Historian Mary Beth Norton, in her 1980 text Liberty’s Daughters, argues that the American Revolution changed colonial women’s self-perceptions, activities, and familial relationships.^[1] The tumultuous years of 1775 to 1783, and the decade or so that preceded them, reformed the private lives and identities of literate, middle- and upper-class white women in particular, those in the best position to leave behind writings chronicling their thoughts and lives — though Norton stresses that the war touched most all women, making it safe to assume its effects did as well to some degree.^[2] Early and mid-eighteenth century women generally existed within a “small circle of domestic concerns,” believing, alongside men, in strictly defined permissible feminine behavior, proper roles for women, and their own inferiority and limited capabilities.^[3] Politics, for instance, was “outside the feminine sphere.”^[4] But in the 1760s and early 1770s, Norton posits, the extreme political climate in the colonies, the tensions and clashes with the British government and army, began to shake up the gender order and create new possibilities. Women began writing in their journals of the major events of the day, avidly reading newspapers, debating politics as men did, participating in boycotts and marches, and even seizing merchant goods.^[5] They published articles and formed relief efforts and women’s organizations.^[6] The Revolution, in other words, was women’s entry into public life and activism, with no more apologies or timidity when pushing into the male sphere of policy, law, and action.^[7]

The war also changed women’s labor. Some worked with the colonial army as cooks, nurses, and laundresses, often because they needed stable income with husbands away.^[8] More still took over the domestic leadership and roles of their absent husbands, managing farms and finances alike, and would later no longer be told they had not the sense or skills for it.^[9] Political debate, revolutionary action, and household leadership with business acumen profoundly shifted women’s views of themselves. “Feminine weakness, delicacy, and incapacity” were questioned.^[10] Equal female intelligence was affirmed.^[11] Some women even applied the language of liberty, representation, and equality to critiques of women’s subservience.^[12] While still constrained in countless ways, by the end of the century, these new ways of thinking had opened even more opportunities for women. More independent, they insisted they would choose their own husbands, delay marriage, or not marry at all; more confident in their abilities, they pushed for girls’ education and broke into the male field of teaching; and so on.^[13]

Norton’s engaging text is organized thematically, with a tinge of the chronological. It charts the “constant patterns of women’s lives” in the first half, what stayed the same for American women from before the Revolution to after, and the “changing patterns” in the second, how their lives differed.^[14] Norton describes this as “rather complex,” stemming from various modes of thought on many issues changing or remaining static at different times — they did not “fit a neat chronological framework.”^[15] The result for the reader is mixed. On the one hand, the layout does allow Norton to demonstrate how women viewed themselves and society before the war, then chart ideological growth and offer causal explanations. This is helpful to the thesis. On the other hand, the first half contains a wealth of historical information that is, essentially, only tangential to the thesis. For if the text presents what did not change, as interesting and valuable as that is, this has little to do with the argument that the American Revolution altered women’s lives. For example, Norton explores views on infants, nursing, and weaning in the first half of the work.^[16] As these were “constant” beliefs in this era, not impacted by dramatic events, they are not much explored in the second half. Thus, the reader may correctly consider much information to be irrelevant to the main argument. Of course, it is clear that Norton did not set out only to correct the historiography that concluded “the Revolution had little effect upon women” or ignored the question entirely; she also saw that a wide range of assumptions about eighteenth-century American women were wrong, which to correct would take her far beyond the scope of Revolution-wrought effects.^[17] Inclusion of this secondary argument and its extra details makes Liberty’s Daughters a richer and even more significant historical work, but gears it toward history undergraduates, graduates, and professionals. A general audience text might have been slimmer with a fully chronological structure, focusing on select beliefs in the first half (pre-Revolution) that change in the second (political upheaval and war).

