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

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

Why I Ban the Word “Feminism” from My Classes

by Jacqueline Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also by Jacqueline Jones on Not Even Past:

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

Industrial Sexuality: Gender in a Small Town in Egypt

Our featured author this month, Hanan Hammad, received her PhD in History at UT Austin in 2009. She is now Assistant Professor of History at Texas Christian University and we are proud to introduce you to her excellent new book.

By Hanan Hammad

Millions of Egyptian men, women, and children first experienced industrial work, urban life, and the transition from peasant-based and handcraft cultures to factory organization and hierarchy in the years between the two world wars. Their struggles to live in new places, inhabit new customs, and establish and abide by new urban norms and moral and gender orders underlie the story of the making of modern urban life—a story that has not been previously told from the perspective of Egypt’s working class.

Reconstructing the ordinary urban experiences of workers in al-Mahalla al-Kubra, home of the largest and most successful Egyptian textile factory, demonstrates how the industrial urbanization of Egypt transformed masculine and feminine identities, sexualities, and public morality. Coercive industrial organization and hierarchy concentrated thousands of men, women, and children at work and at home under the authority of unfamiliar men, intensifying sexual harassment, child molestation, prostitution, and public exposure of private heterosexual and homosexual relationships. Juxtaposing these social experiences of daily life with national modernist discourses shows us that ordinary industrial workers, handloom weavers, street vendors, lower-class landladies, and prostitutes—no less than the middle and upper classes—played a key role in shaping the Egyptian experience of modernity.

Factory culture and organization were sites where male workers and supervisors negotiated traditional and modern masculinity. Men often used violence and aggression on the shop floor as expressions and performances of the contestation, ambivalence, and changing of men’s fluid masculine identities. Men negotiated the coercive, industrial hierarchy by oscillating between docility and violence. In an attempt to strike a balance between personal pride in making a livelihood and protecting their own integrity, workers evaded authority and developed male associations and bonded among themselves.

Peasants in their traditional galabya dress in the convulsive factory shop floor

Outside factories, workers coming from rural areas had to partake in urban traditions and manners, despite mutual hostility with townspeople. Violence broke out as a result of the division between the urbanites and the factory workers. In that context masculine gender identity, the performance of masculinity, and the construction of manhood were important elements in adapting to industrial urban life. In their competing and fluid loyalties, working-class men developed their notion of the ideal masculine identity and created social locations for peer bonding and friendship.

Blue-collar workers under the eyes of the afandiyya supervisors

Textile factories opened more opportunities for rural women to venture into urban life and to assume an industrial working-class identity. Female industrial workers in both handloom and mechanized factories went through a multifaceted process of proletarianization while being subjugated to the coercive industrial hierarchy and facing both capitalism and patriarchy inside and outside the factory. Factory work subjected women to sexual harassment and social stigma. They acquired skills to operate modern machinery, rose in the social ranks of the salaried urban population, and gained experiences in dealing with a factory system. Yet they had the lowest status and payment among the workers in the male-dominated industrial hierarchy and their morality became subject to communal suspicion and mistrust.

Taking advantage of unprecedented growth in the demands for cheap accommodation, women of the popular classes invested in workers’ lodging and set up their own businesses to provide workers food, drink, and other cheap commodities and services. Entrepreneurial women contributed immensely to shaping the socioeconomic transformation and labor history. These new patterns of economic investment and work allowed lower-class women to assume powerful positions in their households and enabled them to challenge patriarchal norms. These lower-class landladies played an important role in shaping new workers’ experiences with urban life, undermined the agricultural economy in favor of real-estate investment, and challenged the power of the state in the spheres of urbanization and urban control.

Thousands of workers leaving factory gates under guards’ surveillance

With the lack of privacy and increasing sociocultural differences among individuals sharing limited spaces, sexual life became vulnerable to public exposure, and exposing sexuality was a way to negotiate disputes in one’s own favor. Children and adults from different geographical origins often shared living and sleeping spaces. Unmarried female and male strangers shared houses with urbanite families and individuals. In living and work environments marked by anxiety, jealousy, mistrust, and suspicion, it was not unusual for ordinary disputes with neighbors, roommates, housemates, and coworkers to slip into judging one another’s sexual behaviors. By examining the social arguments and controversies over sexual practices, such as women’s harassment, child molestation, sodomy, sex outside wedlock, and homosexuality, people in this transformative urban milieu constructed fluid and intricate, rather than rigid, social norms of licit and illicit sexuality.

