlands over former French territory and altered the locations where Native Americans, soldiers, and enslaved people could find or avoid colonial oppression.

Christina Villareal on Not Even Past
The War on Drugs: How the US and Mexico Jointly Created the Mexican Drug War by Carmen Boullusa and Mike Wallace

Andrew Weiss
“The Virgin and The Pri: Guadalupanismo And Political Governance In Mexico, 1945-1979”

This dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between Catholicism and political governance in Mexico from 1945 until 1979 through the lens of Guadalupanismo. Guadalupanismo (devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe) is a unifying nationalistic force in Mexico. After 1940, Church and state collaborated to promote the Virgin of Guadalupe as a nationalist emblem following decades of divisive state-led religious persecution. Mexico, however, remained officially anticlerical sociopolitical territory. I analyze flashpoints of Guadalupan nationalism to reveal the history of Mexican Church-state relations and Catholic religiosity. These episodes are: the 1945 fiftieth anniversary of the 1895 coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe; U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 visit to the Basilica of Guadalupe; the construction of the New Basilica in the 1970s (inaugurated in 1976); and Pope John Paul II’s trip to Mexico and the Basilica in 1979. Each of these occasions elicited great popular enthusiasm and participation in public ritual. And each brought politicians in contact with the third rail in Mexican politics: religion. The essential value of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as I show, is that as both a Catholic and a nationalistic icon, she represented an ideal symbolic terrain for the renegotiation and calibration of Church-state relations under PRI rule. I follow these Guadalupan episodes to track the history of Guadalupanismo and interpret the changing Church-state relationship at different junctures in the course of the single-party priísta regime. These junctures (1945, 1962, 1976, and 1979) are relevant because they are representative of classical and degenerative phases of priísmo (the ideology of the ruling party [PRI] that governed Mexico from 1929 until 2000) and cover the episcopates of three major figures who ran the Archdiocese of Mexico for over sixty years. The Church-state covenant was renegotiated over time as seen by the Guadalupan episodes I analyze.

Andrew Weiss on Not Even Past
Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey

Pictured above (Clockwise from top center): Sandy Chang, Andrew Weiss, Deirdre Lannon, Jimena Perry, Celeste Ward Gventer, Christina Villareal, Itay Eisinger.
Not pictured: Signe Fourmy, Lauren Henley, Sean Killen, Holly McCarthy, Carl Forsberg,

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (2016)

By Tiana Wilson

After reading this book in three different graduate seminar courses, I can confidently argue that Marisa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is one of the most important texts of our time, and a must read for anyone interested in overcoming the limitations of archival research. For many scholars of marginalized groups in the U.S., there remains a challenge in finding materials on our subjects because most of their records are not institutionalized. However, Fuentes offers a useful analytical method for extracting information from sources bent on erasing their existence.

Fuentes’ work contributes to the historical knowledge of early America through her focus on violence and how it operated during slavery and continues today through archives. She cautions scholars to avoid traditional readings of archival evidence, which are produced by and for the dominant narratives of slavery. Instead, she calls for a reading “along the bias grain,” of historical records and against the politics of the historiography on a given topic. In other words, she pushes historians to stretch fragmented archival evidence in order to reflect a more nuanced, complex understanding of enslaved people’ lives. In doing so, her work investigates the sometimes hidden intentions and power dynamics that frame people’s decision-making. Rather than placing our subjects within the categories of victims or victors, Fuentes encourages scholars to examine the “complex personhood” of everyday actions.

Dispossessed Lives provides a portrait of eighteenth-century urban slavery in Bridgetown, Barbados from the perspective of multiple black women. This includes black women’s experiences in public executions and violent punishments, their involvement in the sex economy, and their efforts to escape slavery. Fuentes makes two interventions into the scholarship on slavery in the Atlantic world. First, she challenges the narrative that plantation slavery was more violent than other forms of bondage, and argues that urban slavery was just as brutal. Second, with a focus on the centrality of gender, Fuentes’ study reveals how black women experienced constructions of their sexuality and gender in relation to white women. The main questions guiding this work were: how did black women negotiate physical and sexual violence, colonial power, and female slaveowners in the eighteenth century, and how was freedom defined and what did freedom look like in a slave society?

Map of Barbados, 1767 (via Library of Congress)

Addressing the above questions, Fuentes describes and interrogates archival silences, and then works with these seemingly useless sources to reimagine black women’s experiences, filling in historical gaps in studies of early American slavery. For example, in her strongest chapter, Fuentes works with runaway slave advertisements to narrate the experiences of an enslaved runaway named Jane, as she navigates the colonial-built environments of urban areas that were constructed to terrorize fugitive bodies. Fuentes combines other sources to depict the architectural layout of the city that Jane would have encountered in her journey, such as the Cage (a place that held runaway slaves) and the execution gallows. In doing so, she demonstrates how colonial powers designed urban areas to confine and control black people’s movement.

In another chapter, Fuentes explores how black women’s sexuality was constructed in relation to white women’s identity. In this section, Fuentes discusses the sexual entanglement of a white woman, Agatha, and two white men. The mistress sent an enslaved boy, dressed as a woman to murder one of her sexual partners during the nighttime. Utilizing the trial records of the boy, Fuentes demonstrates what the boy’s attire reveals about black women’s mobility at night. While elite white women were not allowed in public, unaccompanied, Fuentes argues that black women’s ability to cross urban spaces in the night suggests that society viewed black women as sexual agents and therefore as unwomanly. Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how white authorities positioned black womanhood in opposition to white femininity.

Fuentes further problematizes white and black people’s relationship in early America, allowing readers to fully grasp the nuanced meaning of freedom for black people. For instance, in her assessment of Rachael, a woman of color slaveowner, Fuentes challenges the dominant reading of Rachael’s agency in her active role in the commodification of black bodies. Fuentes does not refute Rachael’s agency itself but contends that Rachael was also subjugated to different forms of inequality due to the racial and gendered hierarchies within a colonial context. By questioning Rachael’s actions, Fuentes illuminates black women’s limited opportunities in the slavery era. Readers benefit from Fuentes’ take on freedom because she accounts for enslaved and freed people’s contradictory beliefs and actions.

Fuentes is a beautiful writer, and she responsibly narrates the different types of violence black women faced historically and still face (if we are not careful) through archiving practices and writing today. She intentionally acknowledges her own subjectivity in the work, and readers would appreciate this honesty from a scholar who is passionately concerned with the ethics of history and not reproducing the same historical violence. Dispossessed Lives is a must-read for all historians (professional or amateur), and I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the possibilities for studying subaltern voices and the nuances of historical subjects and events.

Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019)

By Jesse Ritner

The easy correlation contemporary American and British cultures build from sex to pregnancy, pregnancy to birth, and birth to childrearing within a nuclear family is far from uniform throughout history. Mother is not an identity. Not all women will mother during the course of their lives. In Sarah Knott’s words, “mother is a verb,” and it is a deeply ambiguous and sometimes ambivalent one at that.

More than any historian I have read, Knott writes for herself. Her book is driven by self-reflection and personal memory. She does not create her questions simply out of academic interest or a curious piece of archival evidence, but out of a need to make sense of her own experience. Knott eschews the conventions of historical writing. Gone is any pretense to objectivity. And she sees no need to discuss the historical development of mothering chronologically or genealogically. Rather, she writes within a genre of self-help and maternal memoir. Her history reflects experiences like the realization of “the glimmer of novelty… the sheer peculiarity of adding reproduction to sex.” And the “privilege of relative stillness” that allows her to sit reflexively with her hand on her stomach, waiting for the baby to move. Her book is complex and expansive, covering twenty-two stages of mothering. Each addresses a particular discomfort, anxiety, or hope.

