Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 1999"

Anxiety and social explanation: some anxieties about anxiety.

Abstract: Anxiety is invoked as an explanatory device in a wide variety of historical and sociological writing. The general form of such accounts is that the occurrence and timing of some social phenomena is explained by reference to the presence of some elevated state of anxiety which elicits social or political responses by an identifiable group of social agents. I will refer to this form of explanation as 'anxiety theory.' Anxiety analysis takes the general form of seeking to identify an underlying social anxiety or a combination of anxieties which can explain why some specific social response or social action occurred when and where it did. I place 'anxiety theory' in quotes to draw attention to the fact that those who employ this variety of explanatory strategy do not themselves use this label. There is no school of anxiety theorists. Yet it is my contention that it is a widely employed explanatory strategy, but that even its most polished and sophisticated exponents have not felt the need to explore its unspoken assumptions or to justify their reliance on it.

"An Argument that Goes Back to the Womb": The Demedicalization of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, 1973-1992

Abstract: This article provides a cultural history of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) from its naming in 1973 until the 1990s, when it began to be cited in appeals from death-row inmates. It argues that FAS was demedicalized as physicians gradually lost the cultural authority to frame its public meaning. Under the leadership of government officials and legal professionals, and in response to growing public mistrust of the medicalization of deviance, FAS came to be understood not as a cluster of precisely delineated symptoms, but as a social deformity that expressed the moral failings of mothers and marked their children as politically marginal and potentially dangerous. Critical to this reframing of FAS was its identification with a racial minority--Native Americans--its interpretation as an expression of maternal/fetal conflict, and its economic and social costs. In charting the demedicalization of FAS popular portrayals of the syndrome as well as professional literatures are examined.

The Agreeable Recreation of Fighting

Abstract: Using nineteenth century Ireland as a case study this article argues that historians have overlooked the significance of the recreational element in studying violence. While not discounting economic, social and psychological factors the Irish evidence indicates that at times violence served as a sport and that assaults and even homicides were sometimes motivated by nothing stronger than the enjoyment of what those involved viewed as a pleasant pastime. The article looks specifically at faction s fights as well as other brawls. It considers the roles of rules and rituals, gender, weapons, alcohol and celebration in encouraging and evaluating recreational violence. The reactions to deaths and serious injuries resulting from these encounters indic ate that physical harm was viewed as an accidental byproduct rather than a predictable outcome of the violence. The major concern was that recreational violence might reflect badly on the Irish in the eyes of the British. The article concludes by suggesti ng that an appreciation of recreational violence is a prominent part of many cultures and can still be found in contemporary society.

'Fighting the Corsetless Evil': Shaping Corsets and Culture, 1900-1930

Abstract: During the nineteenth century virtually all free-born women in the United States wore corsets. Yet from mid-century onward, the purpose and meaning of the corset generated heated debate. In the early twentieth century, these debates intensified as women began to reject Victorian restrictions upon their mobility. Corset defenders gained a powerful new ally in 1907, the well-organized Corset Manufacturers Association. Arguments supporting corset use changed as a result. By 1930, the shapely "womanly" figure returned to fashion. Corset debates, waged with words and bodies, reveal how the corset works as an instrument of cultural hegemony. U.S. manufacturers and retailers were forced to adapt, but also fought to control fashion changes.

“When Did the Sixties Happen?” Searching for New Directions

Abstract: The nature and breadth of protest movements in the 1960s continues to provoke debates. For years, scholars and participant-observers wrote largely top-down accounts of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), suggesting the organization generated much of the protest of the era. This essay argues that recent trends in the field, particularly the works of younger historians such as David Farber and Alice Echols, represent important attempts to move beyond SDS-dominated sixties histories and focus on neglected constituencies of the period. Using Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) as an example, the essay shows that the scope of the sixties (and early seventies) protest was broader than previously assumed, and makes a plea to merge movement history with social history.