Norton uses letters, journal entries, newspaper articles, and other papers — primarily the writings of women — from hundreds of colonial families to build her case.^[18] She presents documents from before, during, and after the war, allowing fascinating comparisons concerning women’s ways of thinking, activities, and demands from society. A potential weakness of the historical evidence — there are few — mirrors a point the historian makes in her first few pages. Literacy and its relation to class and race have already been mentioned, constituting a “serious drawback”: the sample is not “representative.”^[19] Similarly, are there enough suggestions of new ways of thinking in these hundreds of documents to confidently make assertions of broad ideological change? In some cases yes, in others perhaps not. For example, Norton cites women’s views on their “natural” traits. Before the Revolution, “when women remarked upon the characteristics they presumably shared with others of their sex, they did so apologetically.”^[20] One trait was curiosity. Norton provides just a single example of a woman, Abigail Adams, who felt compelled to “‘excuse’ the ‘curiosity…natural to me…’”^[21] The question of curiosity then returns in the second half of the text, after the war has changed self-perceptions. Norton finds that women had abandoned the apologies and begun pushing back against male criticism of their nature by pointing out that men had such a nature as well, or by noting the benefits of derided traits.^[22] Here the author offers two examples. “The sons of Adam,” Debby Norris wrote in 1778, “have full as much curiosity in their composition…”^[23] Judith Sargent Murray, in 1794, declared that curiosity was the cure for ignorance, worthy of praise not scorn.^[24] Clearly, one “before” and two “after” citations are not an adequate sample size and cannot be said to be representative of women’s views of curiosity. It is often only when one looks beyond the specific to the general that Norton’s evidence becomes satisfactory. Curiosity is considered alongside delicacy, vanity, helplessness, stupidity, and much else, and the mass accumulation of evidence of beliefs across topics and time convincingly suggests women’s views of their traits, abilities, and deserved treatment were changing.^[25] One might say with more caution that connotations concerning curiosity shifted, but with greater confidence that women’s perceptions of their nature transformed to some degree.

Overall, Norton’s work is an important contribution to the field of American women’s history, correcting erroneous assumptions about women of the later eighteenth century, showing the war’s effects upon them, and offering sources some historians thought did not exist.^[26] While one must be cautious of representation and sample size, in more than one sense, and while the thesis could have been strengthened with data tabulation (x number of letters in early decades mentioned politics, y number in later decades, z percentage contained apologies for entering the male sphere of concern, etc.), Norton provides a thorough examination and convincing argument based on a sufficient body of evidence. Few students will forget the new language found in primary documents after the outbreak of war, a metamorphosis from the commitment “not to approach the verge of any thing so far beyond the line of my sex [politics]” to “We are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”^[27]

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^[1] Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), xix, 298.

^[2] Ibid., xviii-xx.

^[3] Ibid, chapter 1, xviii. 

^[4] Ibid., 170.

^[5] Ibid., 155-157.

^[6] Ibid., 178.

^[7] Ibid., 156.

^[8] Ibid., 212-213.

^[9] Ibid., chapter 7, 222-224.

^[10] Ibid., 228.

^[11] Ibid., chapter 9.

^[12] Ibid., 225-227, 242.

^[13] Ibid., 295, chapter 8, chapter 9.

^[14] Ibid., vii, xx.

^[15] Ibid., xx. 

^[16] Ibid., 85-92.

^[17] Ibid., xviii-xix.

^[18] Ibid., xvii.

^[19] Ibid., xix.

^[20] Ibid., 114.

^[21] Ibid.

^[22] Ibid., 239.

^[23] Ibid.

^[24] Ibid.

^[25] Ibid., chapters 4 and 8 in comparison, and parts I and II in comparison.

^[26] Ibid., xvii-xix.

^[27] Ibid., 122, 226.

In The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, historian Carol F. Karlsen argues that established social attitudes toward women in seventeenth-century New England, and earlier centuries in Europe, explain why women were the primary victims of witch hunts in places like Salem, Fairfield, and elsewhere.^[1] Indeed, she posits, women who willingly or inadvertently stepped out of line, who violated expected gender norms, were disproportionately likely to be accused in Puritan society. After establishing that roughly 80% of accused persons in New England from 1620 to 1725 were women, and that men represented both two-thirds of accusers and all of those in positions to decide the fates of the accused, Karlsen observes women’s deviant behaviors or states of affairs that drew Puritan male ire.^[2] For instance: “Most witches in New England were middle-aged or old women eligible for inheritances because they had no brothers or sons.”^[3] When husbands or fathers had no choice but to leave property to daughters and wives, this violated the favored and common patrilineal succession of the era. Further, women who committed the sins of “discontent, anger, envy, malice, seduction, lying, and pride,” which were strongly associated with their sex, failed to behave as proper Christian women and thus hinted at allegiances to the devil, putting them at risk of accusation.^[4] The scholar is careful to note, however, that in the historical record accusers, prosecutors, juries, magistrates, and so on did not explicitly speak of such things as evidence of witchcraft.^[5] But the trends suggest that concern over these deviations, whether subliminal or considered, played a role in the trials and executions.

