Women Who Belong : Claiming a Female’s Right-Filled Place [1 ed.] 9781443847131, 9781443842044

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Women Who Belong

Women Who Belong: Claiming a Female’s Right-Filled Place

Edited by

Marsha R. Robinson

Women Who Belong: Claiming a Female’s Right-Filled Place, Edited by Marsha R. Robinson This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Marsha R. Robinson and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4204-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4204-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Inverting History with Microhistory Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Women Who Belong: Claiming A Female’s Right-Filled Place Marsha R. Robinson Chapter One............................................................................................... 13 From Town Pariah to Venerable Madre: The Remarkable Transformation of Isabel de Jésus (1584-1648) Jenni Shelton Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer Livingston: From New Netherlands Deputy Husband to New York Feme Covert in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Jennifer M. Tobin Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 37 Deploying Wives with the Regiment: Women’s Rights at the Restoration Garrisons of Tangier and Gibraltar, 1662-1741 Marsha R. Robinson Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 51 ‘A Trifle Dark’: Contesting Race, Gender, and Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico Ellen Walsh Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 65 Virginal Mothers and Common Prostitutes: Policing Female Sexuality in Ireland Morgan Paige Denton

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Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 85 Procreating a Superior America without Poor Jane, Grace or Doris B.: Female Field Workers, the Eugenics and Public Health Movements, and the Regulation of Sexual and Reproductive Behavior Tina M. Kibbe Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 99 Slowly Breaking Away: The Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association and Shifting Ideologies of Womanhood in the Early Twentieth-Century Chelsea Griffis Contributors............................................................................................. 111 Index........................................................................................................ 113

INVERTING HISTORY WITH MICROHISTORY PREFACE TO THE SERIES

Inverting History with Microhistory is a series of edited volumes in which scholars lead us to question the allocation and appropriation of power by individuals in relationship to their societies. Microhistory has a long tradition of fascinating stories about the past that help us interpret the present and shape our immediate future. Microhistory can be as powerful as macrohistory and, therefore, microhistory makes some people nervous. The oldest microhistory that I have ever read was that of a great hunter standing up to a charging bison. It was painted on the walls of a Lascaux, France cave some fifteen thousand years ago by prehistoric humans. Actually, I “read” the second edition of the story in a full-size reproduction that was created for tourists like me. Even though it has been two decades since I visited that microhistory, its story is so basic that I have not forgotten it. In fact, I have been inspired by its powerful message. In our lifetimes, events happen in a way that can be described as charging bison that suddenly appear in our paths. What we choose to do at those moments is our contribution to the drama of human history. The oldest stories that I am aware of are stories about individuals who faced overwhelming challenges in particular places. When the stories were told near firelight or by moonlight, the great story tellers could capture the passing breeze and work it into the story. They illuminated the stages of our imaginations with moonlight and fire flare-ups. They held us in a spell as we waited to hear about the choices the protagonists made and the traumas they endured. We remembered the stories and the life lessons of cleverness and foolishness, of bravery and loyalty, of hatred and love. We came to identify each other by the stories we shared. Our stories are where our communities were born. We were members of small communities in those moments and we told microhistories that we could relate to on a personal level. Along the way, other storytellers introduced new characters such as Nation and Empire. These giants were invading us or we were numbered with them as invaders. Our stories now featured great monarchs and generals who led us or our enemies into macrohistory and who were justified by the metanarratives written by the victors who broadcast these

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bigger histories to larger audiences by daylight in imposing and official public places like schools and stadia. Behind the waving flags of battalions and nations in marketplaces and military encampments, humans continued to gather around the firelight to hear stories of individuals facing the challenges of ever more complex societies with all of the rules and structures that provide order out of the chaos of masses of people engaged in the art of survival. The micro-level stories grabbed us, comforted us, taught us, inspired us, and identified us as individuals who matter. Inverting History is a series of edited volumes that contain stories about individuals, the challenges that they faced and the decisions that they made. In our globalizing world, we have a challenge facing us. Will our stories of the past unite us or divide us? Will we fight over limited resources or share our knowledge and creativity to overcome zero-sum game local and regional wars? How will we choose to deploy our power to shape the present and the near future? Our resource desperation is charging at us like giant bison.

Stories and Power Power is perhaps the most elusive prey in history. The hunt for power seems to be one plot in that oldest recorded story in the Lascaux cave. The quest to capture power from the Other is a plot in discussions about adding marginal individuals and groups to official narratives of history. Stories empower their audiences. So, it may be important to control microhistory if one wishes to limit or expand the number of empowered individuals. Stories about events along the human trek through time influence the allocation of power in the present. Sociologist and historian Charles Tilly saw this connection. “Social pressures,” he wrote, “are path-dependent. That is why history matters.”1 Tilly identified three types of constructions of past events: metahistory, world-systems, and macrohistory. Such narratives often imbue the Nation/Empire/State with so much power that only superhuman titans like Octavian Augustus or Elizabeth I could discipline these new characters. Ordinary people seem to follow almost mindlessly in their wake, sucked into history en masse by the riptides and crosscurrents of the charisma and superiority of each titan who is singularly qualified to challenge the charging bison of historic moments and trends. Sometimes, empowered, mindful, ordinary individuals like Fannie Lou Hamer or Napoleon Bonaparte succeeded and that makes some titans rather nervous. Such individuals, whether born into work-a-day families or

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as less-empowered nobility, manage to focus the energies of compatriots into a political wedge that threatens the stability of elite castes. Individuals like Joan of Arc, Sundiata Keita, Sojourner Truth, Vicente Guerrero, Aung San Suu Kyi, Benjamin Franklin, Rosa Parks, and Mohandas Gandhi empower ordinary people through their example. Histories about such relatively ordinary people who stood up to the political bison of their times fall into a category called microhistory. Tilly identified this fourth type of history as microhistory which is the study of “the experiences of individuals and well-defined groups within the limits set by large-scale structures and processes.”2 Stories about these individuals have the potential to reinforce or to weaken the power of the official histories that created a comfort zone for the ruling titans. One scholar whose words seem to express some trepidation over microhistories of ordinary people is Gertrude Himmelfarb, an American expert on Victorian intellectual history. Race/gender/class…any part of that trinity involves a considerable revision of the past, but the whole requires nothing less than its deconstruction,3

As far as I know, there were people of varying races, social classes, and genders in the Victorian era and many of them were intellectuals who were featured on lecture circuits and in various gazettes. Queen Victoria graced many of them with an audience. Queen Victoria’s audiences confess, to some extent, a measure of the diversity of her imperial subjects by race/class/gender and reflect the diversity of her empire’s global trading partners. This reality gave me pause when I read Dr. Himmelfarb’s words about “women, blacks, Chicanos, etc.” She wrote, What they are all “clamoring for” is not a place on the periphery of history—that they always had—but at the center, and not intermittently but permanently.4

Himmelfarb’s comments suggest that history belongs to white male titans and everyone else is relegated to a dream-like story of standing up to charging bison as painted on the wall of a cave. What if titans fear ordinary people more than they fear bison? This question arises after reading Sigurdur Gylfi Magnússon’s summary of microhistory as a movement in Europe. Magnusson was associated with the Center for Microhistorical Research in Reykyavik, Iceland. His essay can be used to map a tense space between Tilly’s and Himmelfarb’s perspectives on the subfield of microhistory. Magnusson wrote that his entry to microhistory occurred around the time of the Ronald Reagan administration. At this time, Magnusson saw that microhistory was tinged

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with the residue of European colonialism. He included the linguistic turn, the contribution of Foucault and Derrida, and the microhistory tension between the French Annales school and the post-fascist Italian school exemplified by the work of Ginzburg. “In the final analysis,” he wrote in 2003, “so far as I am aware, the ideology of microhistory has as yet failed to make any deep and lasting impression upon the discipline at large.”5 If Magnusson is correct, then from his side of the Atlantic Ocean, microhistory must fail as surely as the Lascaux artist recorded the injury of a human who stood up to the charging bison. Magnusson’s assessment, however, leads me to query the trepidation even further by interrogating the very ancient microhistory in the Lascaux cave. As I understand Foucault and the others mentioned by Magnusson, the question underlying those approaches is this: How in the name of titans’ History did the colonized subjects ever find the power to topple European colonial administrations? Titanic histories lose power when microhistories are admitted. Therefore, if Magnusson’s assessment is correct, microhistory must fail for its success will open up a Tilly-type path that leads to the democratization of global economic power and a Himmelfarb-type reconstruction of the European-dominated global economic order. (Before I proceed, it is important to reveal that I toured Versailles Palace, emblem of French national and imperial power, before I visited Lascaux.) What if the paintings on the wall of Lascaux’s caves are an invocation or a spell rather than a history? What if a shaman wished individuals to take on the spirit of the rampaging or charging bison and dominate the other humans and animals of the region? Given that the territory above the Lascaux cave became a stage upon which Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Louis XIV, and Napoleon launched empires, we should leave a door open to the possibility that the Tilly-type residue of the least microhistory, even the simple yet empowering story of a human standing up to a bison, may change world orders on a Himmelfarb scale over many generations and millennia. According to the oldest story that I have ever read, the crafting of microhistories is older than the crafting of macrohistories. According to Kathleen Canning, the trinity of race/class/gender was practiced in the field of women’s history long before it was discovered by Foucault or Derrida.6 In this subfield, the great charging bison was white male dominance. Women’s history had at least two objectives: “the decentering of the Western white male subject and the reformulation of subjectivity as a site of disunity and conflict,” and an end to the “historical exclusion of women and the identification of human with male.”7 With their pens, early women’s historians claimed a permanent place in the narratives of the

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past, just as Himmelfarb described. Historians who factored for race/gender/class show something rather curious, something that is not always so readily apparent in other history. In African American history, the master narrative centers upon slavery, namely that most African Americans entered the American theater of history as conquered commodities. Microhistories of the plantation experience, including abolition literature, often reinforced the idea that power belonged to white males. However, an early African American practitioner of microhistory, George Washington Williams, used his pen in the late nineteenth century to restore African American soldiers to the stage of macrohistories about American wars when he published his History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880; as Negroes, as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens. He claimed a place for them in the victors’ narratives just as surely as many African American veterans received their pensions. In the history of the nation of India, European dominance is only the most recent hegemony. In the imperial cycles of Indian history, the elite castes eventually shared power with the invaders. Mrinalini Sinha affirmed this with her observation that in Indian history, “neither feminism nor women are ever articulated outside macropolitical structures that condition and delimit their political efforts.”8 Such Indian women, along with many American women, were not standing up to the charging bison of social power. In both of these cases, those who are identified by race/gender/class, some African American veterans and some privileged women in India, claim a share of power in the established Nation or Empire. The subjects of these microhistories wanted to run beside the charging bison called Nation or Empire. They reinforce the macrohistory that Himmelfarb did not wish to see deconstructed. So, while I think that the images painted on the Lascaux caves are the texts of one of the oldest microhistories, I dare not pretend to give an authoritative interpretation of the text. In the same manner, I do not predict that microhistories will undermine official histories. In fact, some reinforce macrohistories, world histories and metanarratives written in the long twentieth century. Microhistories often privilege the experience of an individual or a small group of individuals against the backdrop of narratives about such historical titans as Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Mao Zedong. In these contexts, microhistories do tend to invert the place of historical actors on the stage of the past but they do not always subvert the hegemony. The microhistories in this series recognize that individuals and groups have the agency to support and to reject systems of organizing society. —Marsha R. Robinson, series editor

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Notes 1

Charles Tilly, “Future History,” in Theory and Society 17, no. 5 (September 1988). Ibid., 706. 3 Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Some Reflections on the New History,” American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (June, 1989): 668. 4 Ibid., 664. 5 Sigurdur Gylfi Magnússon, “‘The Singularization of History’: Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 701-735. 6 Kathleen Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” Signs 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 370. 7 Ibid., 371. 8 Mrinalini Sinha, “Mapping the Imperial Social Formation: A Modest Proposal for Feminist History,” Signs 25, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 1078. 2

INTRODUCTION WOMEN WHO BELONG: CLAIMING A FEMALE'S RIGHT-FILLED PLACE MARSHA R. ROBINSON

What happens when we invert the patriarchal hegemony and center the ordinary woman as empowered owner and hostess to her life story? In this volume, we present narratives of some ordinary women who actively stood up to their local patriarchal social structures and whose societal place endowed them with the right to make those patriarchal systems work for them.1 In several cases, they also showed many men and women in their communities that patriarchy does not work without women’s cooperation. Oftentimes, feminist historians write about women’s resistance to patriarchy and this can imply a slow state of war that assumes victimhood as the default mode of being female. In this volume, we find that many ordinary women may not have been as defeated as some of us have been trained to believe. Rather, we present several rather ordinary women who chose when, where, how and if they would cooperate with the rules created by patriarchal men. In this sense we have written an inverted women’s history.