Knott draws her questions from personal experience, but her archival explorations are diversified outside of her race, class, and gender identities. As she notes early on, certain developments over the past half century or so – capitalism’s low valuing of caregiving, the emergence of queer families, and more egalitarian parenting amongst some working partners, to name but a few – demand a history that pushes beyond the idea that there is a single labor of mothering in any historical period. Biologically producing a baby and mothering were not always synonymous historically. Black enslaved women and children often did the labor of mothering on plantations in the early nineteenth century. Such attention frequently meant that other women (usually with the title Aunt or Aunty) mothered these women’s children for significant parts of the day, month, or year. Lower- class women in seventeenth-century England frequently brought other women’s babies into their own homes, acting as wet nurses to maintain a stable income for their family while they cared for their own infants. And Ojibwe women nursed the infants of women who died in labor, making them their own. Mothering is necessary labor that varies dramatically depending on the society and its structures.

Knott’s chapters wander through broad histories of time periods, specific historical sources, and personal anecdotes. If a single thread runs through her book, a single theme that ties all who mother together, it is interruption. Mothering interrupts life in both momentary and continuing ways. Knott’s morning sickness risked interrupting her lectures. In the eighteenth century an infant interrupted a woman’s ability to work and bring needed income to her family. On a homestead, the infant interrupted the domestic labor of doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning. But interruption is not unidirectional. Those who mother are also interrupted from time otherwise spent mothering. For instance, Knott recounts an anecdote about an enslaved women separated from her children by trips to Washington D.C.. However, mothers also found ways to mitigate interruptions, such as a women in a factory who hung her child in a basket from the ceiling so she could watch the infant while she worked. These interruptions certainly vary between time, place, and person, but from the seventeenth century on, they collectively define mothering.

Mother and Child: Pablo Picasso, 1921 (via ARTIC)

Knott is not the first historian to write herself into her book, but her method offers an important contribution to a growing genre. Her evidence is in the form of anecdote, mirroring what Lisa Baraitser terms the “constant attack on narrative that the child performs.” (264) Her stories are short and interrupted. And her own anecdotes about the way her son’s crying, or her concern over his reflux interrupts her work, are interspersed with historical voices. Through these moments of memoir, she acknowledges herself as a historical actor who plays a role – equivalent to other historical mothers – in the long-embodied history of mothering. Her theoretical framework reflects some of the most important feminist writings of the past forty years. In her appendix on methods, she discusses Joan Scott’s warning that historians of women must move beyond the study of normative women exclusively, or risk repetition of the political marginalization of all women in their future writing. For Knott, writing a history of mothering, of mother as a verb, makes room for glimpses of trans, queer, and on rare occasion even non-female voices. However, she is also honest about the dominant role cis-women often play in her history. It seems that Scott’s warning both antagonizes and entices her throughout the book, but she resists a definitive answer.

One of the most impressive aspects of Knott’s book is how she invokes queer theories of embodiment, plasticity, and normativity without relying on the difficult terminology that is so common in theoretical works on gender. These theories allow Knott to see mother as something people continuously make themselves, through the labor they do, through the conversations they have, and through their own perceptions of their bodies. “Mother” used as a verb insists that there is nothing inherent, biological, or natural about the action, but it is physical, bodily, and constitutive of identities, if always imperfectly and incompletely.

As a white male in my mid-twenties, who has had little interaction with mothering, I may seem an odd reviewer for this book. However, “Mother is a Verb” is as important for those of us who never intend to become mothers, as it is for people who have been and will be. For non-academics who want access to intricate innovative histories, this book offers a novel approach to the fields of gender studies and women’s history. At the same time, historians who hope to write scholarly books that address wide audiences should take note of the clarity and concision of Knott’s wonderful prose. While asking lots of questions about child care both in the past and the present, Knott offers few answers about the proper way to mother. Instead, she demonstrates the historical centrality of the physical and emotional labor of mothering.

The Racial Geography Tour at UT Austin

by Edmund T. Gordon

For almost two decades, Ted Gordon has been leading tours of UT Austin that show how racism, patriarchy, and politics are baked into the landscape and architecture of the campus. This month, that tour goes live online. In honor of the launch of the new website, “The Racial Geography Tour,” we are featuring an interview Joan Neuberger conducted with Prof. Gordon last week.

JN: Let’s start with the origins of the tour: when and what made you want to start?

TG: Well that’s a good question, and there’s no real answer to it. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it, and I’m not quite sure when it started, and the impetus for doing it is also foggy. It probably started somewhere around 2000, which means that I’ve been doing it for about almost 20 years now I guess, getting close to that, and I think it grew out of requests that were made to me as a young faculty member here to talk about the racial history of The University of Texas. I remember being invited to talk to the housing staff about racial history, and I think one of the things I wanted to do was talk about the history of the university being integrated in relation to its racial past, and being that it was a housing group I think I began to integrate some of the ideas about building and architecture into that discussion, so it actually started out as a slide show, and then at some point there was someone from out of town who was visiting. I was talking a little about the racial history and I was talking about, well actually we have Confederate statues on campus, and there’s a Confederate flag that flies and I said well hold on a second let me show you, nice day, we went out and started walking around and I think that’s the origin of it, some time ago

And you’ve been doing it on and off for a while. What kinds of responses have you had? Do people come up to while you’re talking and engage with you?

Sometimes they do, absolutely have people who join the tour as I’m doing it, and ask if they can follow along and certainly I have a lot of eavesdroppers and folks like that. Almost all the responses I get from both onlookers and people who are on the tour has been positive, well I know this to be the fact, that not that much readily available history of the campus and also not many tours of the campus itself that are available to folks outside the ones that are given to prospective students and all that, so I think there’s a fair amount of curiosity among students and others about the environment that they’re walking through on a day to day basis, so people seem to enjoy hearing about that and they want to know more about it.

There’s a lot in the ordinary (prospective) tours that the tours don’t go into — history of the tower, the kind of history that you’re talking about. What made you want to put it online?

The Littlefield Mansion

There’s a couple of things that made me want to put it online. Well, it wasn’t my idea first of all. The idea came from a young person who was working with us up in African and African Diaspora Studies, she was the electronic specialist or something like that and at any rate she was also the person who was helping me with my calendar, and helping to schedule the tours that I was doing, and she saw that the demand for the tour was becoming larger and larger and it was taking up more and more of my time, and then she also has this kind of digital and media background and thought it might be a good idea, and I think she was actually the one who got in touch with LAITS here and they jumped on it for whatever reasons, and that’s how it got going, so it wasn’t even really my idea. For me, really, it will help because I spend a lot of time giving tours. I gave 25 last semester, and it’s a large amount of time. I’ve got a lot of other things going on, and also people thought that it would be good to have it be available to a larger audience, and so that’s what’s behind it.

So the tour begins at the Littlefield mansion. Why did you start there?

Well, part of it is fortuitous. In recent years, my office was across the street from the Littlefield mansion, and so rather than having me hike some place else to begin, it seemed like a reasonable place to begin, but also it is the Littlefield Mansion. Littlefield personally had a lot to do with the origins of the University, but even more than that, the Littlefields positionality in Texas society is for me kind of indicative or emblematic of the folks who played the key role in the early years of the university, deciding that we need one and also serving the top positions in university, Littlefield’s biography in many ways really brings together a lot of forces that created the early university as it was. Plus there’s a building there that’s named after him, and it’s right across the street from the 40 Acres, so there’s just a number of reasons why it’s a reasonable place to start.

George Washington Littlefield

Let’s talk about his biography a little bit, because as you say it really brings together a lot of the different things that allowed white European people to come to Texas and make a lot of money, and be able to then found a university. So first of all he comes from a slave owning family–

Yes he does, from Mississippi–

A cotton producing family–

Absolutely–

And why did he stop farming cotton?