Karlsen’s case is well-crafted. Part of its power is its simplicity: a preexisting ideology about women primed the (male and female) residents of towns like Salem to see witches in female form far more often than male. The fifth chapter could be considered the centerpiece of the work because it most closely examines the question of what a woman was — the view of her nature by the intensely patriarchal societies of Europe and how this view was adopted and modified, or left intact, by the Puritans. Christian Europe saw women as more evil than men.^[6] They were of the same nature as Eve, who sought forbidden knowledge, betrayed God, and tempted man. Believed to be “created intellectually, morally, and physically weaker,” women were thought to have “more uncontrollable appetites” for sins like the seven above.^[7] It is Karlsen’s exploration of this background that is foundational to the argument. If Christians had long seen women as more evil, a notion of witches-as-women in New England would have been a natural outgrowth (America’s early female religious dissenters, among other developments, added fuel to the fire).^[8] The fact that associations between women and witchcraft existed in the European mind before the Puritans set foot in North America reinforces this.^[9] Karlsen quotes fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers: “More women than men are ministers of the devil,” “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable,” “Because Christ did not permit women to administer his sacraments…they are given more authority than men in the administration of the devil’s execrations,” and so on.^[10] Another penned that middle aged and older women received no sexual attention from men so they had to seek it from the devil.^[11]

Indeed, Karlsen’s use of primary sources is appreciable. She extensively cites witchcraft trials in New England and works by ministers such as Cotton Mather, not only as anecdotal evidence but also, alongside public and family records, to tabulate data, primarily to show that women were special targets of the witch hunts and that most had or might receive property.^[12] The author leaves little room for disputing that witch hunt victims were not quite model Puritan women, and that the Puritans believed that those who in any way stepped outside their “place in the social order were the very embodiments of evil,” and therefore had to be destroyed.^[13] The work is organized along those lines, which is sensible and engaging. But a stumble occurs during a later dalliance with secondary sources.

One piece of the story — appearing on the last couple pages of the last chapter — stands out as underdeveloped. Karlsen posits that the physical ailments the Puritans blamed on possession, such as convulsions and trances, were psychological breaks, a “physical and emotional response to a set of social conditions,” indeed the social order itself.^[14] The gender hierarchy and oppressive religious system were, in other words, too much to bear. Karlsen does cite anthropologists that have studied this phenomenon in other societies, where the minds of oppressed peoples, usually women, split from normalcy and enter states that allow them to disengage from and freely lash out at their oppressors, as, Karlsen argues, possessed New England women did.^[15] But the causes of physical manifestations are such a significant part of the story that they deserve far more attention, indeed their own chapter (most of Karlsen’s final chapter explores the questions of who was most likely to be possessed, how they acted, and how the Puritans explained the phenomenon, though it is framed as a culturally-created power struggle early on).^[16] This would allow Karlsen room to bring in more sources and better connect the New England story to other anthropological findings, and to flesh out the argument. For instance, she writes that convulsions and other altered states would have been “most common in women raised in particularly religious households,” but does not show that this was true for possessed women in New England.^[17] How the ten men who were possessed fit into this hypothesis is unclear.^[18] Things also grow interpretive, a perhaps necessary but always perilous endeavor: “…in their inability to eat for days on end, [possessed women] spoke to the depths of their emotional hunger and deprivation, perhaps as well to the denial of their sexual appetites.”^[19] This is unsupported. In the dim light of speculation and limited attention, other causes of “possession,” such as historian Linnda Caporael’s ergotism theory (convulsions and hallucinations due to a fungus found in rye), remain enticing.^[20] Minds are forced to remain open to causes beyond social pressures, and indeed to multiple, conjoining factors. How physical symptoms arose, of course, does not affect the thesis that prior ideology led to the targeting of women. The concern is whether the anthropological theory fit so well with Karlsen’s thesis — the targeting of women and the physical ailments being the results of a repressive society — that she both gravitated toward the latter and did not grant it the lengthier study it warranted.

Overall, Karlsen’s work is important. As she noted in her introduction, prior historians had given little focus to the role of gender in American witch hunts.^[21] Their witch hunts had little to do with the suspicions about women’s nature or the dismay over women pushing against the gender hierarchy and religious order. Written in the late 1980s, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman represented a breakthrough and a turning point. It is a must read for anyone interested in the topic.

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^[1] Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), xiii-xiv. See chapter 5, especially pages 153-162, for European origins.

^[2] Ibid., 47-48.

^[3] Ibid., 117.

^[4] Ibid., 119.

^[5] Ibid., 153.

^[6] Ibid., 155.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Ibid., 127-128 and chapter 6.

^[9] Ibid., chapter 5.

^[10] Ibid., 155-156.

^[11] Ibid., 157.

^[12] See for example ibid., 48-49, 102-103.

^[13] Ibid., 181.

^[14] Ibid., 248-251.

