The involvement of the men and religion forward movement in the cause of labor justice,Atlanta, Georgia, 1912–1916∗

The radical ideologies and socialist overtones of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) made them an easy target for industrialists as nationalistic and patriotic propaganda flooded the pages of American newspapers during World War I. The war in Europe marked the beginning of the end for the rapid growth and labor organizing power of the IWW, especially in the northwestern United States where WWI was used as a means for state governments and regional industrialists to devise methods meant to damage the union beyond repair. After America’s declaration of war, the Washington State Council of Defense was formed in response to the nation’s demand for mobilization of its citizens for increased production of war materiel and to operate the state’s wartime propaganda machine. With an abundance of natural resources, Washington had a profound impact on national war production output. Although it possessed several important extractive industries, it was Washington’s quality grain, especially in the southeast portion of the state known as the Palouse, which made it a boon for agricultural industrialists. With wheat prices fixed at the highest in the nation’s history, Palouse farmers became wealthy as a result of WWI, while the area’s thousands of migrant laborers suffered from low wages and pitiful job conditions. A general strike issued during the 1917 harvest by the IWW’s most influential branch – the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (AWIU) frightened area farmers, prompting the Defense Council to begin a systematic replacement of AWIU harvest hands via the organization of thousands of women, children, and retirees. Through appeals to patriotism and anti-labor rhetoric, the Defense Council and local reactionaries effectively circumvented union labor with its labor replacement campaign throughout the remainder of WWI, and without the use of violence so common to labor conflicts in Washington State. The IWW/AWIU in the Palouse never fully recovered from the onslaught, thus adding to the union’s near collapse in the aftermath of WWI.     

Editor's Introduction

This issue features some remarkably innovative work about issues of race, ethnicity, and power within the North American workscape. The racialization, ethnic disparagement, and general “othering” of economic competitors or political opponents has become an almost standard trope in 19th and 20th century U.S. history narratives. It comes as no great surprise, then, that Minnesota mining interests, when faced with the militant resistance of Finnish mineworkers allied with the IWW in 1916, should attack the denizens of the remote Iron Range as “Jackpine Savages,” stand-ins for the Sioux of an earlier era—both now equally reviled as “barbarians” who posed “the greatest menace to civilization.” More surprising, surely, is Gerald Ronning's discovery of the intricate ways in which the Finns themselves adapted their identities to the rhythms of the North Woods, in short turning the epithets of primitivism into a cultural badge of honor. Two essays offer provocative new takes on central themes of African-American history. In the first Brian Kelly insists that the “accomodationist” project engaged by Booker T. Washington and others among the educated black elite (those whom W. E. B. DuBois would christen the Talented Tenth) was less about a renunciation of civil and political equality and more about complicity with New South industrialists' quest for cheap labor. A class-based rapprochement between “race leaders” and “white elites,” he argues, accounts for a contemporary discourse of race pride and uplift on the one hand and disgust and even revulsion for “the masses” on the other. Criticizing an historiography of celebration, where every act of elite-led uplift is interpreted as “an important sphere of agency,” Kelly calls for more emphasis on the voices of black working-class dissent.     

Informing Red Power and Transforming the Second Wave: Native American women and the struggle against coerced sterilization in the 1970s

It is argued that despite formidable foes—including powerful feminist organizations and Native American rights groups—Indigenous women's activism had an important influence on the larger movement for the termination of sterilization abuse in 1970s USA. Their work highlighted coerced sterilization as a most agonizing example of compromised tribal sovereignty—and demanded that political leaders address it. The article describes the tangible achievements of these women in effecting federal regulations as well as their influence on mainstream American feminist ideology and Indian Country's interpretation of women's rights as sovereign ones.     

Editing the 1930s: The Lost Work of Josephine Johnson Excerpts from Josephine Johnson's published and unpublished writings are quoted with permission of the Estate of Josephine Johnson Cannon. All quoted materials © Estate of Josephine Johnson Cannon 2005.

The radical avant-garde has aged profoundly. Yet, led by director Judith Malina, the Living Theatre, founded in 1947, remains the longest surviving political theatre collective in the US. The Living Theatre opened its doors at a new theatre/home on New York City's Lower East Side in 2007, where Malina directed a much lauded revival of the company's groundbreaking 1963 production of Kenneth Brown's The Brig, and performed the role of Maudie in the premiere production of Hanon Reznikov's adaptation of Doris Lessing's Maudie and Jane. Vibrant and luminous at 81, an aged Venus rising from the half shell, Malina (dis)played the decaying and decrepit Maudie, standing naked onstage, sensually and lovingly bathed by Pat Russell, playing Jane. Malina's ageing activist/artist's body and voice spoke volumes about decades of societal and cultural transformations, of sexual revolutions, and of wounds that never heal.

