‘We are not merging on an equal basis’: the desegregation of southern teacher associations and the right to work, 1945–1977

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the history of southern teacher association mergers during the Civil Rights Movement. Desegregated teacher associations promised opportunity for black educators during the transformation of public schools in the 1960s and 1970s. Southern black educators at the moment of desegregation controlled the mergers of their own associations and carried forth a civil rights agenda that protected the gains of the movement and the integrity of their professional labor. Threatened with widespread unemployment and the perils of working under white school officials committed to segregation, black educators defended their right to teach in a newly desegregated and volatile work environment. White teacher associations responded by pursuing a ‘right to work’ in desegregated schools that built upon the rhetoric of conservative and antiunion ideology. The perennial yet evolving tensions that underpinned the merger highlights the limitations of the Civil Rights Movement, which promised opportunity yet ironically put forth new forms of resistance that deprived black teachers of the equity they sought through desegregation. The conflict inherent to the merger of education associations provides a nuanced perspective by which to understand desegregation as it precipitated fractures and tensions still evident in the teaching profession today.     

‘My daughter,my dear’: the correspondence of Catherine de Médicis and Elisabeth de Valois

This article explores the evolving relationship between Catherine de Médicis and her daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, as the latter became Queen of Spain. The particular dynamics of their changing political roles juxtaposed with their relative status within the Valois familial hierarchy can be analysed through the extant correspondence that became their main conduit for communication after Elisabeth's marriage and removal to Spain. This correspondence highlights epistolary strategies of emotional rhetoric, silence, and even delay, as well as meaning conveyed through the use of scribes and the physical placement of messages upon paper. These letters between a mother and daughter further reveal complex patterns of involvement of a wider group of individuals at court within the epistolary network, which meant all communication was subject to supervision, interference and mediation.     

Judith Scott’s What is Property?: an inquiry into principles of dependency,propriety, and self-possession of an “outsider” artist

The essay addresses the politics of biography in the interpretation and reception of “outsider artist” Judith Scott’s work. Drawing from feminism, disability studies, and Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s History and Obstinacy (1981) and its political economy of labor power, the essay proposes a new method of analysis which would foreground Scott’s work as a mode of institutional critique. Kluge and Negt ask “Can capital say ‘I’?.” The essay argues that Scott’s work compels a concomitant questioning of this “I” and the very terms of biography, authorship, and ownership that undergird the myths – and the institutions – of the “outsider” and her “art.”     

On being the ‘gender person’ in an academic department: constructions,configurations and implications

The term ‘gender person’ in an academic department is a colloquial expression which refers to someone who researches and/or teaches about gender, but whose primary affiliation is not to a gender studies department or centre. This role has particularly been discussed in relation to international development organisations, but has been neglected in relation to higher education institutions. The article reapplies Lucy Ferguson’s ‘gender person’ framework to academics working as ‘gender people’ in the conditions of contemporary academia. Three cases of different manifestations of the ‘gender person’ role are explored in detail and analysed for the ways in which occupying the ‘gender person’ role impacts upon academic careers and gender knowledge. The article contributes an elaborated concept of the ‘gender person’ in academia and provides empirical evidence of being the ‘gender person’. The article particularly shows that relying on a ‘gender person’ as a form of gender mainstreaming renders both gender academics and academic departments vulnerable in different ways.     

‘This accursed child’: the early years of Marie Madeleine Jodin (1741-90) actress,philosophe and feminist

The childhood and early youth of Marie Madeleine Jodin (1741- 90) who later achieved some notoriety as an actress, correspondent of Denis Diderot and feminist, throws light on the lives of an artisan family in mideighteenth-century France and on the experience of one delinquent daughter. This study examines Marie Madeleine Jodin's life in relation to different categories of discrimination which she experienced; as a Protestant child, as a libertine daughter and as an actress. Her experience illustrates the workings of systems of authority employed in the eighteenth century to control young women as it impinged on an individual. It is argued that the violent familial and institutional conflicts of Jodin's early life were later reflected in her feminist treatise, Vues législatives pour les femmes (1790), which called for the establishment of a Women's jurisdiction over women. In particular her proposal to eliminate public prostitution and her attacks on the police des moeurs (morals police) have their origin in the bitter experience of her incarceration in a prison for prostitutes in her late teens. The collusion of authority (la police des moeurs) with les filles publiques came to symbolise for her the corruptions of the ancien régime     

The Women's Movement and ‘Class Struggle’: gender,class formation and political identity in women's strikes, 1968–78.

