What conditions must be present to declare that capitalism has finally come to dominate one’s society? American historians have varying views on this, as the meaning of capitalism is varied. Further complicating matters, the new paradigm in scholarship is to worry less about precise definitions of capitalism, as Seth Rockman points out in “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?” — an acceptance of the “varieties of capitalism” would seem to make a determination of hegemonic conditions more challenging. Our question has become harder to answer as research has progressed, not easier. Still, historians’ answers and interpretations are interesting. As Paul Gilje writes in “The Rise of Capitalism in the Early Republic,” some of course simply point to capitalist ownership of the means of production — businesses, the factories, the tools and equipment, the resources, and so on — but others disavow domination until capitalists also control the political system. The level of industrialization is another suggestion, but historians such as Jonathan Prude and William Stott urge a step away from centering mechanization and new technology, instead focusing on the division of labor, which brings artisans of the early American republic, a key period of transition, deeper into the story of capitalism’s rise. In other words, for our purposes, hegemonic capitalism would not be reached until the division of labor (the creation of goods being broken down into small steps that low-skilled wage workers could accomplish, replacing the full-task, high-skilled creator, increasing production) had come to define society, regardless of the state of industrialization and even, perhaps, who owned the means of production and the State. 

Further, wage labor, Rockman notes, has long been considered the “sine qua non of capitalism,” its essential element. Before capitalism came to dominate, for instance in eighteenth-century America, most people were involved in their own familial agricultural production — most workers, including artisans and merchants, did not work for someone else, receiving a wage from an employer. The shift to wage labor was a massive change. However, Rockman writes, New Capitalist Studies have drifted away from wage work as the essential characteristic of the capitalist system. Millions of American slaves certainly worked for someone else, and while they received no wages this was a form of exploitation that could not be ignored in the story of economic development. In other words, some historians, those who see slavery as integral to capitalism rather than oppositional or anomalous (see Gilje), may look beyond widespread wage labor for the key characteristic of hegemonic capitalism. They may look instead, for example, to the ubiquity of a new ideology. Michael Zakim and Gary Kornblith’s Capitalism Takes Command phrased it as “capital’s transformation into an ism.” The wider culture adopted principles beneficial to business, though this took some time. As John Larson writes in “The Genie and the Troll: Capitalism in the Early American Republic,” despite some historians positing that capitalism arrived in America with the first European ships, others have demonstrated that the yeoman farmers of the early republic still held cultural values detached from the capitalistic ethos, disinterested in profit. But eventually values like individualism and competition did replace community reciprocity, respected hierarchy, and other norms (see Gilje and Larson). Could one claim that capitalism had reached predominance without the new self-interested belief system doing so as well?

Let’s consider how a few other historians addressed this question of what constitutes capitalism and how American society transitioned to it in the early republic period. In “The Enemy is Us: Democratic Capitalism in the Early Republic,” Gordon Wood addresses the debate between “moral economy” and “market economy” historians of the early American republic. The former posit that period farmers lacked a capitalistic, profit-driven mindset, focusing only on family and community needs. The latter argue that farmers engaged in market exchange to a high enough degree to evidence that capitalism’s grip on society occurred before moral economy historians would like to admit. Wood argues that moral economy proponents have strained reason in their attempts to portray farmers without any capitalistic ethos. Farmers are portrayed as merely providing for their families no matter how intensely they engage in the market. They cannot be capitalistic because, for the caricature-crafting moral economist historians, by definition capitalists have greedy, evil intentions. Wood critiques such thinkers for a lack of nuance and for attempting to fit the early republic into a Marxian framework that strictly requires a checklist of elements for the existence of capitalism; for instance, if there was no class exploitation of American farmers, there was no capitalism, despite the existing free market and other characteristics. Among the evidence Wood uses are the writings of a period laborer to show the true nature of economic activities and social relations. The cartoonish capitalists, Wood writes, did not bring about capitalism, but rather ordinary people with moral and market sensibilities; indeed, the essay breaks down some barriers between the sides of the historical debate.