^[15] Ibid., 246-247, with anthropologists cited on footnote 69, page 249, and footnote 71, page 251.

^[16] Ibid., 231, 246.

^[17] Ibid., 250.

^[18] Ibid., 224.

^[19] Ibid., 250.

^[20] Linnda R. Caporael, “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?,” Science 192, no. 4234 (1976): 21–26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1741715.

^[21] Karlsen, The Devil, xii-xiii.

James Doohan’s Montgomery Scott wasn’t often the centerpiece of “Star Trek” storylines, but he could always be counted on to save the day by eking some kind of miracle out of the Enterprise’s transporters or warp engines. Doohan’s performance was lively, and “Scotty” lovable and charismatic, even if the Canadian actor’s for-television accent was once included on the BBC’s list of “Film Crimes Against the Scottish Accent.” According to The Guardian, Doohan based the voice on that of a Scottish soldier he met in World War II.

Indeed, Doohan was a soldier before he had any interest in acting. He joined the Canadian artillery after high school, right as the largest conflict in human history was brewing. He rose to the rank of lieutenant and was sent to Britain to prepare for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy (Valour Canada). Long before Scotty saved Kirk, Spock, and his other comrades from all sorts of alien enemies and celestial phenomena, he led men into the fires of D-Day, June 6, 1944. 

Following a naval and aerial bombardment, Canadian units stormed Juno Beach. James Doohan and his men unknowingly ran across an anti-tank minefield, being too light to detonate the defenses (Snopes). Bullets piercing all around, they reached cover and advanced inland. Doohan made his first two kills of the war by silencing German snipers in a church tower in Graye Sur Mer. 

After securing their positions, Doohan and his troops rested that evening. But just before midnight, everything went wrong for our future chief engineer. Stepping away from the command post for a smoke, on his way back his body was riddled with at least half a dozen bullets. The middle finger of his right hand was torn off, four bullets hit his knee, and one hit his chest, but did minimal injury because it happened to strike the silver cigarette case in his breast pocket. But this was no German attack. It was friendly fire.

According to Valour Canada, James Doohan was shot by a Canadian sentry who mistook him in the night for a German soldier. This sentry has been described as “nervous” and “trigger-happy” (Snopes). Doohan later said that his body had so much adrenaline pumping through it after the shooting that he walked to the medical post without even realizing his knee had been hit.
Doohan survived the incident and the war, moved to the United States, and started acting in 1950 (IMDb). Sixteen years later, after small roles in “Gunsmoke,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” and more, he landed the part that would bring him global fame. According to StarTrek.com, Doohan had a hand double to conceal the missing finger while filming close-ups on “Star Trek.” However, it is still obvious in many shots, stills of which fans have collected, for instance on this Stack Exchange.

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This paper posits that primary sources meant for public consumption best allow the historian to understand how intersections between race and gender were used, consciously or not, to advocate for social attitudes and public policy in the United States and the English colonies before it. This is not to say utilization can never be gleaned from sources meant to remain largely unseen, nor that public ones will always prove helpful; the nature of sources simply creates a general rule. Public sources like narratives and films typically offer arguments.^[1] Diaries and letters to friends tend to lack them. A public creation had a unique purpose and audience, unlikely to exist in the first place without an intention to persuade, and with that intention came more attention to intersectionality, whether in a positive (liberatory) or negative (oppressive) manner.

An intersection between race and gender traditionally refers to an overlap in challenges: a woman of color, for instance, will face oppressive norms targeting both women and people of color, whereas a white woman will only face one of these. Here the meaning will include this but is expanded slightly to reflect how the term has grown beyond academic circles. In cultural and justice movement parlance, it has become near-synonymous with solidarity, in recognition of overlapping oppressions (“True feminism is intersectional,” “If we fight sexism we must fight racism too, as these work together against women of color,” and so on). Therefore “intersectionality” has a negative and positive connotation: multiple identities plagued by multiple societal assaults, but also the coming together of those who wish to address this, who declare the struggle of others to be their own. We will therefore consider intersectionality as oppressive and liberatory developments, intimately intertwined, relating to women of color.