Well the big issue for Littlefield and all the rest of these folks was the Civil War, and so he went off the fight the Civil War in 1861, was injured, he had his man servant/ slave there with him who rescued him on the battlefield after he’s injured, and brought him back to Gonzalez, Texas where he recuperated, but that was the biggest issue. So after the end of the Civil War, there’s a problem with labor. In other words, where do you get enough labor now that the enslaved folks are free to be able to carry out, but there’s also problems with disease and various other kinds of things, financial disruption after the end of the Civil War, in the time of reconstruction, so he finds it difficult to be able to rebuild his cotton growing operation and then stumbles on to cattle, longhorn cattle.

And so he started raising cattle?

He had always been raising cattle as a side-line on his plantation, or in the area that he owned, but he discovered that by raising his own cattle and then buying cattle from neighboring farms and plantations and then driving them north to Kansas that he could make some money. I think his first drive was in the 1870s and he made a fair amount of money, and then from then on he didn’t actually drive the cattle himself, but he went into that business and became a cattle baron, owning property throughout central Texas, and up in the Panhandle, and in New Mexico, and west Texas, ended up controlling a huge amount of range land.

And where did all that land come from?

Well the land comes from, one of the things I talk about on the tour, is Littlefield was an ex-Confederate, and so in the period of time immediately after the Civil War, he was very much against what he would consider the invasion, the occupation of Texas by federal troops, but its those same federal troops and cavalry who were able to clear west Texas and New Mexico and particularly the Panhandle of the Comanche and other Native Americans who were there, which opened up that territory for people like Littlefield who would be able to exploit them, and then simultaneously, the massacre of the buffalo, over 20 million buffalo, created what Littlefield would see as virgin grass for his longhorns to feed on, and so it’s that kind of combined operation, plus the advent of the railroads pushing west from Kansas City, St Louis into Kansas that enabled them to make millions of dollars.

There are rumors that there are slave quarters in the basement of the Littlefield house.

There are rumors, but of course the Littlefield house was build in the early 1890s, or he occupied it in the 1890s. That’s 30 years more or less after the end of the Civil War, so of course there were no enslaved people who lived in the house, however, ex-enslaved people did and we know that Nathanial Stokes who was his man servant, ex-slave, till the day he died. He lived in the carriage house, above the carriage house and stables in the back of the Littlefield house there, and so I think the quarters that exist in the basement of the Littlefield mansion were probably quarters for domestic servants and many of them were undoubtedly ex-enslaved people, and maybe even his own.

So we’ve really just scratched the surface of Littlefield’s history, and let me just say at this point that there are additional resources on the website that go into more detail on everything that were going to be talking about.

You move from the Littlefield house to what used to be call the Women’s Campus, and this also is a fascinating piece of history that I didn’t know anything about, and I’ve been here for a long time, so can you describe the women’s campus and its architectural layout, and what was significant about that?

Alice Littlefield

The original housing for women on campus was over by where the Flawn Academic Center is now, but in the 1820s, Littlefield in his will left money and a piece of property to build the Littlefield dorm, named after his wife, as a dorm for freshman women, and then in 30s the University decided to create other living spaces for women in that vicinity, Andrews and Carothers were I think both opened in 1935, and so they created a women’s side of the campus. The main building there that kind of defines the whole space is Gearing Hall, the Home Economics building and if there’s any question about who that’s for, there’s a sculpture of a women and child on the façade there. They also put in Anna Hiss Gym, which is a gym for women, as well as playing fields for women behind the gym, and tennis courts just to the south of the gym for women. So it’s an area of campus for women built behind, on the north side, of the Tower, and in the tour I talk about the symbology of having women outside of the public sphere, outside of, or on the opposite side of, the entrance to the University, and what that means in terms of the gendered ideologies of the time.

You talk about how Gearing Hall was designed by the same architect, Paul Cret, who designed the Tower –the Tower’s our big administrative center, it’s the first building on campus, it is where the President’s office is housed now, the central library used to be there, it’s a big important tall building — and the same person who designed that designed Gearing Hall as a flat sort of circular building and the gendered nature of those two structures seems really clear, but you go further than that, and talk about the way they’re placed and the way the Tower even looks. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Gearing Hall

Sure. The point I’m trying to make on that whole section of the tour is to talk about how it is that space is gendered and space in terms of location of things, but also the design, the architecture, the naming, etc. And if you look at both the way in which the original women’s dorms, if you think about Littlefield, Carothers, and Andrews — Blanton wasn’t built until 1955, so the honors quad is only formed in the 1950s after they put Blanton there. So it’s a U shape, an open U shape that faces to the gym, and then you have Gearing Hall which is placed right on the axis, the north-south axis behind the Tower, to the north of the Tower, where’s there’s no mall leading up to it, and it opens up, it’s a also U shaped as well, and has a gateway, which opens up to the south with the Tower looming up above it. So it’s clear to me that there’s a kind of receptacle aspect to the architecture of Gearing Hall and a phallic kind of aspect to the Tower as a seat of power and kind of the public symbol of the University, and very masculine in that kind of way, and so there’s a femininity and a masculinity about the way the architecture is designed and Cret [Paul Cret], was the main consulting architect for all those buildings, and either implicitly or explicitly the gendered aspect of it is very clear.

And then you walk around to the west side of the Tower, which also has a really interesting history. The west mall is filled with these large planters and limestone walls, why was that?

The west campus, pretty shortly after the university was opened in 1883 became an area of residence for, originally faculty members and students, now it’s mostly students. And if you look carefully at the west mall, and you look at the planters and you look at the trees there, you’ll see that trees are much younger than the trees on the south mall and so they’re about 40, 50, 60 years old. So if you think we’re in 2019, you go back 50 years and now you’re talking about the 1960s, the late 1960s — so on the west mall which leads to Guadalupe and west campus where students are on the other side, think about what students were engaged in, in the late 1960s. There was a lot of political activity, civil rights, anti-war, free speech, and all those things were in fine form here at the University of Texas, students used that west mall area as an area of congregation. There was a relatively conservative President of the Board of Regents, Frank Erwin, we’ve got the Erwin Center named after him, who was particularly incensed by the students’ intransience or their rowdiness in terms of their politics, and one of his ways of dealing with it was to order that the University convert the mall into what we have today, putting walls up and down Guadalupe, and putting planters in the middle of the mall, and planting trees and in other ways making it difficult for students, large groups of students, to access, to really control the access to the campus, and to discourage the assembly of students in that particular area. So it’s a politicized landscape, very pretty, but political .

Lets talk about the statues on campus. Statues, everyone knows have been in the news, have been controversial politically. We have some new ones of civil rights heroes Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Barbara Jordan, and other statues are only marked by their former pedestals, so what’s that about? Could you talk about the statues?

I learned a new word with this, the removal of the statues, they’re actually plinths, who knew, and the plinths are still there and actually some of the statues are still there. I don’t know if you’ve been to see the Hogg statue, the return of James Hogg

I wanted to ask you about that…

Right, so the statues were placed actually ultimately in the early 1930s, but George Washington Littlefield began thinking about having statues be placed on campus probably in 1915 or 1916. 1915, if you think about, that’s 50 years after the end of the Civil War. There are some historians who claim that Littlefield was the wealthiest ex-Confederate, and he was very active in the state of Texas and elsewhere in terms of trying to memorialize the Civil War and the folks who fought in it. And he was a very big proponent, as you were mentioning earlier, of the Lost Cause. In fact, he and John H. Reagan were some of the biggest proponents of that.

The Lost Cause is an ideology which tries to say that the Civil War was fought to preserve the Constitution and the individual state’s rights to preserve what they considered to be one of the key aspects of the Constitution, which is the right to private property. So they want to make the claim that what the Civil War was about was a noble cause to enshrine and further the Constitutional rights that were originally granted; that the cause of the Civil War was not slavery itself but this issue over Constitutional and states’ rights within the context of the Constitution.

