The
March 2014 issue of the
Journal of American History is out. Articles of interest include:
Privileges of Locomotion: Expatriation and the Politics of Southwestern Border Crossing
By the early 1830s, nearly twenty thousand U.S. citizens had quit their country for lives as colonists in Mexican Texas. Eric R. Schlereth
asks readers to consider this migration without presupposing the
inevitable rise of a U.S. empire in North America. To gain this
perspective, he explores the history of Anglo colonization in Texas as
an expression of expatriation, or a personal right under international
law to change political allegiance at will. This right proved deeply
resonant to Mexican officials in Texas and Anglo colonists alike.
Tracing how the principle of expatriation influenced life in Mexican
Texas during the 1820s and the 1830s reveals individuals from both
groups creating a legal order at the U.S.-Mexico border determined by
agreement that free individuals possessed natural rights to move
throughout world.
Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia
That the U.S. woman suffrage amendment passed within a few years
of the Russian Revolution was no mere coincidence. Many know that
antisuffragists (the “antis”) used charges of socialism and “bolshevism”
to discredit American suffragists. Some know that proponents of woman
suffrage taunted their opponents with reminders that women in “darkest
Russia” had obtained the vote before their American sisters. But
historians have been so loathe to validate red baiters’ accusations that
they have ignored U.S. feminists’ abiding attention to revolutionary
Russia. In her essay, Julia L. Mickenberg
argues that the Russian revolutionary agenda–in theory if not in
practice–provided a framework for reimagining the terms of women’s
citizenship, and as such, was of vital interest to U.S. feminists. It
also reveals historical continuities between abolitionists, feminists,
and “friends of Russian freedom.”
A Higher “Standard of Life” for the World: U.S. Labor Women’s Reform Internationalism and the Legacies of 1919
Worker and democracy movements surged around the world in 1919, as did hope for a more just international world order. Dorothy Sue Cobble
recovers the surprisingly robust traditions of social justice
internationalism among U.S. labor women in the aftermath of World War I.
She chronicles the internationalist initiatives of the Women’s Trade
Union League of America, the largest U.S. working women’s organization
in this era, and uses U.S. and non-U.S. sources to compare the class and
gender politics of U.S. and European women trade unionists. Her study
challenges reigning scholarly tropes of American exceptionalism, expands
understandings of U.S. internationalism in the World War I era, and
reveals the significance of the 1919 moment for later transformations in
global gender and economic policy.
“Don’t Agonize, Organize!”: The Displaced Homemakers Campaign and the Contested Goals of Postwar Feminism
In an article that challenges portrayals of 1970s feminism as a movement that demeaned and neglected middle-class housewives, Lisa Levenstein
examines a major feminist campaign on behalf of “displaced
homemakers”–middle-aged housewives who had lost men’s financial support
after divorce or widowhood. The leaders of this campaign participated in
national feminist efforts to secure social policies that recognized the
economic value of middle-class women’s household labor. Fearing that
these policies would attract broad popular support, conservatives
misrepresented the displaced homemakers campaign and claimed that
feminists sought to penalize full-time mothers. At the same time,
left-wing activists condemned displaced homemaker advocates for
neglecting the struggles of welfare recipients. Such criticisms
contributed to the reorientation of modern feminism away from advocacy
on behalf of housewives and agitation that emphasized the economic value
of women’s unpaid labor in the home.
A full list of the book reviews is available
here.