Evoking Pierre Nora's ‘sites of memory’—this performative lieu de memoire ‘talks back’ on many levels, both in contemporary contexts and re-membering the zeitgeist of Malina's earlier performances—nearly naked, strident and much younger in the Living Theatres’ legendary production of Paradise Now (1968–70), and eloquently, flamboyantly anarchist, if too old, playing Antigone in Malina's adaptation of Brecht's version of Sophocles play (1967–84). This essay analyses the mise en scène and the reception of Maudie and Jane in light of the working processes and performance history of director/performer/inspirator Malina. Finally, the challenges and hope made visible and corporeal in Malina's on- and off-stage performances are explored.     

Wet and wobbly harmonies: music and saloon-life in the industrial workers of the world, 1905–1920

ABSTRACT

During the first fifteen years of its existence, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) gained a reputation for being an exceedingly musical labor organization. Where did this proclivity originate? This article complements and elaborates existing explanations by sourcing the roots of IWW music to the institution that was both historically and contemporaneously integral to working-class culture – namely the saloon. It demonstrates strong and persistent links with the culture of proletariat drinking establishments. First, it investigates the ease with which individuals and songs travelled between the recreational environments of the barroom and activist environments of the IWW. Second, by comparing the values and attitudes associated with the musical cultures of the IWW and the saloon, it demonstrates an enduring compatibility between these two working-class institutions. Finally, it demonstrates the value of these findings for historians of the IWW organization, labor historians, and theorists of social movements.     

A stroll down memory lane: my fifty years-plus association with Labor History

Mexico's rail workers’ struggle of 1926–27 encompassed one of the largest strikes following the 1910–20 revolution, yet contemporary official government statistics omitted any mention of it. The labor struggle involved an independent, militant confederation of transport workers and, opposed to it, the largest rail company in the country (heavily indebted to foreign creditors), the state, and its principal labor ally. While the strike was broken, the confederation leading it obtained an impressive judgment from the nation's supreme court against the authoritarian federal executive power, which, moreover, vindicated the right to strike affirmed in the 1917 Constitution. But the judicial and administrative decisions reached in connection with the strike subsequently served to structure and limit labor's right to strike. This article analyzes the railroad strike of 1927, the judicial and administrative response to it, and its legal significance, which together have contributed to the formation of the nation's post-revolutionary system of regulating industrial conflict.     

工人运动视野下邓中夏“纸老虎”观点探析

邓中夏的"纸老虎"观点,源于其认为资本家是"老虎"、工贼背叛革命是为虎作伥。在领导工人运动的实践中,他逐渐认识到资本家、军阀和帝国主义的本质,认为这些也是"纸老虎"。在省港大罢工中,邓中夏的"纸老虎"观点包含着认清英帝国主义的真面目、英帝国主义危机论和中华民族反英斗争的实践总结等丰富的内涵。其"纸老虎"观点随着中国工人运动而不断发展,反映了他寻求中国革命之路的理论和实践的发展历程。     

I'll Take My Farm: The GI Bill,Agriculture and Veterans in North Carolina

This article examines pivotal components of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 that have largely escaped careful study. The GI Bill of Rights, as the act is familiarly known, established a broad and groundbreaking social safety net of educational and economic benefits and incentives for veterans returning from World War II. Two elements of the legislation – farm loans and on-the-farm training – aimed to advance the nation's agricultural economy, and proved to be especially popular in the South, a region deeply rooted in the agrarian history of the United States. In North Carolina, the wide embrace of the farm aid by veterans is illustrative. It highlighted an abiding desire to own and operate farms, an ambition that had survived the war. Yet, North Carolina's experience ultimately reveals that the agricultural components of the GI Bill contributed more to the capitalist transformation of southern agriculture than to fulfilling landless veterans' hopes for acquiring farms.     

Skilled hands,strong spirits: a century of building trade history,by Grace Palladino

When a hired thug hurled acid in the face of the prominent newspaper columnist, Victor Riesel, in 1956, the attack left him permanently blind. The incident appeared to dramatically vindicate Riesel's repeated warnings about the dangerous power of labor racketeers and it helped spur the creation of the largest ever congressional investigation into union corruption, the McClellan Committee hearings (1957–1959). This article raises important questions about the accepted version of why this attack occurred and what it meant. It uses recently released documents from the FBI as well as records from the McClellan Committee's staff. The article also suggests that several governmental bodies, including the FBI and the US Attorney's Office, played a role in furthering the public's misunderstanding of this episode. In so doing it offers a new understanding about how the issue of union corruption came to assume an important place on the nation's political agenda in this era.     