The Littlefield Fountain

One of the things that’s interesting, in the inscription that existed on the wall just to the west of the Littlefield Fountain, is an inscription that talks about Littlefield’s giving the money to construct this and one of the things it says is that the Civil War was fought for state’s rights and doesn’t mention slavery at all, so slavery gets disappeared. Littlefield is a very big proponent of that and so is J. H. Reagan. In fact, they played a major role in placing the Memorial to the Confederate Dead, which is at the entrance to the State Capitol grounds, which has Jefferson Davis as the largest figure there. Littlefield also, as a proponent of the Lost Cause, unlike other proponents of the Lost Cause who really looked to Robert E. Lee as the key figure in the Confederacy because he’s a less political figure and one who’s less identified with slavery than Jefferson Davis. Littlefield and Reagan were very big Jefferson Davis folks. So Littlefield gave the major part of the money for the Jefferson Davis memorial that’s up in Kentucky and he decided that he wanted to have Jefferson Davis as well as Robert E Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, J. H. Reagan, and James Hogg statues built on campus as a memorial to the Lost Cause. And his original idea was to have a huge bronze arch that extended over the south entrance to the 40 Acres, with Jefferson Davis right in the center of it all.

That got changed because there was some backlash, actually even before Littlefield passed in 1920. Littlefield put this idea and the money for it into his will. But there were people on campus who didn’t want as much of an association with the Lost Cause as Littlefield and some others did so there was some back and forth about that. So that’s when it was decided to add the statue for Woodrow Wilson. And also when it became clear, particularly after Littlefield’s death, that there wasn’t enough money in the will to build the entire arch, that’s when they decided instead of the arch to build the Littlefield fountain, which was a memorial to WW1.

So the idea then becomes that there’s a Lost Cause aspect of it, which was what Littlefield’s original wish was, but there’s also a notion of national unification around WWI but also particularly around the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Because Woodrow Wilson, of course, was a Democrat, a Southern Democrat. He also was a white supremacist. He resegregated the army, resegregated the federal offices in Washington, DC, wrote histories that were relatively sympathetic to the antebellum south and critical of Reconstruction. So this was the kind of figure that Littlefield but also the leadership of the University could get around.

Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945) in 1910. (via Wikipedia)

That’s the history of how that got placed. Of course the final placement was the same person, Paul Cret, who was the architect (of the Tower and Gearing Hall), decided that instead of having those statues at the very entrance to the University, to put them along the walkaway thereby tying the tower to the statuary and to the Littlefield Fountain and making of it a, well I have a relatively lengthy analysis of the white nationalist aspects of that whole tableaux, which I lay out in the racial geography tour.

You also mentioned the MLK statue and those others. One of the things that is clear to me is that all these symbols speak to each other. And there almost certainly would not have been a Martin Luther King statue on campus if those Confederate statues hadn’t existed and without a Martin Luther King statue on campus, we wouldn’t have had Barbara Jordan and we also wouldn’t have Cesar Chavez. So they all are in one way of another, in conversation with one another in interesting ways.

And in conversation with the community, right?, because it was protest about Jefferson Davis that led to the erection of a statue of MLK.

Yes, there were students in particular who thought not only Jefferson Davis but the rest of the Confederate statues were problematic. The University back in 70s was not about to move them, or in the 80s or in the 90s or do anything else about them, so one of the alternatives was to produce alternative symbology and that’s where Martin Luther King comes up.

Now if you ask most people on campus if Confederate flags flew in prominent places at U.T. I think even people who really care about these things would be surprised to know that they did. So where were they and how did they fly under the radar for so long?

Well they fly under the radar because most people don’t recognize the national flag of the Confederacy. What they recognize is what has been publicized since the 1950s and 60s, which is the battle flag of the Confederacy, which is St. Andrew’s cross. That became the kind of symbol of the rebirth of Ku Klux Klan, the white citizens’ groups at the time of, as part of the anti-civil rights and anti-Brown vs. Board of Education movements in the 50s and 60s. So most people don’t know the Stars and Bars as the Confederate Flag. That flag flew at least at two places. One was over the stadium over the scoreboard, and it also flew at the Erwin Center as part of Six Flags. Six Flags over Texas. Six Flags over Texas became an important symbol of Texas basically around the time of the Texas centennial in 1936. The Six Flags over Texas of course are Spain, France, Mexico, the Lone Star flag, the Confederate flag, and the United States flag. These are all the countries that Texas was under, one way or another. One of the things that the state of Texas was trying to do in the 1930s was to distance itself somewhat from the Lost Cause ideology, and to project itself as an American state, and as a pioneer state associated with American pioneering move west etc., and as a western state. And so in the sense that the United States was engaged in a struggle for freedom from previous colonial eras, Texas was positioning itself in that same kind of, using that same kind of notion of move towards progress, progress towards freedom, and independence, and so it emphasized its various associations on the way towards this America destiny of westward movement, and increased freedom, and progress, and all that. So within that context, the Six Flags over Texas became one of the key symbols of Texas and the Confederate flag was right there in the middle of it.

There is still Confederate symbology here on this campus. If you go up to the Tower, which was erected at precisely that time, if you look on the outside of tower it says 1836-1936. The Tower was open in 1937, but it was still part of this Texas centennial celebration mode, and if you go up to the second floor and you go into what the main room used to be the university main library and now is the Life Sciences library, and if you look up you’ll see these big plaster cast seals for all the six flags, for all those six countries, and right there is the symbology of the Confederacy. And one of the things that people have no idea about and actually is represented by the fact there are two statues left on the south mall. Those two statues are the assemblage which is the Littlefield fountain and the other one is George Washington. So why is the George Washington statue still there? Well it’s not associated with the Confederacy, but if you go up to the second floor of the Tower and you go into the Life Sciences library and look at that symbol of the Confederate nation, who’s right there in the middle? It’s George Washington on horseback. So in some sense the Daughters of the Revolution who are paying for putting George Washington’s statue on the mall in actually 1930, it didn’t get up until 1955 or 1950-sometime. He’s put there as the father of two countries, he’s the father of the United States, but he’s also the father of the Confederacy and that comes out through this Confederate symbology of which the Confederate flags were part, from the 1930s up until when they were taken down, I guess a year and a half ago.

Names of buildings are especially significant on campus, and you talk about a lot of different names, and naming, and changing of names, so let’s talk about some of those. First of all, the main library on campus, which everyone knows as the PCL, what does that stand for?

Ervin Perry and Carlos Castañeda

That’s Perry-Castañeda. That library was open in the late 70s, in fact must have been 78 because they had their anniversary last year and I think both the Perry and the Castañeda families were present for that. That was quite an event. But yes that library was opened in the late 70s and named after Ervin Perry, who was the first African American who was hired in a tenure track position here at the University of Texas, in the School of Engineering. He actually went on to get tenure and then passed as an Associate Professor. And Carlos Castañeda had been an undergraduate, a Mexican American undergraduate here, and then I think he got his Masters, I believe he got his PhD here as well, came back as a lecturer and he taught for a while, and I believe he was associated with the Benson Library for many years. So that [main] library was appropriately named after a couple of the pioneers in terms of the integration of the University of Texas.

And then in the other direction, if we move down to the hill to the Darrell K. Royal stadium, Darrell K. Royal is a hero to many people in Texas. Who was he, why was he celebrated, and what’s left out of the story?