Becoming Urban: Mendicancy and Vagrants in Modern Shanghai

Abstract: This essay starts with an analysis of mendicancy as a competitive urban profession in modern Shanghai, a city that had one of the nation's largest armies of street beggars and was in many aspects the best case to reveal mendicancy in urban China. This is followed by a glimpse of the rich variety of public views on mendicancy that, taken together, formed a culture on poverty. Most of the public views and images of beggars were skillfully exploited by the beggars themselves to develop begging tactics and techniques. This in turn affected the image of beggars in the public's eyes. Finally, by examining the relations between the state and vagrants, the author suggests that the absence of state intervention in the beggars' world brought forth begging rackets and politics. Beggars organized and governed themselves to achieve some degree of control over competition and to establish social order among themselves. In this respect, beggar society was not unlike other social groups in China, such as trade organizations, native place associations ( tongxiang hui ), professional societies, and the like, which existed to secure some degree of autonomy in their own domains in order to help with their members' success--or in some cases, sheer survival--in an increasingly competitive urban world.

Mansions, Men, Women, and the Creation of Multiple Publics in Eighteenth-Century British North America

Abstract: The evolution of the many-roomed mansion in colonial British America permitted the creation of multiple public spaces within the house itself. Using the theoretical insights of Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Karen Hansen on the nature of the kinds of publics possible in the eighteenth century, this article demonstrates how real as opposed to theoretical publics arose. As outside space and mansions formed a continuum from "public public space" to "private public space," mansions permitted elite men to control "private public space." For elite men mansions provided a social geography wherein the range of alternative publics broadened. However, that process marginalized women by trivializing the ways that heterosocial social space was used and relegating female homosocial space to the mansion's political, economic, intellectual, and psychological periphery. The eighteenth-century mansion provided gendered spaces which facilitated the integration of elite men into local, provincial, and international publics but which simultaneously contributed to a wider segregation of men and women and the exclusion of women from the political, economic, and intellectual world beyond the house. In the nineteenth century these patterns would become legitimized for the middle classes through the ideology of domesticity and the notion of "separate spheres."

Working on White Womanhood: White Working Women in the San Francisco Anti-Chinese Movement, 1877-1890

Abstract: Through a gendered analysis of the San Francisco anti-Chinese movement, this paper raises new questions about the historical and social construction of class identity. The analysis suggests that the historical process of political identity formation functions both as a process of exclusion and as a process of moving strategically among social categories in an effort to build political coalitions. The paper turns first to the ways that the white male labor movement conceptualized working women as victims of both sexual perversion and economic competition as a result of the presence of Chinese male immigrant laborers. Second, it looks at the divergent constructions of white working women by male and female employers, and argues for the salience of class, race and gender to employers' assessments of the value of white working women. Finally, the article explores how white working women navigated complex political coalitions by organizing on their own behalf to challenge their depiction in the rhetorics of the male labor movement and of middle-class women. The paper concludes by arguing that racially coded class and gender identities emerged as powerful sites of political coalition as a result of the presence of the Chinese male "other."

Rescuing the ‘Waifs and Strays’ of the City: The Western Emigration Program of the Children's Aid Society

Abstract: Charles Loring Brace, founder and first director of the Children's Aid Society, pinned his hopes for social progress on a radical experiment--the removal of thousands of poor New York City children from the "contaminating influence" of their families to "good Christian homes" in the West. This article examines CAS's western emigration program over four decades, from 1853 to 1890. Using case records, it looks at children's lives before and after foster placement. Analysis of the records reveals that few children fit the profile of neglected and abused "waifs" that Brace liked to publicize. Adolescent males, in quest of work, formed the overwhelming majority of emigrants. Parents brought others to CAS for foster placement during a family crisis and retrieved them when the crisis passed. While Brace hoped to sever ties between children and their families, children's bonds to their natural families remained strong. This study concludes that while Brace set the policies for CAS, clients helped shape the actual practices of the organization.

“Mercenary Hirelings” or “A Great Blessing”?: Doctors' and Mothers' Conflicted Perceptions of Wet Nurses and the Ramifications for Infant Feeding in Chicago, 1871–1961

Abstract: Well into the twentieth century, physicians hired wet nurses to breastfeed babies in hospitals. Well-to-do families also employed them--almost always through the family doctor--as live-in servants. Physicians went to unusual lengths to find wet nurses because they deemed human milk vital to infants' health. Yet some of these doctors were also uneasy with wet nurses, arguing that they were low-class and unreliable and might produce milk harmful to their tiny charges. Other physicians contended their milk was invaluable but the price families paid for it \"in submission to wet nurses' whims, accessions to their demands, and forbearance with their bad habits\" was too high. The mothers able to afford wet nurses for their babies were even harsher, charging that the milk--necessary for their babies' health--of the vulgar and immoral wet nurse was \"impure,\" and only rarely worth the havoc created by their presence in the household. The attitudes of these mothers and doctors--that human milk was a volatile substance easily changed by the impropriety of its producer and that the women who breastfed for a living were immoral, uncouth, and impossibly troublesome--helped orchestrate the move of middle- and upper-class mothers from breast to bottle.