Jean-Christophe Agnew helms the afterword of Capitalism Takes Command, delivering a short essay entitled “Anonymous History.” The piece concerns the financial instruments of capitalism and their effect on ordinary Americans, such as farmers, in the early republic period. Agnew argues that the “paperwork” of capitalism, the new financial, commercial, and legal devices — the mortgages, debts, securities, bonds, investments, lines of credit, and so forth — powered the shift from a society of family-centered production to industrial capitalism. Farmers became caught up in these instruments, pulling them from their private worlds and communities and into a truly national economic system. Agnew draws on the essays featured in Capitalism Takes Command for evidence, touching on several of their themes and theses, pulling them together. He cites, for instance, nineteenth-century farmers who felt their world had been turned upside down as they were sucked into the developing commercial system, worrying they would “die of mortgage” and complaining the mortgage “watched us every minute, and it ruled us right and left,” to quote a poem. The historian’s title, “Anonymous History,” refers to a focus on the economic practices, such as use of these financial instruments, that impacted ordinary people, rather than a focus on big names like Rockefeller and Carnegie, who do not appear in the book.

Wood argues that farmers had more of an entrepreneurial spirit and sought profit in the market, touching on the ideology and free market elements necessary for capitalism’s ascendance and moving the timeline up a bit, to the chagrin of moral economist historians. Agnew also finds earlier, more advanced capitalist development among farmers, though it is more against their will and to their detriment; he focuses on the financialization characteristics of the new economic system. These historians are not alone in their conclusions. Robert E. Wright, in “Capitalism and the Rise of the Corporate Nation,” also centers financial instruments in the story of capitalism’s ascendance. Investment, credit, and loans allowed corporations to hugely expand production and profits; corporations then came to dominate the U.S. economy. Agnew and Wright would concur that modern capitalism entails widespread financialization, which became a true force in the early republic period. Jeanne Boydston, who penned “The Woman Who Wasn’t There: Women’s Labor Market and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States,” might better relate to Gordon Wood. Wood wrote about ordinary Americans engaging in market exchange and rejected the false dichotomy of capitalist mindset vs. family-focused provider. Boydston looks at women’s economic roles in the antebellum era. Women’s work helped farms maintain their self-sufficiency and at the same time fed the market and grew the economy — for instance, women undertook outwork for textile mills, receiving compensation. What served the family served capitalism, and vice versa.

While these are not the only elements of hegemonic capitalism, they are major ones that offer a glimpse at a lively historiographical discussion. Given the nuance of the debate and the myriad definitions (or definitional apathy) inherent, it seems sensible to posit that a healthy (or unhealthy) mix of societal realities — a preeminent ideology, capitalist ownership of the means of production and governmental functions, wage labor, industrialization, financialization, a free market, the division of production tasks, and more (such as consumption levels or competition; see Larson) — are necessary to stamp capitalism as hegemonic, a thesis that should please both everyone and no one.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

With Daring to Be Bad, Alice Echols is the first historian to chart the rapid rise and fall of radical feminism in twentieth-century America.^[1] Radical feminism, birthed in 1967, was eclipsed by cultural feminism by 1975.^[2] Writing in 1989, Echols sought to demystify radical feminism for readers.^[3] This required a significant exploration of the tendency that succeeded it: “A study of this sort seems to me especially important because radical feminism is so poorly understood and so frequently conflated with cultural feminism. This conceptual confusion arises in part because radical feminism was not monolithic and aspects of radical feminism did indeed anticipate cultural feminism.”^[4] The latter evolved from the former, plus “cultural feminists almost always identified themselves as radical feminists and insisted that they were deepening rather than jettisoning” radicalism, creating fertile ground for disorientation.^[5] Echols’ work is an intriguing history of these theories. Let us review the major distinctions between them.

Radical and cultural feminists have important points of intellectual departure. Radical feminism sought revolutionary changes in power structures, along Marxist lines, to bring about gender equality; cultural feminism was a turn inward, attention drifting away from the State and toward women’s culture, with the establishment of women’s businesses and other supports (stores, health clinics, credit unions, festivals) that to critics represented “an evasion of patriarchy rather than a full-throated struggle against it.”^[6] The former was an anticapitalist movement for political transformation, the latter a self-sufficiency, self-improvement counterculture that rejected class struggle.^[7] The radicals stressed the personal was political — a new system was needed to rectify oppression in the home, the bedroom, and so on.^[8] Culture-minded reformers viewed matters from the other direction: the personal was the “foremost site of change,” from which a new world could be built.^[9] Each movement had some form of opposition to male political supremacy and the construction of a new women’s culture, but each poured most of their energies into one arena. Echols offers a helpful parallel by pointing to the civil rights movement, which saw black nationalist offshoots that were “more involved in promoting black culture than in confronting the racist policies of the state.”^[10] Of course, there were many other ideological differences among feminists. For instance, would women’s liberation be best served by minimizing male-female differences (the tack of the radicals) or placing more value on a unique female nature dismissed by the patriarchal society (the tack of the culturalists)?^[11] Should you eradicate gender or celebrate it?^[12]