Aerial view of DKR Memorial Stadium on the Texas campus as seen on Sunday April 23, 2017.
RALPH BARRERA/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Darrell K. Royal was a very successful football coach, in fact, probably more people know about him and his success than they know about anything else. If you can’t name anybody else associated with the University of Texas, you can usually name either Earl Campbell or Darrell K. Royal. He won three national football championships as coach here, but what people don’t usually know is that his second, the one in 1969, has the distinction of being the last all white national championship football team. Darrell in later years claimed that he didn’t recruit any black folks for the team because alumni wouldn’t like it, which is probably true, but nevertheless, he didn’t, and there’s a movie about when the University of Texas at Austin was to play Syracuse in the Cotton Bowl and the University of Texas football team refused to play or allow Ernie Davis, who was one of the early black stars for Syracuse, to play in the game. There’s a whole movie about that. So racial segregation in Texas football or Texas athletics in general was pretty extreme, although to University of Texas’ credit, we were one of the first schools in the Southwest Conference to integrate. We had our first black track athletes were recruited in 1964, and finally in 1970, actually Julius Whittier, who just passed last year, was the first black football player at the University of Texas to play on a national championship football team, when the University won. But even the basketball team, Royal went on to be the A.D. for a number of years, the athletic director, and his [basketball] coach who eventually integrated the team, I have a quote of him saying that they didn’t have any black basketball players on the team because there were no black boys in the state of Texas who were good enough or tall enough to play.

So in 1954 the Supreme Court decides the famous case of Brown vs. Board of Education and that prohibited racial segregation in public schools. U.T. responded in various ways, but one of the ways is architectural, and your tour takes us to sites of several dorms that were new in the 50s maybe we could talk about that for a bit.

One of the things that happens is first of all, there’s Swett vs. Board of Education which is finally won, the supreme court decision that’s won by Heman Swett along with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP in the 1950s. So immediately after that we get our first black students at the University of Texas, but they’re all graduate students. And none of the graduate students were allowed to stay on campus until around 1954 or 55 where there was space made in one dorm, which is down by where the San Jacinto garages are for some of those folks. Almost immediately subsequent to that, University of Texas, and this is now after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954; in 1956 the University of Texas decides to allow the first black undergraduates to come to campus. At that point they had to decide what to do about housing for those students. The decision was made not to offer housing at all to black women, so most black women who came to the University of Texas in 56 lived in a cooperative down on 10^th St. on what used to be East Avenue — I-35 has now been placed over 10^th St. — in effect the dorm where they lived was destroyed in order to be able to put I-35 through. But anyway it was a co-op, and it was co-op which they shared with women from Huston Tillotson. There were a few black women who were allowed to stay in a co-op, which was across the street from where Carothers is now, where the Belo Communications building is — Whitis House was a co-op in which a small number of black women were allowed to stay, but that was off campus, the University didn’t own it at that point.

The University decided to allow some black men to stay on campus, and those folks were placed in basically two dorms that were dorms that had been purchased after World War II as temporary housing for students on campus. They were army barracks that were dismantled and brought to campus and built back up again. So one was placed more or less where the Alumni Center is now, and the other is placed over where the San Jacinto parking garage is. Ironically, in that period of time the Law School had decided to build a new, very luxurious dormitory for graduate students and law students. It was the first dormitory that was air conditioned on campus. It was opened in 1954 shortly after the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and the dean of the law school decided to name it after William Simkins, who was a law professor for 30 years, very well known, but he also was grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. He and his brother, who was actually a UT regent, had started the Klan in Florida. So right after, within weeks to months after the Supreme Court decision, the head of the law school decides to name a dorm after a grand dragon the Ku Klux Klan, and right behind it is the wooden, tar paper shack, army surplus dorm that they designated for black students, two years later in 1956, so the juxtaposition was hard to miss, pretty complete.

Let’s finish up with something else that surprised me, the story of the Eyes of Texas, the song that students sing without probably knowing the history of it, so you take the tour to the Texas Cowboys Pavilion, which is also right down there by the dorms you were just talking about. Can you tell us about that site and about the activities there?

We cover this in two places. One is in front of the Robert E Lee statue. Robert E Lee, very few people know this, and it does seem strange, but Robert E. Lee became a University President right after the end of the Civil War, so he loses the Civil War and within a couple of years he is the President of Washington University in Virginia, which later became Washington and Lee. He’s the President and there is a young man by the name of Prather who is a law student under him, who subsequently became a President of the University of Texas. Now one of the things that Prather brought to the University of Texas when he came was a saying. Robert E. Lee at the end of every speech he made to his collective students and faculty members would say “The eyes of the south are upon you,” and so when Prather got to the University of Texas he decided to take freely from what Lee had been saying, and at the end of his speeches to his assembled students and faculty members he would say “The eyes of Texas are upon you,” taking it directly from Lee. Students of course found that to be interesting, and they decided to create a satirical song about it that put words to it, “the Eyes of Texas are upon you,” and the words are probably very familiar to many of you who are listening to this, and they put it to a familiar tune, which was “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which actually comes from “I’ve Been Working on the Levee,” which is either a work song sung by black folks or a minstrel song that was developed making fun of black folks, but either one, they took that tune. And then its first performances were in minstrel shows, blackface minstrel shows, the Hancock Opera House down on Sixth Street was actually the first time it was performed, and it was performed in blackface. So it comes from the minstrel tradition, it’s a satiric tune, it plays off Robert E. Lee, and was originally sung in blackface.

And how is this connected with the Texas Cowboys?

Well the Texas Cowboys are an interesting group. It’s one of the primary “spirit groups” and has been around for many years. They certainly sing the song and all that but one of the things the Texas Cowboys were most known for was they would put on minstrel shows as part of, sometimes twice a year, but almost always at least once a year, during either the fall Homecoming or during the spring Roundup celebrations. And so they would put on minstrel shows, there were comedy shows and musical shows. As many as 60 of these young people would dress in blackface and cavort around. The racism was so extreme that they also played Mexican Americans in blackface. So you have stereotyping and denigration of Mexican Americans in sombreros and serapes and things like that in blackface, as well what they considered to be black people dressed in stripes and other kinds of disparaging kinds of ways, and that went on until 1964.

Til 1964?

1964-1965 it was outlawed, there was one final young cowboy who raced across the stage in black face, but there’s been kind of racially tinged play, you could call it, associated with the Roundup for years and years, well through the 1990s.

Prof. Gordon

Well thank you for making this history known to all of us in the community, and I think to a lot of people outside the community will be really interested in it. The website will definitely make it accessible for people on campus and off campus too, so thank you and thanks for talking to us today.

Well thank you for bringing me in, and thank you for asking me insightful questions, and giving me a chance to talk about what’s going here on campus, or what went on on campus.

You can listen to this interview on 15 Minute History.

You can see the online Racial Geography Tour at racialgeographytour.org

That website will include further reading on all the topics we discuss.

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!

White Women and the Economy of Slavery

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Harrington Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin, 2018-2019

In 1849, sixty-five “ladies of Fayette County” Tennessee wanted their State legislature to know that a central dimension of patriarchy was failing. In a collective petition, they highlighted the ways that this failure was unfolding and how it impacted the lives of Tennessee women, particularly those who were married or who were soon to be wed. At the center of their petition were “thoughtless husbands” who fell far and short of patriarchal ideals. These men, through “dissipation or improvident management,” created circumstances which compelled their new wives to endure lives plagued by “destitution,” “hardship, and suffering.”

The signatories went on to draw astonishing contrasts between the patriarchs of old and those of a new age, and the ways that these different generations of men treated the women in their lives. The young women they purported to represent entered marriages with “competent estates descended to them from the estates of their deceased fathers,” noble men who accumulated their wealth and property through years of labor, diligence, and frugality. They waxed nostalgic about those hardworking men of their fathers’ generation who hoped to pass the fruits of their extensive and admirable efforts onto their children. Yet, within no more than two years of marriage, they alleged, their husbands had wasted it all. Playing to the legislature’s fatherly sentiments, the Fayette County ladies told its members that the men whom they entrusted their daughters to were inept, thieving failures who stole their fortunes and financial legacies, and left their most vulnerable children in “want and suffering.”

The legal doctrine of coverture and the constraints it imposed upon married women were central to the failures of which they spoke. Coverture provided that when a woman married her assets or wages became her husband’s. If she acquired any property after she married, those assets would belong to her husband as well. In other words, the legal doctrine of coverture robbed married women of their independent legal and economic identities.

