Gendered entanglements: Dakotas and Scandinavians at Spirit Lake, 1900–1930

In this article the author explores the interconnections between the social and the material—as people move to a space on the land, coexisting with one another. By focusing in on one specific place—the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation (formerly called the Devils Lake Sioux Indian Reservation) in North Dakota—the author analyzes what happened when white immigrants came to homestead and live on land historically reserved for Dakotas. Against the backdrop of Native dispossession, this illustrative case reveals the ways everyday interactions created entanglements through landownership, the gendered division of paid work, neighboring practices, and leasing land. It challenges us to uncover gendered processes, probe denials, and interrogate silences.     

For better or for worse? The dilemmas of unmarried motherhood in mid-twentieth-century popular British film and fiction

This article investigates representations of unmarried motherhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s through readings of popular British film and fiction. These sources are used to illustrate contradictions and conflicts in the meanings afforded to unmarried motherhood and, in turn, to highlight how the unmarried mother was used as a motif for exploring post-war normative boundaries around marriage, motherhood, and female sexuality. The article draws upon Raymond Williams's idea of a 'structure of feeling' to make connections between these representations and issues and debates about the role and status of women and mothers more generally in post-war Britain.     

Pills,potions, and purgatives: women and abortion methods in Ireland, 1900–1950

This article examines women's efforts to induce miscarriage in Ireland (the Irish Free State, Éire, and the Republic) from 1900 to 1950. It demonstrates that, when possible, Irish women avoided surgical procedures, preferring instead to consume pills, potions, and purgatives to cause abortion. Irish women viewed emmenagogues and abortifacients as more natural than surgery and in keeping with women's traditions; these substances, they understood, had been used for centuries to restore menstruation and return the female body to normalcy and health. Overall, it was control—control over the methods of abortion and control over what they put into their own bodies, as well as autonomy when it came to managing their own reproductive health—that mattered most to Irish women seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Irish women's abortion efforts expose their resolve to manage their reproductive lives and thus remind us how they sometimes rejected the dictates of the conservative twentieth-century state-Church consensus, bypassing legislation and negotiating religious cultural norms.     

The development of capitalism in the Atlantic world: England,the Americas,and West Africa, 1450–1900

Abstract

The paper traces the development of capitalism in England, the Americas, and West Africa over a long time period, 1450–1900. The developments in these major regions of the Atlantic Basin during the period were strongly interconnected and ultimately gave rise to the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy which integrated the major economies of the Atlantic world. The development of capitalism in the three specified geographical areas is analyzed in the context of the interconnected developments. Central to the historical analysis is a discussion of the contending conceptions of capitalism as a socioeconomic system. The paper shows that the original conception by Karl Marx, which identified free wage earners separated from their means of production and entrepreneurs who own those means of production as the defining elements, was generally accepted by supporters and critics for several decades; attempts to redefine began in the 1960s. The paper contends that, unlike the original Marxian conception, the new conceptions fail to capture precisely and accurately the dynamic elements which distinguish capitalism unambiguously from other forms of socioeconomic organization and do not facilitate a sharply focused historical investigation of its development over time. The employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas was critical to the development of capitalism in England and in the Americas, but the adverse effects on West Africa’s economies held back the development of markets and the market economy and, ultimately, the development of capitalism in the region.     

The appearance of women's politics in the correspondence pages of Aberdeen newspapers, 1900–14

A newspaper's ‘Letters to the Editor’ column represents its readership in a unique way and can provide a useful ‘thermometer’ with which to measure the extent of critical debate and discussion a particular issue generated in a locality. In this article, the letters of women to the editor of the Aberdeen Daily Journal, 1900 to 1914, are analysed to discover the type of political issues with which these women concerned themselves. It is argued that the women must have felt particularly strongly about such issues since they were prepared to take their arguments outside their social circle and to identify themselves as politically active in the pages of their daily newspaper. Political issues dealt with include local government, the suffrage question and government legislation. While much of the evidence used comes from the letters of active suffragists who were usually members of national suffrage associations, it is argued that the period showed an expansion in the type of woman interested in politics, and the corresponding urge to write to the newspapers. This is evidenced in the number of women who firmly stated that they were not suffragists, but became politicised enough to write to the newspaper complaining about the Insurance Act in 1912.     

Sporting Women and Machonas: negotiating gender through sports in Argentina, 1900–1946

This article shows how sports contributed to create new experiences and expressions of gender in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century. The sportswoman embodied a new model of femininity, a novel type of modern, healthy and active womanhood that defied traditional constructions of gender. Sports affected women's experience of gender, providing a site for the development of an emotional and spiritual well-being by fostering personal and psychological qualities like self-esteem, self-satisfaction and self-determination. Participation in sports also helped to redefine how women related to their environment by widening their social circles and relationships. These changes triggered a number of fears and anxieties about sport's potential for gender dis-order. In particular, the figure of the machona, a masculinized, unattractive, and mannish woman, became a symbol of this dis-order. The use of humor, parody, and theatrical displays of gender became ways through which these fears were both expressed and negotiated.     