Both tendencies left important legacies. The women in the earlier movement for social transformation demonstrated the power ordinary women have to enact political change. “They fought for safe, effective, accessible contraception; the repeal of all abortion laws; the creation of high-quality, community-controlled child-care centers; and an end to the media’s objectification of women.”^[13] Unjust rape and domestic violence policies were challenged, as was exclusion from workplaces and universities.^[14] Radical feminists engaged in direct action and civil disobedience, disrupting Miss America pageants and Senate hearings, hosting rallies, marches, and sit-ins.^[15] Their organizing pushed the United States in a new direction. The Fourteenth Amendment was applied to women in Reed v. Reed (1971), the Equal Rights Amendment sailed through Congress (1972), the right to an abortion was guaranteed (1973), and more. With the ascendance of cultural feminism, political successes, expectedly, trailed off.^[16] However, the later movement for personal transformation turned away from the talk of capitalism’s overthrow and other tenants of radicalism, broadening the tent. After the 1970s, far more women of color joined the movement, for instance.^[17] In the same way, during the heyday of the radical feminists, “liberal feminism was…in some cases morediverse” than the radical feminist movement.^[18] Though cultural feminism cannot be applauded for shifting focus away from political struggle, and much merit can be found in radical feminist beliefs, it is difficult to deny that more women might be attracted to a more tempered movement further divorced from the Marxist niche. This went beyond anticapitalism, as well, to other aspects of radical thinking. One of the defining texts of cultural feminism was Jane Alpert’s 1973 “Mother Right” piece, which “reaffirmed rather than challenged dominant cultural assumptions about women” by refusing to erase male-female differences, instead celebrating the “biological difference between the sexes… The unique consciousness or sensibility of women…”^[19] Cultural feminism was better adapted to mainstream American ideologies, and could therefore attract a wider, more diverse following.

Overall, Daring to Be Bad offers history students and lay readers many ideas and phenomena to consider. It spotlights the bitter infighting leftwing movements typically experience. It prompts one to ask whether members of an oppressed group should focus on their commonalities or fully embrace their differences (an intersectional, but potentially paralyzing or divisive, approach). And will, as Alpert wrote, “economic and political changes…follow rather than precede sweeping changes in human consciousness”?^[20] Or is it best to change social structures first, as the radicals insisted, freeing human thought, letting ideology catch up? Echols has produced both a fine history of a Leftist movement and a potential guide for future struggles.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

---

^[1] Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), xvi.

^[2] Ibid., 5.

^[3] Ibid., xvi.

^[4] Ibid., 6.

^[5] Ibid., 7.

^[6] Ibid., viii-ix, xviii-xix.

^[7] Ibid., 6-7.

^[8] Ibid., ix, 3.

^[9] Ibid., xix-xx.

^[10] Ibid., 7.

^[11] Ibid., xviii.

^[12] Ibid., 6, 9.

^[13] Ibid., 4.

^[14] Ibid., vii-viii.

^[15] Ibid., ix-x.

^[16] Ibid., 293.

^[17] Ibid., 291.

^[18] Ibid., xxii.

^[19] Ibid., 250, 252.

^[20] Ibid., 251.

Troy R. Saxby, casual academic at the University of Newcastle, offers an intimate, engaging look at an increasingly recognized twentieth-century human rights advocate in Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life. Pauli Murray’s personal life was as turbulent and winding as her political life was significant to American justice movements. She experienced great personal loss, poverty, discrimination, health problems, and struggles with sexuality and gender identity from the 1910s to the mid-1980s.^[1] Saxby’s biography seeks to “connect Murray’s inner life with her incredibly active public life,” which included civil rights activism (first pushing for the integration of the University of North Carolina), helping found the National Organization for Women to work for gender equality, becoming an influential lawyer, professor, and author, and later being the first black woman to serve as an Episcopal priest.^[2] Her writings and legal arguments influenced Brown v. Board of Education (and other NAACP battles) and Reed v. Reed (the 1971 case that first applied the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to sex), broadening rights for blacks, women, and, after her death, LGBTQ Americans.^[3] Considering Murray’s private struggles, Saxby argues, “is essential to understanding Murray,” with her early experiences, her most intimate feelings and thoughts, “shaping her…aspirations.”^[4] This of course is a mere truism. All people are molded by prior experience, circumstances, and so on. Still, the impact Murray’s private life had on her public service is a fascinating history, and was lacking in the historiography.^[5] Let us consider what motivated Pauli Murray.