Salt of the Earth, the 1954 film in which the wives of striking Mexican American workers ensure a victory over a zinc mining company by taking over the picket line, is intersectional at its core.^[2] Meant for a public audience, it uses overlapping categorical challenges to argue for gender and racial (as well as class) liberation. The film was created by blacklisted Hollywood professionals alongside the strikers and picketers on which the story is based (those of the 1950-1951 labor struggle at Empire Zinc in Hanover, New Mexico) to push back against American dogma of the era: normalized sexism, racism, exploitation of workers, and the equation of any efforts to address such problems with communism.^[3] Many scenes highlight the brutality or absurdity of these injustices, with workers dying in unsafe conditions, police beating Ramon Quintero for talking back “to a white man,” and women being laughed at when they declare they will cover the picket line, only to amaze when they ferociously battle police.^[4]

Intersectionality is sometimes shown not told, with the protagonist Esperanza Quintero facing the full brunt of both womanhood and miserable class conditions in the company-owned town (exploitation of workers includes that of their families). She does not receive racist abuse herself, but, as a Mexican American woman whose husband does, the implication is clear enough. She shares the burdens of racism with men, and those of exploitation — with women’s oppression a unique, additional yoke. In the most explicit expositional instance of intersectionality, Esperanza castigates Ramon for wanting to keep her in her place, arguing that is precisely like the “Anglos” wanting to put “dirty Mexicans” in theirs.^[5] Sexism is as despicable as racism, the audience is told, and therefore if you fight the latter you must also fight the former. The creators of Salt of the Earth use intersectionality to argue for equality for women by strategically tapping into preexisting anti-racist sentiment: the men of the movie understand that bigotry against Mexican Americans is wrong from the start, and this is gradually extended to women. The audience — Americans in general, unions, the labor movement — must do the same.

A similar public source to consider is Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. Like Salt of the Earth, Beloved is historical fiction. Characters and events are invented, but it is based on a historical happening: in 1850s Ohio, a formerly enslaved woman named Margaret Garner killed one of her children and attempted to kill the rest to prevent their enslavement.^[6] One could perhaps argue Salt of the Earth, though fiction, is a primary source for the 1950-1951 Hanover strike, given its Hanover co-creators; it is clearly a primary source for 1954 and its hegemonic American values and activist counterculture — historians can examine a source as an event and what the source says about an earlier event.^[7] Beloved cannot be considered a primary source of the Garner case, being written about 130 years later, but is a primary source of the late 1980s. Therefore, any overall argument or comments on intersectionality reflect and reveal the thinking of Morrison’s time.

In her later foreword, Morrison writes of another inspiration for her novel, her feeling of intense freedom after leaving her job to pursue her writing passions.^[8] She explains:

I think now it was the shock of liberation that drew my thoughts to what “free” could possibly mean to women. In the eighties, the debate was still roiling: equal pay, equal treatment, access to professions, schools…and choice without stigma. To marry or not. To have children or not. Inevitably these thoughts led me to the different history of black women in this country—a history in which marriage was discouraged, impossible, or illegal; in which birthing children was required, but “having” them, being responsible for them—being, in other words, their parent—was as out of the question as freedom.^[9]

This illuminates both Morrison’s purpose and how intersectionality forms its foundation. “Free” meant something different to women in 1987, she suggests, than to men. Men may have understood women’s true freedom as equal rights and access, but did they understand it also to mean, as women did, freedom from judgment, freedom not only to make choices but to live by them without shame? Morrison then turns to intersectionality: black women were forced to live by a different, harsher set of rules. This was a comment on slavery, but it is implied on the same page that the multiple challenges of multiple identities marked the 1980s as well: a black woman’s story, Garner’s case, must “relate…to contemporary issues about freedom, responsibility, and women’s ‘place.’”^[10] In Beloved, Sethe (representing Garner) consistently saw the world differently than her lover Paul D, from what was on her back to whether killing Beloved was justified, love, resistance.^[11] To a formerly enslaved black woman and mother, the act set Beloved free; to a formerly enslaved man, it was a horrific crime.^[12] Sethe saw choice as freedom, and if Paul D saw the act as a choice that could not be made, if he offered only stigma, then freedom could not exist either. Recognizing the unique challenges and perspectives of black women and mothers, Morrison urges readers of the 1980s to do the same, to graft a conception of true freedom onto personal attitudes and public policy.

Moving beyond historical fiction, let us examine a nonfiction text from the era of the Salem witch trials to observe how Native American women were even more vulnerable to accusation than white women. Whereas Beloved and Salt of the Earth make conscious moves against intersectional oppression, the following work, wittingly or not, solidified it. Boston clergyman Cotton Mather’s A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning (1693) begins by recounting how Mercy Short, an allegedly possessed servant girl, was once captured by “cruel and Bloody Indians.”^[13] This seemingly out of place opening establishes a tacit connection between indigenous people and the witchcraft plaguing Salem. This link is made more explicit later in the work, when Mather writes that someone executed at Salem testified “Indian sagamores” had been present at witch meetings to organize “the methods of ruining New England,” and that Mercy Short, in a possessed state, revealed the same, adding Native Americans at such meetings held a book of “Idolatrous Devotions.”^[14] Mather, and others, believed indigenous peoples were involved in the Devil’s work. Further, several other afflicted women and girls had survived Native American attacks, further connecting the terrors.^[15]