Why Bother to Invert Women’s History? Why bother to invert the history of women? We should bother to invert women’s history because historians know all too well, as the late Eric Hobsbawm made clear, that history is constructed, historical narratives are rarely objective and often the produced interpretation of the data story is disharmonious with the lived experience of the research subjects.2 We found this to be the case as we looked for signs of women’s power in patriarchal circumstances. Taken as a whole, these chapters show that even under patriarchy, there were obligations that men owed women in exchange for women’s cooperation with their own suppression.3 In an

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ordered society, one that had a formal legal code or a cultural tradition, women who properly occupied their place were right to make some demands upon the men in their communities. The key for these women was finding the right clause in that social contract. We found several rights available to such women regardless of their social caste. x x x x x x x

The right to be protected The right to transact business The right to own property The right to personal reputation The right to legal redress The right to community The right to cooperation and support in fulfilling the demand and expectations of their social place

To be sure, we found that few of our female research subjects had all of these rights; however, the ordinary women in the following chapters stood up for their rights by using the same social system that on the surface seemed designed to constrain them. We also found that these women often recruited male allies and frequently faced female enemies. Our findings affirm a consensus that has been emerging with the end of colonial regimes that privileged the idea of white middling and upper class male superiority. As Chandra Mohanty wrote 1984, The connection between women as historical subjects and the representation of Woman produced by hegemonic discourses is not a relation of direct identity, or a relation of correspondence or simple implication. It is an arbitrary relation set up in particular cultural or historical contexts.4

So, what are the hegemonic descriptions of women? An assumption of women as an always-already constituted group, one which has been labeled “powerless,” “exploited,” “sexually-harassed,” etc. by feminist-scientific, economic, legal and sociological discourses.5

It is quite true that many women have been exploited and sexuallyharassed. It is quite true that many women have been powerless. It also true that many men have been exploited and sexually-harassed and that they have been powerless. Somehow, we rarely speak of male victims and in doing so we construct images of Man as “always-already” predators. Why are we surprised when some men live up to the constructed image? Is it possible that the category of Woman-the-powerless begets Man-thepredator? 6 A decade ago or so, the literature seemed saturated with Woman-

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the-powerless and with Man-the-predator until this binary became a cataract and a callous on my scholarly vision, shoving the oh-so-many male victims I know out of my academic world of the Socratic realm of the Real until the day I sat in an audience composed of ethnic cleansing survivors—men with machete scars on their heads and women with hidden scars. That day, I knew what was always true: Power has no gender. Teodora Todoroval wrote about peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina, she suggested that, Since the end of the war post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina has been plagued with the legacy of the civil war and the urgent tasks of reconciliation and reconstruction. The task of reconstruction has necessitated the need to (re)establish democracy and restore a system of law and order; while reconciliation has required a fine balancing act between socio-cultural remembering and forgetting of the war.7

We may not want to remember the crimes of mass rape committed during the civil war when we are tourists and we can ignore these lived experiences because women permit us to do so. Woman-as-victim and Man-as-victim “always-already” have the power to disrupt the civil order by making us remember their pain and a dangerous power it is. Todoroval reminds us that consent to political silence is only an anesthesia leaving the memory festering in the homes of victims, watered with tears until it erupts in the next generation as a new plague of violence. Historical over-emphasis on the past violations of one’s community can result in a victimhood mentality that serves to neglect responsibility and excuse current acts of violence against others, as was the case with the narrative of Afrikaner suffering during the Boer War being used as a tool of legitimisation for the oppressive apartheid regime in South Africa.8

Women have been exploited and sexually harassed but their potential power of speaking the Memories often operates beneath the radar of patriarchal, and even of feminist, history for a generation or even longer. Tordoval reminds us of that which we may not want to acknowledge: the Dayton Agreement was written with red ink on parchment from the female body-field of civil war. Such parchments exist throughout global history. Feminist scholarship often presumes that women everywhere are struggling against male domination because of public evidence but it may not be fair to continue this assumption. For a decade, when I presented this assumption to undergraduate students, many white male students challenged this statement by stating that in their homes mothers and sisters

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dominate men and these student challenges happened year after year. Meanwhile, many female and some male students affirmed that many women and men suffer from domestic violence, including some students of both genders who attended class with fresh, visible bruises. I have also taught male and female victims of rape. There is a sub-culture in the United States that shames rather than supports these victims. For example, in the 2012 American electoral campaign season, Republican Missouri Congressman Todd Akin said, First of all, from what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.9

Akin’s comment is born of a Western sub-culture that believes that males have a right to rape. Darlene Clark Hine wrote about this culture as a product of American slavery. Black women’s sexual vulnerability and powerlessness as victims of rape and domestic violence […led to the] development of a culture of dissemblance among Black women. By dissemblance, I mean the behavior and attitudes of black women that created the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressors.10

Is dissemblance exclusive to Black women? I do not think so. Journalist Bernard Lefkowitz documented another American sub-culture that brings Akin’s philosophy out of the category of race and into realm of social class in his exposé, Our Guys: the Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb (1997), in which he found a white middle-class, New Jersey suburb with a sub-culture of not protecting their daughters from gang-rape by high school gridiron (football) warriors.11 The rape culture that Lefkowitz found in Glen Ridge and other communities across the nation is protected by Akin’s definition of “legitimate rape.” Dissemblance cannot be exclusive to Black Americans. So, the culture of violence and rape is not exclusive to the Western enslavement of Africans and unfortunately this truth has to be enunciated because it has too often been anesthetized into the realm of Memory and ignorance. Anna Clark linked violence against women and patriarchy with the rise of the Industrial Age in The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class.12 Here is a history of a violent domestic sub-culture that some of my students continue to experience. It is a culture that transcends class and religion and it operates within a group that Americans call “white.” Sadly, too many of my students related to this

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history of gender relations. One white male student wrote on his review essay of Clark’s book, “Now I know why Dad beats Mom. Thank you.” I cannot forget the solace on his face when I returned his assignment; neither can I forget the bruises on other students who may have risked their lives to get an education as the gate out of a life of domestic abuse. I also cannot forget two incidents in which I witnessed a white man beating a white woman on the sidewalks of London in 2003 and dozens of people who simply walked by and offered no assistance. Nor can I forget the female African scholar who confessed to being beaten by her husband because in her community it was simply a factual condition of being married. Despite these incidents, I know that this is not normal behavior even if it has been normalized for some. Each of these victims wore faces that pleaded for personal peace and relief. Women’s history and feminist history and gender history are insufficient projects if solace is the sole product we have to offer.13 What is the point of fluency in post-colonial discourse or women’s history if we continue to validate sorrow with an abundance of case studies that reify and render patriarchy eternal and universal? Is a global community of empathy sufficient and satisfactory? Absolutely not. The project of women’s history should not normalize the oppressor and deflate the victim any more than African American history should perpetuate plantation mentality in the minds of twenty-first century citizens. No, the project of women’s history ought to be the recovery of stories of healthier gender relations to validate a younger generation that says “Enough!” to violence against people. It ought to serve a generational change current in the global community. As Myra Marx Ferree phrased it, Gender is therefore also part of what is being remade in the current reconfiguration of power relations. As with other aspects of this global reorganization, this restructuring involves women and men in a variety of local and transnational settings. Some of these women’s movements are feminist, but others are not.14

Women Who Belong: Claiming a Female's Right-Filled Place is a collection of microhistories of women who defied their particular culturally proscribed woman-as-powerless model and chose to pursue peace and power in the middle of societies at various degrees of unrest toward women, women’s rights, and women’s right to place. Some chapters focus on elite women. Others focus on work-a-day women. These chapters present a diverse group of women from areas across Europe and U.S. The volume includes microhistories from the Renaissance to the Great War era. All of the women pursued empowerment by claiming membership in

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Introduction

particular social groups or classes. That membership provided allies and entitlements from social contracts. In this volume we are de-centering the hegemony and inverting the historical narrative to privilege these relatively ordinary women so that we can understand their view of the world and the political power that they possessed. When we finished our work, we had a collection of microhistories that is less about affirming patriarchal hegemony and more grounded in what may be one of the oldest recorded narratives on the planet—the charging bison and the wounded man as depicted by Neanderthal artists on the walls of a cave in Lascaux, France.15 (Refer to the series preface that precedes this introduction.) Those themes are: 1. Ordinary women are often unsung heroines who successfully slew the bison of patriarchy as it appeared in their lives. 2. Ordinary life, even when gynocentric, is a tapestry of male-female relations that are not always defined by sexual relationships. 3. So many ordinary men allied with these ordinary heroines so often and so loyally that we must continue to question the idea of universal, eternal patriarchy and look for other ways to analyze male behavior because the foe of the charging bison may actually be a union of men and women fighting and defeating patriarchy. 4. Many ordinary men contended with oppressive patriarchal men to stop the abuse of the female body-field and this happens so often in history that we must wonder if extreme feminist binaries may inadvertently convert some men to patriarchy and allow such feminists to join forces with the charging bison of patriarchal oppressors of women.

These are some of the themes that we found as we attempted to understand the rights that our subjects sought to exercise in places where it would have been easy to overlook such rights. I feel that I have not sufficiently answered the earlier question. Why should we bother to invert women’s history? We should bother because women’s studies students often enter careers wherein their clients watched Humanity follow Dignity out of their lives. Should we numb our students by reifying patriarchy as universal and eternal? Or should we teach them to look for role models of women of all social classes who found their personal power within the system at hand? Women Who Belong is a collection of narratives about women who did exercise power by demanding the rights defined by their social place.

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The Case Studies: Women Who Belonged The women who are the subjects of these articles each faced similar questions. What is the right way to be female in my society? What kind of power does that role offer me? Can I live within that socially circumscribed role and still be true to myself? Jenni Shelton brings us Isabel de Jésus who was a nun at the Augustinian Recollect Convent of San Juan Bautista of Arenas (near Avila, Castile) in the early seventeenth century. At the request of her confessor, Francisco Ignacio, she dictated her life experiences, or Vida, to prove her spiritual sanctity and to glorify her religious order. Isabel transformed from a pariah into a venerable madre with the help of God, the saints, and the patronage of male clerics. Isabel’s Vida not only demonstrates the importance of patronage in becoming a woman religious, it also reveals the conflict that occurred between male clerics and the laity. The male clerics who supported Isabel went against the wishes of her brothers who wanted Isabel to remarry, as well as those of the town who hurled rocks at Isabel in mocking disrespect. Isabel’s Vida functions as an oral history of this conflict between the clergy and the local townspeople. Jennifer Tobin narrates a life of Alida Livingston, great-grandmother of the revolutionary war-time governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, and a woman who faced dramatic social, cultural and legal upheavals during the seventeenth century. New York, originally colonized by the Dutch, faced tremendous changes as it transitioned from Dutch to English rule. Alida, and many women like her, faced significant challenges as English gender ideals became the standard in New York, replacing the “woman as partner” institution modeled by the Dutch. As feme covert became more and more entrenched, women were no longer expected to serve as their husband's helpmates, but were instead slowly relegated to a more ornamental position that displayed the English ideals of wealth and class. Alida Livingston was one of the last of her kind, a woman who forged a livelihood and acted independently of her husband when it came to financial decisions. A savvy business woman, she was one of the few women who actively and successfully participated in the public realm as the colony completed the transition to English rule. Meanwhile at the Strait of Gibraltar, my own work examines ordinary women’s lives at the Restoration garrison of Tangier and its successor garrison at Gibraltar. The arrival of British military units was accompanied by rapine as a war tactic. This atmosphere could not continue if Britain wished to plant a colony and occupy the Straits. British women as wives and entrepreneurs were actively recruited to move to the region. Such

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women became so important part to the military-merchant enterprise at the entrance to Mediterranean trade that they parlayed their economy power into political power as they individually and collectively with male civilians and soldiers demanded the military establishment to support many rights for women. This strategy was remarkably successful in the seventeenth century but, unfortunately, this military support declined during the same era in which Alida Livingston experienced greater challenges with feme covert under the new British hegemony. Ellen Walsh recovers Victoria Adams, an American missionary and daughter of a missionary. Though the United States Constitution did not accompany the U.S. military intervention in Puerto Rico in 1898, many mainland Protestant missionaries eagerly did. Collaborating with the new colonial state and U.S. commercial interests, these missionaries participated in a broad-based, multi-faceted campaign to Americanize Puerto Ricans. Comprising the majority of missionaries, mainland “consecrated women” engaged in health-care, vocational, and academic training in addition to religion-related activities. This article examines the conflict over the appointment of Victoria Adams, “a trifle dark” Anglo-Armenian, as an American missionary to the island. The conflict reveals the influences of race, gender, sexuality, and nation in the construction of “consecrated women” and the differing notions of white racial superiority within the missionary community and on the island. It also illustrates the varied uses of rhetoric and ideology and alliance-building that a skillful subaltern successfully exploited, taking advantage of the fault lines formed by contradictions within the civilizing project in order to gain admittance to and maintain her “right-filled place” in her chosen field. Chelsea Griffis takes us to an under-celebrated group of suffragists. Ohio women have a long history of political activism in the struggle for political rights. While at times they failed, at other times the women succeeded. The quest for women’s suffrage was no different. Although Ohio passed statewide women’s suffrage in 1917 and the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919, the fifth state to do so, women were denied the right to vote by numerous referendums between 1900 and 1917. During this time period, the Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association was active in pursuit of equal voting rights. This chapter discusses the different methods of struggle that the suffragists used. It also analyzes whether those methods changed over the course of the early 1900s. Finally, this chapter analyzes whether the women were influential, whether their voices were heard, and whether, in the end, it was their persistence that paid off. Tina Kibbe presents a women’s movement that questions the application of the term “women’s movement.” At the beginning of the

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twentieth century both the eugenics and public health movements gained tremendous support and momentum in the United States. Eugenic proselytizers sought to strengthen society by eliminating its “defective” elements, while public health officials worked to establish normative personal and public hygiene standards. Both movements emerged as significant forces that shaped public policy as cultural and economic changes threatened long-established gender and class hierarchies. Eugenicists and public health physicians envisioned a superior nation of “fit” citizens. Utilizing the authoritative and powerful language of science and medicine, eugenics experts, and, in perhaps less obvious ways, public health physicians sought to implement means of drawing distinctions between “fit” and “unfit” bodies. This chapter examines the juxtaposition of women as eugenics field workers and as public health nurses who participated in the construction of other women’s bodies, thus enabling the eugenics and public health experts to often work in tandem to regulate sexual and reproductive behavior in an effort to direct “fit” women toward marriage and reproduction. Simultaneously, they attempted to constrain “unfit” women from doing so—all in an effort to manage the genetic fitness of the American population and to create a “superior” society. Morgan Denton takes us across the Atlantic to another “women’s movement” that challenges women’s right to sexuality and employment in the name of creating a “superior” national identity. As marginal figures on the Irish historical landscape, prostitutes provide a window through which one can investigate gender relations and sexuality within Irish society. Both aspects of Irish life were linked definitively to the power of the Irish Catholic Church in the crucial early years of the Irish Free State and with that state’s process of defining Irish identity. The Catholic Church promoted the ideal of motherhood within a married heterosexual relationship as the proper role for Irish women. State legislation increasingly embraced this ideal, seeking to police and to regulate those women who acted outside such norms of behavior. By exploring the daily lives of working class prostitutes in Dublin and Cork, historians can illuminate the ways in which personal ethics practiced on a daily basis diverged from and competed with the quest of the Irish Catholic Church and the Irish state to present Ireland as a unified moral, Catholic nation. The interactions of prostitutes both with state authorities and their surrounding communities reveal how wider issues of class and gender informed not only how prostitutes were defined by others but also how prostitutes themselves reacted to and were at times able to resist such categorization, creating an alternative subculture to the conservative Catholic mainstream.

