Transplanting a Seattleite

I bought this a Really Long Time Ago (October 1998, from University Books in Seattle, so if you're keeping track, I'd retired the previous month from a different bookstore in Seattle). I started reading it a couple February's ago, IIRC, and have finally just decided there are only two chapters left, I can do that, so I did.

Subtitled: _The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920_

On the one hand, it's a really interesting book in a lot of ways. There is good documentary history here about post-Civil War efforts by women, mostly, but not entirely, black women in particular, but not exclusively, to educate and uplift their race out of poverty and oppression. It fits very well into reading I had been doing before starting reading this book (and books I had bought in roughly the same time frame) about the WCTU, and _White Women's Rights_, which is a somewhat flawed book about racial friction within earlier stages of the women's movement. The extensive use of quotations allows the reader to grasp rhetorical techniques that the author isn't necessarily drawing attention to, but which are interesting (turns out that people have been saying, "it's just as bad/worse than slavery" since very shortly after the end of the Civil War. Who knew? And not just white people, I might add.).

Activists used multiple strategies to advance the cause of equality and social justice, and the author devotes individual chapters to major ones. By directing group resources to the education and nurturing of particularly able individuals ("the talented tenth"), the group hoped to benefit by showing that blacks could be doctors and lawyers and learned preachers and academics. By emphasizing manners and demeanor, the group hoped to benefit by showing that while they were poor and oppressed, they adhered to the supposed codes of whites better than they did. Little mention is made of women in the Black Baptist Church and the women's suffrage movement (one gets the sense that they weren't particularly involved, but I'm not clear on that. It was so difficult for black men to vote that there was probably some prioritization going on there). Descriptions of coordination between white women activist groups and individuals and black women activist groups and individuals are included occasionally.

If there is something missing, it is any kind of detail on conflict in goals and strategies between the separate groups. Sure, there were some heinously bigoted women who said awful things, but they weren't typically all that great on women's issues for white women or black women. I feel some confidence that there _was_ conflict on goals and strategies, but I'm sort of feeling a little weird that I've now read two academic books (well respected ones) that should have given me a sense of where that conflict was, and I still just am not understanding. Perhaps it is my fault. (And before you ask, YES, I do understand the pre- and post- Civil War prioritization of abolition vs women's suffrage. And that's exactly why the weakness on where the Women's Convention was on suffrage stood out for me. Was that perceived at the time as a major difference in priorities/goals? How did groups and individuals talk about that? _Did_ they talk about that?)

It's a monograph. Because it's a monograph about a church, a good chunk of the middle is about women engaging in theology and/or preaching. That may have limited appeal. The author makes an effort to draw some larger themes out of the theology and preaching, but it is tough going. 19th century moralizing is not an attractive activity. At all, and I don't care _who_ is doing it. It just sounds terrible.

The book does provide a fairly good context for the civil rights movement(s) of our own era (it's imperfect, because the section on railroads and separate but equal doesn't get into any of the details of Plessy v Ferguson, which is a real pity, however, scope matters, and including details about women activists trying to get better bathrooms, or at least segregated by gender, was pretty amazing. Having to press for soap and towels is kind of shocking, altho again, this is in the era of lynching, so there's plenty of shocking to go around).

If any of the components of the topic (race, gender, religion, politics, education and activism) are of interest to you, and you have any tolerance for monographs at all, it's a good one.

Subtitled Why Women Drink and How They Can Regain Control

My walking partner heard the author on NPR and told me a bit about the book; it was interesting enough to pick up and read.

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/01/20/women-and-alcohol

The historical coverage is poor; there are numerous errors and misrepresentations.

The comparison of how much and how many women are drinking now versus in the past is baseless and, I believe, completely wrong. I do not believe there is any real basis for believing that more middle class or upper middle class women are drinking in a way that they are unhappy with or that objectively appears problematic now than earlier in the 20th century, never mind the 19th century. Glaser, who in many respects is admirably data oriented, doesn’t have data for this so it’s just kinda commentary.

You might wonder, why the heck bother with such a flawed book? Ah, well, there are not a lot of books out there about women and alcohol specifically. This one includes great coverage of the history of AA with a view to the women who aren’t typically mentioned, in particular Marty Mann. There’s wonderful descriptions of research about how women are affected by alcohol consumption -- and why there is so little research and how that is slowly changing. Glaser mostly avoids blame-the-victim, and for those who are looking for a solution to their drinking problem, she points the reader at what I believe are these people: http://www.non12step.com/ She also suggests Moderation Management, whose book _Responsible Drinking_ I read over a decade ago and found insightful and reassuring; I can’t speak to how effective it is. Glaser notes over and over how unfortunate drinking patterns develop in college and then become very difficult to change; she also talks about how evening is a trigger for many women (can’t really avoid evening, and if you’re already doing most of your drinking at home, that’s kinda tough to avoid, too). She does a nice job of showing how the different way alcohol affects women interacts particularly negatively with 12 Step program which emphasize powerlessness. The stories she includes of sexual abuse in AA chapters are quite harrowing, and accompanied by detailed descriptions of how various people at the national level failed in their efforts to make meaningful cultural changes.