This placed women like Tituba, a Native American slave, in peril. Women were the primary victims of the witch hunts.^[16] Tituba’s race was an added vulnerability (as was, admittedly, a pre-hysteria association, deserved or not, of Tituba with magic).^[17] She was accused and pressured into naming other women as witches, then imprisoned (she later recanted).^[18] A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning was intended to describe Short’s tribulation, as well as offer some remedies,^[19] but also to explain its cause. Native Americans, it told its Puritan readers, were heavily involved in the Devil’s work, likely helping create other cross-categorical consequences for native women who came after Tituba. The text both described and maintained a troubling intersection in the New England colonies.

A captivity narrative from the previous decade, Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, likewise encouraged intersectional oppression. This source is a bit different than A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning because it is a first-hand account of one’s own experience; Mather’s work is largely a second-hand account of Short’s experience (compare “…shee still imagined herself in a desolate cellar” to the first-person language of Rowlandson^[20]). Rowlandson was an Englishwoman from Massachusetts held captive for three months by the Narragansett, Nipmuc, and Wompanoag during King Philip’s War (1675-1676).^[21] Her 1682 account of this event both characterized Native Americans as animals and carefully defined a woman’s proper place — encouraging racism against some, patriarchy against others, and the full weight of both for Native American women. To Rowlandson, native peoples were “dogs,” “beasts,” “merciless and cruel,” creatures of great “savageness and brutishness.”^[22] They were “Heathens” of “foul looks,” whose land was unadulterated “wilderness.”^[23] Native society was animalistic, a contrast to white Puritan civilization.^[24]

Rowlandson reinforced ideas of true womanhood by downplaying the power of Weetamoo, the female Pocassett Wompanoag chief, whose community leadership, possession of vast land and servants, and engagement in diplomacy and war violated Rowlandson’s understanding of a woman’s proper role in society.^[25] Weetamoo’s authority was well-known by the English.^[26] Yet Rowlandson put her in a box, suggesting her authority was an act, never acknowledging her as a chief (unlike Native American men), and emphasizing her daily tasks to implicitly question her status.^[27] Rowaldson ignored the fact that Weetamoo’s “work” was a key part of tribal diplomacy, attempted to portray her own servitude as unto a male chief rather than Weetamoo (giving possessions first to him), and later labeled Weetamoo an arrogant, “proud gossip” — meaning, historian Lisa Brooks notes, “in English colonial idiom, a woman who does not adhere to her position as a wife.”^[28] The signals to her English readers were clear: indigenous people were savages and a woman’s place was in the domestic, not the public, sphere. If Weetamoo’s power was common knowledge, the audience would be led to an inevitable conclusion: a Native American woman was inferior twofold, an animal divorced from true womanhood.

As we have seen, public documents make a case for or against norms of domination that impact women of color in unique, conjoining ways. But sources meant to remain private are often less useful for historians seeking to understand intersectionality — as mentioned in the introduction, with less intention to persuade comes less bold or rarer pronouncements, whether oppressive or liberatory. Consider the diary of Martha Ballard, written 1785-1812. Ballard, a midwife who delivered over eight hundred infants in Hallowell, Maine, left a daily record of her work, home, and social life.^[29] The diary does have some liberatory implications for women, subverting ideas of men being the exclusive important actors in the medical and economic spheres.^[30] But its purpose was solely for Ballard — keeping track of payments, weather patterns, and so on.^[31] There was little need to comment on a woman’s place, and even less was said about race. Though there do exist some laments over the burdens of her work, mentions of delivering black babies, and notice of a black female doctor, intersectionality is beyond Ballard’s gaze, or at least beyond the purpose of her text.^[32]