10

Introduction

Collectively, these women pursued their rights using strategies available to them because of their location. Some chose to pursue loyalty to self by staying single and finding organizations that supported their decision. Jenni Shelton and Ellen Walsh show us that Isabel de Jésus and Victoria Adams each found power as single women by embracing a role as a protected daughter of the church, much to the ire of some men who preferred to deprive them of their social right to a measure of political rights. Some found power through marriage. Jennifer Tobin shows that Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer Livingston insisted on exercising her economic rights as a Dutch colonial wife and she found a way to do so by manipulating English law against British feme covert culture. Chelsea Griffis finds that some female Toledo, Ohio suffragists used their social status as elite wives and daughters to reject their disenfranchisement by being New Women within a Cult of Domesticity milieu. Some women, though, found their membership in social groups to be a surmountable liability. Morgan Denton found some educated women who supported the oppression of these working women. Tina Kibbe reminds us that feminists do not only have to deal with men who act to de-power women. In her analysis of the eugenics movement in the U.S., Kibbe reminds us that some women finally acquired the power if they were willing to turn against other individual white women. Racial and gender unity are not always supported by the lived experience of women, just as Ferree suggested. As a whole, these essays remind us of the significance of microhistory in understanding world history as it happened. Each person is born to a particular social place with proscribed behaviors and options. Women have the individual agency to embrace or reject those roles. Some women acquiesce. Some transform the role to suit themselves. These women acquired and used rights in order to be true to themselves as humans and as women situated in particular social places.

Notes 1

One of the pleasures of women’s history is learning about the variety of gender systems around the world and throughout time. For orientations to world women’s history, one might consult: Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986; Peter N. Stearns, Gender in World History (London: Routledge, 2000); Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Gender in History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001). This volume focuses on Western women and for a context to this discussion, one might consult: Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz ed., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977); Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, eds., A History of Women in the West (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992,

Women Who Belong

11

French version, Pion, 1991, original, Rome: Laterza, 1990); Bonnie G. Smith, Changing Lives: Women in European History since 1700 (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Co., 1989); Marilyn J. Boxer, Jean H. Quataert, eds., foreword by Joan W. Scott, Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Margaret Strobel, ed., Expanding the Boundaries of Women’s History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness from the Middle Ages to 1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Mrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy and Angela Woollacott, Feminisms and Internationalisms (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); Philippa Levine, ed. Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 2 Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 3 For more about this approach, see Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 4 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2 12, no. 3 (Spring-Autumn, 1984), 334. 5 Ibid. 6 Mohanty, 338. 7 Teodora Todoroval, “‘Giving Memory a Future’: Confronting the Legacy of Mass Rape in Post-Conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Journal of International Women’s Studies Special Issue 12, no. 2 (March 2011): 4. 8 Todoroval, 6. 9 Syndicated columnist Eugene Robinson found a context for Akin’s comment. “He’s obviously talking about what Republicans call ‘forcible rape’…The statutory rape of a child by an adult would not fit the definition the House Republicans tried to impose; nor would the rape of a woman who was drugged, say, or who had limited mental capacity. Never mind the fact that, as far as criminal law is concerned, rape is rape…That ‘female body’ line is not only a frightening glimpse at the dangerous nonsense rattling around inside the heads of some on the far, far right. It is also—in its sheer, befuddled, clueless anatomical ignorance—an illustration of why we need more women in public office.” Eugene Robinson, “Todd Akin’s Comment Brings ‘War on Women’ Back to Prominence,” Washington Post August 20, 2012, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugenerobinson-todd-akin-comment-brings-war-on-women-back-to-prominence/2012/08/ 20/c4570fae-eafd-11e1.9ddc34d5efb1e9c_story.html. 10 Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 912. 11 Bernard Lefkowitz, Our Guys: the Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 12 Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

12

Introduction

13 For definitions that distinguish these projects, consult Antoinette Burton, “‘history’ Is Now: Feminist Theory and the Production of Historical Feminisms,” Women’s History Review 1, no. 1(1992): 25-39. For questions about the privilege of defining feminism, see Oyeronke Oyewumi, “Conceptualizing Gender: the Eurocentric Foundations of Feminist Concepts and the Challenge of African Epistemologies,” Jenda: a Journal of Culture and African Women’s Studies 2, no. 1(2002): 1-9. 14 Myra Marx Ferree, “Globalization and Feminism: Opportunities and Obstacles for Activism in the Global Arena,” in Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, eds. Aili Tripp and Myra Marx Ferree (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 5. 15 See “Panneau de l’homme blessé” (panel of the injured man) at www.lascaux.culture.fr. (accessed on 22 September, 2012). This is a Stone Age painting of a man confronting a charging male bison and the man is injured and falling backward to the ground. For a more scholarly discussion, see Francesco et al, “Neanderthal Acculturation in Western Europe?: A Critical Review of the Evidence and Its Interpretation” Special issue, Current Anthropology 39, no. 2 (June 1998): S1-S44.

CHAPTER ONE FROM TOWN PARIAH TO VENERABLE MADRE: THE REMARKABLE TRANSFORMATION OF ISABEL DE JÉSUS (1584-1648) JENNI SHELTON

In 1645, the illiterate, indigent, occasionally mad yet ultimately revered sor Isabel de Jésus, obeying orders from her confessor Francisco Ignacio, began to dictate her autobiography to fellow nun Madre Inés del Santísimo Sacramento.1 Over the next several months the two laboriously worked to produce the lengthy autobiography Vida de la Venerable Madre Isabel de Jesús, recoleta Augustina en el convento de San Juan Bautista de la villa de Arenas dictada por ella misma y añadido lo que falto de su dichosa muerte.2 Books I and II, dictated by Isabel, detail her life story before and after she entered the Augustinian Recollect convent of San Juan Bautista. Isabel’s last confessor Francisco Ignacio wrote Book III, the biographical portion of this work, when he arranged for its publication in 1675. That Isabel’s life experiences were recorded was not unique. Sixteenth and seventeenth century nuns throughout Spain and the rest of Catholic Christendom wrote or dictated their life stories, which centered on their religiosity.3 Why did Francisco Ignacio wait to publish Isabel’s Vida thirty years after her death? It should hardly be surprising. Publication of the life stories of many women religious occurred precisely because their publication would enhance the legitimacy of their religious orders as well as their confessors.4 In this case Isabel had prophesied the founding of the Augustinian Recollect convents of Serradilla (Cáceres) and La Calzada de Oropesa (Toledo) which her niece sor Isabel la Madre de Dios founded in 1660 and 1676. The Augustinian Recollect order considered Isabel’s life story to be historically significant, hence its publication in 1675. Indeed, Ignacio’s biographical addition to the publication emphasized Isabel’s prophetic abilities, something Isabel herself barely mentioned in her

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Chapter One

autobiography.5 Regardless of what motivated Ignacio to publish his penitent’s Vida, both the autobiography and biography are qualitatively important sources to the historical field because they provide us with insight on what life was like in seventeenth century Castile. The autobiography/biography also functions as an oral history, showcasing the conflicts between women religious, the laity and the religious orders of peasant communities that existed in early modern Spain. The analysis of women writers such as Isabel is a growing field among historians and literary analysts of early modern Spain. According to Mary E. Giles, In an effort to hear women’s voices from the past, scholars are turning to convent archives for letters, poetry, plays, accounts of foundations, biography, and autobiography and to Inquisition files.6

The majority of women writers during this period belonged to a convent and wrote to an ecclesiastical audience. Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau found that “few women of the period wrote, but nuns were the great exception to that rule.”7 Between 1500 and 1679, women who belonged to a Hispanic convent published one hundred forty-five religious books (mostly autobiographies), and seventy-four of these works were written by saints later canonized.8 Hundreds of other nuns wrote or dictated life stories which remain unpublished today. Prior to the 1980s, scholars largely ignored these works and regarded St. Teresa of Avila and Juana Inés de la Cruz as isolated instances of women as major writers.9 Arenal’s 1983 essay, “The Convent as Catalyst for Autonomy: Two Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works,” and Arenal and Schlau’s Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (1989) revealed female writers, including Isabel, who had been left out of the historiography. Prompted by the advent of women’s and gender studies as articulated in influential works like Joan W. Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis” (1986), scholars of the late 1980s and 1990s began to realize the “literary, social, and historical importance” of women’s writing as a rich, qualitative resource.10 Arenal and Schlau revealed the individuality of Isabel and other women writers. To Arenal, Isabel’s autobiography reveals…a devotion to private and religious life: how she dealt with her poverty, her intelligence, and her madness, how she developed as an individual, [and] her attitudes towards knowledge and revelation.11

In contrast to notarized documents or Inquisitorial records written by elite

From Town Pariah to Venerable Madre

15

men about women, the women themselves voice the cultural practices and processes inherent to their individual experiences in their spiritual autobiographies. Even though male clerics edited women’s spiritual writings, these texts allowed these women at least some freedom of expression and from their texts we are able to catch a glimpse of their thoughts and behaviors. For example, Ruth Anthony El Saffar’s Rapture Encaged: The Suppression of the Feminine in Western Culture (1994) examines Isabel’s life through an analysis of how her identity was formed. In this psychoanalytical literary analysis, El Saffar demonstrated how Isabel’s visions allowed her a way to escape her misogynist culture. While works such as El Saffar’s shed light onto what life was like for individual women, they do not show the complexity of the relationships between these women, male clerical authorities and their community and families. This scholarship on women is valuable yet the question remains: how did women religious such as Isabel affect their society both during their lifetime as well as after their death? And what information can we glean from these sources about not only the women religious themselves but also about the social, political and cultural practices of their communities? Spanish historians need to follow the lead of scholars like Natalie Zemon Davis who use micro-histories of lower class people to demonstrate the development of collective identities.12 How did Isabel form reciprocal relationships of power with men and women in her community and the convent and how did these relationships reflect the society in which they lived? What conflicts arose from those power relationships? What can we learn about the religious practices, gender roles and family life of early modern Spain from her spiritual autobiography/biography? By looking at Isabel’s autobiography and biography in a new way, this essay seeks to answer these questions in order to learn not just about Isabel’s life and how her society helped formed her identity, but how the nun Isabel used her social power to shape the lives of others and how she used her dictations to record the complexity of the society she lived in. For the purposes of this study, I chose to focus on Book I of the autobiography which describes Isabel’s life from the time she was born to when she entered the Augustinian Recollect convent of San Juan Bautista in Arenas, a small village in the province of Toledo.13 It details the struggles Isabel went through as she tried with great perseverance to become a religiosa (woman religious) and gain acceptance into a convent. It details how Isabel served her fellow villagers as an intercessory between her neighbors and God and how she developed this relationship into a

16

Chapter One

pivotal role in her community as a person who could heal the sick, cast out demons, communicate God’s forgiveness, prophesize, and proselytize God’s messages. While Isabel went through a period of her life when she was suspected of demon possession, she eventually became a revered woman religious and a venerable mother to her community. Her transformation from town pariah into a revered member of her community mirrors the relationship early modern Spaniards had with women religious: in this age, society viewed women religious as either agents of God or agents of the devil, either venerated by their communities or treated as criminals. In Book I Isabel describes how the Church and her mother influenced her to become a woman religious and details the trials and tribulations she endured on her journey to becoming a nun for the Augustinian Recollect Order. Francisco Ignacio claimed that Isabel de Jésus was born in the mountainous village of Navalcán to María Jiménez and Juan Sánchez Agustín in 1586.14 Recently, historian Eugenio Ayape Moriones located Isabel’s birth record in the Archivo Parroquial de Navalcán and discovered that Isabel was born in 1584, not 1586.15 Isabel’s parents were poor shepherds and devoted Catholics. Since Isabel’s mother could not afford the dowry necessary for Isabel to enter a convent, she chose to marry her off to a much older man.16 Isabel’s mother, recently widowed, also married Isabel against her will because she was under pressure from her sons who were eager to make commercial ties with a new brother-in-law as well as to find a suitable man who would support their sister Isabel.17 Isabel married Sebástian Jiménez in 1599. Isabel described her reaction to meeting her husband for the first time in her autobiography. She relates that she married at the age of fourteen to her “disgusto (disgust).”18 Her husband “no tiene dientes (does not have teeth)” and is an old man.19 At first Isabel despised having sex with her husband but after imagining that he was St. Joseph she was able to endure the process of procreation.20 During her marriage Isabel had “tres varones (three sons)” but none of her sons lived past the age of three. Isabel’s husband died in 1623. Despite having lived with her husband for twenty-four years, Isabel devoted only a few paragraphs of her lengthy autobiography to the retelling of this period of her life. Isabel did not mention the names of her deceased husband or their children nor did she devote much attention to the friendships and relationships that she had with her neighbors. Instead, Isabel ignored or minimized the importance of exterior relationships in her life and focused on her interior, or spiritual, relationship with God. In the text, Isabel and God are the main protagonists and other characters are barely mentioned unless they are people or beings integral