A Conversation About Q. D. Leavis

Mary Ellen Mark's photographic collection Twins (2003) raises provocative questions about performance, contingency and the relativity of difference, self and other. Her images complicate notions of individuality and foundational difference and challenge both self-recognition and recognition by others. They require viewers to observe closely, to spend time studying her subjects and to address the relativity—sometimes the radical relativity—of difference but also of sameness. Difficult questions about where ‘you’ end and ‘I’ begin are raised. Though Twins contains images of fraternal twins and triplets, Mark's subjects are, overwhelmingly, identical twins. She usually photographs them standing together, dressed in precisely the same way, in carefully constructed poses. This recreates the carnivalesque, performative aspect of Twins Day, held each year in Twinsburg, Ohio, in which the fact of being a twin (or in some cases triplet) is affirmed. Some identical twins choose to represent themselves as twins rather than solely as individuals, or as siblings who are also twins, in order to test out the limits of individuality. Here, I consider the ways in which such a chosen celebratory representation challenges different ways in which identical twins have been conceived of, which emphasise instead alterity and uncanniness.     

‘If Not Yourself,Who Would You Be?’: Writing the Female Body in Agatha Christie's Second World War Detective Fiction

The mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976) has long been understood as a best-seller who could negotiate the demands of the marketplace, but who never tried to engage with political or social issues. Formulaic, linguistically simple and dependent on stereotypes, her books have a reputation as ‘animated algebra’—retreats from reality. This essay rethinks Christie's political significance, with reference to selected texts published during the Second World War. During the crucial war years, Christie published murder mysteries prolifically, mostly set in country houses or holiday resorts. Apparently escapist settings, however, gave her space to explore problems facing women at a time when men had been displaced to the battlefield. The majority of Christie's victims in these texts are women and, more than usual, the plots revolve around identifying or misidentifying corpses. In the two novels explored here—Evil Under the Sun (1941) and The Body in the Library (1942)—Christie considers women as victims in commercial and domestic narratives. In both cases, women trade identities with each other in death: for example, a schoolgirl dresses up for a Hollywood screen test, only to be killed, her body swapped with a glamorous dancer's to obscure the time of death. In life and in death, characters read women as combinations of bodies and cosmetics. Far from avoiding reality, Christie engaged with concerns of the day. Her detective fiction rarely references war directly, but there is a running commentary on domestic and commercial spheres, and women's roles, as victims, within these.     

‘Give us peace’: Gladys Avery Tillett and the search for women's political activism in the United States, 1945–1950

As previously demonstrated by scholars, the social justice feminism movement in the United States accomplished its two central goals by the time of that nation's official involvement in World War II. This article examines the subsequent development of former social justice feminists' search for political activism after World War II through the activities of one of the social movement's later, significant leaders, Gladys Avery Tillett, particularly in her participation in the controversial and bitter campaign of North Carolina United States Senator Frank Porter Graham to retain his seat in the 1950 Democratic party primary.     

Training the “Wizards”: A Model for Building Self Efficacy and Peer Networks Among Urban Youth Workers

This article presents a community's efforts to address the professional development needs of frontline youth workers. A coalition designed a 13-week Youth Worker Training Institute to increase youth workers' knowledge, skills, self-efficacy, and professional networks. After the Institute, participants reported feeling more skillful, connected to other youth workers, confident, professional, reflective, and being more powerful change agents. Based on results from this formative evaluation, we suggest that it was multiple teaching and learning strategies that promoted reflection, peer learning, and networking—that contributed to youth workers gaining knowledge and skills that in turn increased their confidence and sense of self-efficacy.     

Technocrats and Tortured Bodies: Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images

Through an analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's final novel Les Belles Images (1966), this article examines how a 1960s French technocratic class dealt with individual and collective traumas, particularly how they placed their faith in an undying hope in the future while simultaneously ignoring the horrors of wartime violence. The article contends that Beauvoir's novel is a story of not remembering—or, more specifically, attempting to forget—Algeria and all the conflict signified to the average French citizen, including decolonization, torture, racial difference and political tumult. Analysis rests on the novel's representation of its protagonist Laurence, who had been shaken to the core after reading a newspaper article about a (likely Algerian) woman tortured to death, ultimately causing a nervous breakdown that forever altered her interactions with her family and fellow technocrats. Gender and nationality also figure centrally in this examination of the broader role that images—not only belles images—played in the construction of French national identity at this historical moment.     

Left Activism,Succour and Selfhood: the epistolary friendship of two revolutionary mothers in 1970s Britain

At the height of mass activity on the Left, the ascendancy of the women's liberation movement (WLM), and the beginnings of real social and personal change for men and women, the 1970s are increasingly seen as the decade when sixties permissiveness began to be truly felt in Britain. This article draws upon a personal archive of correspondence from this turbulent decade, between two revolutionary women, Di Parkin and Annie Howells. It argues that the women's letters form an important contribution to new understandings about the construction of the post-war gendered self. The letters represent an interchange of motherhood, domesticity, far-left politics, and close female friendship. The article will show how the women's epistolary friendship offers intimate insight into female self-fashioning at a breakthrough social and political moment in 1970s Britain. As they reflected on some of the key political and social themes of the decade—class, labour, race and gender relations, as well as international politics—Di and Annie sought to negotiate themselves in relation to shifting discourses and social patterns. Writing as relational female subjects and individuals, the women's letters became simultaneously a private and shared space in which to compose themselves as women, revolutionaries and feminists, and autonomous sexual subjects. As a result, this article will show, the epistolary lives of these two radical women inform valuable understanding about some of the complex ways in which post-war individuals used available cultural and political resources to find meaning in their lives.     