Similarly, private letters often lack argument. True, an audience of one is more likely to involve persuasion than an audience of none, but still less likely than a mass audience. And without much of an audience, ideas need not be fully fleshed out nor, at times, addressed at all. Intersectional knowledge can be assumed, ignored as inappropriate given the context, and so on. For instance, take a letter abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sarah Grimké wrote to Sarah Douglass of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society on February 22, 1837.^[33] Grimké expressed sympathy for Douglass, a black activist, on account of race: “I feel deeply for thee in thy sufferings on account of the cruel and unchristian prejudice…”^[34] But while patriarchal norms and restrictions lay near the surface, with Grimké describing the explicitly “female prayer meetings” and gatherings of “the ladies” where her early work was often contained, she made no comment on Douglass’ dual challenge of black womanhood.^[35] The letter was a report of Grimké’s meetings, with no intention to persuade. Perhaps she felt it off-topic to broach womanhood and intersectionality. Perhaps she believed it too obvious to mention — or that it would undercut or distract from her extension of sympathy toward Douglass and the unique challenges of racism (“Yes, you alone face racial prejudice, but do we not both face gender oppression?”). On the one hand, the letter could seem surprising: how could Grimké, who along with her sister Angelina were pushing for both women’s equality and abolition for blacks at this time, not have discussed womanhood, race, and their interplays with a black female organizer like Douglass?^[36] On the other, this is not surprising at all: this was a private letter with a limited purpose. It likely would have looked quite different had it been a public letter meant for a mass audience.

In sum, this paper offered a general view of how the historian can find and explore intersectionality, whether women of color facing overlapping challenges or the emancipatory mindsets and methods needed to address them. Purpose and audience categorized the most and least useful sources for such an endeavor. Public-intended sources like films, novels, secondary narratives, first-person narratives, and more (autobiographies, memoirs, public photographs and art, articles, public letters) show how intersectionality was utilized, advancing regressive or progressive attitudes and causes. Types of sources meant to remain private like diaries, personal letters, and so on (private photographs and art, some legal and government documents) often have no argument and are less helpful. From here, a future writing could explore the exceptions that of course exist. More ambitiously, another might attempt to examine the effectiveness of each type of source in producing oppressive or liberatory change: does the visual-auditory stimulation of film or the inner thoughts in memoirs evoke emotions and reactions that best facilitate attitudes and action? Is seeing the intimate perspectives of multiple characters in a novel of historical fiction most powerful, or that of one thinker in an autobiography, who was at least a real person? Or is a straightforward narrative, the writer detached, lurking in the background as far away as possible, just as effective as more personal sources in pushing readers to hold back or stand with women of color? The historian would require extensive knowledge of the historical reactions to the (many) sources considered (D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation famously sparked riots — can such incidents be quantified? Was this more likely to occur due to films than photographs?) and perhaps a co-author from the field of psychology to test (admittedly present-day) human reactions to various types of sources scientifically to bolster the case.

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^[1] Mary Lynn Rampolla, A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, 10th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2020), 14.

^[2] Salt of the Earth, directed by Herbert Biberman (1954; Independent Productions Corporation).

^[3] Carl R. Weinberg, “‘Salt of the Earth’: Labor, Film, and the Cold War,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 24, no. 4 (October 2010): 41-45.

  Benjamin Balthaser, “Cold War Re-Visions: Representation and Resistance in the Unseen Salt of the Earth,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (June 2008): 347-371.

^[4] Salt of the Earth, Biberman.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), xvii.

^[7] Kathleen Kennedy (lecture, Missouri State University, April 26, 2022).

^[8] Morrison, Beloved, xvi.

^[9] Ibid, xvi-xvii.

^[10] Ibid., xvii.

^[11] Ibid., 20, 25; 181, 193-195. To Sethe, her back was adorned with “her chokecherry tree”; Paul D noted “a revolting clump of scars.” This should be interpreted as Sethe distancing herself from the trauma of the whip, reframing and disempowering horrific mutilation through positive language. Paul D simply saw the terrors of slavery engraved on the body. Here Morrison subtly considers a former slave’s psychological self-preservation. When Sethe admitted to killing Beloved, she was unapologetic to Paul D — “I stopped him [the slavemaster]… I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” — but he was horrified, first denying the truth, then feeling a “roaring” in his head, then telling Sethe she loved her children too much. Then, like her sons and the townspeople at large, Paul D rejected Sethe, leaving her.

^[12] Ibid., 193-195.

^[13] Cotton Mather, A Brand Pluck’d Out of the Burning, in George Lincoln Burr, Narratives of the New England Witch Trials (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2012), 259.

^[14] Ibid, 281-282.

^[15] Richard Godbeer, The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2018), 83.

^[16] Michael J. Salevouris and Conal Furay, The Methods and Skills of History (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 211.

^[17] Godbeer, Salem, 83.

^[18] Ibid., 83-84.

^[19] Burr, Narratives, 255-258.

^[20] Ibid., 262.

^[21] Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God by Mary Rowlandson with Related Documents, ed. Neal Salisbury (Boston: Bedford Books, 2018).

^[22] Ibid., 76-77, 113-114.

^[23] Ibid., 100, 76.