One intriguing aspect of Murray’s life was her early refusal to cooperate with unjust systems. As a child in 1910s America, racial oppression led Murray to “hate George Washington, mumble allegiance to the flag, resist standing for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” and more.^[6] She “boycotted segregated facilities — instead of taking public transport, she rode her bike.”^[7] Not only does this foreshadow Murray’s important work for civil rights, it suggests that her central motivations were already operating, or at least in development, at seven years old, typically an age of conformity. Thus, an exploration of what drove Murray should start there.

From Saxby’s text, it could be argued that early feelings of alienation played a role — this is more of a subconscious motivation, but important nonetheless. Segregation and sexism of course “othered” the young Murray, but there is much else. She was separated from her father and many siblings at age three, after her mother’s death; she fought feelings of abandonment; caretakers like Aunt Pauline and her grandfather were not affectionate; Murray’s darker complexion stood out in her new family, and she felt like an outsider; her complexion was lighter than most of her classmates, however, drawing mockery; the family’s middle-class values kept her at a distance from neighborhood kids; “Pauli also felt different from her classmates because she did not have visible parents”; she was even left-handed, unlike most students and adults.^[8] At every turn, Saxby writes, “Pauli Murray stands apart, somehow ‘other.’”^[9] A complex, constant sense of difference helped mold Murray into a child who could rebel against nationalism and segregation, among other things: “Pauli’s rebellious streak, a hallmark of her adult life, emerged at school — such was her ability to turn a classroom to chaos that one of her primary school teachers would take Pauli with her whenever she was called away from the classroom.”^[10] The field of psychology has shown that children lacking a sense of belonging often act out (and struggle with poor mental health).^[11] Whereas other children without her experiences might go along with hands over hearts and direction toward the back of a public bus, Murray’s history of alienation led to resistance.

There were of course positive influences as well, more conscious motivations, such as her grandparents’ emphasis on black pride and uplift, and Aunt Pauline’s assurances that Murray was destined for greatness.^[12] The Fitzgeralds in fact had long “avoided any contact with white people if it meant losing dignity…”^[13] America and its segregation had previously been questioned and experienced. There are many factors that push us to do what we do. But Murray’s view that “in some ways, I was alien” dominates the text, especially as she becomes an adult and her feelings toward women and her interest in passing as a man develop.^[14] She was, at the same time, rejected from one college for being a woman and from another for being black.^[15] Murray remained The Other in myriad ways. This fact contributed to her mental health challenges.^[16] That it also pushed her toward activism seems a sensible supposition: Otherness impacted her behavior as a child (so it might do the same in adulthood), and it could only be rectified through policy change. Murray’s sense of difference that contributed to behavioral nonconformity against unjust systems as a child persisted, rose to a more conscious place, and manifested anew in work in the black struggle and the feminist movement — as an adult, Murray could work to create a society with greater inclusion for herself and others. She never felt like she belonged, so she built a world with more belonging.

Overall, Pauli Murray conjures many musings on the nature of history and biography, which undergraduate and graduate students may find interesting. For instance, environment and prior experiences motivating an individual is a given, as stated, but it is also open to interpretation. What factors were at play, and how influential each was, can be argued at length, based on historical sources. Other historians may see the Fitzgeralds’ rebellion against segregation as a much more significant factor on Murray’s activist path than her sense of being an outsider. One may instead emphasize the constant tragedies of her life and consider potential connections to social oppression, such as her father being killed by a white man in an insane asylum when she was ten.^[17] As we have seen, conscious and subconscious drivers can be theorized and posited, their strengths speculatively compared. The forces that molded historical actors are as powerful as they are elusive.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

---

^[1] Troy R. Saxby, Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), xiv-xv.

^[2] Ibid., xiii, xvii, 68-76.

^[3] Ibid, 145-146, 212-213, 249-251.

^[4] Ibid., xiv, xvi.

^[5] Ibid., xv-xvi.

^[6] Ibid., 23.

^[7] Ibid., 24.

^[8] Ibid., 6-7, 9-12, 15-16, 20, 23,    

^[9] Ibid., xvii.

^[10] Ibid., 23.

^[11] Kelly-Ann Allen, DeLeon L. Gray, Roy F. Baumeister, and Mark R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: A Deep Dive into the Origins, Implications, and Future of a Foundational Construct,” Educational Psychology Review 34 (August 2021): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-021-09633-6.

^[12] Saxby, Pauli Murray, 21-22, 38.

