At its annual meeting in April, the Organization of American Historians awarded the Binkley-Stephenson Award (for "the best article that appeared in the Journal of American History during the preceding calendar year") to Karen L. Zipf (East Carolina University) for "Exposing the Masculinist Narrative in Federal Antislavery Law: A History of U.S. v. Tony Booker (1980)," Journal of American History, 110 (March 2024), 689–714. The citation:
“Exposing the Masculinist Narrative in Federal Antislavery Law: A History of US. V. Tony Booker (1980),” by Karen Zipf (East Carolina University), is a deeply researched and compelling contribution to modern slavery studies, showing that lawyers in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice were trying to apply a gendered lens to U.S. antislavery law. Zipf highlights a missed opportunity to unite antislavery law and anti–sex trafficking law because judges could not overcome their “masculinist” reading of slavery as male, and sex trafficking as female. The lawyers in U.S. v. Tony Booker, the case at this heart of this article, worked hard to show that labor contractors tried to create a “climate of fear” by threatening sexual assault, debt bondage, violence, and death to keep farm workers in bondage. Despite the work of feminist theorists and legal analysts to apply gendered analysis to the language of the Thirteenth Amendment, it was not until the 1990s and later that courts began to recognize sexual violence as an essential component of involuntary labor. Well-grounded in Black feminist theory, legal history, and slavery history, Zipf’s essay will be foundational for scholars assessing slavery after emancipation.
Congratulations to Professor Zipf!
-- Karen Tani