The largest labor strike in the history of modern Egypt took place in 1947. Striking workers exposed horrific work and living conditions and shattered the idealistic, nationalist image of industry as a banner of nationalism and economic independence. Prostitution was blamed for the deterioration of workers’ health, which exposed all workers’ sex lives to public scrutiny. Religious and nationalist discourses against sex work that had been a part of the urban landscape made the morality and sexuality of the working classes a target of bourgeois anxiety. Invoking morality against sex workers resonated with the nationalism and the state’s effort to medicalize, control, and stigmatize the lower class’s sexuality, but these discourses also served to overlook tuberculosis, malnutrition, and other diseases that preyed on the poor urban population and triggered strikes and urban unrest.

Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt, The University of Texas Press (2016)

Further reading on the history of gender, sexuality and the working classes in Egypt:

Liat Kozma, Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (2011)

In Policing Egyptian Women, Liat Kozma traces the effects of nineteenth-century developments such as the expansion of cities, the abolition of the slave trade, the formation of a new legal system, and the development of a new forensic medical expertise on women who lived at the margins of society. Kozma outlines the complicated manner in which the modern state in Egypt monitored, controlled, and “policed” the bodies of subaltern women. Some of these women were runaway slaves, others were deflowered outside of marriage, and still others were prostitutes.

Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (2001)

Inspired by the Indian Subaltern Studies school, this social history offers a survey of subaltern history in the Middle East. Beinin illuminates how their lives, experiences, and culture can inform our historical understanding. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the book charts the history of the peasants and the modern working classes across the lands of the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim-majority successor-states.

Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (1985)

Focusing on lower-class women, this study traces changes in the work role and family life of peasant women in the countryside and craftswomen and traders in Cairo during the rapid social and economic change in the nineteenth century. Brought about by the country’s developing ties with the European economy, the effects of capitalist transformation on women are studied in detail, using material from the Islamic court records.

Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (2007)

Focusing on Egyptian national and gender politics between the two world wars, Baron shows how vital women were to mobilizing opposition to British authority and modernizing Egypt. Egypt as a Woman explores the paradox of women’s exclusion from political rights at the very moment when visual and metaphorical representations of Egypt as a woman were becoming widespread and real women activists–both secularist and Islamist–were participating more actively in public life than ever before.

Films on gender, sexuality and the working classes in Egypt:

I’m suggesting few Egyptian films, mostly from the social realism genre, that discuss issues of gender and sexuality in the intersection with class, social morality, urbanism and rural exploitation.

Youssuf Chahine, Cairo Station, 1958

In the hustle and bustle of Cairo Station, this movie tells a story of romantic infatuation, frustrated sexual desires, and labor struggles in the newly-independent Egypt. A physically-challenged peddler coming from Upper Egypt falls for a gorgeous lemonade seller who is engaged to one of the station’s workers. That fiancé is a strong and respected porter struggling to unionize his fellow workers to combat their boss’ exploitative and abusive treatment.

Muhammad Khan, Factory Girl, 2013

Through the ordinary life of a 21-year-old female worker in a Cairo textile factory, the movie engages with class aspiration, female desires, and moral hypocrisy. When the impoverished factory girl becomes attracted to the factory’s new supervisor, she discovers the glass ceiling of class and gender hierarchy inside the factory and the moral hypocrisy of the larger society that divides the urban working and middle classes.

Henry Barakat, al-Haram (Sin), 1965

This masterpiece portrays the cruel reality of itinerant rural workers. The newspaper Le Monde wrote: “we have been attracted to this movie due to the true picture that reflects the suffering of this village, the picture is not about a problem for one individual; it’s about the reflection of everything surrounding her, from people to culture.”