The Bureaucratic Origins of Migrant Poverty: The Texas Cotton Industry, 1910–1930

Migrant poverty resulted from the bureaucratization of Mexicans as a cheap source of labor for the Texas cotton industry from 1910 to 1930. State and federal employment programs and policies designed to maintain an organized and efficient labor market bureaucratized the divisions of labor that segregated Mexicans in seasonal low-wage agricultural work. While the implementation of labor legislation solved the temporary labor needs of large-scale cotton farmers, it exacerbated the working and living conditions of Mexican migratory workers. The welfare of Mexican migrants worsened as state managers integrated the recruitment and distribution of this labor force into the organizational structure of the Texas cotton industry.     

Structural conflict and the Farmworker: Norfolk, 1900–1920

In Britain the farm labourer has presented a severe organisational problem to the trade union organiser and the socialist agitator: a phenomenon which has been explained, conventionally, by different versions of the ‘idiocy of rural life” theory. A general orthodoxy has emerged to the effect that the farmworker is acquiescent in his bondage. In the following article this orthodoxy is questioned. It is shown that in Norfolk, between 1900 and 1920, there was a certain kind of conflict on the farm which went on beneath the apparently calm and ordered relationships of what has been categorised as a paternal and deferential society. Behind the show of deference lay a world in which conflict was potentially endemic: conflict which derived from the simple fact, clouded by much modern sociology, that the relationship between master and man was one of exploitation. Those tensions which exist in any work relationship were present and manifested themselves in struggle: over, for example, wages, hours and job definition. Such struggle was particularly likely at those times of the year (which were more numerous than is commonly realised) when withdrawal of labour could cause considerable difficulty to the farmer.     

Negro labor in the western cattle industry, 1866–1900

The trade union movement in sub-Saharan Africa during the struggle against colonial rule in the 1950s has long commanded the attention of historians. Numerous books and articles have detailed the growing strength and critical role of trade unions in France's vast West African colonial federation, l'Afrique occidentale française (AOF). Far less is known about the fate of these trade unions in the nine newly independent countries that emerged from the demise of AOF. In the 15 years following independence, most autonomous trade unions in French-speaking West Africa were either marginalised or integrated into the political structures of ruling parties. With the exception of Burkina Faso, single national trade union federations controlled by ruling political parties existed everywhere in francophone West Africa by 1975. Whether capitalist, military or socialist, all political elites sought to create a trade unionism that would serve as a transmission belt for party control over the workforce, a type of unionism that was referred to as ‘participation responsable’. This article details the experience of Dahomey (now Benin), where independent trade unions struggled against responsible participation and continued to play a pivotal political role until 1975, when the state socialist regime of Mathieu Kérékou finally succeeded in imposing state-controlled trade unionism.     

Filipino Elite Women and Public Health in the American Colonial Era, 1906–1940

This article is the first step in the process of writing Filipino elite women into the history of public health by focusing on those who were not health practitioners (not doctors, nurses or midwives), but who were heavily involved in the campaign against infant mortality in the American colonial period. It argues that Filipino elite women fulfilled the extremely important role of administrators of organizations that addressed infant care and maternal and child health, in the distribution of milk and the dissemination of information about maternal and children's health. Using hitherto unused sources from the archives of La Protección de la Infancia, the periodicals of the National Federation of Women's Clubs, and colonial records, this study reveals how the public health movement in the Philippines was gendered, and analyzes the contributions made by Filipino elite women that have to date not yet been acknowledged in the scholarship.     

Bullying and Depressive Symptomatology Among Low-Income,African–American Youth

Utilizing a risk and protective factors approach, this research examined the relationship between self-reported depressive symptomatology, group membership (bully, victim, bully–victim) risks, and protection among a sample of African–American youths. Self-report data were collected in spring, 2002. Youth in grades 5–12 were sampled (n = 1,542; 51% female) from an urban school district in the Southeast. African–American youths self-identifying as bullies, victims, or bully–victims, reported higher levels of depressive symptoms compared to their nonbullied–nonvictimized counterparts. Additionally, multivariate results highlight a significant set of risk and protective factors associated with depressive symptomatology, even after controlling for the effects of self-identified group membership. These findings further contribute to our general understanding of the interplay among bullying, victimization, risk and protective factors, and their effects on depressive symptoms among a group of understudied African–American youth.