From Town Pariah to Venerable Madre

17

to Isabel’s becoming a woman religious such as angels, saints, confessors, bishops and nuns. Isabel’s autobiography also does not devote as much space to events and dialogue as it does to her feelings, thoughts, desires, visions and dreams. For example, when Isabel discussed the death of her sons, she devoted much more space to how she was coping with their death (with the help of her faith in God) than how they died or what they were like when they were alive.21 This is typical of spiritual autobiographies of the period: women religious, at the request of their confessors, were asked to write about their relationship with God rather than about their families and childhood. The first major event Isabel discussed in her autobiography described her decision to dedicate her life to God. After her husband and children died, Isabel chose not to remarry. Instead, she made the decision to become a woman religious and to begin the process of “leaving the world” or, in her own words, “iba dexando al mundo.” 22 Her choice caused her great pain as well as made her a pariah to her community. Her brothers wanted her to remarry but she ran away to avoid a forced arranged marriage. Isabel believed that she had to give up her voluntad or free will and obey God, even if that meant disobeying her brothers.23 At this point in the autobiography Isabel showcased the conflict that arose between her, her religious calling and her brothers. When she chose to pursue life as a lay woman religious, or beata, Isabel chose a life of homelessness and hardship yet it was a life in which she was no longer under her brothers’ control. Isabel’s decision to surrender her free will to God purchased freedom and a life in which her brothers (and, conceivably, a future husband) did not control her body or her actions. Book I also describes the growing hatred Isabel’s neighbors had for her. Because Isabel had visions of God and the saints which kept her immobile for hours, she had developed a reputation as the town loca, or madwoman.24 She served her community in her role as woman religious by healing the sick but when she was unsuccessful at healing one of the neighbors’ children, her neighbors decided to ostracize her from the community. One day when Isabel arrived at her local church to receive Communion, the church body asked her to leave. She refused.25 Isabel’s insistence on staying did not meet the approval of her confessor and caused a great disturbance in the church. At this time Isabel said the townspeople “ignoravan mi gran bien” (did not know of my great goodness) and thought “me avia traftornado el juizio todo confufion, y alboroto (I had transformed into a person of unsound mind and judgment during all of this confusion and fuss).”26 Isabel’s confessor then took her to a “medico del alma” (doctor of the soul) who then proceeded to perform

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Chapter One

an exorcism on her. Isabel’s spirit did not respond to the exorcisms at first, but after a while Isabel “tenia trastornado el juizio (gained back her sanity).”27 Her brothers did not recognize that Isabel was now free of demons or spirits. They chained Isabel up by her thumbs, molding her arms into a sign of the cross in an attempt to force the demons out of their sister’s body. They then confined her in isolation before deciding to send her to visit a priest in Arenas.28 After Isabel’s unsuccessful exorcism, her brothers sent her to the Convent of St. Augustine in the village of Arenas.29 Fray Pedro Sanchez heard Isabel’s confession. Isabel told him, “No necesitaba de conjuros (I did not need an exorcism).”30 She then explained to Fray Pedro that she did not need an exorcism because God had told her that He would exorcise her Himself and she did not need a priest to do so. According to Isabel, God spoke to her in a vision, reassuring her of her important role as His messenger on earth: “Yo obro en ti una de las grandes obras que he obrado defpues de mi Encarnacion (I am doing in you the greatest work that I have done since my Incarnation).”31 To support this claim, Isabel said next in the autobiography: “Todo el pueblo estava efcandalizado, aguardado el dia q me avian de sacar los efpiritus” (The whole town was scandalized, and looked forward to the day that I would be rid of these [evil] spirits).32 Looking back on this period of trial and tribulation in her life, Isabel legitimized her standing as a woman religious by claiming that the town would eventually come to realize her spiritual greatness. This passage illustrates that Isabel, though dependent on God, believed she was independent from male clerical authorities because she did not need them to free her of demon possession for that was something God was able to do. Spirit possession was a socially-recognized inoculation that gave Isabel a self-possession that even her brothers could not negate. Shortly after her exorcism, Isabel attempted to enter the Augustinian Recollect convent of San Juan Bautista in 1623 as a servant but the nuns rejected her due to her history of demon possession.33 After resigning herself to employment as a servant for the local nobility, Isabel was then able to find work as a lay aide to Discalced Franciscan monks. Isabel described in her autobiography how on her first day of work men in the community hurled stones covered with snow at her.34 Regardless of these men’s hostility, Isabel did not leave her place of employment and she gradually developed a good reputation in the town of Arenas by living a life of piety and austerity and by working hard for her employers. Despite the antagonism of the townspeople, Isabel was able to enter the convent of the Augustinian Recollects in Arenas in 1626. This nascent order, established by Madre Mariana de San José at the turn of the

From Town Pariah to Venerable Madre

19

seventeenth century, valued women who had visions and other mystical abilities.35 Isabel entered this convent as a servant nun. She attained this position with the help of Madre Inés del Santísimo Sacramento and an uncle of Inés. Inés was a choir nun at this convent, or a “woman religious who had full status in the convent.” According to Arenal and Schlau, “ordinarily, since a dowry and literacy were required [to become a choir nun] they came from privileged families.” Inés’ uncle “was the prelate responsible for issuing licenses to enter the convent.”36 Since Isabel had worked as a servant for this uncle in the past, he granted her the patronage needed to enter the convent. Much of the local community still did not accept Isabel as a woman religious despite her new position. It was only after years of servitude that her community began to see Isabel as a “venerable madre” of the Church. Isabel adopted a religious role in her community against the wishes of her brothers who wanted her to remarry and against the consensus of her neighbors who thought she was a loca, a madwoman.37 While she received support from religious clerics, she relied heavily on the higher authority she gained from God who spoke directly to her. The transformation of Isabel from a town pariah into a venerable madre of the Augustinian Recollect order did not happen in the three years that Isabel spent trying to convince clerics to let her become a nun. Even after Isabel entered the convent she spent years with nuns who believed she might be demon possessed and with “antagonistic” confessors who “either resented or disbelieved Christ’s interest in her.”38 It was only after “a change of confessors and her growing reputation as a visionary” that clerics and her community saw Isabel as a “venerable madre,” which was the first step in the process of becoming a saint.39 Isabel chose to leave the communities of Oropesa and Navalcán and form connections with priests, monks and noblemen in Arenas and her decision empowered her to change her status in society. Her legacy lives on in plays; her community glorifies her life story on the website of her hometown, www.navalcan.com. She has been the subject of books and articles published by the Augustinian Recollect order in Upper Castile during the last twenty years. In Spain, people remember Isabel today as a woman whose religious life enhanced the status of her community and the Church. Isabel’s life was significant precisely because this life, as told in her autobiography/biography, reflects the values and beliefs of the people of her community and her religious order.40 People accepted her extraordinary spiritual connection but they questioned the nature of the spirits that inhabited her. Many recognized that a woman who lost her own children could bring healing to other people. This daughter of shepherds

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Chapter One

acquired social power by rejecting a social norm of arranged marriage. Isabel was a woman who proclaimed her spiritual power by becoming a bride of Christ who belonged to a convent rather than to a second husband.

Notes 1

A confessor is a priest who is directly in charge of a person’s spiritual life and who hears his or her confessions of sin. 2 Isabel de Jésus, Vida de la Venerable Madre María Isabel de Jesús recoleta Augustina en el convento de San Juan Bautista de la villa de Arenas dictada por ella misma y añadido lo que falto de su dichosa muerte (Madrid: Viuda de Francisco Nieto, 1675); María de San José, Oaxaca Manuscript. Spanish Codex 39-41, 1703-1719, 4. (The life of the venerable mother Isabel of Jesus, an Augustinian Recollect of the convent of San Juan Bautista of the village of Arenas, dictated by Isabel herself and with an additional retelling after her death [by Francisco Ignacio].) 3 For statistical information on the prevalence of religious men and women and their writings in Early Modern Spain, see José Luis Sánchez Lora, Mujeres, Conventos, y Formas de la Religiosidad Barroca (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1988). 4 Isabel de Jésus, Vida, 399-470; Eugenio Ayape Moriones, Historia de dos monjas místicas del siglo XVII: sor Isabel de Jesús (1586-1684), sor Isabel de la Madre de Dios (1614-1687) (Yale: Salamanca, 1989); Jesús Gómez Jara, Isabel de la Madre de Dios (1614-1687), fundadora de los conventos de Serradilla y La Calzada de Oropesa (La Calzada de Oropesa (Toledo) Convento Agustinas Recoletas de La Calzada de Oropesa, 2006) and La madre Isabel de Jesús : Navalcán 1584-Arenas 1648 (Navalcán, Toledo: Ayuntamiento de Navalcán 2007); Los agustinos recoletos en la Provincia de San Nicholas, “Biografía de una fundadora recoleta del siglo XVII” (11-11-2006), http://www.agustinosrecoletos.org/noticias (accessed March 20, 2010). I was not able to access Gómez Jara’s works, since no copies outside of Spain of his works on Isabel de la Madre de Dios and Isabel de Jésus were available, but I was able to read reviews of these books via the Augustinian Recollect’s local website (Toledo). 5 Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450-1750 (Ithaca and New York: Cornell, 2005): 87. 6 Mary E. Giles, ed., “Introduction,” Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University, 1999), 9. 7 Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works, trans. Amanda Powell (Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 1989), 1. 8 Sánchez Lora, Mujeres, Conventos, y Formas, 384. 9 Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters, 1-3; Arenal, “The Convent as Catalyst for Autonomy: Two Hispanic Nuns of the Seventeenth Century,” in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley: University of California, 1983): 147-8. 10 Arenal and Schlau, Untold Sisters, 2. Nuns did not only write autobiographies,

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they also wrote letters, poetry, and plays. 11 Electa Arenal, “The Convent as Catalyst for Autonomy” in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idol, ed. Beth Miller, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 151. 12 Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hesse, “Introduction” in Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1993), 1. Also see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), and Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 13 Arenal and Schlau, Untold Sisters, 193. 14 Isabel de Jésus, Vida, 409. In 1570 the village of Navalcán had a population of 215 according to Eugenio Ayape Moriones, Historia de Dos Monjas Místicas del Siglo XVII: Sor Isabel de Jésus y Sor Isabel de la Madre de Dios (Yale: Salamanca, 1989), 15. 15 Moriones, Historia de Dos Monjas Místicas, 48-9. 16 Women had few occupational choices in early modern Spain and their choice was often limited to being either a housewife or a nun. While Haliczer in Between Exhalation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (2002), like most historians, made the claim that upper and middling classes sent their daughters to the convent because they could not afford the dowry required to have them marry well to men of their class, women in poverty did marry and convents often kept poor women out despite attempts by religious leaders such as St. Teresa of Avila to not turn women away because they lacked a dowry. Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 39. 17 Arenal and Schlau, 192, taken from Isabel de Jésus, Vida, 260-70. 18 Fourteen was not a typical age for a woman to get married. It seems that this marriage occurred because Isabel’s family was impoverished. Allyson M. Poska, who looked at marital life in Galicia in comparison with other communities throughout Spain, found that women throughout Spain tended to marry in their twenties. Allyson M. Poska, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: the Peasant of Galicia (New York: Oxford University, 2005). 19 Isabel de Jésus, Vida, 11-3. 20 Ibid. 21 One son died when a priest failed to cure him and I am not sure of the cause of death for the other two sons. 22 Ibid., 19-20. 23 Ibid., 35-8. 24 Ibid., 52. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 52-3.

22

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Ibid., 53-5. Ibid., 54. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 56. The Incarnation in Catholicism refers to when God took on the human form of Jesus. 32 Ibid, 54-5. 33 Arenal and Schlau, Untold Sisters, 193, taken from Isabel de Jésus, Vida, Book I. 34 Arenal, “The Convent as Catalyst for Autonomy,” 158-9; also see Isabel de Jésus, Vida, 125-26. 35 Moriones, Historia de dos Monjas, 23-35. 36 Arenal and Schlau, 194, also see Isabel de Jesus, Vida, 437. 37 Isabel de Jésus, Vida, 117-8, 50-1. 38 Arenal and Schlau, Untold Sisters, 193. 39 Ibid.; also see Peter Burke, “How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz 45-53 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984). 40 See www.navalcan.com; Moriones, Historia de dos monjas; Jesús Gómez Jara, Isabel de la Madre de Dios (1614-1687), fundadora de los conventos de Serradilla y La Calzada de Oropesa (La Calzada de Oropesa (Toledo): Convento Agustinas Recoletas de La Calzada de Oropesa, 2006) and La madre Isabel de Jesús: Navalcán 1584-Arenas 1648 (Navalcán, Toledo: Ayuntamiento de Navalcán, 2007); Los agustinos recoletos en la Provincia de San Nicholas, “Biografía de una fundadora recoleta del siglo XVII” (11-11-2006), http://www.agustinosre coletos.org/noticias. 29

CHAPTER TWO ALIDA SCHUYLER VAN RENSSELAER LIVINGSTON: FROM NEW NETHERLANDS DEPUTY HUSBAND TO NEW YORK FEME COVERT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES JENNIFER M. TOBIN

Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer Livingston was a lively and active Dutch wife for she was raised to be a helpmate and a partner within her marriage. The transformation from Dutch to English laws and cultural traditions in seventeenth century New York had a significant impact on the way women interacted with the private and public realm. Many colonial women were economically savvy and facilitated their family’s success within the colony: yet, after the turn of the eighteenth century English law became more and more entrenched and recognized by the colonists. This transformed the majority of women’s roles into cultural subservience under feme covert, a concept that prevailed in England in which a woman lost her individual legal identity as an adult upon marriage because at that moment she became a wife who was considered a juridical minor under the legal guardianship of husband. The transition from Dutch to English law made feme covert a legal and social reality in colonial New York. However, the continued increase in trade and money, as well as the emphasis on emulation of the English elite, made it a norm.1 Alida Livingston was an active participant in her husband Robert’s business prospects but as time went on the emphasis was on women to be mere housewives, not deputy husbands.2 Under Dutch rule New Netherland, renamed New York in 1664 when it was seized by the English, had no tradition of feme covert and women