ABSTRACT

Women workers’ industrial disputes were of fundamental importance to the WLM, reflected in the deeds of activists and early participant-histories. These disputes were sites of worker-employer conflict and conflict between feminists and the wider Labour Movement. This article considers how these differing interpretations related to the striking women themselves. It focuses on four key disputes and analyses contemporary reports and the accounts of those involved. It argues women strikers' particular experiences of trade unionism, class politics and feminism resulted in gendered, but still fundamentally class-based, identities, and concludes by considering the position of women workers' industrial actions in feminist histories.     

Beginning an ‘Extraordinary Opportunity’: Eleanor Roosevelt,Molly Dewson,and the expansion of women's boundaries in the Democratic Party, 1924–1934

This article contributes to recent reinterpretations of women's participation in the United States' political system in the 1920s and 1930s by arguing that the years 1924 through 1934 demonstrated an expansion of female boundaries in the Democratic Party. Eleanor Roosevelt became the first agent in this process through her involvement in both the New York State Democratic Party and in social justice feminism. Her protégée, Molly Dewson, continued the expansion as the first full-time director of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, also helping to re-establish social justice feminism's national prominence.     

‘Ringleaders and Troublemakers’: Malawian (Nyasa) migrants and transnational labor movements in Southern Africa,c.1910–1960

The article examines the transnational role of Malawian (Nyasa) migrant laborers in the emergence and development of African labor and proto-nationalist movements in Southern Africa. Using both archival and secondary evidence mainly from Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, it argues that the history of Southern Africa’s labor consciousness from the early to mid-twentieth century can be enriched by exploring the place of Nyasa migrants in shaping anti-colonial processes across the region. Nyasa migrants, a product of the colonial labor migration system (chibaro/mthandizi), laid the foundations for, and influenced trade unionism in the region, especially between 1910 and 1960. The colonial wage economy created ambiguities of dependence for Africans forcing many into a migrant and capitalist world laden with dilemmas, tightropes, and frustrations that fueled social movements. Malawian migrants who were at the core of such movements within a regional colonial economic system, gained a reputation for being ‘ringleaders and troublemakers’ to the colonial governments. Existing literature has not fully historicized the centrality of Nyasas in molding this critical episode of Southern African history. The historiography has dealt with these dynamics in an ad hoc manner, approaching this Nyasa ‘annoyance’ on a national basis, without drawing on the underlying regional connections.     

‘Equal Laws Based upon an Equal Standard’: the Garrett Sisters,the Contagious Diseases Acts,and the sexual politics of Victorian and Edwardian feminism revisited

Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917), co-founder of the London School of Medicine for Women, and Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), leader of the constitutional suffrage movement, were centrally involved in the Victorian and Edwardian campaign for women's equality. Both women attempted to maintain a separation between the suffrage movement and the sexualized realm of the female body, which was subject to state intrusion during the debates over the Contagious Diseases Acts and again during the force-feeding of imprisoned suffragettes some forty years later. But the Garretts had to negotiate the intersection of gender, class, and sexual politics in order to advance the cause of feminist social reform.     

‘Bodies Across Borders. Oral And Visual Memory in Europe and Beyond’ (BABE): a conversation with Luisa Passerini,Donna Gabaccia,and Franca Iacovetta

In this final contribution to this theme issue on Luisa Passerini's important scholarship, the guest editors and Passerini discuss her current EU Research Council-funded collaborative project, BABE, which is meant to bring together oral and visual forms of memory that reformulate the concept of Europe (and Fortress Europe) in more inclusive ways. Its distinctive features are discussed, including the collection and analysis of drawings and other visual itineraries by artists and other subjects, including students, from the global diaspora in Europe. Other topics include the importance of conversation in oral history work, the ‘mobility turn,’ and the gendered nature of mentorship.     

‘Queen of the Bristol Channel Ports’: the intersection of gender and civic identity in Cardiff,c.1880–1914

This article explores how civic identity could shape, and be shaped by, gender distinctions during the period of commercial and municipal development. It argues that women's relationship to the urban scene was more nuanced than theories of exclusion imply, gender and civic identity being mutually constitutive. Through the case study of Cardiff, the article advocates the need for deeper analysis of the way regional and national complexities permeated gendered civic sentiments. Notions of femininity in Wales had been defined in opposition to England ever since the 1847 ‘Treachery of the Blue Books’. However, Cardiff's relatively anglicised status and aspirations in the local and global urban hierarchy meant there was often a desire by civic leaders to emulate what was occurring elsewhere, or to develop their own definition of Welsh femininity. Consequently, these competing gender ideals underlined Cardiff's civic and national—Welsh and British—identity.     