^[24] This was the typical imperialist view. See Kirsten Fischer, “The Imperial Gaze: Native American, African American, and Colonial Women in European Eyes,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 3-11.

^[25] Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), chapter one.

^[26] Ibid., 264.

^[27] Ibid.

   Rowlandson, Sovereignty, 81, 103.

^[28] Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, 264, 270.

^[29] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).

^[30] Ibid., 28-30.

^[31] Ibid., 168, 262-263.

^[32] Ibid., 225-226, 97, 53.

^[33] Sarah Grimké, “Letter to Sarah Douglass,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870 (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019), 94-95.

^[34] Ibid., 95.

^[35] Ibid., 94.

^[36] Ibid., 84-148.

In one sense, fiction can present (or represent, a better term) history as an autobiography might, exploring the inner thoughts and emotions of a survivor or witness. In another, fiction is more like a standard nonfiction work, its omniscient gaze shifting from person to person, revealing that which a single individual cannot know and experience, but not looking within, at the personal. Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved exemplifies the synthesis of these two commonalities: the true, unique power of fiction is the ability to explore the inner experiences of multiple persons. While only “historically true in essence,” as Morrison put it, the novel offers a history of slavery and its persistent trauma for the characters Sethe, Paul D, Denver, Beloved, and more.^[1] It is posited here that Morrison believed the history of enslavement could be more fully understood through representations of the personal experiences of diverse impacted persons. This is the source of Beloved’s power.

One way to approach this is to consider different perspectives of the same event or those similar. To Sethe, her back was adorned with “her chokecherry tree”; Paul D noted “a revolting clump of scars.”^[2] This should be interpreted as Sethe distancing herself from the trauma of the whip, reframing and disempowering horrific mutilation through positive language. Paul D simply saw the terrors of slavery engraved on the body. Here Morrison subtly considers a former slave’s psychological self-preservation. As another example, both Sethe and Paul D experienced sexual assault. Slaveowners and guards, respectively, forced milk from Sethe’s breasts and forced Paul D to perform oral sex.^[3] Out of fear, “Paul D retched — vomiting up nothing at all. An observing guard smashed his shoulder with the rifle…”^[4] “They held me down and took it,” Sethe thought mournfully, “Milk that belonged to my baby.”^[5] Slavery was a violation of personhood, an attack on motherhood and manhood alike. Morrison’s characters experienced intense pain and shame over these things; here the author draws attention to not only the pervasive sexual abuse inherent to American slavery but also how it could take different forms, with different meanings, for women and men. Finally, consider how Sethe killed her infant to save the child from slavery.^[6] Years later, Sethe was unapologetic to Paul D — “I stopped him [the slavemaster]… I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” — but he was horrified, first denying the truth, then feeling a “roaring” in his head, then telling Sethe she loved her children too much.^[7] Then, like her sons and the townspeople at large, Paul D rejected Sethe, leaving her.^[8] This suggests varying views on the meaning of freedom — death can be true freedom or the absence of it, or perhaps whether true freedom is determining one’s own fate — as well as ethics and resistance and love; a formerly enslaved woman and mother may judge differently than a formerly enslaved man, among others.^[9]

Through the use of fiction, Morrison can offer diverse intimate perspectives, emotions, and experiences of former slaves, allowing for a more holistic understanding of the history of enslavement. This is accomplished through both a standard literary narrative and, in several later chapters, streams of consciousness from Sethe, Denver, Beloved, and an amalgamation of the three.^[10] Indeed, Sethe and Paul D’s varying meanings and observations here are a small selection from an intensely complex work with several other prominent characters. There is much more to explore. It is also the case that in reimagining and representing experiences, Morrison attempts to make history personal and comprehensible for the reader, to transmit the emotions of slavery from page to body.^[11] Can history be understood, she asks, if we do not experience it ourselves, in at least a sense? In other words, Beloved is history as “personal experience” — former slaves’ and the reader’s.^[12]

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^[1] Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), xvii.

^[2] Ibid., 20, 25.

^[3] Ibid., 19-20, 127.

^[4] Ibid., 127.

^[5] Ibid., 236.

^[6] Ibid., 174-177.

^[7] Ibid., 181, 193-194.

^[8] Ibid., 194-195.

^[9] Morrison alludes, in her foreword, to wanting to explore what freedom meant to women: ibid., xvi-xvii.

^[10] Ibid., 236-256.

^[11] Morrison writes that to begin the book she wanted the reader to feel kidnapped, as Africans or sold/caught slaves experienced: ibid., xviii-xix. 

^[12] Ibid., xix.