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experienced a significantly higher degree of freedom and economic autonomy than their counterparts in English colonies. When Henry Hudson claimed New Netherland for Holland in 1609 as a commercial and trading center, it was hoped by the Dutch East India Company that the established colony would prosper. As the principal settlement at the tip of Manhattan Island, New Amsterdam became a thriving port of trade but it never reached the economic heights expected by the Dutch.3 By the end of the 1620s only two hundred seventy immigrants claimed New Netherland as their home. Even with the settlement bonuses and enticements offered to prospective settlers, there were no push factors that made people in Holland wish to leave their prosperous country. Holland was the trading and commercial center of the world at the time with low unemployment and a religiously diverse and tolerant culture. For the fledgling colony in the New World to survive, the Dutch were forced to reach out to less satisfied men and women from other countries, most notably the Germans and the English.4 When New Netherland eventually became an English colony, it was a remarkably diverse region composed of a wide array of colonists from different countries and people who practiced a variety of skills and religions. Holland and New Netherland were tolerant of other religions, an uncommon practice in the colonial era. There were Presbyterians, Lutherans, Quakers and Anglicans worshipping in the colony along with those who attended the Dutch Reformed Church. Alongside the Dutch, Germans and English were men and women from Sweden, France and Africa. The colony was also economically varied and boasted three primary profit-makers (merchants, fur traders, and landowners) who were supported by a wide range of small merchants, entrepreneurs and artisancraftsmen.5 By 1664 over nine thousand colonists made New Netherland a highly functioning and profitable colony. In New Netherland, women found they were able to claim an individual, civil identity even after marriage though not all women took advantage of this opportunity.6 The Dutch legal system was based on the sixth-century Justinian Code which viewed women and marriage as a partnership between two equal and consenting adults. English law differed in that it viewed women as wholly dependent upon their husbands, both legally and economically. In a marriage under Dutch law both parties were accountable for the economic success or failure of the marriage.7 The law in New Netherland was strikingly similar to the laws of Holland. A woman had three options available to her when she married in New Netherland. She could live within the marriage as manus, by

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accepting status as a minor within the marriage with her husband acting as her legal and rightful guardian. This was similar to the English feme covert. When a woman married under the tenets of manus she gave up all legal rights and her husband acted in her stead in legal matters.8 The second choice a woman had in Holland and in New Netherland was to make a legal contract with her spouse before the marriage to retain economic and legal independence once married. With such a contract a woman retained control of her property and did not share it with her husband.9 The third option was available only to New Netherland women and not their counterparts in the Netherlands. Even if a New Netherland woman married under the understanding of manus, she could renounce it after marriage. This happened less frequently than either manus or antenuptial agreements. Either way a woman maintained the right to retain her own surname.10 Dutch law was remarkable because both the man and the woman had equal rights under the law to any property and wealth either brought to the marriage or accumulated during the course of the marriage. This practice was reinforced through the ability of the couple to write joint wills. The widow or widower was automatically entitled to half the estate unlike the English custom where, at the death of a husband, the bulk of the estate went to the eldest son while the wife received a dower portion, typically a third. The house and fields went to the son who might, or might not, make room for his mother and see that she was properly cared for. Many English husbands specified in their wills that their wives had to be cared for and permitted access to the cooking fire. Under the Dutch, widows found themselves with full executor rights of their husband’s property with the ability to administer it as she wished.11 Furthermore, when parents died in New Netherlands, women inherited property equally along with their male siblings. In many wills it was stipulated that the daughters as well as the sons were to receive an education to prepare them to earn a living. Both sons and daughters were expected to perform as contributing members of the family and these contributions were often economic in nature.12 Even within the marriage, women were permitted to act as buyers of trade or shop goods independently or in conjunction with husbands. They could own their own businesses and earn incomes separately from that of their husband, all without their husband’s permission. Women in New Netherland owned land in their own name and regularly managed estates either completely on their own or in conjunction with their spouse. They could enter into contracts and accrue debt, be sued and bring their own

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cases to court. In other words, they had an economic and legal identity separate from that of their husbands.13 The English gained permanent control of New York in 1674 through the Treaty of Westminster at the end of the Third Dutch War. With this the economic independence that New Netherland women previously enjoyed slowly eroded and was eventually replaced with the English standard of feme covert despite the fact that women managed to continue trading on their own for several decades after the conquest. While English law slowly supplanted Dutch law, women’s economic rights declined as did their ability to make a will, enter into contracts and own property in their own right. Even so, those women who were traders in the former New Netherland found ingenious ways to maneuver around such obstacles into the late seventeenth and very early eighteenth century, mainly by having their husbands act as figureheads in their trading enterprises.14 English law was not immediately imposed after the 1664 conquest. Instead the English implemented Calvin’s Case (1608) at first. Calvin’s Case explored, for the first time, the philosophical argument that a person born in a particular place received citizenship of that locale. The case revolved around whether a person born in Scotland could be considered an English subject after Scottish King James VI claimed the English throne in 1603. It was determined they would and further it was applied to captured Christian nations where it was decided to leave the laws of said country intact. Therefore, since Dutch law was left in place but under English law, both in custom and officially, women slowly began to loose their independent status and became subjugated to their husbands.15 Hard, legal evidence exists to support the conclusion that the changes in the law had a negative influence on women’s economic status and independence in the thirty-six years after English law was instituted in both New Amsterdam and Albany, its sister city to the north on the Hudson River. The numbers of women engaging in trade or as proprietors or in service jobs declined severely, the frequency of women in court either as plaintiff or as defendant decreased, the numbers of women making wills jointly with their husbands dropped, and the numbers of women inheriting real property plunged.16

In New York, after English law was instituted and English cultural norms enforced, the number of female entrepreneurs, traders, and women involved in public roles fell dramatically. From 1654 to 1664 there were at least forty-six registered female traders in Albany but by 1695-1700 there were none. In Manhattan in 1653-63 there were one hundred thirty-four

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female traders but that number fell dramatically by 1674 when there were only forty-three. The number of women in service jobs fell in both areas after English law was instituted, from thirteen in 1654-64 to only three by 1700 in Albany and from fifty in 1653-63 to seventeen in Manhattan. The number of court cases in which women appeared as plaintiffs tapered off during the second half of the seventeenth century, dropping from one hundred eighty-four in 1653-57 to fifty-five in 1673-4.17 The conversion from Dutch law to English common law profoundly affected women’s economic and legal status within the New York colony. Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer Livingston was an active trader. She oversaw a number of Robert Livingston’s commercial interests as he became more and more entrenched in the politics of the colony. Her life demonstrates the changing dynamics of the ability of women to participate in the world of trade and economic ventures during the conversion from Dutch to English law. As the colony accepted English law, the seats of power shifted from the rural manors, where Alida’s power was concentrated, to New York City, the center of government. Alida, so involved in the running of the manor and managing its economic pursuits, was limited by the transition to feme covert and the movement of power to the city. Still, the management of the manor remained in Alida’s capable hands during Robert’s continual absences.18 Alida was born February 28, 1656, and was one of ten children whose parents emigrated from Amsterdam, Holland. Her father, Philip Peterse Schuyler, supported his large family as a tradesman, a landowner and ultimately as an English colonial officer. Thus the Schuylers were one of the better-known and wealthiest colonial families in New York colony.19 Alida may have inherited Schuyler’s ambition or studied his business habits quite intensely for in 1675 Alida married her first husband, Nicholas Van Rensselaer, the new minister of the Dutch Church at Albany and director of the prosperous 500,000 acre Rensselaerswyck estate. Even though Alida was only nineteen while Rensselaer was over twice her age, Hudson River Valley colonial tradition propelled the young Alida into the position of co-director of one of the largest estates in North America. Alida’s was a most opportune marriage to a deeply religious man who claimed to have “visions” from time to time that foretold the future. Rensselaer had little interest in entrepreneurship or economic ventures, to the great disappointment of his family. Little is known of this first marriage, only that a conspiracy among the clergy of the colony resulted in his dismissal from his ecclesiastical post in Albany and he died a year later in 1677.20

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Scarcely a year later, childless widow Alida struck another opportune marriage to the former secretary of Rensselaerswyck, Robert Livingston. Now a fledging but successful merchant in the colony, Robert Livingston was a Scottish immigrant who arrived in the colony at age nine with his father. He worked steadily from the time he was a young adult to make his mark in the world of trade. While he was economically successful, he recognized the importance of family and connections. For someone with few connections and with a healthy dose of ambition, the unsettled nature of Albany was perfect. His fluency in both Dutch and English made him a valuable commodity to the colonial governors and tradespeople alike. Livingston quickly rose to prominence within the colony, acting in whatever stead was asked of him by the English governors including as secretary of Indian Affairs. Since fur pelts trapped and prepared by Native Americans were primary exports of the Hudson River Valley, this allowed him to interact and make connections with those outside the community and gave him access to land.21 Soon after the two were wed, Alida and Robert Livingston attempted to claim the Rensselaerswyck estate. Robert reclaimed monies owed to him by his former employer. Livingston also argued that, since Alida and Rensselaer had no children, the estate should go to Alida. While Alida and Rensselaer were married under Dutch law, the colony was now under English law and therefore Alida could not inherit the estate under her own name due to her gender. She could not even file the petition to challenge the inheritance. Under feme covert it was legally Robert’s responsibility as the patriarch of the family to do so. After a six-year battle, Alida Schuyler van Rensselaer and Robert Livingston’s claim to Rensselaerswyck’s 500,000 acres was denied. A short time later, to help smooth the sting of his failed claim on Rensselaerswyck, Governor Thomas Dongan granted Livingston the patent for 2,600 acres of Livingston Manor which eventually comprised 160,000 acres on the eastern side of the Hudson River. Robert received full rights and obligations as lord of the medieval-styled estate in that he was responsible for the improvements, major equipment needed by the manor’s farmers and the administration of laws and justice on the estate. The manor could also elect a representative to the colonial assembly and it was usually the manor lord.22 Alida was once again the lady of a manor. Philip Schuyler’s daughter Alida operated as a true Dutch colonial partner-wife in the Livingston family business during her near half-century of marriage, despite the legal turnover from Dutch to English law within the colony. In the new culture she was what was deemed a “deputy husband” under English common law, but the same common law created

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economic hindrances for her because legally she was not independent. As English law replaced Dutch law and traditions, Alida continued to fulfill her duties as helpmate, as described by the Christian minister and author John Bunyan that “in her husband’s absence, she is wife and deputyhusband, which makes her double her files of diligence.”23 While Robert was traveling throughout the colony building his business and political career, Alida was at home in Albany or at the manor, overseeing their business interests, managing their estate holdings, and seeing to their affairs in general. Furthermore, she was responsible for all the domestic duties including bearing and raising the children and running the household. Alida increasingly took responsibility for the management of their financial affairs, collecting rents from tenants and selling for profit what the estates produced.24 For example, Alida and Robert came across a new and appealing financial opportunity in the years following Leisler’s Rebellion (1689). Robert Livingston, a friend of Governor Nicholson, was forced into exile when Leisler’s faction seized control of the colony. Alida and the children joined him to ride out the rebellion. Livingston was a prime target of the Leislerian faction since he was related through his marriage to Alida to one of the key anti-Leislerian leaders, Stephanus Van Cortlandt. After the rebellion was over and Jacob Leisler executed, newly arrived Governor Henry Sloughter appointed Robert victualer of all British troops in Albany and New York with compensation at a flat rate per soldier. Since English law did not permit women to enter into contracts, the contract was in Robert’s name. However, it fell to Alida as estate manager to oversee the fulfillment of the contract.25 Alida eventually found a legal loophole to free herself from the legal hindrances of English law that limited her business activities. Over the next several years, Robert was constantly traveling throughout New York, New England and abroad to England. When he was gone, Alida worked diligently to extend their holdings and trade interests. Legally, she had to obtain a power of attorney to act on his behalf. Even though they were married under Dutch law, they now abided by English law and the official tenets of feme covert. As the two became one in marriage, the wife’s identity, economically and politically, became submerged under the patriarchal rule of her husband.26 Alida’s signature on a contract now mattered because of the power of attorney. Shortly after Robert returned from England in 1696 with newly forged political connections and, on the more practical side, a variety of goods for Alida to sell, he was appointed to the Governor’s Council. This required him to purchase a house in New York City. In the years to come, this

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house served as the focal point for the Livingstons’ trade interests. Alida sent saleable goods from the manor and Robert shipped them to their local and international destinations. Robert’s political appointments continued to serve Alida’s business interests. When Robert was in New York, Alida made nearly all of the major decisions regarding their finances although they were technically and legally Robert’s responsibility. Alida decided what to purchase and what to sell, and negotiated with Native Americans in the fur trade. She sent Robert bear, deer and beaver pelts, lumber, wheat and other farm produce. In return, Robert sent her more refined items for resale such as sugar, silk and tobacco. Over the years Alida experimented with a variety of goods to sell, constantly looking for the best profit. She also oversaw the expansion and building of profitable manor ventures like a grist mill and a brewery.27 Alida Schuyler van Rensselaer Livingston refused to relinquish her business activities that her social position as a colonial partner/wife guaranteed her under Dutch marriage law and as a result she was fully involved in overseeing all manorial economic and trade ventures, not just the palatines. None of these tasks, according to English law, were her responsibility. The transition to English law was a hindrance because she could not legally enter into contracts on her own or without her husband’s permission. This often left Alida in a precarious position, forced to depend upon her husband in certain areas of trading and manor business. Alida was de facto in full control of the finances but de jure legally obligated to tell Robert how they should be handled. When Robert received owed monies from the government, she wrote to him that he “must use your money now to pay off your debts in England.”28 By this time, Alida had shrewdly expanded their trade interest into a wide variety of areas, from spices and rum, to tea and white gloves, even to thread and lace.29 Robert, who was not as savvy in business as his wife or as involved in their everyday affairs, often made critical errors that hurt the family. He occasionally hesitated too long to purchase goods, missing the chance of a good price for which Alida scolded him. He often forgot to send the small sloop to collect trade goods from Alida. Once, in an effort to relieve Alida’s burden, he bought her several slaves, not realizing they added to the problem. Alida was responsible for getting the materials necessary for operations on the manor to function such as obtaining a required anvil for the blacksmith. She would send the requests to Robert who often forgot to locate the goods. Robert also tended to forget to send needed craftsmen for repairs around the manor.30 Apparently, Alida was so competent and reliable regarding the family’s business matters that Robert felt that he could tend to other interests and not mind the manor’s affairs.

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Under feme covert married women could, when necessary, participate in concrete economic activities. This was acceptable behavior when the activities in question were performed as a service to the family. It would be unreasonable to assume women did not take part in any economic activity since colonial families before the Industrial Revolution were the basic economic unit. As Gunderson and Gampel state, married women participated in economic endeavors in three key ways, as representatives for absent husbands, as managers of family businesses when husbands were present, and as operators of their own businesses.