^[13] Ibid., 24.

^[14] Ibid., 24, chapter 2, for instance 45-48.

^[15] Ibid., 39, 70.

^[16] Ibid., 65-68.

^[17] Ibid., 35.

The dominant social construction of womanhood from 1945 to 1960, which became the dominant historical image of women later on, was one of the suburban housewife and mother — white, middle-class, straight, and patriotic, she was content to cook, care for the home, and raise children.^[1] But as Not June Cleaver, edited by historian Joanne Meyerowitz, demonstrates, the postwar era was far more complicated. Women were politicians, workers, union organizers, and strikers; they were Communists, peace activists, and secret abortionists; women were city-dwelling Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, black Americans; they were lesbians with cultural creations, Beatniks who ran away from home, the poor just trying to survive, and tireless organizers pushing for civil rights and gender equality, whose efforts would expand in the 1960s.^[2] Though an anthology with the works of many historians, Meyerowitz’s text argues that women had more agency and more diverse experiences and ideologies than the historiography acknowledged; it “aims…to subvert the persistent stereotype of domestic, quiescent, suburban womanhood.”^[3] She further demonstrates that the postwar literature and “public discourse on women was more complex than portrayed” in works such as Betty Friedan’s famous The Feminine Mystique, which positioned women as well-trapped in the home, thanks to inculcating cultural messaging.^[4] Yet, as we will see, magazines and other media could in fact push back against the gender ideal and show this other side of the age.^[5] Let’s look closely at three papers in the text, each revealing how women broke the mold.

Donna Penn’s “The Sexualized Woman: The Lesbian, the Prostitute, and the Containment of Female Sexuality in Postwar America” examines the lives of lesbian women of the era and the larger society’s changing reactions to their existence. For a time adorned by the stereotype of the heterosexual wife, there was considerable effort — in films, books, articles by social scientists, and so on — expended on vilifying lesbianism in a harsher manner compared to prior decades, for instance by beginning to link gay women to the pre-established categorization of prostitutes as fallen women, sexual deviants in a criminal underworld.^[6] “Many prostitutes,” one expert wrote, “are latent homosexuals insofar as they resort to sexual excesses with many men to convince themselves that they are heterosexual.”^[7] Lesbians were often prostitutes, prostitutes were often lesbians, it was asserted — and prostitutes, as everyone knew, were of the wicked underbelly of society.^[8] This was different from the dominant prewar image of lesbians as refined middle-class women with lifelong female partners, otherwise respectable.^[9] Though some lesbians took assumptions of sexual depravity to heart, struggling with sexual identity under restrictive social norms and pressures, others pushed back against demonization.^[10] Defiant appearances in public, building community at lesbian bars, writing lesbian pulp fiction and articles, and more signaled a right to exist and to live true to the self.^[11] More intimately, a culture of “sexual ceremony and dialogue” developed that gave lesbians a coded language to express interest beyond the repressive gaze of the larger society, and which also subtlety subverted gender norms when butch women, who mirrored the man in heterosexual relationships, made giving pleasure, rather than receiving it, their “foremost objective.”^[12]

In “The ‘Other’ Fifties: Beats and Bad Girls,” Wini Breines shows the extent to which women and girls sought to escape from their dull, prescriptive futures as homemakers. Rather than happy in their place, as the standard image of the postwar era suggests, some dreaded “a life where nothing ever happened. I looked around me and saw women ironing dresses and hanging out clothes and shopping for food and playing mah-jong on hot summer afternoons, and I knew I couldn’t bear to spend my life that way, day after drab day, with nothing ever happening. The world of women seemed to me like a huge, airless prison…”^[13] So, like boys and men, girls and women became or imitated Beats, the free-spirited artists, writers, and musicians of New York City who rebelled against mainstream society, its conservatism, materialism, religiosity, male careerism, and so forth.^[14] Women and teens enjoyed rock and roll, jazz, sex, intellectual discourse, racial integration and black culture, bad boys, drugs, artistic creativity, Buddhism, and other experiences that they described as “Real Life,” an existence “dramatic, unpredictable, possibly dangerous. Therefore real, infinitely more worth having.”^[15] Not only did these exciting countercultural lives undermine the happy housewife trope, they contradicted the hegemonic ideal of girlhood — properly behaved, virginal, neatly dressed and done up, hanging out “around the malt shop” — found in magazines, novels, films, and other cultural outlets.^[16] Rebellious females also contradicted the notion, pushed by social commentators, that problem children of this generation were exclusively boys, who, unlike girls, were expected to make something of themselves, but were failing to do so after falling into delinquency, hipsterism, doping, and the rest.^[17] Although the stories of female Beatniks would not be well-captured until memoirs printed in the 1970s, the 1950s saw films like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause, which displayed girls’ interest in troublemakers and bad boys.^[18]