One History or Many Herstories? Gender politics and the history of physiotherapy's origins in the nineteenth and early twentieth century

Compared to other professional groups in the healthcare sector, physiotherapists seldom use historical references in their efforts to define or empower their profession's identity. This article shows that the gender politics of physiotherapy is central in attempting to answer why this is the case. As illustrated, the gender mechanisms of the professionalizing of physiotherapy consisted of two co-existent developments—homosocial, or professional rivalry between men of differing professional scientific backgrounds—and heterosocial, where women competed against men in order to re-legitimize their professional occupation. Focusing mainly on Sweden but with references to England for comparison, the article brings together masculinity studies with women's history in order to show how the demasculinization of physiotherapy as a profession benefitted women in certain ways while disadvantaging male physiotherapists.     

‘The Message Is in the Book’: What Virago's Sale in 1995 Means for Feminist Publishing

This article examines the UK publisher Virago, the world's largest women's imprint and the best known of the second-wave feminist publishing houses that sprang up during the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist publishing remains a peculiarly unacknowledged and underexamined aspect of feminist history, but one that had real influence and effect. This article gives a historical account of Virago, noting its intention to enact feminist politicking through the act of publishing books. The author looks at the effect Virago had on the industry more widely, on literary culture and on attitudes to women. The author also examines changing formulations of feminism and how these were reflected—or not—through Virago's published output. The author then moves on to her central proposition: that Virago's sale in 1995, rather than marking the death of feminist publishing (as was stated in media comment at the time), was in fact the point at which it was saved. Virago's move into Little, Brown, coinciding with the rise of an increasingly commodified consumer culture, the conglomeration of the book industry and more pluralized expressions of feminism, allowed it to continue to work as a publisher of women's writing while none of its contemporaries survived. The author looks in detail at the changes post-1995 within the book industry, within feminism and in wider culture, as well as at Virago. The author asks whether Virago still has value as a ‘feminist’ imprint and how it has sought to remain vital and relevant.     

En-Gendering the Sublime: Aesthetics and Politics in the Eighteenth Century

In this essay I expand on the analysis of the en-gendered sublime, an aesthetic concept of political consequence used in the eighteenth century. In a discussion of the initial phase of modern aesthetics I will present Immanuel Kant's opinions on the sublime's ennobling effect as having solely male connotations. This, I argue, became an important part of the construction of a new notion of citizenship on the basis of nationality and as an exclusively male domain. Furthermore, I will claim that conceptions of the “bad” sublime, as expressed by thinkers such as Edmund Burke, made up another side of this ennobling sublimity coin, which was the politically provocative defined in female terms. Aesthetics has obviously walked hand-in-hand with politics ever since Plato's Republic, and the concept of the sublime only make up a small part of this complex union—but undeniably a rather interesting one.     

Between tradition and modernity: Bulgarian women during the development of modern statehood and society, 1878–1945

Abstract

The paper attempts to draw the general outlines of women's input in the establishment of the modern Bulgarian state and society in the period 1878–1945. Set against the background of traditional roles and attitudes that were prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century, women's contributions include active participation in the nation's economy and labor force, disproportionately significant representation among the educated élite, nationally and internationally recognized achievements in the arts, and the establishment and promotion of Bulgarian feminism. The paper suggests that a detailed study of the public role played by women will achieve a more accurate understanding of the modernization process in the Balkans since women have tended to act in a trend-setting manner. Furthermore, Bulgarian feminism is viewed as an example of the existence of elements of a civil society in the region.     

Love and Marriage: Ellen Key and Hiratsuka Raichō Explore Alternatives

This article provides a case study of how maternal feminist ideas traveled across national and cultural boundaries in the early twentieth century. It briefly examines Swedish feminist Ellen Key's (1849–1926) ideas on love, marriage, and motherhood and then explores the impact these ideas had on Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971). Encountering Key's writings early in her career had a lasting impact on Raichō's thought, writing, and activism. It also shows how Raichō drew on the modern, universal aspects of Key's thought to promote women's rights and influence in an increasingly nationalistic Japan. The condition of all development is, not to be content with the present, but to have the courage to ask how everything can be made better and the good fortune to find a right answer to this question in thought or in action. —Ellen Key, Love and Marriage 3.