Alida’s role was the most commonly needed and accepted. Since Robert was often absent from the manor fulfilling political duties in New York, it was acceptable, even under English strictures, for her to stand in his stead as deputy husband when absolutely necessary. It was significantly more difficult now that the colony was under English rule.31 Economic contributions made by women like Alida were both honored and necessary in the seventeenth century. As the eighteenth century progressed, it became increasingly more difficult for women to maneuver and conduct businesses in a legal system that regarded them as having no more, and in some cases even less, legal rights than children.32 As the social more of feme covert replaced Dutch colonial traditions, women with Alida’s social standing were expected to act less as helpmates or deputy husbands and more as gentlewomen. This reduced women’s participation in the public realm. The blurred lines of the seventeenth century, when the land was on the frontier of England’s zone of influence and the emphasis was on survival during the transition from Dutch to English law, permitted women like Alida Livingston to act independently in trade. During the eighteenth century, though, the public and private realm began to separate and strict rules for the passive and demure behavior and social etiquette of genteel women of the aristocracy were established.33 While one hundred six women were still involved in overseas endeavors at the time, and fifteen managed to stay afloat as late as 1770, many female merchants led traditional lives and their participation in the trading ventures were often limited. Under English law the scope of their participation narrowed and they were frequently constrained to the role of junior partners in their husband’s greater schemes. In other words, they were reduced from independent entrepreneurs capable of acting on their own to helpmates in the husband’s work.34 English law did permit women to be declared feme sole traders, or “women on their own,” in very rare cases that required special circumstances. While the colonies formally followed the social strictures

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placed upon women by feme covert, in the beginning the practice was often ignored and women simply went about their business often to their husbands’ benefit. It was much easier to ignore the new laws than to stop their activities during the transition phase. As the eighteenth century progressed that began to change.35 Historian Cynthia Kierner describes the transformation: By midcentury….these informal rights were increasingly disregarded by courts, lawyers, and husbands alike….economic development enabled the emerging colonial gentry to accept the English notion of the ornamental gentlewoman—and at the same time, sons and brothers could fill women’s vacated positions in the family business and a rising class of professional lawyers could render unnecessary the wife’s power of attorney.36

Women’s position as equal partners in family trading affairs and legal matters was no longer needed or wanted. As the colony transitioned from Dutch to English rule, the majority of women in colonial New York found themselves bound by subservience in three key ways: by their gender, as colonists and as colonists in a conquered colony. Alida Schyler van Rennsalaer Livingston refused to surrender her Dutch colonial economic rights. While the scale of her trade ventures was not the norm for women in colonial New York, she was not the only female entrepreneur. Other women of her rank and position, including Maria Van Rensselaer and Margaret Hoardenbroeck, also acted as traders and managers for their families’ international businesses. The changeover from Dutch to English law drastically affected and limited how women participated in the public realm. It would take the nineteenth century Domesticity revolution to completely hide such deputy husbands.37

Notes 1 Elizabeth Evans, Weathering the Storm: Women of the American Revolution (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 2-3; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986), 37. Speech made by Christopher Gadsden reprinted in Kerber entitled, “To the Planters, Mechanics, and Freeholders of the Province of South Carolina, No Ways Concerned in the Importation of British Manufacturers” (1769). The Consumer Revolution was a period in England where the ability to consume rose drastically. This occurred alongside the Industrial Revolution and was uniquely characterized by the general public’s ability to consume, the industry of the eighteenth century and the contributions of raw and unfinished goods by the colonies. The far-reaching impacts and ramifications of feme covert were complex for colonial and revolutionary women. This cultural institution invaded the lives of

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the colonists and their legal system, both before and after the Revolutionary War. Feme covert determined who a woman married, how she was able to participate in society and in turn how society perceived her. It dictated what legal options were available to her if she wished to separate or divorce, and what rights she had in regard to property before, during and after a marriage. 2 Carol Berkin, First Generations: Women in Colonial America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 17, 27, 46; Linda Briggs Biemer, Women and Property in Colonial New York: The Transition From Dutch to English Law, 1643-1727 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983), 10; Letter from the Directors to Stuyvesant, 25 April 1659, in Berthold Fernow, ed., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New York (hereafter DRCHNY) (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons & Company, 1883), 1: 439; Berthold Fernow, ed., The Records of New Amsterdam: 1653-1674 (hereafter RNA) (The City of New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1897), 1:113-273; R. W. Lee, An Introduction to RomanDutch Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). While New England tended to follow the model of a strong, patriarchal family structure, New Yorkers had a different outlook due to its Dutch heritage. Most white women in New England, the Chesapeake, and in the southern colonies submitted to their husbands’ oversight and rule. When necessary, women worked alongside their husbands in the family business. New England’s patriarchy was further reinforced by its strict enforcement of Puritan beliefs and practices. In New York, Dutch Calvinism also stressed a subservient role for women but this was counterbalanced by Dutch law. 3 Berkin, 82-3; Jean Ashton, “The Papers of John Jay, 1745-1829,” [November 24, 2004] Columbia University; available from . 4 Berkin, 83-4. 5 Song Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York, Manorial Society, 1664-1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 76-9; Lawrence H. Leder, Robert Livingston, 1654-1728 and the Politics of Colonial New York (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 248-9; Mary Lou Lustig, Robert Hunter, 1666-1734: New York’s Augustan Statesman (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1983), 71-3. 6 Berkins, 83-5. 7 Berkins, 84; Biemer, 10, 3-5; Lee, 63-79; A. J. F. Van Laer, ed., Minutes of the Court of Albany, Rensselaerswyck and Schenectady, 1675-1680, (Albany: The University of the State of New York, 1928), 2:13-16. The Dutch West India Company was told to have their magistrates and colonists govern as if they were in their homeland. To help them in this endeavor, the Dutch West India Company sent out a booklet used by justices in Amsterdam, “Ordinances and Code of Procedure before the Courts of the City of Amsterdam.” This booklet dealt specifically with the legal rights of women within a marriage and on their own. 8 Biemer, 3; Lee, 63-79; “Letter from the Directors to Stuyvesant,” 25 April 1659, DRCHNY, 14; “Reference to Fatherland,” 8 September 1653 and 14 December 1654, RNA, 1:113-273, 439; E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674 (hereafter LONN) (New York: Weed, Parsons & Company,

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1868), iii; Griswold Van Rensselaer, History of the City of New York During the Seventeenth Century (New York: 2002), 1: 42, 426, 2: 153. 9 Biemer, 3; Lee, 63-79; LONN, iii; “Letter from the Directors to Stuyvesant,” 25 April 1659, DRCHNY, 14. “Reference to Fatherland,” 8 September 1653 and 14 December 1654, RNA, 1:113-273, 439; Rensselaer, 1: 42, 426, 2: 153. 10 Ibid. 11 Berkins, 84; Biemer, 3-5 10; Joan R. Gundersen and Gwen Victor Gampel, “Married Women’s Legal Status in Eighteenth-Century New York and Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 39, no. 1 (Jan. 1982): 118; LONN, iii; Lee, 63-79; Rensselaer, 1: 42, 426, 2: 153; A. J. F. Van Laer and Jonathan Van Laer, ed., Early Records of the City and County of Albany and County of Rensselaerswyck: Mortgages 1658-1660, Wills 1681-1765 and Notarial Papers (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1918-1919), III, IV; Van Laer, ed., Minutes of the Court of Albany, Rensselaerswyck and Schenectady, 1675-1680, (hereafter MCARS)2: 13-16; A. J. F. Van Laer, ed., Minutes of the Court of Albany, Rensselaerswyck and Schenectady, 1680-1685, (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1932), 3: 219-20, 285, 324-6, 355-6, 359-61, 439, 454, 563, 598-600, 606-8. 12 Biemer, 3-5; DRCHNY, 14: 439; Berthold Fernow, ed., The Minutes of the Orphanmasters of New Amsterdam, 1655-63 (New York: Kessinger Publishing, LLC., 2007), I: 48, 50, 65, 170-1, 268, 315, IV: 10, 139, VI: 86, 163; Gundersen and Gampel, 132; Lee, 71, 422-24; E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., “Charles II’s Private Instructions to Nicolls,” 23 April 1664, in Documentary History of New York (New York: Weed, Parsons & Company, 1849), 3: 60; LONN, iii.; Rensselaer, 1: 42, 426, 2: 153.; MCARS, 2:13-16. 13 Berkins, 84-6; Biemer, 3, 4, 10; RNA, 1-49; Gundersen and Gampel, 132; Kim, 3-20; Lee, 63-79; MCARS, 2: 13-16. 14 Gundersen and Gampel, 131; Cynthia A. Kierner, “From Entrepreneurs to Ornaments: The Livingston Women, 1679-1790,” in The Livingston Legacy: Three Centuries of American History, ed. Richard T. Wiles, (Taconic Region: Bard College, 1987), 339-40. 15 Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979), 169, 176, 180; Biemer, 6-7, 11; Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 16 November 1680, translated in Linda Biemer, ed., “Business Letters of Alida Schuyler Livingston, 1680-1726,” NY History 63 (1982): 188, 184-5; Zechariah Chafee, Jr., “Colonial Courts and the Common Law,” in Essays in the History of Early American Law, ed. David H. Flaherty (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 69-78; Julius Goebel, Jr. “King’s Law and Local Custom in Seventeenth Century New England,” in Essays in the History of Early American Law, ed. David H. Flaherty (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 249; John Hawarde, Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata: 1593-1609, ed. William P. Baildon (London: Privatley printed, 1894), 366, 447; Cynthia A. Kierner, Traders and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, 1675-1790 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 19-20; Leder, 22-4; Charles Z. Lincoln, William Johnson

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and A. J. Northup, ed., The Colonial Laws of New York From the Year 1664 to 1749, Vol. 1: 1664-1719 (Albany: Lawbook Exchange, 1894/2006), x-xi; DRCHNY 2: 250-53, 3: 260, 416, 4: 1154; Richard B. Morris, Select Cases of the Mayor’s Court of New York City, 1674-1784 (American Historical Association, 1935), Introduction; Joseph H. Smith and Thomas G. Barnes, The English Legal System: Carryover to the Colonies (Los Angeles, 1975), 4.; James, Duke of York, was in charge of the colony, a gift from King Charles II. He quickly set about imposing “the Duke’s Laws,” a series of legal statutes fashioned after the New England codes found throughout other English colonies in the New World. This change in law reduced the position of women within the colony. 16 Biemer, 7; Chafee, 69-78; Morris, Introduction. 17 Biemer, 5, 7-8. Service jobs included such jobs as that of “tapsters, brewers, launderers, bakers…”; Lincoln, 1:9, 32, 114; Goebel, 249; Lee, 66-7; Smith and Barnes, 4. 18 Biemer, 59; Martha J. Lamb and Mrs. Burton Harrison, History of the City of New York: Its Origin, Rise and Progress, (New York: The A. S. Barnes Company, 1877), 1: 153; George H. Schuyler, Colonial New York: Philip Schuyler and His Family (New York, 1885), 1: 99, 100, 167, 2: 306.; A. J. F. Van Laer, ed., Correspondence of Maria Van Rensselaer, 1669-1689, (hereafter CMVR) vol. 1 and 2 (Albany: The University of the State of New York, 1935), 4. 19 Biemer, 59-61, 62-3; Lamb and Harrison, 1:153; Schuyler, 1:99, 100, 108, 112, 118-120, 162, 167, 206, 2: 306; CMVR, 4. 20 Biemer, 60-1; O’Callaghan, ed., in DHNY; Schuyler, 1:108, 162, 112, 118-20, 206, 245-6, 99-123, 210, 243; O’Callaghan, ed., in DHNY, 3: 725, 611-15, 617-27, 690-702. 21 Alida often wrote Robert several times a day and referred to him affectionately throughout her letters and vice versa. See the following for examples. Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 16 November 1680, Biemer, ed., in Business Letters, 188, Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 7 April 1692, Ibid., 189; Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 2 September 1717, Ibid., 203. She wrote of how she was “sad having to miss [his] company” and hoped he arrived safely and on time to his destination. Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 20 March 1698, Biemer, ed., in Business Letters, 191; Kierner, Traders and Gentlefolk, 13-16, 24; Leder, 15-16; “Duke of Yorks Instructions to Andros,” 1 July 1674, DRCHNY, 3:216-19; “Proclamation of Governor Andros”, 31 October 1674, Ibid., 3:227; “Charles II’s Private Instructions to Nicolls,” 23 April 1664, Ibid., DRCHNY, 3:60; Van Laer, Early Records, III: 441-42. 22 Biemer, 61-3; DHNY, III: 689-91, 695, 696; Kierner, From Entrepreneurs to Ornaments, 10, 338. Alida’s stake to the Rensselaerswyck patroonship was challenged in court, but eventually dropped and Alida was awarded a several thousand-acre patent by Governor Dongan to let the matter of Rensselaerswyck go. Kim, 39, 98-9; Lee, 63-7, 420; CMVR, 100, 115, 125-128, 168-9; MCARS, 2: 22526. 23 John Bunyan, Christian Behavior—Being the Fruits of True Christianity: Teachings husbands, wives, parents, children, masters, servants, etc…how to walk