These sixty-five Fayette County women challenged the tenets of coverture and asked the legislature to consider whether the elements of this legal doctrine were “based on the principle of equity and justice.” They queried whether it was “right and justice to subject the patrimony of married Ladies to the payment of the debts of the husbands which often exist before marriage.” Their line of questioning made it clear that, in their eyes, it was not.

They called upon the legislature to “devise and enact some Law for the State” whereby “the personal estates of females [would] be placed upon a similar basis as their Real estate, and so protected and secured that it cannot be sold, and taken from them without their consent.”

There was a specific reason why they deemed this “placement” necessary: slavery and the region’s dependency upon it. Slave-owning parents typically gave their daughters more slaves than land, and as a result, slaves were profoundly important to women’s personal stability. These women asked the legislature to protect the kind of property that was worth the most to them, because in light of “peculiar Southern institutions, manners, and customs, it [wa]s in most cases a much greater privation and inconvenience to the married ladies to be deprived of their slaves than of their land.”

The petition put forth by these sixty-five “ladies” was exceptional because of its collective nature, but the arguments and circumstances they laid bare in this document echoed those which married slave-owning women voiced in their homes and communities as well as in the individual bills of complaint they filed in nineteenth-century chancery courts throughout the South. In the not-so-private conversations at home and in their petitions, married slave-owning women throughout the South repeatedly made it clear that their husbands were robbing them of their slaves, squandering their assets, and violating what these women believed to be their property rights in enslaved people.

They explained how they came to own the slaves in question—i.e. whether they were inherited, given as gifts, or purchased—as well as the kind of control they exercised over them. They provided documents such as bills of sale, wills, and deeds to support their claims. With striking candor, they informed family, friends, and judges alike that their husbands came to their marriages impoverished and slave-less. It was women, they argued, who owned the slaves in their households, not their husbands. And when it was necessary, they produced witnesses whose testimony substantiated their assertions. One by one, at home and in court, married slave-owning women throughout the South did what the sixty-five women from Fayette County, Tennessee did collectively; they called upon family, friends, and judges throughout the region to help to secure their ownership of slaves and shield their property from their husbands’ ineptitude and misuse.

New Orleans, 1850s. Daguerrotype. The Burns Archive via Wikimedia.

White slave-owning women were not the only ones to insist on their profound economic investments in the institution of slavery; the enslaved people they owned and white members of southern communities did too. The testimony of formerly enslaved people and other narrative sources, legal documents, and financial records dramatically reshape current understandings of white women’s economic relationships to slavery, situating those relationships firmly at the center of nineteenth-century America’s most significant and devastating system of economic exchange. These sources reveal that white parents raised their daughters with particular expectations related to owning slaves and taught them how to be effective slave masters. These lessons played a formative role in how white women conceptualized their personal relationships to human property, imagined the powers that they would possess once they became slave owners in their own right, and shaped their techniques of slave control.

These lifelong processes of indoctrination make it clear why some white women did not feel compelled to relinquish control over their slaves to their spouses once they married, why they sought to manage and “master” their slaves, why they felt completely comfortable buying and selling enslaved people, and why they sued their husbands in court over their slaves, too. The ownership of slaves was gendered: white women slave owners played roles in the trans-regional domestic slave trade and nineteenth-century slave markets. And they responded to the Civil War and adapted to its economic aftermath in the ways that were often different from their husbands, fathers, and brothers.

The Petition of Ladies of Fayette County Tennessee, November 9, 1849, is Document Number: 19-1849-1, Legislative Petitions, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville Tennessee, Accession #: 11484907 Race and Slavery Petitions Project, Series 2, County Court Petitions

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

Books for Further Reading

Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) is the most recent and comprehensive study of southern slave markets to date. Johnson examines the interplay between white sellers, buyers, and enslaved people within the context of the slave market and the interstate slave trade.

Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (2007) complements Johnson’s study by exploring the ways in which the slave market permeated every town, city, and rural landscape. By doing so, Deyle makes visible how the indifferent calculations of white southerners, and the trauma which these calculations brought about in the lives of enslaved people, occurred far beyond the slave market and often via private sales between members of southern communities.

Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2016) lays bare the human impact and toll of the slave trade and how the forced migration and labor of enslaved people in the West and Lower South, and the violence white southerners perpetrated against them in order to get them to do that work, proved fundamental to American capitalism.

Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (2017) studies the actual human cost of slavery via the prices affixed and values assigned to enslaved people from conception to after death. Ramey Berry’s study also reveals that enslaved people developed their own systems of value that forthrightly challenged those imposed upon them.

Featured Image: Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South (1859). New York Historical Society via Wikimedia (detail)

The Politics of a Handkerchief: Personal Thoughts on the Motif of Female Activism in Argentina

By Paula O’Donnell

(All photos are courtesy of the author unless otherwise stated.)

Windswept litter and flaming logs on asphalt. Backlit figures swaying to handmade percussive instruments and bongos. High school seniors from Colegio Nacional huddled for warmth on the sidewalk, resting foreheads on shoulders for brief shut eye. A neighboring group of teens hoisted Argentine flags that read Movimiento Estudiantil Liberación. They danced and chanted, their makeshift bonfire illuminating passionate faces, streaked with glittering green paint. Tens of thousands filled the park, mostly young and female. Their necks adorned with green handkerchiefs, an aesthetic marker of political and ethical community.

It was June 13, 2018 at around 10:30 pm when my mother and I joined the lively demonstration taking place outside of Argentina’s Congressional palace. After seeing intriguing images of the protest on the news, we were eager to witness the spectacle with our own eyes. We entered Plaza del Congreso just as the sun receded behind the neoclassical citadel in which the House of Deputies deliberated. Argentina’s lower house of Congress was voting on a bill that would decriminalize abortion in the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy. As political elites quarreled in their palace, a discussion that would last nearly twenty hours, protestors flooded the plaza outside to noisily advocate for the bill. Empty tour buses from countless distant provinces lined up along the avenues north of the blocked-off parameter. Inside the square, a cacophony of voices, symbols, and bodies deluged the space. Signs, banners, canopies, and tents exhibited slogans and logos of Tendencia Guevarista, Juventud Radical, Frente Popular Darío Santillán… and innumerable other left-wing political organizations.

A loquacious group of teen artists sat on checkered blankets exhibiting sketches, magnets, and stickers for sale. My mother paid a blond boy with a nose-ring ten pesos for a magnet, which she handed to me, “un regalo – a present.” In bright red letters on a green background, it read “¡CUIDADO! EL MACHISMO MATA” (Careful! The patriarchy kills.) More than anything, I wanted a green handkerchief like everyone else, but no one seemed to know where they came from.

As a historian, I was impressed with the visual symbolism inherent in the handkerchiefs. I was immediately reminded of the photographs many of us have seen of elderly Argentine women defying a murderous military dictatorship. Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo were middle-aged and elderly women who lost children and husbands to the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. At great personal risk, these women met at the presidential palace every Thursday, beginning in 1977, to hold a vigil, wearing images of their missing kin on strings around their necks and plain white handkerchiefs on their heads.

It is reasonable to speculate that most of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo would not have considered themselves feminists, and it is even less likely they would have supported abortion rights. The historian Diane Taylor has pointed out that these women mobilized to defend their roles as mothers and wives, and they exploited traditional representations of femininity (purity and subservience to male family members) to mobilize shame. Even so, they remain national icons of feminine resistance in the public sphere.

Certainly, Las Madres paved the way for other female activist organizations, some of whom aligned themselves more directly with reproductive rights. For instance, Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo consisted of women whose daughters or daughters-in-law were pregnant when detained by the military dictatorship. While searching for their missing grandchildren, this political group highlighted the military regime’s practice of kidnapping newborn infants for adoption into “loyal,” Catholic families. Margaret Atwood claims that this pro-natalist practice, with deep roots in Argentine history, was a fundamental inspiration for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Today, Las Abuelas continue to search for their grandchildren, many of whom are now in their late 30s or 40s and unaware of their biological heritage.

Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo (via Wikipedia)

It goes without saying that today’s generation of activists in Buenos Aires operates in an entirely different historical context, with distinct political objectives. However, the symbolic implications of the pieces of cloth they wear on their bodies appear to acknowledge the role Las Madres and Abuelas played in legitimizing female activism. Now as then, Argentine women have shown they can provoke concrete political changes by assertively occupying public spaces.

As I think back to that Wednesday, I still remember wading through the sea of green, dazed and impressed with the demonstration unfolding. The closer to the palace we moved, the more boisterous and frenetic the crowd became. About fifty feet from the limestone and marble building, it became difficult to move. Here, banners rose fifteen feet into the air, most of them advertising Trosky-ist political parties, such as Movimiento Al Socialismo or Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores. The clamorous singing and drumming left my ears ringing after we painstakingly made our way out of the mosh pit. It was a rowdy rock concert with no central performer to orient the crowd and no security team to direct flows of human traffic. An overstimulation of sound, color, and corporal energy contrasted conspicuously with public displays of exhaustion nearby: teenagers sleeping in truck beds, on blankets, and against the iron fence circulating the square. A village of silent camping tents at the periphery of it all.

I spent only an hour or so at the demonstration, a small fraction of the time that most participants sacrificed to stand in the brisk winter night. The next afternoon, the Argentine Chamber of Deputies voted to decriminalize abortion by a narrow margin. This was an unprecedented victory for reproductive rights in a dominantly Catholic society and region of the world. The bill would have made Argentina just the third Latin American nation (after Cuba and Uruguay) to decriminalize abortions, and analysts speculated as to the effects this would have on reproductive rights transnationally. Unfortunately, the victory in the House of Deputies subsequently galvanized a counter mobilization of pro-life Catholics all over the nation. Even Argentine-born Pope Francis spoke out to condemn the legislation, and the country’s Senate ultimately defeated the bill in August. All the same, the bill’s narrow margin to victory and the movement’s prominent visibility were remarkable for a conservative country on a continent where abortion rights are the exception. In any case, the extraordinary June demonstrations deserve to be remembered for their historical and social significance in the larger trajectory of the Argentine feminist movement, rather than the legislative defeat that followed.

For more on gender in Argentina, see Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Clare Sears (2015)

by John Carranza

Clare Sears, associate professor of sociology at San Francisco State University, explores cross dressing and its place in the formation of San Francisco as an urban center in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Sears uses codebooks, arrest records, and court reports to reconstruct the history of cross dressing in an urban setting. In her analysis, Sears determines that cross-dressing laws expanded to include the policing of race, sex, citizenship, and city space. The result is a multifaceted work that examines how law and fascination with other people’s bodies create marginalized individuals. Sears pioneers what she calls “trans-ing analysis” as a mode of inquiry that encompasses the historical understanding and production of a boundary between what is considered normative and nonnormative gender.

The first two chapters of Arresting Dress construct for the reader a San Francisco that had been shaped by the instability at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 and the Gold Rush of 1849. These two events created a space in which a distinctly “American” urban landscape was never established, and it fostered a community of predominantly men. In this society where women were largely absent, cross-dressing became a form of entertainment and the subject of desire for other men. While some women did live in early San Francisco, there was only a small segment who engaged in cross-dressing. These women usually tried to subvert gender norms or they wove the social evils of prostitution and cross-dressing together by dressing as men to show their availability to customers.

One of the more interesting discussions in the book occurs in the third and fourth chapters as Sears recounts how the San Francisco Board of Supervisors moved to outlaw what they considered indecency and vice. While there were several activities they considered vices in San Francisco in the nineteenth century, the association of cross-dressing with prostitution was one reason why cross-dressing was outlawed. Furthermore, outlawing cross-dressing applied to other marginal groups of San Francisco society, such as Chinese immigrants who were viewed as threats to white Americans. For example, Chinese immigrants were accused of perpetuating prostitution and taking jobs from European-American workers. In many instances, it was presumed that Chinese immigrants entered the ports by cross-dressing, which threatened the United States and its citizens. In many ways, applying cross-dressing laws to the Chinese was a way in which white Americans could regain control.

Omar Kingsley perfoming as Ella Zoyara. Kingsley performed in San Francisco throughout the 1860s and 1870s (via Wikimedia)

In the final two chapters of Arresting Dress, Sears outlines how enforcing anti-cross-dressing laws was based on looking at others’ bodies and deciding if their bodies could be clearly labeled as man or woman. Prescriptive dress and mannerisms were how law enforcement determined whether a person fit into gender roles deemed “normal.” As a result, law enforcement employed pulling wigs off women believed to be men, jailhouse medical examinations, and more invasive “mysterious” examinations by jail matrons. Enforcing such laws was an invasive means of preserving order, but it brought to the public’s attention to other people’s bodies that were subject to examination and held to be inferior if they did not adhere to expected norms.

While laws were established to regulate public cross-dressing, Sears also elucidates instances where the public exhibition of cross-dressing was allowed. Using freak show documents, Sears shows the reader that despite its illegality cross-dressing was allowed for entertainment. Where cross-dressing in public would have been grounds for arrest, the freak show was a source of entertainment and a livelihood for those individuals who cross-dressed before an audience. Sears also discusses slumming tours where the wealthy could view attractions such as Chinese opium dens and other similarly indecent spaces. As part of the experience, some tourist women could dress in men’s attire to have the full experience. If caught cross-dressing, these tourist women who were frequently white and wealthy could often escape punishment.

Ella Wesner around 1973 (via Wikimedia)

Finally, Sears also attempts to make far-reaching connections between cross-dressing and national identity by analyzing the intersection of cross-dressing and immigration laws in San Francisco. Sears rightfully mentions that federal laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and local laws could not operate on the same level, but they were similar in their goals of ensuring that desired gender norms were required to belong in society. In judging who could come into the United States, those who cross-dressed were viewed as lacking in moral integrity and unworthy of inclusion in the national community. Positioned with a list of enumerated undesirables, such as prostitutes, the disabled, and vagrants, it is easy to see how the perceived connection between vice and cross-dressing and the subversion of gender norms would create a new category to discriminate against.

As a work of history, Sears makes extensive use of archival sources, but the viewpoint of the people who engaged in cross-dressing practices was unavailable. However, the sources she does use paint a portrait of how the law can regulate behavior that was previously acceptable. Sears, a sociologist, is also careful to not impose the present on her reading of the past, and respects the people who cross-dressed by not assigning sex or gender to them without their permission, so to speak. Arresting Dress is a necessary read for a time when transgendered individuals were frequently the subjects of laws that dictated acceptable gender expression. The history of cross-dressing shows the reader how the law can be used to discriminate against those who are different and in theory could be used to move away from such discrimination.

Also by John Carranza on Not Even Past:

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Scientists Tamed AIDS by David France (2016)

“Doing” History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Originally posted on Process History on September 5, 2017.

by Christopher Babits

Near the end of the spring semester, my department asked me to teach a summer session of U.S. History since 1865. I had a short time to think about what I’d teach and how I’d teach it. For me, it was important for students to “do” the work of historians. This meant more than reading primary sources, though. In addition to this, students would engage with “essential questions” that are key for understanding the United States’ recent past. Moreover, in lieu of assigning a traditional textbook, which might not fully align with these essential questions, I decided that my students would read, analyze, and critique articles from the Journal of American History.

My first preparatory task was to frame the course around the essential questions. I wanted to create questions around a broad range of potential student interests. I chose four topics: 1) America’s role in the world; 2) economics and labor; 3) women and gender; and 4) comparative civil rights. These topics covered some of the important themes of post-Civil War U.S. History.