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

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

By Laurie Green

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus marchers in 1932 (via Wikimedia Commons).

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

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

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

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

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

Anna Arnold Hedgeman (via Hamline University).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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George Forgie discusses the work the Emancipation Proclamation left undone.

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

By Christopher Babits

Good historians keep an open mind when doing archival research. Our reading of the relevant literature, not to mention the preliminary research we conduct, provides a general understanding of our topic, but we have to prepare ourselves for surprises. This is the most exciting part of research — examining documents no one has seen and making connections others have not made. Research has a funny way of bringing the unforeseeable into one’s life, though.

green_repository_at_the_national_archives

National Archives (via Wikimedia Commons).

There was little reason I should have anticipated coming across Hitler in my research. I am a historian of the United States and my dissertation examines the history of sexual orientation change therapies from the Second World War into the twenty-first century. A wide-range of stakeholders have practiced, sought out, been forced to undergo, and challenged the ethics of therapeutic practices aimed at changing a person’s homosexuality. Needless to say, researching this topic has brought me into contact with some disturbing history. This has included graphic descriptions of men and women being electrocuted or even lobotomized because of their sexual orientation. I expected to come across these accounts in the archives. They are an integral part of the history I want to tell. Hitler was a different story.

I first came across the infamous German dictator while conducting research in the Special Collections at the University of North Texas. I was going through an extensive LGBT collection and came to a folder devoted to Paul Cameron. In the 1980s, Cameron earned acclaim for being expelled from the American Psychological Association (APA). The reason? He falsified data in order to push an anti-gay agenda. After being expelled from the APA, Cameron doubled his efforts to discredit LGBT activists by continuing to conduct and disseminate research. This included a 1985 pamphlet called “Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality: Homosexuality is a Crime against Humanity.” Cameron’s organization, the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (yes, they were called ISIS), mailed thousands of these pamphlets across the nation.

Envelope from a promotional Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality mailing (via UNT Digital Library).

In “Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality,” ISIS included a section with the title “German History Repeats Itself in the U.S.” According to the pamphlet, “gays [in 1920s and 1930s Germany] were seeking a political party to carry their lifestyle to power. They threw their weight behind the Nazis and were rewarded with leadership of the stormtroopers (SA).” The pamphlet continues: “Over time, Nazi youth organizations and camps became notorious for homosexual molestations. Open homosexuality, pornography, drugs and prostitution turned Berlin into the San Francisco of Europe.”

(via Wikimedia Commons)

I had no clue what to think when I first read these sentences. Did I not pay attention in my world history courses? Were my teachers and professors woefully ignorant of the past? I sent pictures of the pamphlet to colleagues who know German history much better than I do. We were all confused. Despite this confusion, I knew that I would not be free from Hitler.

I was proven correct repeatedly as I conducted research at the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville. In 1993, Cameron’s organization, now called the Family Research Institute, sent out a newsletter with an article that asked, “Was the Young Hitler a Homosexual Prostitute?” The authors pointed to Samuel Igra’s 1945 work, Germany’s National Vice, as evidence that Hitler was a homosexual artist before rising to power. Other publications, including Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams’ The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (1995), give the same warning: the Nazis were a bunch of homosexuals who desired a fascistic takeover of their country. Importantly for my research, proponents of sexual orientation change therapies have referred to not only Cameron’s pamphlets but also the works of Igra and Lively and Abrams. If I truly want to understand the intellectual rationale for sexual orientation change therapies, I had to know how and why someone would want to believe that the Nazis were a bunch of homosexuals. But first, I needed to see if there was any historical basis for these accusations.

Nürnberg, Reichsparteitag 1933. Adolf Hitler und Stabschef Röhm.

Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm, 1933 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Research into the history of Nazism brought me to Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA. Röhm, who had convinced Hitler of his political potential in 1919, was homosexual, a fact that Hitler knew about his political and military subordinate. Over the next fifteen years, Hitler and Röhm worked closely as they grew the Nazi Party. Although Röhm and a few other SA leaders were open about their homosexuality, their rise to power was not due to their sexual orientation. What’s more clear, however, is that the downfall of Röhm and the SA prefaced the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. In 1934, Hitler, with the help of other aides (like Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler), orchestrated the arrest of Röhm and other SA leaders because the latter challenged Hitler’s authority. After Röhm was murdered in his prison cell (Hitler gave him the option of taking his own life, which he refused to do), homosexuals became a group targeted by the Nazis. A pink triangle, not a pink swastika, soon singled out (mostly) homosexual males in concentration camps.

Although I was not prepared to find Hitler in the archives, it is clear that people like Cameron had easy-to-discern motivations. They were able to use parts of the past, even if they took liberties with what had happened, to discredit LGBT activists and claims for equality. What better way to do this than compare them to the Nazis?

More by Christopher Babits on Not Even Past:
Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy
Review of The Rise of Liberal Religion, by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)
The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

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

By Natalie Cincotta

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

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

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

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

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

urging_peasants_to_speed_up_cotton_production_-_russian_and_uzbek_tashkent_1920s_mardjani

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

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

You may also like:

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

Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

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

Huaiyin Li recommends:

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

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

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

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

Nancy Stalker recommends:

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

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

Cynthia Talbot recommends:

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

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

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Great Books (US)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

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

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

By Jing Zhai

Seventy-two ordinary women, living in four different villages in central and southern Shaanxi Province, mostly born during the 1920s or 1930s, witnessed the rise of the new Communist regime in 1949 and experienced dramatic life transformations as a result. During the 1950s and 1960s, a few of them were national or regional labor models. Some were local activists, village-level officials, or midwives. And the others were just ordinary village women who did not involve themselves in local politics. Although the national or regional labor models might get the precious chance of going to Beijing and even meeting Chairman Mao, these women’s life experiences were mostly confined to their villages. Few of them had the habit of keeping a diary or recording their observations. And in official documents, their personal life stories were rarely discussed. If not for the interviews conducted by Gail Hershatter and Gao Xiaoxian from 1996 through 2006, aging and death would have surely silenced these women’s memory.

This book focuses on the memories of rural women who lived through the momentous events of the 1950s. It attempts to recount their life stories not only as historical witnesses, but mostly importantly as women. By tracing the social roles that rural women assumed across their lifetimes, the book reveals changes taking place in women’s field work, domestic labor, childbearing, and marriage. Hershatter successfully brings out the beauty, vibrancy and pain in these women’s rich life experiences. The author asks, “If we placed a doubly marginalized group — rural women — at the center of an inquiry about the 1950s, what might we learn about the effects of Party-state policy and its permutations and appropriations at the local level?”

Usually, memoirs, diaries and interviews that contain people’s memory are used as important clues for historical facts. However, Hershatter’s book is striking for its study of memory itself, based on the large number of interviews she and her collaborator were able to carry out. The distance between memory and the “true” story seems to not be an obstacle for the author and she is fully aware of today’s influences on recollecting the past. Instead, she analyzes the context in which individual memory is generated, especially the subjects’ special experiences as rural women and girls. The stories we hear from women reflect a more distant relationship from politics than that of men. Taking timekeeping as an example, compared with rural men who were familiar with using official time to organize their daily life, women relied on domestic events to remember things. The zodiac, the date of their marriage, and the birthdates of their children formed the system of timekeeping that they used to frame their memories. Memory here is gendered memory.

This book challenges the conventional narrative on the 1950s that is usually focused on changing political campaigns. Many events that people experienced are outside the narrative frame punctuated by campaigns such as land reforms, collectivization, and the Great Leap Forward. By following the life stories of women in farming communities far from the center of state control, these women’s conception of time produced a much more continuous narrative compared with official histories.

Chinese workers in front of the open hearth furnace, September 1958. Via Wikimedia Commons

Memories of Chinese rural women also questioned the unified narrative in the academic study of gender. For example Chaofeng had been a tongyangxi, a “child raised to be a daughter-in-law.” But she experienced painful uncertainties when she decided to divorce her husband during the New Marriage Law Campaign due to her close relations with her mother-in-law. Her experience argues against the traditional analysis of gender reform, regardless of the guilt of tongyangxi or the absolute legitimacy of marriage freedom. This book questions the limitations of a lot feminist scholars’ opinion and brings out the question about recording the perspective and the experience of ordinary women. Is gender such a coherent and unified genre that feminists can easily represent the experience of women from a lower society stratum?

As a work about China’s collective past, Hershatter’s book sheds light on the cultural and social history of the 1950s China. But even if you are just simply searching for some enchanting stories, Hershatter’s book is a great place to start.

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

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973, by Heidi Tinsman

by Elizabeth O’Brien

In this gendered labor history, Heidi Tinsman looks at the lives of rural agrarian workers under Salvador Allende’s socialist revolutionary government. She examines women’s participation in — and exclusion from — agrarian production and reform in Chile. Tinsman makes a major contribution by showing that the marginalization of women affected the success of Allende’s efforts to expropriate land and create worker-run agrarian cooperatives.

Drawing on a wealth of oral testimonies and legal sources, Tinsman shows how agricultural workers lived under the highly exploitative systems of inquilino and obligado labor in the years before Allende came to power. The author then chronicles the Christian Democratic regime’s initiation of agrarian reform in 1964. The Christian Democrats sought to modernize industry, punish abusive patrons, unionize laborers, and raise the rural standard of living. As a result the number of unionized workers rose from 2,000 in 1964 to a quarter of a million by 1972. The reformists were not revolutionary, however, and although they encouraged workers to resist landowners, the Christian Democrats did not challenge state authority.

After his election in 1970, Allende called for the complete destruction of latifundia. He quickly doubled the amount of expropriated land and converted it into communally run plots, known as asentamientos, which incorporated approximately 20,000 Chilean families. Although still operating hierarchically, asentados (the workers in charge of asentamientos) paid workers more fairly than patróns and made collective decisions about production and construction. Only men were allowed to serve as asentados, however, which excluded wives (who were seen as dependents) and single women who allegedly lacked the requisite experience.

*Salvador Allende and his government, 1970. Source: Wikimedia Commons*.

The impact of agrarian reform on women was mixed. For example, the Unidad Popular (Allende’s party, the UP) did not respond to feminist calls to reassess domestic divisions of labor that restricted women’s ability to participate in working communal plots. Nonetheless, women assumed new levels of political activism: they participated in land tomas (takeovers), successfully demanded housing reform, and coordinated community soup kitchens. Women’s Committees (CEMAs) flourished, union membership skyrocketed, infant mortality dropped by 60%, and illiteracy was halved.

Mujer avanza con la bandera dela patria” (“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland”) (1970). la Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), Chile. Courtesy of Centro de Documentación Salvador Allende. — *“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland”: a poster supporting* La Unidad Popular, 1970. *Source: Centro de Documentación Salvador Allende.*

Historians traditionally depict rural women as conservative, religious, and opposed to political change. Tinsman shows that in Allende’s Chile this was not the case. Women in Aconcagua, for example, were not particularly religious and rural female support of the UP grew stronger as land expropriation accelerated. To investigate how women experienced the reform, Tinsman explores on-the-ground issues that produced social polarization in rural Chile. Some campesinos, for example, opposed expropriation and defended the bosses, which at times provoked bloodshed. Problems also arose when husbands excluded their wives from politics and took advantage of their political positions in order to take mistresses. To make matters worse, rural food distribution was politicized, and UP supporters often received more rations. Amidst the political and social turmoil, charges of wife beating tripled in comparison to the Christian Democrat years, and rape charges increased as well. Although Tinsman interprets these figures at face value, they are not clear indicators of increases in abuse, because, under the UP, women might have felt more empowered and thus filed more charges.

While Allende’s approach to women and gender was more radical, egalitarian, and feminist than the Christian Democrats who preceded him, Tinsman shows that men were still the “central subjects and main protagonists” of agrarian reform, while women experienced “sexually inscribed vulnerability within the process of political struggle.” Women worried about the effects of social upheaval on their families, which was sadly ironic because “the family continued to be central to female survival and still loudly touted by the UP as the foundation of social uplift.”

Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973

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