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so as to please God. www.projectgutenberg.org, 2003-2008, Accessed May 13, 2009, Project Gutenberg Library Archive Foundation. 24 Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 24 October 1682, Biemer, ed., in Business Letters, 188; Leisler to Major Gold, 2 June 1689, DHNY, 2:14-15; David Lovejoy, Glorious Revolution in America (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers), 73-83.; DRCHNY, 2:2268; Ulrich, 36-7. Livelihoods still transmitted from father to son. 25 Biemer, 66; Schuyler, 1: 247; Edwin Brockholst Livingston, The Livingstons of Livingston Manor (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1910), 66-8; DHNY, II: 88, 92-3, 99-100, 102, 103, 119; DRCHNY, 3: 302-15, 610, 634, 649, 784-5, 802. 26 Biemer, 66; Livingston, 66-8; DRCHNY, 3: 784-5, 802; Schuyler, 1: 247. 27 Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 7 April 1692, Biemer, ed., in Business Letters, 189-90; Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston,” 20 March 1698, Ibid., 191; Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 19 May 1698, Ibid., 192.; Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 24 June 1698, Ibid., 192-3; Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 12 September 1698, Ibid., 194-5; Kierner, Traders and Gentlefolk, 48; Lamb and Harrison, 2: 418, 1: 424-5; Leder, 109-10; Schuyler, 1: 275; “Proceedings of the Lords of Trade concerning Mr. Livingston’s Petition, &c.,” 28 August 1695, DRCHNY, 4: 127-41; DRCHNY, 3:630-32, 638-9, 644-51, 653-5.; “Messrs. Perry, Keill & Dupre to the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations”, 11 December 1711, DRCHNY, 5: 290-2. 28 Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston,” 12 September 1717, Biemer, ed., in Business Letters, 203-4; Lincoln, 1: 959. 29 Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 23 June 1722, Biemer, ed., in Business Letters, 205-6; Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 23 June 1722, Ibid., 205-7.; Lincoln, 1: 959. 30 Alida Livingston to Robert Livingston, 3 August 1717, Biemer, ed., in Business Letters, 202-3; Biemer, 70, 72; Ulrich, 40; DHNY, 3:683, 685-6.; Patent for Livingston Manor, 1 October 1715, DHNY, 3: 690-702. 31 Gundersen and Gampel, 129. 32 Marylynn Salmon, “The Legal Status of Women in Early America: A Reappraisal,” Law and History Review 1st ser., 1, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 134; Ulrich, 36. 33 Fernow, ed., in Minutes of New Amsterdam, I:48, 50, 65, 170-1, 268, 315, 316, IV:10, 139, VI: 86, 163; Gundersen and Gampel, 130, 132; Ulrich, 37-9; Lee, 71, 422-424; Alice Morse Earle, Colonial Days in Old New York (New York, 1896), 55. 34 Kierner, From Entrepreneurs to Ornaments, 340-41; Cotton Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, (Cambridge, 1692), 101; Laurel Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 36. 35 Kierner, From Entrepreneurs to Ornaments, 341; Gundersen and Gampel, 131. 36 Kierner, From Entrepreneurs to Ornaments, 341. 37 Biemer, 75-6; Kierner, From Entrepreneurs to Ornaments, 341; Biemer, 6, 8; Goebel, 84; Lee, 66-7; DRCHNY, 2:250-53; Ulrich, 37, 39; Lincoln, x-xi, 1:9, 32, 11.

CHAPTER THREE DEPLOYING WIVES WITH THE REGIMENT: WOMEN’S RIGHTS AT THE RESTORATION GARRISONS OF TANGIER AND GIBRALTAR, 1662-1741 MARSHA R. ROBINSON

In 1657 General Blake proposed “a castle in the straights [sic] mouth which the Portugals have called Tangar.” England could capture Tangier with just a hundred men, according to Blake, whereas the estimate for taking Gibraltar was four or five thousand.1 England desperately needed a military base at the entrance to the Mediterranean in order to protect its fledgling international mercantile interests. The design for Tangier called for “a naval base and a centre for commerce…[and] an extensive English colony in Africa.”2 The effort failed. Initially, British wives and children were included in plans for Tangier colony to motivate merchants to relocate while other British women were imported to work directly for the garrison or to distract British soldiers and sailors from committing sex crimes against local women.3 This pattern was repeated at Gibraltar Garrison the following century. While some men wrote about British women to suit their own political agendas, the evidence reviewed for this essay, especially the garrison courts martial record, reveal that these British women were far from being passive patriarchal objects. British women brought their own cases to the courts martial to defend their property rights. The fact that women are mentioned in garrison records underscores the importance of their work to the military enterprise. British women with this sense of commercial and legal empowerment contributed to the fusion of commercial and military interests in an unstoppable combination that eventually built the first British global empire.

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Battlefields and Female Body-fields Britain’s modern Mediterranean empire was conceived in the bridal chamber of Catherine of Braganza and Charles II. Tangier, as Charles pointed out, was the way to British expansion in North Africa, the Far East and South America and he could acquire it as dowry without a single cannon shot. This may have convinced many Protestants in Parliament to approve Charles’ marriage to the Catholic Portuguese. Tangier harbor had to be enhanced with an artificial jetty or mole, a very expensive project. Charles II bore the majority of this expense out of his personal funds in addition to the cost of maintaining the garrison defenses against the Moroccans who clearly wanted to evict the Europeans from Moroccan soil. As for the portion of costs contributed by Parliament, budgetary debates degraded to feuds between factions suspicious of each other’s Catholic, Anglican and Puritan inclinations. The slander sheets of the day argued that there were too many Catholics at Tangier and in the Navy, accusing them of being immoral. Nevertheless, England gained valuable bureaucratic experience in maintaining overseas bases to protect commercial interests. Despite Charles’ dreams and nearly two decades of his personal and state investment in its maintenance, Tangier’s potential profitability was never reached.4 In 1683, the British destroyed the forts and harbor improvements.5 By the turn of the eighteenth century, the need for a naval base at the Strait of Gibraltar was no less urgent. In 1702 Britain attacked Cadiz, Spain. Catholicism had an opposite effect on the soldiers who brought the Union Jack into the strait this time. Whereas Kirke’s Lambs were infamous ravaging soldiers who suppressed remnants of Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1685 and were rumored to be “dreaded papists” because of their affiliation as Queen Catherine’s regiment, the badge of infamy crossed the religious divide in 1702 when it was the Protestant British soldier along with his Dutch comrades who committed atrocities against Catholic Spanish women. There is no way to diminish the reporting of “the barbarous behavior of the British troops at Cadiz.” One author softened the war crimes against women as one type among many, including “drunkenness, raping, looting and sacrilege,” activities which damaged England’s “reputation throughout Europe and inflamed Andalusian resistance.”6 In 1704, the British Navy was dispatched to obtain a base on the Mediterranean coast of Spain and women suffered once more. With Cadiz a failed effort, Admiral Rooke and Prince Hesse-Darmstadt turned their guns on Gibraltar. The decisive battles took place on August 1-2, 1704.

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Exactly what happened at that landing is unclear in the literature. Spanish Governor Salinas maintained the Gibraltar garrison as long as he could. He was not able to protect all of the town’s civilians, especially many of its women. Women and children had been evacuated from the town at the beginning of the bombardment and shepherded by priests to the shrine…All retreat to the town was now cut off for the women.

Salinas, who must have been aware of the Cadiz incident, inquired about the safety of the town’s women now trapped in British-controlled land, asking “that the [town’s] women in his possession might be kept from the rudeness of the sailors and to release them.” Admiral Byng replied that no rapes had occurred.7 Scholars disagree on the intensity of the crimes against women during the Gibraltar conquest. Hills believed that the soldiers must have been diverted by plunder. Andrews and Bradford disagreed. Bradford carefully reminded his audience that in 1704 There was no Geneva Convention in those days, no concept of the rights of civilians, or of the protection of private or public property. Murder, rapine and loot was the order of the day.

Bradford blamed this ill treatment of women on class issues. Soldiers and sailors alike were recruited from the scum of society. The capture of a city provided the opportunity for men to make up for their privations and inadequate pay. Gibraltar was no exception.

Without going into much detail, Bradford recalled the sex-crimes committed at Cadiz in 1702 with the simple reason that it was “all the more violent because it was the abode of the hated ‘Papists’.”8 Andrews avoided blaming the British for these crimes. He deftly used the Spanish point of view to describe the carnage, referring to the history written by Ayala. In that version, the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt was the commanding officer of the Anglo-Dutch forces; hence, one could infer that the offending troops were strictly Catholic rather than British Protestants. Andrews also placed the timing of the crimes on the days after the British assault on the fortress. The Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt acted as Governor with some troops and “one thousand eight hundred sailors, who committed a thousand excesses in the ruined city.” In Andrews’ summary of Ayala’s narrative, the churches were desecrated and then the women were violated, again making this an issue of religion and politics with gender issues as secondary concerns. The attacks on women were called

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“insults and outrages.” The insults were not specified but the response of the inhabitants is highly suggestive of their sense of outrage. “Numerous sanguinary acts of vengeance on the part of the inhabitants” occurred. Specifically, they “murdered the perpetrators and threw their bodies into wells and sewers.”9 Andrews claimed that the British restored order to the town and protected the townsfolk. He hailed Admiral Rooke as the man who had a living town on his hands peopled by creatures of flesh and emotion, desperately concerned with individual security and happiness. Over these people during the steaming August days, lay the smell of death and corruption and rapine. The conquerors were out of control. Into the raw hand of fighting seamen, their tar-stained nails broken with work on rope and canvas and cannon, alcohol and plunder and women passed wildly and indiscriminately.10

Josep Pla’s version of events is blunter. In spite of the attempts of the Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt to put a stop to the looting, the undisciplined soldiery pillaged the houses, violated the women, and set fire to the churches, licentious conduct which naturally provoked cruel acts of vengeance. One thing which forced the hand of the Spanish commander and impelled him to surrender was the fact, noted by Bishop Burnet, a contemporary, that the invading troops had succeeded in cornering all the women of the village, who, terrified by the irruption of heretics, had gone out in a body to implore divine protection at the shrine of Our Lady of Europe on Europa Point. “Anyone,” writes T. G. Garratt, “who has read contemporary accounts of British soldiers and sailors in the early XVIII century can imagine what was bound to happen when these alcoholic and sex-starved men were let loose in a southern port.”11

Britain’s experience in its first thirty years in the Strait of Gibraltar set a clear agenda for garrison administration beyond the military and mercantile missions. Soldiers’ and sailors’ sexual appetite had to be addressed as much as the need for food and medical attention. By 1730 a somewhat regular garrison administration agenda took shape. If British soldiers continued to encounter women as body-fields on which to continue the destructive energy of war, British mercantilism would never be profitable.

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Litigious British Women at Tangier and Gibraltar Garrisons British women were present from the very beginning of its imperial garrison system. The first official deployment of soldier wives and families occurred in 1662 when Charles II dispatched a full regiment led by Governor Henry Mordaunt Second Earl of Peterborough to occupy Tangier. The model for incorporating women and family into garrison life was patterned at Tangier, 1662-1683, and it was later modified at the Gibraltar Garrison beginning in 1704. These deployments of women were honest recognition that no regiment would remain celibate while on extended duty overseas. When the history is inverted, though, women were far more central to many other aspects of this mercantile-military model. Within sixty years of the first deployment of wives at Tangier, some eighty-five colonial governors served part of their military career at garrisons like these where they grew accustomed to women with strong personalities who were integral to the functioning of the economy.12 By the 1730s, the military had a clear model of women’s roles and rights within the imperial garrison system that utilized private civilian enterprise under military oversight. For example, there was a deliberate attempt to recruit families to settle and civilize the British garrison communities. One published circular sounded like the type of document that might have been used to recruit families to the colonies in North America. Tangier is a pleasant city as any in the world, in a most wholesome air, pure and free from all infection, scituate [sic] in a most rich and fruitful soil, able to yield all things needful to the life of man….It is neither very hot in the Summer and excessive cold in the Winter, but temperate and agreeable with the disposition of our human bodies.

To underscore the healthy environment, the author continued, “the Moors thereabouts live commonly to a great age: I have seen many amongst them about eighty and ninety years of age, very lusty.” The author acknowledged some unnatural deaths but their causes were elective and not from plague. I confess many have died in this place, but most through their own follies, debaucheries, and lust: which have destroyed here many of his Majesties good subjects.13

Where lust and debauchery could be satisfied, wives must have been scarce and sex-workers may have been available.

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At Tangier and Gibraltar, British women’s societal roles were defined in relation to the needs of men so they often appear in the historical records as casualties of war crimes, as officers’ and soldiers’ wives or as sex-workers. Courts martial records are among the rare sources which record some of these women as self-actualized advocates who demanded their political rights in a very male-dominated, artificial social structure. Four female plaintiffs brought cases that give some information about the evolution of the power of women in this military environment. From Tangier, Mrs. Elizabeth Shinford filed and won a slander case. From Gibraltar, Mrs. Savage, Elizabeth Clements, and Bridgett Franklin experienced declining degrees of success. Combined, these cases show that modern British patriarchy with female submission is an artificial structure that was not uniformly accepted by women, soldiers or civilians in this region of the empire. Mrs. Elizabeth Shinford was a woman of honor who protected her good name at the short-lived British colony at Tangier, Morocco. On September 15, 1690, in a Tangier Garrison court martial, a charge exhibited by Mrs. Shinford against Lawrence Rosse private soldier…that on the 4th of this instant March the sayd Rosse abused her with ill and provoking language calling her a common whore…bitch whore saying hee would sacrifice her and after him afterward striking her on the heade, contrary to the 7th article under the generall lawe.