The questions I crafted (see Figure #1: The Course’s Essential Questions) were beneficial on several levels. Initially, they helped me with one of the most daunting challenges of syllabus creation—picking and choosing content to cover. These essential questions narrowed what I would focus on; lectures and in-class activities would always have to answer (at least) one of these questions. On top of this, I used the four questions to pick articles from the Journal of American History. From a content standpoint, these articles would provide additional detail that my lectures and in-class activities might not be able to cover in depth.

Selecting academic articles for an introductory survey can be tricky. I had to think about whether students would have enough prior knowledge to truly engage with the secondary source. At the same time, I needed to be cognizant of whether the article covered a fair amount of time, which might then help students understand important historical concepts, like change over time and contingency. Moreover, if I could, I wanted the articles to be useful for answering more than one of the course’s essential questions.

The Journal of American History, March 2014

I ultimately chose fifteen articles from the Journal of American History to help students answer the course’s four essential questions. (See Figure #2: Academic Articles for a complete list.) Erika Lee’s “Enforcing the Borders,” for example, helped students compare and contrast a wide-range of racialized lived experiences from the Chinese Exclusion Act through the 1924 Immigration Act. Her article complemented lecture material on and primary sources about the history of white supremacy. Julia Mickenberg’s “Suffragettes and Soviets,” on the other hand, highlighted the interconnections between domestic and global events. Mickenberg’s article proved useful for students interested in women’s and gender history as well as those fascinated by the events of the First World War. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s classic, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” was one of my students’ favorite articles. Hall famously critiqued the “classical” phase of the Civil Rights Movements in her article. Yet, for the purposes of my course, Hall’s article also helped students better understand the history of African Americans, the intersection of race and gender, and racialized economics. Hall’s seminal article, then, could assist students with three of the course’s four essential questions.

Students who are used to reading textbooks, however, can find reading academic articles challenging. To have them gain the skills necessary to successfully engage with these academic articles, I devoted a fair amount of in-class time to reading, interpreting, and analyzing these sources. I viewed my role as an encouraging coach who kept his approach to the analysis of academic articles straightforward and accessible. For the first three articles assigned in the class, I had students (re)read the introduction and the conclusion with a partner or in small groups. I asked students to underline and annotate where the historian(s) articulated their argument. Sometimes this meant that students had to mark several parts of the introduction and conclusion, trying to make sense of complex arguments which had multiple supporting parts. At first, this was a tough task for students, consuming upwards of 20 minutes of a 75-minute class. However, as we spent more time on this skill, students slowly gained more confidence. I was able to go around the room to work with small groups of students, focusing them on specific parts of introductions and conclusions. After a couple sessions, I asked students to paraphrase arguments in their own words. Students’ confidence grew the more they worked with one part of “doing” history—understanding historical arguments. Over time, what had taken 20 or 25 minutes soon dwindled to 12 or 15.

Students were required to write an analysis for two of the academic articles they read. To ensure further success, students were provided a fair amount of scaffolding on these assignments. To assist with article analyses, I created a reading grid that asked students to: research the historian/scholar; note and critique the sources used in the article; make historical connections to lectures and/or primary sources; and reflect on how the source could answer one of the course’s essential questions. I had detailed questions for each box of the reading grid, providing a fair amount of guidance for students to understand what they should be looking for when analyzing an article. Figure #3:The Reading Grid displays the course’s emphasis on scaffolding the analysis of academic articles.

By the end of the term, I could see that the focus on teaching with and analyzing academic articles worked on several levels. The most important, in my opinion, was how students improved from their first to their second article analysis. They had a much more nuanced understanding of historical argumentation in their second analyses. In addition, students wrote more critically about the historians’ source bases and felt more comfortable critiquing “master narratives” they had learned in high school. For those afraid of using academic articles in their surveys, I want to offer a simple reassurance: students never shied away from this hard work. My provisional course instructor survey scores indicate that students recognized article analyses as a core part of their learning. I already have a strong sense of which articles students enjoyed, but I hope my course instructor surveys include constructive criticism about the articles students viewed as least helpful for answering the course’s essential questions.

There were other outcomes to using academic articles. Many of the articles I selected emphasized U.S. History in a transnational perspective. As a result, students had to think about the United States as a place which influences—and is influenced by—others parts of the world. By carefully selecting articles, I also made it so I did not have to assign a traditional textbook. Lectures, primary sources, and the articles covered enough material for students to understand the American experience and to walk away with their own informed interpretation of the nation’s history.

As an educator now weeks removed from the course I taught, I see an even greater purpose to teaching with academic articles. As we navigate a period of deep political division, one that is fraught with fear for many, teaching with academic articles has the possibility to instill crucial civic skills in our students. By respectfully challenging those who came before them, each scholar I assigned demonstrated that disagreement is a core part of the democratic experience. Using academic articles instead of a textbook allowed my students to see that disagreement does not need to be hateful or vitriolic. Instead, it can be a productive way to move forward, pushing in the direction of the “more perfect Union” enshrined in the Constitution.

Figure 1: The Course’s Essential Questions

America’s role in the world	Determine how the United States’ foreign policy changed and/or remained consistent from the Spanish-American War through the Cold War. How did the U.S. confront the challenges it faced around the globe? Are there core tenets (or beliefs) that have guided American foreign policy? If so, what are they? If not, how do foreign policy conflicts differ from each other?
Economics and labor	Evaluate the ways the American economy has changed over the past 150 years. How did “big business” alter the landscape of U.S. industry? Why did Progressive Era and New Deal reformers pass the reforms they did? Have Americans found a way to balance economic growth and workers’ rights in the post-World War II period?
Women and gender	Analyze the political and economic fight for women’s equality. To what extent has the role and status of women changed over the past 150 years? What have been landmark victories for women’s rights? Why have various political factions opposed women’s and feminist groups? Is there work left to be done?
Comparative civil rights	The continued fight for equality has, in many ways, defined the American experience. Compare and contrast the struggle for civil rights that two of the following segments of the population experienced: 1) African Americans; 2) women; 3) Mexican Americans; 4) Asian Americans; and/or 5) LGBTQ individuals. Are there commonalities that you see in the political rhetoric and tactics of these two groups? How would you describe the unique challenges these segments of the population faced? What are the arguments, agendas, challenges, etc. that have made coalitions difficult to form, both within and between different rights movements?

Figure 2: Academic Articles

Author	Article title	Year of publication	Essential question(s) answered
Erika Lee	Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882-1924	2002	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Richard White	Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age	2003	Economics and labor
Jürgen Martschukat	“The Art of Killing by Electricity”: The Sublime and the Electric Chair	2002	Economics and labor & comparative civil rights
Julia L. Mickenberg	Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia	2014	America’s role in the world; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Lisa McGirr	The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History	2007	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; & comparative civil rights
Julia C. Ott	“The Free and Open People’s Market”: Political Ideology and Retail Brokerage at the New York Stock Exchange, 1913–1933	2009	Economics and labor
Rachel Louise Moran	Consuming Relief: Food Stamps and the New Welfare of the New Deal	2011	Economics and labor & women and gender
James J. Weingartner	Americans, Germans, and War Crimes: Converging Narratives from “the Good War”	2008	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Thomas A. Guglielmo	Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas	2006	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; & comparative civil rights
Elaine Tyler May	Security against Democracy: The Legacy of the Cold War at Home	2011	America’s role in the world; economics and labor; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Nancy Bernkopf Tucker	Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China	2005	America’s role in the world & comparative civil rights
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall	The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past	2005	Economics and labor; women and gender; & comparative civil rights
Michael B. Katz et al.	The New African American Inequality	2005	Economics and labor & comparative civil rights
Kevin J. Mumford	The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969-1982	2011	Women and gender & comparative civil rights
Michael H. Hunt	In the Wake of September 11: The Clash of What?	2002	America’s role in the world

Figure 3: The Reading Grid (PDF)

Also by Christopher Babits on Not Even Past:

Finding Hitler (in all the Wrong Places?)
The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)
Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)
Another perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

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