Finally, there’s Deborah Gerson’s “Is Family Devotion Now Subversive? Familialism Against McCarthyism,” wherein the mainstream construction of American womanhood is shattered by women running their households without their husbands, organizing, and speaking up for Communism and free speech. When the Smith Act of 1940 eventually sent leaders of the Communist Party to prison or into hiding over their political and revolutionary beliefs, their wives formed the Families Committee of Smith Act Victims, which gave “financial, material, and emotional assistance” to each other, their children, and the prisoners.^[19] Fundraising allowed for childcare, trips to visit fathers behind bars, birthday presents, and more.^[20] But the Families Committee also existed to fight anticommunist policies and practices.^[21] It denounced the imprisonment of Reds and the FBI’s continued harassment and surveillance of the wives and children.^[22] In a sense, the Smith Act blew up the postwar ideal, creating single mothers who had to enter the workforce, become heads of households, and return to the world of organizing they had known as young Communist women.^[23] The Families Committee seized the opportunity to publicly turn American ideology on its head, through pamphlets, articles, and letters.^[24] To be a true American, a good mother, a healthy family in the 1950s was to be anticommunist — patriotic, loyal, conformist.^[25] But the U.S. government was, in its persecution of dissenters, attacking families and ignoring stated American values.^[26] “No home is safe, no family life secure, as long as our loved ones are persecuted and imprisoned for exercising their constitutional right to speak out for their political ideas,” the women wrote in one pamphlet.^[27] It was the Communists, in other words, who were fighting for secure, whole families, and the First Amendment. (Language that centered families, one should note, was a new tack for the Communist Party, which long focused on how power impacted workers; and the Committee itself represented a greater leadership role for women in the CP.^[28]) The all-female Families Committee continued its support network and its campaign of familial rhetoric until the late 1950s, when the Supreme Court ruled imprisonment over beliefs, even revolutionary ones as long as no specific plans for violence are made, to be unconstitutional, and Communist leaders were freed or returned from hiding.^[29]

Overall, while Not June Cleaver reveals women’s diverse identities, perspectives, and activities, Meyerowitz of course does not deny the conservatism of the era, nor the domestic ideal.^[30] But the work makes the case that dominant ways of living and meanings of womanhood (there were of course many white, middle-class, suburban housewives) were not as dominant as the historiography suggested. There were rebels and countercultures enough to toss out myths of homogeneity. There was sufficient diversity of postwar literature to question notions of textual ideological hegemony. We mentioned lesbian pulp fiction, blockbuster films with rebellious male and female teens, and articles by and about Communist women in newspapers. Meyerowitz, in her study of nearly 500 magazine articles from Reader’s Digest, Atlantic Monthly, Ebony, Ladies’ Home Journal, and more, found that “domestic ideals coexisted in ongoing tension with an ethos of individual achievement that celebrated nondomestic activity.”^[31] “All of the magazines sampled advocated both” housewifery, motherhood, and other stereotypical experiences and women’s advancement beyond them.^[32] Indeed, 99 articles “spotlighted women with unusual talents, jobs, or careers,” such as in politics or journalism.^[33] Another 87 articles “focused on prominent entertainers.”^[34] Compared to magazines of the 1930s and 40s, there was in fact less focus on the domestic sphere.^[35] But glorification persisted of the woman — sometimes the career woman — who was a “good cook” and “never a lazy housewife,” who was beautiful, married, motherly, soft-spoken.^[36] The postwar era, then, was less a regression for women who found new opportunities and independence during World War II (the ranks of working women actually grew after the troops came home^[37]), less a time of a universal gender ideology and a concretized women’s place, and more a clash of recent progress, new ideas, and different experiences against the larger, traditionalist society.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

---

^[1] Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 1-3.

^[2] Ibid., 3-11.

^[3] Ibid., 1-2, 4, 11.

^[4] Ibid., 2-3.

^[5] Ibid., 229-252.

^[6] Ibid., 358-372.

^[7] Ibid., 370.

^[8] Ibid, 370-371.

^[9] Ibid., 369.

^[10] Ibid., 372-378.

^[11] Ibid., 375-378.

^[12] Ibid., 374-376.

^[13] Ibid., 389.

^[14] Ibid., 382-402.