Private Rosse was found guilty and ordered to stand with his naked arme tyed to the wooden horse and a gag in his mouth and that hee shall the two first days receive ten stripes each due upon his naked arme and the third day eleven stripes smartly layd on by the marshall’s man.14

Besides her charge against Corporal Rosse, she brought Robert Moody, already a private soldier, to court martial that day. Mr. Moody also found reason to harangue her. He used “provoking language calling her lardmotch pad & nasty” and claimed publically that “hee would prove it.”15 Regardless of his evidence, Mrs. Shinford won her slander cases because she provided necessary service to the garrison. The first woman identified in the Gibraltar Garrison set of cases is a Mrs. Savage, a woman who controlled property in the form of a house of her own. She entered the court martial record because she was ordered on December 19, 1720, to leave Gibraltar town in 12 days and had permission to settle her affairs including having “leave to dispose of her house.”16 Whether Mrs. Savage was a widow of a soldier or a feme sole operating in

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the town independently is not clear. What is certain is that Mrs. Savage, and not a man, was empowered to settle her affairs. A second female plaintiff in the Gibraltar series was Bridgett Franklin who also had a house. According to the court martial record, a sailor was in her home. The record does not state the purpose of the sailor’s visit nor does it indicate Franklin’s occupation or relationship to the sailor. In the court record on December 4, 1741, Thomas Battley, a soldier of the Garrison, was accused of “breaking into the house of Bridgett Franklin, and robbing a sailor.” The description of the event makes it unlikely that the sailor was her husband for he was unnamed while Franklin was specified by name as the property owner. Since 1726, sailors could legally impose themselves on the home of an inhabitant so Franklin may have been an innkeeper by choice or by imposition due to an early form of a quartering act.17 A third female plaintiff in the Gibraltar series was Elizabeth Clements. On April 4, 1741, Clements presented her case against “Hugh Cross, Benjamin Beckley, John Coulton & John Beck, of General Kirks’ Regt.” The men were “tried by the court for breaking open the door of Elizabeth Clements’s house in ye night & breaking open her chest.” They also faced charges of violating curfew at the barracks. These women are representatives of British garrison women at the Strait of Gibraltar. While the fact that their cases were heard by the courts martial informs us that such women were important economic actors and stakeholders in garrison economy, the punishments earned by the offending men make it quite clear that these women were not as valued by the military command staff in Gibraltar as Mrs. Shinford was in Tangier. In the Clements case the men were found not guilty from the charge of breaking open the house & chest….Hugh Cross & John Coulton are likewise acquitted of being out of their barrack. But Benjm Beckley & John Beck are found guilty of being out of their barracks contrary to orders.

Curiously, from the perspective of the panel in the court martial, the military aspect turned upon the issue of the men leaving the barracks. Beckley and Beck were sentenced to two hundred lashes at a rate of “one hundred per day, before the grand barracks.” Clements received no satisfaction for the damage to her door, her chest nor any compensation for property that might have been stolen. It seems the court may have concluded that Clements was unable to prove the four men were in her house without her permission. In the Franklin case, no order was recorded to repair the damage to Franklin’s door or to restore the money to

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Franklin’s guest. In fact, Thomas Battley was acquitted of the civil matter in this case. According to these cases, women lost a profound amount of power when compared to Mrs. Shinford’s Tangier results. Why?

Controlling Women’s Economy at Tangier and Gibraltar Garrisons Women were a sizeable portion of the population in the Tangier garrison and town. A 1676 survey recorded three hundred two army wives and children and two hundred wives and children of citizens, in addition to seventy widows and single women.18 When Samuel Pepys was drafting the logistics for evacuating the town of Tangier in 1683, he was informed that among “the inhabitants and their families…there is full 400 children.”19 Another class of military females was the women of the Regiment. Some of these women were laundresses and other skilled women recruited in Britain and brought to the garrison on salary. Others were widows eking a living with a tavern, boarding house, suttle shop or some other occupation. Still more were the wives of soldiers. In addition, and perhaps at a parallel social rank, were the local women among the permanent inhabitants and merchants from other nations all of whom traded in the garrison towns, areas that had been occupied by international merchants and military since the Punic Wars if not earlier. Women had a place in the garrison towns of Tangier and Gibraltar and they often found it to be rather lucrative. In the eighteenth century, a series of orders were issued to regulate businesses. Women as wives of soldiers or independent women often participated in these businesses as proprietors alongside many men, civilian or soldier, who also participated as fellow entrepreneurs and customers. The garrison commanders took note of particular businesses because they seem to have enticed soldiers to be overly absent from the barracks. One governor issued an order on November 15, 1720 that forbad “any settlers or others [to] entertain soldiers after the hour appointed.” Life in the barracks must have been quite dull for this order was reinforced several times with additional ones on January 28, March 23, June 22 and August 22 of 1721. The local business community resisted these orders by finding loopholes. While records of these conversations were not available, evidence of the results does exist. The November 15, 1720 order restricted the act of entertaining soldiers in the house of inhabitants after a certain hour. It did not define the “hour appointed” so civilians could quibble about this until January 28, 1721 when the time was specified as Tattoo (when evening drumming called the soldiers back to barracks for

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the night.) Well, the civilians then dickered over the meaning of entertaining because a March 23, 1721 order limited that to the act of drinking and it did not include the serving of meals. Apparently someone figured that if the soldier was not in the house at Tattoo but returned later, then the order was fulfilled. Tavern and pub keepers and soldier/customers may have calculated that the time for a reasonable return to drinking after the appointed hour may have been five hours or even five minutes for a June 22, 1721 order was directed at “publick houses” and specified the prohibition to commence at Tattoo in the evening and to continue until Guard March of the following morning.20 Even this order caused confusion. It interfered with conjugal visits to wives, mistresses or common prostitutes. Since April 2, 1721, the captains of the guards stationed at the Europa section of the fortress were allowed to return home twice a week but, according to the orders, they were not allowed to drink with their wives after Tattoo if their rented rooms were in a public inn. Wiley, and perhaps by now very desperate soldiers, began to make visits to inns and pubs while on patrol, if only to slake a thirst. Some even changed into civilian clothing while on duty in attempt to skirt the prohibitions. Orders put a stop to this on August 22, 1721, forcing “all soldier to keep their accoutrements on the time they are upon Guard” and ordering civilians to refuse to serve any soldier in full uniform on pain of losing their establishment.21 One can argue that these solders were merely seeking the pleasant company of civilians and other soldiers at the local pub for an innocent evening. The desperate actions of some these soldiers took to continue to frequent these inns indicates something else: the presence of female sex workers. This now informs the dismissal from town of a woman like homeowner Mrs. Savage. If Mrs. Savage were a great cook and maker of fine pastries, pasties and ales, she might have arranged delivery of her goods to the barracks. If she were the manager of a brothel or the principal sex worker in a house she controlled, then her business might need to be open after Tattoo. Suppose she were a sex worker. She must have catered to non-commissioned soldiers for if she were an officer’s kept woman, her discretion in that position would not have rendered her a public nuisance. One can also infer that Mrs. Savage was a widow for no man stood to complain of her dismissal and removal. She was free to settle her own estate. Mrs. Savage was only the first female property owner in this set of courts martial records. The records suggest that women augmented the cash economy by bartering or extending credit via the pawn system to

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seamen and soldiers. The size of this unofficial money economy must have been sufficiently large enough to disrupt the government’s regulation and tax collection system. On September 17, 1740, the Governor therefore order[ed] no serjeant corporal, or drummer or their wives or any inhabitant to presume to buy of a sayler or take in pawn, shoes, stockings, shirts, or any thing belonging to a soldier or Saylor on any pretence whatsoever.22

Were this limited only to clothing, such a regulation may have been for the purpose of increasing the effectiveness of quarantines. The inclusion of “any thing” indicates that other goods were included and women’s economic activity was specifically restricted. In 1690, civilians were important to the success of the first British garrison at the Strait but by 1720 a clear shift of power had begun. Mrs. Shinford used the court martial system to retaliate against soldiers Rosse and Moody who hurled slanderous words and threats at her and she won. By 1720, it seems that soldiers were no less restrained in their expression of verbal and physical abuse against civilians. While violence against civilians continued, there was a change in the behavior of citizens who felt little restraint in returning the abuse. The scale of retribution and disrespect occasioned an order from the garrison command staff. As of November 15, 1720, “all complaints of inhabitants or others to be brought first to ye judge advocate.” On June 10, 1722 inhabitants were reminded that the complaint process existed and were ordered “not to strike a soldier but complain.” Those who preferred more instant satisfaction of their grievance were to be exiled from the town, surely to suffer a loss of business. The order was given again on December 6, 1723.23 It is possible that those striking the soldiers were men who may have sought to get a drunken soldier to leave their premises, home or business or to leave their womenfolk alone. It is also possible that women, sex workers or not, were striking offensive soldiers. Perhaps the soldiers felt freer to engage in verbal assaults of the inhabitants after punishment changed to fall on the inhabitant for striking a soldier. Civilian hesistance to file complains suggests that they may have felt that judge advocates were too quick to dismiss complaints for lack of evidence, lack of damages or whatever reasons best insulated soldiers from punishment. However, some onus was still on the soldiers as evidenced by an order given on January 20, 1724 and reinforced on April 7, 1724. Soldiers were prohibited from “prophaning the Lord’s name & swearing.”24 A soldier found guilty of this could have been fined “a shilling for each oath…or obliged to do one day’s work” around the Garrison. The order maker was

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apparently aware that the soldiers might intimidate inhabitants into silence because the order of January 20, 1724 also made the inhabitant “liable to ye same punishment” for failure to report the incident. The intimidation must have been effective in silencing the inhabitants because the order issued on April 7, 1724 increased the punishment on inhabitants from fines and unpaid labor to exile from the town. That was still not enough to counter the threat of a soldier’s revenge. On June 29, 1724, the punishment to inhabitants was raised to being whipped out of town. Even this was not enough. By October 28, 1725, the defense that must have been used by many soldiers appeared. In the order recorded on that day, no soldier or officer could any longer claim justified assault against an inhabitant. In such cases where “any officer or soldier shall think himself injur’d by an inhabitant they are not to beat them nor take their own satisfaction but complain to their proper officers.” Some of these injuries included being taken advantage of in the marketplace as is evidenced by a much earlier order of April 4, 1721.25 This order indicates that the balance of power returned once again to the citizens, including women, and that the protection that Mrs. Shinford enjoyed was not totally lost.

Conclusion Soldiers tend to enjoy getting away from barracks, parade grounds and mess halls. The courts martial record might suggest that female entrepreneurs depended only on soldiers for customers but one must remember that these garrisons were established to facilitate British mercantile efforts. Garrisons guarded ports populated with warehousers, jobbers, consolidators, brokers, financiers, outfitters and repair crews. All of these people needed to eat and many of them wanted to laugh between pints of ale before heading to their home away from home at an inn or boarding house. It must have been colorful then if the appearance of Tangier and Gibraltar now are any indication. This set of courts martial cases and garrison regulations produce a picture of early modern British garrison culture at the Strait of Gibraltar as a booming economy. In this context female plaintiffs Shinford, Savage, Franklin and Clements all claimed the right to own property and to be respected. They also expected and demanded the right of protection due civilians and inhabitants. While there is no direct comment in the courts martial record from the garrison command staff about the importance of women to the garrison system that became the foundation of the British Empire, there is evidence that women were recruited as employees and wives of port city merchants from the very outset of Britain’s foray into

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the Strait. These records show, however, that many British women were independent, informed and capable of acting to protect their legal rights in these early modern places.

Notes 1

According to J. D. Davies, between 1678 and 1681, the “greatest part of the navy’s operational strength was based in the Mediterranean, fighting wars against Algiers and Sale.” J. D. Davies, “The Navy, Parliament and Political Crisis in the Reign of Charles II,” The Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (June 1993): 277. In 1625 the list of possible naval installation locations included Malaga, Gibraltar and Cadiz. In 1656, Gibraltar was the choice. Admiral Sir Herbert W. Richmond, The Navy as an Instrument of Policy, 1558-1727 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 75, 130. For Blake, see G. T. Garrett, Gibraltar and the Mediterranean (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1939), 30. For more on the dire situation that made this an urgent matter, see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000); Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillen, 2003). 2 Stephen Saunders Webb, “The Strange Career of Francis Nicholson,” The William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 23, no. 4(October 1966): 515. E. M. G. Rough, “The English at Tangier,” The English Historical Review 26 (July 1911): 469. 3 In the eyewitness accounts of the siege of Tangier and in the documents about recruiting and repatriating British women from Tangier, it is the non-sex work of women that predominates. See Daryl M. Hafter, ed. European Women and Preindustrial Craft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 4 Bishop Gilbert Burnet, an observer of the time, claimed that Charles II “had no inclination to marry a Protestant; the Germans he despised, and the northern crowns were too inferior to him; France had no sister; the Duke of Orleans’ daughters he had seen, and liked none of them; Spain had only two Infantas and the one was to be married to the King of France, and the other to the Emperor, so that the house of Portugal only remained.” Rev. Thomas Stackhouse, ed. An Abridgment of Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Times (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1910), 63-64. “Portugal sought more active help from England. She acquired it by giving the restored Charles II of England a wife and the cities of Tangier and Bombay.” George Hills, Rock of Contention: a History of Gibraltar (London: R. Hale and Company, 1974), 148. At the time, Charles II was not overly concerned with Bombay and placed it under the control of the East India Company. Richmond, Navy as Instrument, 141. Hills suggested that the British experience in garrisoning Tangier might have been irritating and unpleasant enough to deter them from coveting any other Mediterranean bases. Hills, Rock of Contention, 148. For more about the reasons to abandon this place, see the analysis of eyewitness (though biased to the point of politically expedient satire) Samuel Pepys’ writings about the women of Tangier

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later in Edwin Chappell, ed., The Tangier Papers of Samuel Pepys, Publications of the Navy Records Society LXXIII (London: Navy Records Society, 1935). 5 A tract of the time described Tangier as “a most convenient station for our naval forces…It has supplied merchantmen and ships of war with victuals and intelligence.” Julian S. Corbett, England in the Mediterranean: a Study of the Rise and Influence of the British Power within the Straits, 1603-1713 (New York: Longman’s Green, and Company, 1917), 2: 393. There is a question of whether the mole was ever finished. Loades claimed that it was completed by 1673 but that England was never able to launch offensive galleys against the corsairs. David Loades, England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce and Policy, 1490-1690 (Harlow, Eng. New York: Longman, 2000). The construction of the mole was supervised in part by Samuel Pepys who spent some fourteen years on the project. The original design included docking facilities, warehouses and housing for merchant families. “The English administration of Tangier, incidentally, (which pre-figured some of their later administration of Gibraltar) showed little improvement upon that of the Spaniards. Samuel Pepys who visited the city in 1683 commented on the unhygienic and thoroughly lax situation there, and described how, under the drunken and corrupt [Governor] Colonel Percy Kirke, all was chaos and indiscipline.” Chappell, Pepys, Tangier Papers; Ernle Bradford, Gibraltar: the History of a Fortress (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971), 39-40. Webb noted that Kirke’s contact with the Emperor of Morocco provided Kirke and Francis Nicholson, future governor of the dominion of New England, with “a lesson of absolutism.” Webb, