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Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt

Gender was central to nation-state formation and working-class politics under the Popular Front governments that ruled Chile between 1938 and 1952, preceding Salvador Allende’s socialist regime (1970-1973). The Popular Front sought to industrialize the economy, create an educated and compliant working class, construct a modern welfare state, and solidify the nuclear family as the base of a unified nation.

The Popular Fronts struck compromises between the national leaders and the growing socialist and communist movements in Chile. One of Karin Rosemblatt’s main contributions is to show that the Popular Front enjoyed the support of various subaltern groups such as the National Labor Confederation (CTCh) and, initially, the feminist group Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena (MEMCh). Focusing on political structures and elite ideology, she analyzes the politics of gender in state policy, and leftist and feminist struggle. The author’s use of oral histories as well as government archival sources helps her paint a complex historical narrative that shows that political and ideological diversity strengthened the Popular Front coalition instead of weakening it.

State officials and employers sought to transform working class men into disciplined and economically stable husbands. With the support of CTCh, they passed the Family Wage Act in 1952, which paid married men more than single workers and reinforced male authority in the family by institutionalizing the notion that men should be primary breadwinners. But in some industries such as mining, employers discriminated against married workers to avoid increasing their pay, and this often prompted married men to claim their status as single. She also shows that although base wages rose overall in masculinized fields like mining, construction, and transportation, they stagnated in the female-dominated realms of hotel service, domestic work, and sewing factories. Feminists in MEMCh called for equal pay between genders and denounced the Family Wage Act, claiming that it excluded women from workforce. Nevertheless, most working-class women supported the family wage system, and National Labor Confederation pamphlets promoted the idea that women belonged in the home.

Rosemblatt traces other conflicts between Communists, progressive feminists, and MEMCHistas, some of whom were politically conservative. MEMCh began in close affiliation with the Communist Party, but many men in the Party rejected the feminists as snobbish and disruptive. Despite a lack of support from the Communist Party, MEMCh succeeded in organizing 58 grassroots committees that lobbied for mothers’ centers, education, healthcare, housing, state funded daycares, increased access to birth control, reform of marriage laws that subordinated women, and legalization of divorce.

As the political climate turned rightward under President Gónzalez Videla (1946-1952), MEMCh did as well. Rosemblatt shows that moderate feminists used close alliances with the state to wrest control of women’s committees from Communists and radicals, and that conservative feminists even helped to suppress Communist organizing among housewives and common women. Cross-class feminist organizing strengthened and promoted the compromise state and the bourgeois-democratic alliance, but feminist success was limited due to the popularity of normative gender ideologies (even on the Left), and feminists’ failure to win over the working class.

Workers march in support of Allende in 1964

Leftists, like the state, wanted to regulate working class life and re-define normative masculinity, but they pursued a socialist brand of discipline and morality. By examining leftist publications and oral histories, Rosemblatt shows that moral prescriptions unified the left and defined its boundaries. Socialists did not place much emphasis on virginity and honor: instead, they valued restraint, morality, and class unity. Although their parents often disagreed, Communist youth therefore felt that they did not have to wait for marriage to have sex. Socialist masculine norms focused on abstention from alcohol and marital fidelity, although many labor leaders engaged in adulterous affairs. Although socialists claimed that an alternative economic system would eliminate patriarchy, Rosemblatt concludes that leftist organizations ultimately reinscribed class and gender hierarchies. Furthermore, socialists and feminists alike appropriated and abrogated working class women’s struggles.

The Popular Front governments gave rise to important social debates about patriarchy and capitalism in modern Chile, and set the stage for Salvador Allende’s peaceful socialist revolution. None of these mid-twentieth century regimes were able to institutionalize gender equality. However, they were certainly preferable to the brutal military dictator Augusto Pinochet, who came into power after the 1973 U.S.-supported coup on Allende’s democratically elected government and enacted widespread human rights abuses during his seventeen-year rule (1973-1990).

Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950

The Countess’s Cats

by Douglas Cushing

Francesca Consagra, curator of In the Company of Cats and Dogs at the Blanton Museum of Art, has observed that felines and canines in art are rarely mere props. More than decoration, their presence serves a meaningful purpose. These creatures may represent human endeavors, moralities, values, and behaviors. Alternately, their image may signify the lives and conditions of individual animals themselves, or entire categories of such animals, existing in domestic relationships with humans, as suppliers of labor, or even as a sources of food. Animals in art offer novel and useful ways to understand historical trends and events. Within this exhibition, an excellent example of how cats provide charged and multifaceted meanings in a work of art, is a hand-colored, soft-ground etching by James Gillray entitled The Injured Count, S. __ (c. 1786).

James Gillray, The Injured Count S. ____, (c. 1786). Hand-colored soft-ground etching. Blanton Museum of Art (used with permission).

The print depicts the buxom Countess of Strathmore, Mary Eleanor Bowes, blithely suckling two greedy cats as she drinks wine or liquor with a pockmarked companion. A child at her side bawls, “I wish I was a cat / my mama would love me then.” Despite its curious scenario, the print reflects the tendency towards pet keeping that emerged in Enlightenment England. It also points to the Western historical-symbolic relationship between femininity and felinity, the status of women in late eighteenth-century England, and the machinations of power that played out in arenas of class and gender.

Gillray was a satirist working in a field that frequently burlesqued Georgian women, especially prominent ones.. The last four decades of the eighteenth century, when he was at work, are frequently thought to be the high point of English satirical printmaking. Here, the artist—something of a hired gun in the day—was likely fulfilling a commission that joined a series of attacks leveled against the countess. At the far left margin of the print, Gillray depicts her forsaken husband, Andrew Robinson Stoney, surveying a map of the countess’s estate. Stoney later changed his surname to Bowes, fulfilling the wishes of his wife’s father as expressed in his will. This name change traded the military associations with his family name for the more politically and socially recognized Bowes name, ultimately helping him to gain a position as M.P. for Newcastle. Stoney, however, was actually a fortune seeker, who, coveting the Countess’s wealth and social advantage, had tricked her into marriage. Widowed by John Lyon, the Earl of Strathmore, the lady’s dowager status gave her the right to own property—something denied to married women. This included the sizable inheritance she had brought into the marriage, which attracted Stoney. Staging a duel against a libelous newspaper editor in defense of the countess’s honor, Stoney emerged wounded. Under the pretense of a dying wish, he asked the countess’s hand in marriage. She agreed, and once married, Stoney recovered miraculously.Unbeknownst to him, however, her fortune had been deeded into the care of trustees. Stoney soon began to abuse his new wife physically and mentally. In time, the countess sought a divorce. She won preliminarily in an ecclesiastical court, but Stoney conspired to kidnap her and keep her hidden. Stoney also employed mendacious newspaper stories and satirical prints in an attempt to sway public opinion against the countess. When she eventually escaped and continued proceedings, the utter reprehensibility of Stoney’s actions secured a divorce.

The cats in this print likely represent the countess’s actual pets, Angelica and Jacintha. Tellingly, Stoney had lamented in a courtship letter that he was not one of her cats, musing, “. . . were I Proteus, I would instantly transform myself, to be happy that I was stroked and caressed like them, by you.” Gillray twisted Stoney’s sentiment in order to depict Mary Ellen Bowes as a bad mother who preferred her cats to her children. In truth, both Stoney and her previous husband’s family had cruelly separated her children from her at length. In addition to the accusation of being a poor mother, the presence of the licentious footman, beckoning her to bed, suggests that she is an adulterous wife. Infidelity was one of the reasons argued for divorce in eighteenth-century England, though marriage was generally held to be inviolable. The best that most people wishing a divorce could expect from the ecclesiastical courts of the day was a legal separation allowing a couple to live independent lives without dissolving the marriage itself. Full annulments were rarely granted to men, and almost never to women. Occasionally, after the ecclesiastical courts refused to dissolve certain marriages, special dispensations from Parliament (in the form of acts) permitted individual-case divorces. Such legislation was usually aimed at safeguarding fortunes from “bad” women and illegitimate children.

The lives of Andrew Robinson Bowes, Esq. and the Countess of Strathmore, written from thirty-three years professional attendance, from letters, and other well authenticated documents. By Jesse Foot Published 1810 for Becket and Porter, and Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, by J. Bryan in London. Available from Open Library

As symbols, cats reiterate these social constructions of femininity that is motherly if it is good, and morally negligent—wanton, desiring, willful, chaotic, and vicious—if it is ill. Cats often connoted immoral femininity, following a tradition that emerged from the concatenation of felines, Satan, and witchcraft from at least by the early thirteenth century until the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Above the countess in the print, Gillray places a painting of Messalina, one of antiquity’s most scandalous women, so as to reinforce the negative characterization of the countess. .

Gillray’s anthropomorphized cats also stand for what they are—pets. By the eighteenth century, the former luxury of keeping pets was practiced at all levels of society. And by the middle of the following century, cats would easily eclipse dogs as favorite pets in London. In this regard, the countess’s cats reflect the real tendencies of keeping pets and the growing popularity of felines in Georgian England.

Yet, in Gillray’s Injured Count, S., both woman and cat represent ideas of illicit femininity. A woman’s proper role in the day, enforced by a male-governed society, was foremost as a wife and mother, and in the late eighteenth century, breastfeeding was a sign of a good mother. Gillray’s 1796 The Fashionable Mamma,—or—the Convenience of Modern Dress lampoons an aristocratic woman, who, dressed in a skimpy, high-fashion gown, dispassionately suckles her child while her coach, visible through a window, waits to shuttle her away. A painting above her head entitled “Maternal Love” offers a foil, depicting a peasant woman who lovingly nurses her child in a natural landscape. The distinction between the dispassionate aristocratic mother, authentic natural mother, and the countess unnaturally suckling her cats, speaks volumes.

Listen to Francesca Consagra discuss the exhibit and the roles of cats and dogs in history on a podcast episode of 15 Minute History.

Read more about pets, marriage, and satirical prints in early modern England:

Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (2004)

Adrian Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity (1999)

Richard Godfrey, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature (2001)

Draper Hill, The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray (1976)

Linda Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (2005)

Cindy McCreedy, The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England (2004)

Wendy Moore, Wedlock (2009)

Oliver Ross McGregor, Divorce in England, A Centenary Study, (1957)

Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (2002)

Douglas Cushing earned his BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and his MA in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. His master’s thesis, written under the supervision of Linda Dalrymple Henderson, examines Marcel Duchamp’s relationship with the writings of the Comte de Lautréamont. Douglas is currently a PhD student in art history at the University of Texas at Austin and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Prints and Drawings, and European Paintings at the Blanton Museum of Art.

Student Showcase – The Day the Gridiron Turned Pink

Seth Franco and Dylan Gill
Cedar Bayou Junior School
Junior Division
Group Exhibit

Read Seth and Dylan’s Process Paper

In 2014, female athletics are common in America’s high schools and colleges. But this was not always the case. Prior to the 1972 passage of the Title IX Education Amendment, all male teams received most, if not all, of the resources available for athletics. But in the following decades, female participation in high school and college athletics skyrocketed. In their Texas History Day exhibit, Seth Franco and Dylan Gill explored the history behind this monumental piece of legislation and considered how it changed America–and even their own school:

Indiana Senator Birch Bayh exercises with Title IX athletes at Purdue University, ca. 1970s (Birch Bayh Senate Office - Senatorial Papers of Birch Bayh, Indiana University) — Indiana Senator Birch Bayh exercises with Title IX athletes at Purdue University, ca. 1970s (Birch Bayh Senate Office – Senatorial Papers of Birch Bayh, Indiana University)

This year’s National History Day theme, Rights and Responsibilities, offered many great topics to consider, but we ended up selecting Title IX, which is the law that opened the door to equal access for girls and women across our nation. We chose this topic because we wanted a topic that would be unexpected for two boys. Also, we had a couple of girls that were on our football team this year so we were both wondering how girls were able to participate in a sport that is dominated by males. Before the History Fair this year, we didn’t even know that Title IX existed and even though it seems normal that girls play lots of different sports today, it has not always been that way.

Section from Seth and Dylan’s exhibit shows pink board with photos of women athletes — Section from Seth and Dylan’s exhibit

Our project related to the theme of Rights and Responsibilities because Title IX established the right of gender equity in education, jobs, and sports. Although we are focusing our project on sports because we feel that sports scholarships have offered women the opportunities to further themselves in the education and business world more than ever before, Title IX has made it possible for the door to be opened into many different areas that were previously closed. This historically significant legislation has changed the lives of girls and women across our nation.

A look back on recent Texas History Day projects:

One enslaved man’s attempt to revolt against American slavery

An early pioneer for free press in America

And a look at the brutal world of migrant work during the Great Depression

State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State by Ulrike Strasser (2004)

by Julia M. Gossard

Munich’s central square, Marienplatz, is best known today for its magnificent Rathaus-Glockenspiel that delights tourists and townspeople alike with its melodies. But until the nineteenth century, the square’s main attraction was a golden pillar adorned with the Virgin Mary known as the Mariensäule. Still standing today, the Mariensäule is a reminder of the religious reformations Bavaria endured as well as the Bavarian state’s early attempts at centralization and modernization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Erected in 1638 by order of Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria to thank the Virgin for protecting the city from an attack by Protestant Swedes during the Thirty Years War, the Mariensäule not only represented Maximilian’s fervor for Catholicism, but, as Ulrike Strasser writes, also represents his use of “virginity as a master metaphor to elaborate ideas about good governance and a functioning society.” Usually used to imply innocence, purity, and occasionally frailty, images of virgins and virginity were among Maximilian’s strongest metaphorical tools. State of Virginity explores how Maxilimilian employed female virginity to increase patriarchal power and limit female agency and facilitate Bavaria’s centralization.

Drawing on a wide variety of archival documents including Bavarian laws, civil court records, ecclesiastical court documents, and select convents’ records, Strasser investigates the ways in which marriage, family organization, and female religious life changed as a result of the new emphasis placed on virginity as the female moral and political ideal. Strasser explains that judicial records are useful to her study because they show how individuals explained their own behavior, emotions, and identities under the eye of powerful institutions. These records permit her to observe the state or the church at work, and to see how people reacted to mandates from above.

Starting with an examination of Bavarian marriage, Strasser notes that people explained their attitudes toward marriage and sexuality in the context of competing religious and secular judicial discourses. The Catholic Church wished to have all couples marry, regardless of social status, in order to affirm their respect for the sacrament in marriage and avoid licentious behavior. The state, on the other hand, took a rather paradoxical approach to marriage with its establishment of Munich’s marriage bureau. Of the utmost importance to the marriage bureau was a bride’s virginal status. If a woman was not a virgin, the union was unlikely to be approved by the marriage bureau. The state saw this virginal prerequisite to marriage as a way to prevent poor people from procreating outside of marriage, and reduce sexually licentious unions. However, in addition to virginal status, the marriage bureau also scrutinized the financial stability of couples. On top remaining chaste, the prospective spouses also had to prove they were capable of providing for a family. For the poor couples, this was often difficult to achieve. Therefore, the creation of the bureau resulted in marriage becoming a type of social status reserved for the upper echelons of society.

By making the prerequisites of marriage so strict, Bavarian authorities required women to “uphold the boundaries of a new social and sexual order” that made virginity a moral obligation, among both upper and lower classes. When wealthy women remained chaste, their families’ economic interests and possible alliances with other wealthy families remained intact, benefitting both the families and the state, which relied on these families for money and support. When women from the lower sorts remained chaste, the state believed the number of illegitimate children and single mothers would greatly decrease. This would also further strengthen the patriarchal household that the Catholic state viewed as being essential to an orderly and stable society. Although virginity became the female moral and political ideal, as Strasser argues, that was often difficult for women of the lower sorts to achieve. With marriage being denied to poor couples, these couples entered into nonmarital sexual relationships that were not sanctioned by the state. Strasser hints that the “perpetual state of virginity” that the state advocated for women who were denied marriage by the bureau, was simply an unrealistic goal. One of the only institutions that guaranteed a perpetual state of virginity for women was a convent. However, just like marriage, in the seventeenth-century, Bavarian cloisters turned away poorer women and increasingly became depositories for elite, unmarried women. Though groups of unmarried, uncloistered virgins, like the English Ladies, were established, they too consisted of “honorable women,” meaning those from the upper-middling classes or the elite. Although poor women may have remained chaste, the Bavarian state began to view unmarried and uncloistered poor women, regardless of their individual virginal status, as a “social and sexual threat” to the Bavarian state.

With marriage, family, and the convent all becoming elite institutions, what happened to the unmarried, poor, virginal woman? Are we to believe that she merely succumbed to “the sins” of the lower sorts and entered into profligate relationships? Strasser suggests, without much evidence, that the new marriage regulations and convent restrictions may have strengthened the state’s control over noble society but actually led to more relationships outside of marriage among the lower classes. Despite this lack of evidence, State of Virginity is an innovative piece of scholarship. Other studies have focused solely on the impact that this new “virginity” had on women’s experiences, but while Strasser does include the effects on women, her most poignant arguments explain how the state’s regulation of virginity brought about changes in societal structure, specifically the centralization of the Bavarian state. State of Virginity successfully repositions the role of the female sexualized body as a factor in the strengthening of Bavarian patriarchy and the process of state building under Maximilian I.

Photo Credits:

Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, with his wife Elisabeth Renée of Lorraine, 1610 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Hand colored illustrated of Maximilian I at the age of 11 (Image courtesy of Penn Provenance Project)

Munich’s Rathaus-Glockenspiel (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Mary Neuburger on Tobacco & Smoking in Bulgaria

By Mary Neuburger

The global history of tobacco—the weed that captured the hearts, minds, and imaginations of so many in the twentieth century—has been told in splendid and enlightening detail. Historians have delved into the stark economic, political, and social implications of the production, consumption, and exchange of this commodity in various national contexts, most notably the United States.

In writing Balkan Smoke, I wanted to explore the ways tobacco drove historical transformation in Bulgaria, a place often left out of these global histories. On the periphery of Europe and Asia, and in the path of various geopolitical interests, Bulgaria became a tobacco “center” of its own in the twentieth century. Balkan Smoke explores Bulgaria’s global economic and political entanglements via tobacco, with the Ottoman Empire, Central Europe, The Soviet Union and the Bloc, and the West, including the United States. From provisioning the Ottoman Empire (which Bulgaria was a province of until 1878), to supplying Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union, by the 1960s Bulgaria became the largest exporter of cigarettes in the world.

A prodigious literature has also outlined how tobacco—as one of the global “big three” drugs of choice along with alcohol and coffee—has served as a central chemical palliative in the modern era. Tobacco—brought to Europe, the Near East, and the rest of the globe from the New World—seduced consumers but also provoked public scrutiny and debate. Perhaps in part this was because smoking rituals moved west from the “Orient”—more specifically the Ottoman lands. Oriental-style smoking rooms, for example, became an escapist symbol of wealth and excess for the West to emulate, appropriate, and domesticate.

This was also true of the more public coffeehouse institution, and coffee itself, that was directly imported from the Ottoman Near East to Western Europe beginning in the seventeenth century. As many scholars have argued, smoking played a role in new patterns of consumption, commerce, sociability, and even political mobilization in the West. In the Ottoman lands, the smoke-filled coffeehouse had also played similar roles, but with peculiarly local patterns.

Specifically, smoking and the coffeehouse had been always firmly associated with the Muslim coffeehouse, as opposed to the Christian tavern. Bulgarians were directly ruled by the Ottomans from the 15th-19thcenturies and lived among large Muslim populations. Yet it was not until the nineteenth century that they began to enter the Muslim coffeehouse, where they conducted commerce and local administration, read newspapers, and engaged in debate. It was then that they learned to smoke, as they came of age politically and culturally, and as their national movement gained momentum. Indeed, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, smoking, like the tobacco industry itself, drove social change, accompanying and even propelling a certain “coming of age” for social groups who joined the ranks of passionate smokers.

As Bulgarians entered the coffeehouse at home, they also began to frequent European cafes and discover themselves as “Bulgarians” abroad, amidst the intellectual ferment of Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. Soon Bulgarians began to establish coffeehouses at home that took on increasingly European characteristics, mainly aesthetically. For example, the traditional hookah was replaced by the newly minted cigarette. Paraphernalia became a marker of modern, European sensibilities, as coffeehouses became places of intellectual and cultural activity, and tobacco became a muse for generations of the Bulgarian elite. In the interwar period, in particular, the coffeehouse was at the heart of intellectual life, though other kinds of smoke-filled venues mushroomed in the Bulgarian capital and elsewhere in Bulgaria.

Smoking became the quintessential modern habit, a necessary accoutrement for the modern man and eventually woman, in both the sober coffeehouse and the drunken tavern. Women and youth slowly entered this world of public smoking in the course of twentieth century, a fact that impelled anti-smoking impulses (however meager).

In some respects this is a familiar story, with obvious global parallels, yet the Bulgarian context continually reveals it own particular nuances. In pre-1945 Bulgaria, for example, anti-smoking impulses flowed from two rather disparate sources, American (and Bulgarian convert) Protestants and the communist left. Both had a radical vision for “moral uplift” and social reform and utopian visions of the future. But both were also, in a sense, foreign, and so faced local and official hostility in the period before 1945. Most Bulgarians simply did not want to give up their new found pleasures, and the state was an important beneficiary of tobacco industry revenues and consumption taxes. In the post World War II period, the dramatic change to a communist form of government brought an entirely new set of practical and theoretical quandaries. The Bulgarian tobacco industry took off, producing ever greater numbers of increasingly luxurious cigarettes for the enormous “captive” Soviet and Bloc market.

There was also a veritable explosion of state built and run restaurants, cafes, hotels and sea-side resorts in the later decades of period, as the state sought legitimacy by providing the “good life” to its workers. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, communist state-directed abstinence efforts emerged, along with heightened concerns over the growing numbers of smoking women and youth. The Bulgarian communists continually connected smoking to “western” moral profligacy and “remnants” of a capitalist past, as well as “Oriental” degeneracy—or Bulgaria’s backwards, Ottoman past. Yet the state continued to provide cheap cigarettes and places to smoke them as never before. Bulgarian smoking rates skyrocketed under communism and the period generated a society of smokers for whom the voice of abstinence was just another form of state propaganda.

Since the 1989 collapse of communism, smoking is still central to leisure culture in Bulgaria. The gleaming new post-communist cafe, cocktail bar, pizzeria, and now McDonalds are still smoker-friendly. Although the tobacco industry was devastated by the transition, a 2010 bill to prohibit all smoking in restaurants, bars, and other leisure establishments failed to pass through the Bulgarian parliament. Smokers are digging in deep in order to maintain what one Bulgarian friend told me is their “way of life.” History helps us understand why, as the world gradually pushes tobacco smokers out in the cold, in Bulgaria they are still welcome inside.

The Enduring Chanel: Reaction to a Revolutionary Reformer of Women’s Fashions

by Leila Bonakdar, Kate Chen, Jessica Salazar, and Lauren Todd

“The idea to do our project on women in the Roaring Twenties initially intrigued us because the romanticized era appealed to our captivation with fashion, music and American culture. Few people look past the glamorization of the flappers, but we wanted to dig deeper to find both the causes of the reform in gender roles as well as the era’s lasting impact on women today. In November, after a preliminary perusal of various sources at our local public library, we decided that our project should explore the controversial fashions of the twenties that boldly symbolized the liberation of women from confining Victorian social expectations.”

Drawing of three women in ankle length dresses with hats.

“We visited with Dr. Rebecca Sharpless, a Women’s Studies professor at Texas Christian University, in December and she suggested that we focus on the legendary French designer, Coco Chanel, whose revolutionary designs helped shape the role of women in the twenties. However, the majority of our research came from sources found in the University of Texas at Arlington Library. With the aid of Lea Worcester from the Special Collections Department, we were able to access a trove of primary resources, including 1920’s magazines, advertisements, newspaper articles, photographs, and microfilm, that was instrumental in helping us develop our script. We also accessed the university’s online research database and borrowed several books about fashion, the twenties and Chanel to refer to later in our project. We had the opportunity to view an exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art that featured works of American artists in the 1920’s. Many of the artists (O’Keefe, Hopper, Murphy, etc.) had dramatic, avant-guard styles that seemed to demonstrate the boldness of the decade. Melba Todd, a Neiman Marcus Special Events Coordinator, gave us her perspective on the significance and legacy of Chanel. Additionally, we visited several other local libraries and conducted email interviews with experts in the field of fashion.

We chose to do a documentary as our medium of expression because it allowed us to strategically use many of the visuals we found as we researched. In January we outlined the script and considered which issues would be crucial to our documentary. Our goal was to illustrate the significance of fashion in history. With our analysis, we were able to formulate the final script and record the voiceovers on Garageband. The documentary was compiled and edited on iMovie for the finished product.

Cartoon shows a woman in a large hat and long gown shooting at a flock of geese. — Source: The Library of Congress

The Roaring Twenties proved an ideal time to foster social, political and economic reform for women. And although fashion is considered by many to be immaterial to historical events, it often reflects changing attitudes because it is a powerful form of self-expression. Women reacted by embracing the androgynous, sleeker styles offered by Chanel as they audaciously proclaimed their independence and demand for equality. By shedding constrictive corsets and voluminous skirts, women were able to demonstrate their desire for freedom from oppressive social expectations. Chanel was more than a pioneer of fashion; her revolutionary designs and unusual role as a businesswoman consolidates her enduring legacy today.”

“Home Economics Training is for the Improvement of Home and Family Life?”: African American Women Professionals and Home Economics Training in Texas, 1930-1950

This year, third year doctoral student Ava Purkiss received the prestigious L. Tuffly Ellis Best Thesis Prize for Excellence in the Study of Texas History. Her paper, titled “‘Home Economics Training is for the Improvement of Home and Family Life?’: African American Women Professionals and Home Economics Training in Texas, 1930-1950,” examines African American enrollment in the home economics major at Prairie View A&M University in the 1940s. Read the abstract to her award winning paper below.

Abstract:

In 1943, Prairie View A&M University published an academic catalogue that described the careers that black women could pursue with degrees in home economics. As a historically black institution, Prairie View provided important social and economic opportunities to African Americans in Texas. The catalogue asserted that students’ prospective careers included “teaching home economics and parent education groups, managers of tea rooms, school dormitories, cafes and cafeterias, hotels, child health centers, nursery schools, [and] home demonstration agents.” Evidently, home economics provided opportunities for black women to raise their vocational statuses beyond menial labor. At the time of the publication, home economics was the most popular major for women at Prairie View with thirty out of eighty-two female students enrolled. These Prairie View students represented a few of the African American women in Texas who challenged racial, social, and economic inequality by creating a cadre of professionals through home economics education. My paper argues that black Texas women used their training in home economics as a professionalization tool, and entered the labor force as home demonstration agents (state employees who worked in rural homes), teachers, and entrepreneurs between 1930 and 1950. Despite the extant literature that presents white women as the leaders in home economics, numerous black women in Texas proved to be resourceful and enterprising black home economists. Using college catalogues, newspapers, hall of fame nomination forms, interviews, and demonstration agent reports, this paper expands typical categories of “feminized” professions while enhancing our understanding of the nature of black entrepreneurship, the African American middle-class, self-help, and education within Texas historiography.

Photographs of the aformentioned academic catalogues, published by Prairie View A&M University in the 1940s, that described the careers that black women could pursue with degrees in home economics (All courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin).

Image from an academic catalogue from the 1940s depicting the careers that black women could pursue with degrees in home economics

About Ava Purkiss:

Ava Purkiss is a third year United States history student at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies African American women’s health and physical culture in the early twentieth century, with a focus on the economic, political, and social barriers to exercise that African American women encountered and ultimately circumvented in pursuit of health and fitness. She will spend the summer of 2012 conducting pre-dissertation research in various U.S. archives under the direction of her advisor, Dr. Tiffany Gill. Ava earned her B.A. in psychology from Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA and her M.A. in African New World Studies from Florida International University in her hometown of Miami, FL.

Visit Ava Purkiss’ homepage.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Title IX: Empowerment Through Education

by Priya Ramamoorthy, Maanasa Nathan, Kavya Ramamoorthy, and Smrithi Mahadevan

In 1972, the U.S. Congress passed Title IX to end discrimination against women in education. This website , which won First Place for Group Website (Junior Division) at National History Day 2012, provides a history of Title IX in three main parts: the changes Title IX brought about, the reactions to Title IX, and its impact on women’s education, especially in athletics.

Button: Equal Education Title IX is law now

The authors also provide historical context that brought about Title IX, interviews with major figures who contributed to is passage and implementation, and a discussion of the ways Title IX is still being used to protect women’s rights in education, even Helen Reddy singing “I am Woman” in 1975.

They use interviews, songs, magazine articles, statistics, and much more to give a rich history of Title IX and its impact.

[Note: video seems to work better in Firefox than in Chrome or IE]

Group Interpretive Website
Junior Division
Noel Grisham Middle School
(Teacher: Sheryl Rank)

Photo credits:

All photos courtesy of “Title IX: Empowerment Through Education”

Making History: Takkara Brunson

Interviewed by Zach Doleshal

In the sixth installation of our new series, “Making History,” Zach Doleshal speaks with Takkara Brunson about her research on Afro-Cuban women in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Brunson’s research experiences in Cuba, and stories of the fascinating women who form the core of her research offer a taste not only of life and work in a place few Americans get to visit, but also a window into the making of a social and cultural historian.

Brunson’s dissertation, “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba, 1902-1958,” is the first full-length treatment of the formation of a modern Cuban identity that examines race and gender as complementary and conflicting forces in the lives of women rather than as distinct categories of analysis.

This dissertation explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals—from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families—established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations. The dissertation’s chapters—on patriarchal discourses of racial progress, photographic representations, la mujer negra (the black woman), and feminist, communist, and labor movements—probe how patriarchy and assumptions of black racial inferiority simultaneously informed discourses of citizenship within a society that sought to project itself as a white masculine nation. Additionally, the dissertation examines how Afro-Cuban women’s writings and social activism shaped legal reforms, perceptions of cubanidad (Cuban identity), and Afro-Cuban community formation. The study utilizes a variety of sources: organizational records, letters from women to politicians, photographic representations, periodicals, literature, and labor and education statistics. Engaging the fields of Latin American history, African diaspora studies, gender studies, and visual culture studies, the dissertation maintains that an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nation is integral to developing a nuanced understanding of the prerevolutionary era.

Takkara Brunson received her PhD in the history department from the University of Texas in 2011. She specializes in modern Latin American history with a particular focus on race and gender, citizenship, and national identity. She currently holds a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and Africa-American Studies at the University of Rochester.

Photo credits:

“Advertisement for Pomada ‘Mora,'” 15 December, 1914

Minerva via “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba, 1902-1958.”

You may also like:

Our book recommendations for readings on Afro-Cubans and Afro-Americans.

Hear UT Professor of History – and Takkara Brunson’s dissertation supervisor – Frank Guridy talk about his new, award-winning book “Forging the Transnational Diaspora” in our recent monthly feature interview.

And read Professor Guridy’s review of two recent movies about the figures behind the Cuban Revolution.

Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905–1960 by Ann Farnsworth-Alvear (2000)

by Lizeth Elizondo

Dulcinea in the Factory presents a gendered historical analysis of the boom in the textiles industry in Medellín that goes beyond the typical economic analysis of industry-based modernity. It places gender in the context of the roles of the church and the paternalistic factory owners as well as the memories of the workers, to tell this history of forgotten myths and morals in the workplace. Dulcinea in the Factory shows that male factory owners, managers, and church officials saw themselves as Don Quixotes protecting fragile, virginal Dulcineas –their female employees. However, as Farnsworth-Alvear reveals, the real Dulcineas, the mujeres obreras (working women) found clever ways of coping with such fervent guardianship.

Farnsworth-Alvear offers a synopsis of the evolution of industrial work in Medellín by examining the modernizing projects pushed by the technocrat elites who established the first textile factories. As the title implies, this industrial project was an experiment that merged modernity and religion on the factory floor. Housing, recreational facilities, and company-sponsored activities simultaneously monopolized control and granted factory owners opportunities for public display of their protective and affectionate nature toward the female workforce. In the same vein, Catholic rhetoric depicting a vulnerable, virginal, working woman influenced factory guidelines aimed at protecting women from arduous factory work and sexually precarious situations. As the author emphasizes, the close relationship between the factory and religious rhetoric is an important component to consider when evaluating the shifts in factory policy in Medellín.

Yet, these imaginary threats to chastity, painted by the church and reinforced by factory rules, were often challenged by those women who did not consider themselves in need of protection. The author’s interviews reveal that some women were far from afraid of their workingmen counterparts and they often spoke out defending themselves in a variety of ways. Farnsworth-Alvear brilliantly utilizes a combination of statistical sources and oral history that together reveal the ideologies, challenges, and lived experiences of the workers. Oral interviews uncover the secret ways in which both women and men obstructed severe factory regimens: courtships, secret marriages, pregnancies, and even abortions occurred under this strict paternalism.

By focusing on gender relations and by comparing statistical and archival material with interviews of workers, the book offers a rich history of labor, gender, and class relations in Medellín. What emerges in Dulcinea in the Factory illuminates the experiences of those involved in the Medellín modernizing project. For sixty years, workers – whatever their gender and social stratum – had significant power in negotiating their own fate. This book offers an important contribution to the study of labor and gender. More importantly, it effectively incorporates the often-neglected social and cultural component into our understanding of industrial modernity.

Photo credits:

Dmitri Kessel, “Overhead view of housing project for workers,” Medellin, Colombia, July 1947

LIFE Magazine via Flickr Creative Commons

Dmitri Kessel, “Worker sorting leaves in a tobacco factory,” Medellin, Colombia, July 1947

LIFE Magazine via Flickr Creative Commons

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