‘Do not forget your bit wife’: love,marriage and the negotiation of patriarchy in Irish Presbyterian marriages,c. 1780–1850

Drawing on the marital correspondence of Isabella Marshall and William John Campbell Allen, an Ulster Presbyterian couple, alongside a number of other Presbyterian families, this article explores how patriarchy was negotiated within Irish Presbyterian marriages, c. 1780–1850. It begins by framing the Campbell Allens as a case-study, and examines how the couple negotiated three elements of the patriarchal marriage ideal: love, obedience and the control of economic resources. Next, it uses the family papers and personal correspondence of two other Presbyterian couples, and considers how typical their examples are of love, marriage and patriarchy. This article argues that patriarchy was not a fixed principle in marriage. Rather, it was subject to a constant process of negotiation and refinement during the course of marriage. The roles played by women and men in marriage were also fluid and elastic.     

‘The streets have been watched regularly’: the York Penitentiary Society,young working-class women,and the regulation of behaviour in the public spaces of York,c. 1845–1919

The York Penitentiary Society, a charitable female reformatory in York, aimed to transform ‘fallen’ women in the city into useful citizens through institutionalisation, domestic training, and moral and religious instruction. The Penitentiary focused on isolating its ‘inmates’ from wider society, but its moral reach extended far beyond the high walls of the Refuge, and the young women confined within. This article examines the York Penitentiary Society, and considers how it acted to police the streets and public spaces of York, and the behaviour of young women who populated them. In addition to adding detail to our understanding of the operation of female reform institutions, this study also adds to our knowledge on the unofficial policing of women’s behaviour in public space, and has significant implications for histories of urban life.     

‘Wrongful’ Inheritance: Race,Disability and Sexuality in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank</Emphasis>

In 2014 Jennifer Cramblett, a white lesbian, filed a Complaint for Wrongful Birth alleging that the Midwest Sperm Bank mistakenly provided sperm from an African–American donor. In this article, we trace the complex and overlapping lines of legal and social inheritance that have conditioned not only the possibility of such a lawsuit, but also the legal language and arguments within the Complaint itself. First, we trace the racial politics of homonormativity, which set the conditions of possibility for an out, white lesbian to bring this case forward. Second, we trace the inheritance of wrongful birth tort law, reviewing its prior race and disability-related uses, and its basis in feminist reproductive rights. Third, we trace how disability, race and sexuality interlock within the eugenic inheritance of both ‘wrongful birth’ and reproductive technologies. Finally, we follow traces of racial inheritance, namely, the loss of white property and proximity to whiteness.     

All the labor problems fit to print: the New York Times and the cultural production of the U.S ‘labor problem’, 1870–1932

The period that spanned the Gilded Age to the onset of the Great Depression saw the rise and relative decline of the US labor movement. The salient events of labor movements over these years undoubtedly shaped public perception about labor issues, and some scholars have been attempting to unpack the mechanisms through which depictions and characterizations of the ‘labor problem’ were produced in authoritative venues that could have shaped the future of the movement. This study goes beyond the standard practice of explaining news report volume to feature the political valance of the reports on the labor problem over a 63-year time period. The aforementioned period also saw significant changes in news reporting practices, with the rise of objective informational writing and the embrace of journalism as a profession. The change within journalism itself could potentially shape the depiction of the labor problem, yet such change has been overlooked by existing literature pertaining to the topic. This research makes a theoretical case for integrating social processes central to the labor movement and journalism from 1870 to 1932 and explains patterns in the cultural production of the labor problem in the New York Times by analyzing these two tracks of history in conjunction using both qualitative and quantitative data.     

‘King Solomon's mines cannot compare with the money that has been raked in by greyhound racing’: greyhound racing,its critics and the working class,c. 1926–1951

Greyhound racing emerged in Britain in 1926 and, during its first quarter of a century, was subject to institutional middle-class opposition because of the legal gambling opportunities it offered to the working class. Much maligned as a dissipate and impoverishing activity, it was, in fact, a significant leisure opportunity for the working class, which cost little for the minority of bettors involved in what was clearly no more than a ‘bit of a flutter’.