"Damn You, You Informing Bitch." Vox Populi and the Unmaking of the Gin Act of 1736

Abstract: This study examines the interaction between legislation and popular culture, with a particular emphasis on the extent to which popular resistance undermined enforcement of the Gin Act of 1736. It is argued that popular resistance, while significant, had no effect on policy until members of the middle classes intervened in an attempt to restore the social relations that had existed before the Act took effect. It was only at this point that the Act became a dead letter. In this role members of the middle classes functioned as mediators between two cultures, one plebeian, the other patrician. As such, our findings suggest that the dialectic of plebeian culture and patrician culture, as variously articulated by E.P. Thompson, may be excessively stark, especially when applied to a setting as dense and heterogenous as early Hanoverian London. Our findings also suggest that working men and women in the capital worked and socialized side by side, sometimes as drinking companions, and sometimes as professional informers.

Politics and the Technology of Honor: Dueling in Turn-of-the-Century Mexico

Abstract: Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, dueling beame increasingly frequent among Mexican elite men. The duel was associated with modern science and the cosmopolitan culture of the national ruling class. Authorities refused to prosecute duelists. The translation and production of texts on dueling, as well as the influence of some experienced duelists, conveyed to public men the importance of a technology of honor. This technology, which involved the use of pistols and the knowledge of codes of dueling, sought to establish a space in which all members of the political elite, regardless of their ideological affiliation, could claim the same kind of honor. After the 1910 Revolution, as violence became widely associated with politics, duels became less frequent, but the concern among public men about honor and virility expressed by violence remained visible in political life, as witnessed by several episodes in Congress. The technology of honor was a central piece in the construction of a modern public sphere in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexico. It granted equality to educated men, while excluding women and the poor from having a voice in politics. These lacked honor because they could not legitimately use violence to defend it.

The African American Experience in Professional Football

Abstract: Since the end of World War II, African Americans have made some significant gains in professional football, particularly in the labor force. Previous scholars have suggested that the increased agitation for black political power, international circumstances, the changing attitude of whites towards blacks, and the quest for additional profits by sports entrepreneurs facilitated the process of desegregation of professional team sports. Furthermore as historian Jules Tygiel points out, the team sports industry, particularly Organized Baseball in the 1950s and 1960s, destroyed many racial barriers without the use of mass protest and federal intervention. While these forces were significant in the integration of team sports, in conjunction with the elimination of racial barriers in American society, they are generally more stated than substantiated. This paper analyzes the existing research on professional football and suggests avenues for future research.

Syphilis, foundlings, and wetnurses in nineteenth-century Italy.

Abstract: I, the undersigned mayor of the Town of Camugnano, certify that the married couple Gaetano Cesarini and Domenica Puccetti find themselves in such penurious condition that they do not know how they are going to live. I further certify that the only cause that has reduced them to this condition is having contracted the venereal disease years ago as a result of the nursing, on the part ofthe above-mentioned Domenica Puccetti, of a foundling from the Foundling Home of Bologna. The couple used to work plots of land owned by others, but because of the long illness they contracted they have had to abandon this work in the fields and live on public charity.1

Black Housing, White Finance: African American Housing and Home Ownership in Evanston, Illinois, Before 1940

Abstract: A case study of African American housing and home ownership in Evanston, Illinois, a railroad suburb of Chicago, illustrates that there was a greater variety in suburban housing markets before WWII than historians have recognized. Housing discrimination was a fact of life in early, affluent suburbs, such as Evanston, by the mid-1910s, yet housing markets in these suburbs often accommodated black population growth and comparatively high rates of black home ownership, albeit within the limits of segregation. In Evanston, members of the local real estate establishment played key roles in the process--building, selling, and even financing housing for African Americans. Black suburbanites, for their part, made exceptional efforts to become home owners, in some cases even building their own homes (owner-building). In Evanston and other suburbs where patterns of local race relations were built on a foundation of domestic service, white paternalism combined with the aspirations of black southerners to shape housing markets that supported black home ownership and accommodated black community building in otherwise affluent and white suburbs.