I look forward to future books about women and alcohol, and women and drinking. This is an important and under-studied topic. I expect over time that gender based consumption patterns -- including abuse -- of alcohol will converge (by women consuming more and men consuming less), as we have seen with a variety of other trends. I also believe that we will eventually come to realize that while AA has some particularly negative aspects with respect to women, the built-in dismissal of underlying mental health issues present in AA from the beginning and throughout its history, in conjunction with its relentless (altho increasingly covert) religiosity, will lead to its general loss of credibility in favor of more pragmatic approaches to changing deleterious drinking.

In was a fortunate accident that I happened to read this in conjunction with a book about the WCTU and during Women's History Month; there wasn't a plan.

Subtitled The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States
OUP 1999

I bought it in October 2002 in Williamsburg while on a road trip.

I rarely comment on the physical characteristics of a book, beyond noting whether I read it on the kindle or not. However, the print in this book presented enough problems for me to feel compelled to mention those problems. First, the print is small and I, increasingly, am old. Second, the ink or toner is weak or faded, or inadequate, particularly on the left hand pages, and more towards the spine. I did not consciously notice this at first, but it contributed greatly to my difficulties reading the book (along with the prose style, which monographs sort of universally suffer from, and the trigger-y nature of the topic). After a while, I asked R. to take a look at it, and he was able to identify the toner or ink problems (he thinks this may have been a POD edition) which, combined with the font (there’s no colophon — maybe no one wanted to take any responsibility for this) result in o’s which are not complete, etc. (He said it was like reading a whole page of captcha. Which it is.)

I’m not sure what I will do with this copy. In general, I prefer to destroy physically flawed books (provided they are not rare), to save future readers the agony.

The author “is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Florida” at the time of publication, and the CV I found online for her looks like Associate Professor now. The text is informed by her use of the material in teaching.

Chapters 4-7 are character studies of particular women: (4) May French-Sheldon (who went on safari in Africa), (5) Alice Fletcher (who administered allotments of land on reservations), (6) Charlotte Perkins Gilman (and Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge) and (7) Margaret Mead. These chapters aren’t just character studies; they argue that these women modified cultural discourses involving the place of (white) (middle class) women, vis a vis (white) (ruling class) men and POC, both in their writings and in how they lived their lives.

Chapter 2 is more or less the same thing, for Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Catharine Beecher, Mary Dodge/“Gail Hamilton", as (white) (middle class) women abolitionists (mostly) were prevented from participating in abolitionist organizations dominated by men, started their own, and (sort of) started the woman’s movement as well. This _could_ have been a really great analysis of differing perspectives on whether and how much to work towards Someone Else’s (Primary) Goal vs. focusing on One’s Own (Primary) Goal — a real classic dilemma of identity politics when the identity groups are each a minority but collectively the majority. I don’t know if Newman didn’t want to frame it that way, because that’s a modern frame, or she didn’t think to frame it that way, because she did all that work in the 1990s, and those ideas were not yet dominating academia yet? In practice, all the information is there, but without any frame that I perceived.

Chapter 3 is a mess, and it’s probably not the author’s fault. She’s attempting to describe the convergence of the Serious Thinkers Becoming Aware of the Demographic Transition, the industrial revolution in full swing and total control of the judicial system (thus rolling back all labor protection that had previously been put in place), and increasing female participation in the labor force. What women’s organizations decided to do (agitate for access to college/careers, agitate for protective labor laws for women, since they couldn’t keep them on the books for everyone, and back anyone who had an intellectual/academic fig leaf to justify these two goals) was entirely reasonable, but if you’re parsing the rhetoric, it seems a little odd. Hence, the mess.

And that brings me back to chapter 1, which sets up the book as a whole. Newman’s overall frame is the use of social evolution, Spencerian and Lamarckian conceptions of racial progress/devolution, by (white) women to carve out a better place in society for themselves and future generations of men and women (and I didn’t put white in parentheses there on purpose). Newman talks throughout the book about how evolution and ethnography and ideas of race and sex difference were modified by women (and men) for various purposes. What she _doesn’t_ do is talk about how this discourse interacted with the historically more dominant and still very powerful religious frame — which was even worse for women and for POC, but much harder to rework directly, much less attack directly.

That, in combination with her extremely limited treatment of the temperance movement, make this book a lot less powerful than it could have been. It’s sort of an interesting oddity, rather than a Must Read. Because this is basically a horribly detailed analysis of a strain of rhetoric that wound through a whole lot of very exciting political times — while mostly ignoring all of the excitement. This book supports the thesis that the history of ideas separate from, well, everything else is hugely problematic.

Next up: either Ruth Bordin's _Woman and Temperance_ or Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's _Righteous Discontent_. It's like I planned this to coincide with Women's History Month or something. (I didn't.)

Additional complaint:

p 166: "In this climate of racial tension, Anglo-Protestant women often saw themselves as potential rape victims, even when no sexual interest was shown them," Erm. What's that clause doing there?

Further observation: It's clear that this book was written at least partly in response to arguments that the women's movement (in its various incarnations over the decades) got more racist after the Civil War. Newman exhaustively demonstrates that race (and racism) was part of the discourse and the way (white) women thought about themselves and their place in the world from well before the Civil War, and that to the extent there was a trend, it wasn't to become more openly contemptuous of POC (altho it wasn't necessarily to become _less_ racist, either -- just different forms, alas).