^[15] Ibid, 391-392.

^[16] Ibid., 385-386.

^[17] Ibid., 382-383.

^[18] Ibid., 396, 398.

^[19] Ibid., 151.

^[20] Ibid.

^[21] Ibid., 157, 160.

^[22] Ibid., 152, 157-158, 165.

^[23] Ibid., 162, 155-156.

^[24] Ibid., 164-168.

^[25] Ibid., 152.

^[26] Ibid., 152, 165.

^[27] Ibid., 165.

^[28] Ibid., 166, 170-171.

^[29] Ibid., 165.

^[30] Ibid., 4, 9.

^[31] Ibid., 231-232.

^[32] Ibid., 231.

^[33] Ibid., 232-233.

^[34] Ibid., 232.

^[35] Ibid., 249.

^[36] Ibid., 233.

^[37] Ibid., 4.

In Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, English scholars Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene seek to lift American suffragist Alice Paul into history’s pantheon of nonviolent theorists and leaders, alongside Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.^[1] One might posit, particularly after the first few pages of the introduction, that the authors intend to elevate Paul into her proper place as a major figure in the fight for women’s right to vote, alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Anna Howard Shaw, having been long ignored and unknown.^[2] The work does this, certainly, but is not the first to do so. Adams and Keene make clear that prior works of the 1980s and 1990s at least partially accomplished this, and clarify what makes their 2008 text different: “It is time for a thorough consideration of her campaign theory and practice.”^[3] They see a “blank space” in the history of Paul, the need for an examination of “her reliance on nonviolence” and “her use of visual rhetoric,” the foundations of her theory and practice, respectively.^[4] Of course, a “consideration” is not a thesis, and the reader is left to ascertain one without explicit aid. After the parenthetical citations, this is the first clue, for those who did not examine the cover biographies, that the authors are not of the field of history. Fortunately, it grows increasingly clear that Adams and Keene are arguing Paul was one of world history’s great nonviolent theorists and activists, not simply that she was one of America’s great suffragists, seconding prior works.

The introduction, after the comments on the text’s purpose, notes that Paul “established the first successful nonviolent campaign for social reform in the United States, experimenting with the same techniques that Gandhi employed in South Africa and India.”^[5] This is the first mark of her full significance. The book concludes with the reiteration that she “created the first successful nonviolent campaign for social change in the United States. Like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, she used every possibility of a nonviolent rhetoric to bring both a greater sense of self and civil rights to a disenfranchised group.”^[6] In between, especially in the second chapter, on Paul’s theory, “like Gandhi” is used repeatedly. For instance, it or something analogous is employed on pages 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, and 41. “Like Gandhi, [Paul] would not alter her course to placate unhappy adherents.”^[7] (The parallel thinking and work is outlined, but the authors do not actually cite evidence concerning what influence Gandhi, leading passive resistance in South Africa until 1914 and in India after that, had on Paul, or vice versa, despite teasing that the two may have met in 1909.^[8]) Not being Paul’s contemporary, King receives less attention. But by the end of the chapter and the book, the message is received: Paul’s name, her ideology and campaign, should be spoken in the same breath as other historical icons of nonviolent mass movements. There are few similar glowing comparisons to, say, Stanton or Anthony, further suggesting the authors’ primary intent.

The text is organized largely chronologically. The first chapter concerns Paul’s youth, education, and activism in England, while the second chapter, exploring Paul’s theory of nonviolence, is the most thematic. Then chapters three through nine focus on the different activities of the American campaign for women’s right to vote (“The Political Boycott,” “Picketing Wilson,” “Hunger Strikes and Jail”), following its escalation over time (1912-1920).^[9] Of course, some of the activities span the decade — chapter three examines the Suffragist paper and its appeals, an ongoing effort rather than strictly an early one.

Adam and Keene use letters, newspapers, photographs, pamphlets, books, and other primary documents of the era to illuminate Paul’s campaign of powerful visuals, persistent presence, and bold acts of protest, as well as her commitment to peaceful resistance and disruption. The Suffragist publication is the most cited source, and Paul’s personal letters are oft-used as well.^[10] At times, the authors also cite a plethora of secondary sources, perhaps more than average for historical texts — possibly another subtly different tack of the English academics. Five secondary sources are used on pages 28 and 29 alone, for instance. This is during an exploration of the goals, tactics, and philosophy of nonviolent action, and the effect is twofold. While it fleshes out the conclusions people like Paul, Gandhi, and King reached, it pulls the reader out of the historical moment. An example:

As Paul’s clashes with Wilson and the legislature escalated, she was keeping her movement in the public eye, but she also risked alienating those with the power to pass the bill. Increasingly strong nonviolent rhetoric could have the wrong effect, as William R. Miller notes: if campaigners “embarrass the opponent and throw him off balance,” they could “antagonize the opponent and destroy rather than build rapport.”^[11]

The best works of history often use secondary sources, but this repeated structure, Paul’s strategies approved or critiqued by more modern texts on movement theory, begins to feel a bit ahistorical. It is looking at Paul through the judging lens of, in this case, Miller’s 1964 Nonviolence: A Christian Interpretation. It would have been better for Adams and Keene to use, if possible, Paul’s own writings and other primary sources to capture this idea of the cost-benefits of confronting power. Then secondary sources could be used to note that those in later decades increasingly came to accept what Paul and others had determined or theorized. Perhaps the authors were summarizing and validating that which they did not see summarized and validated in the 1910s, but this is done often enough that one suspects they were stuck in a mindset of working backward.

Nonetheless, the work’s sources powerfully accomplish its purpose, the elevation of Alice Paul. This exploration of her ideological foundations, her theory of passive resistance to change perceptions (and self-perceptions) of women, and her steadfast strength and leadership through a dangerous campaign secure her “place in history.”^[12] Adams and Keene demonstrate how Paul’s Quaker background and reading of Thoreau and Tolstoy molded a devotion to nonviolent direct action and “witnessing,” or serving as an example for others.^[13] And they show how closely practice — strategies and tactics — followed theory, a key to placing Paul alongside Gandhi and King. Under her direction, visual rhetoric was used to witness and make persuasive appeals, growing from “moderate to extreme forms of conventional action and then from moderate to extreme forms of nonviolent action,” all widely publicized for maximum impact.^[14] It began with articles, cartoons, and photographs in publications like the Suffragist, as well as speeches and gatherings, to artful parades, coast-to-coast journeys, and lobbying, and then escalated to a boycott of Democrats for opposing women’s rights, a picket of the White House, and a badgering of President Wilson wherever he went. Upon arrest over picketing, the suffragists engaged in work and hunger strikes (Paul was force-fed). After release from prison, they burned Wilson, and his words, in effigy.^[15] Rejecting the more violent methods of England’s suffragettes, Paul and the American activists were nevertheless abused by police, crowds, and prison overseers.^[16] Fierce opposition stemmed from reactionary ideologies of womanhood (neither the vote nor direct action was thought the purview of proper ladies), nationalism (such strong denouncements of Wilson and pickets during World War I were deemed unpatriotic and offensive),^[17] and likely power (victory could lead to domino effects — the fall of other repressive laws against women, as well as attempts by other subjugated groups to rise up). As Paul had envisioned, their struggle demonstrated to themselves and all Americans women’s strength and power, making it increasingly difficult to argue against suffrage over notions of women’s dependency and weakness.^[18] Adams and Keene’s primary sources thoroughly depict all of these developments. For instance, an article in the Washington Star in early 1917, while suffragists tried not to freeze during their daily protest in the capital, demonstrated how direct action informed views on women: “Feminine superiority is again demonstrated. The President of the United States took cold during a few hours’ exposure to conditions the White House pickets had weathered for weeks.”^[19]

Overall, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign is an excellent text for general readers. Due to its oddities, it may not be the best example of historical writing for undergraduate and graduate students — though that is not to say the story of Paul and the more militant American suffragists can be passed over. Adams and Keene’s thesis, though somewhat unconventional, is compelling and urgent. Alice Paul’s name must no longer be met with blank stares by the average American, but, like the name Gandhi or King, with recognition and respect for her many accomplishments.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

---

^[1] Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), xv-xvi. 

^[2] Ibid., xi-xv.

^[3] Ibid., xv-xvi.

^[4] Ibid., xvi.

^[5] Ibid., xvi.

^[6] Ibid., 247.

^[7] Ibid., 35.

^[8] Ibid., 26.

^[9] For a summary of the campaign, see ibid., xiv or 40.

^[10] Ibid., Works Cited and 258.

^[11] Ibid., 39.

^[12] Ibid., 247.

^[13] Ibid., 21-25.

^[14] Ibid., 40.

^[15] Ibid., xiv, xvi, 40, 246.

^[16] Ibid., 201-204, for example.

^[17] Ibid., 92-94, 126-127, 165-166, 167-172, 216.

^[18] Ibid., xvi.

^[19] Ibid., 166.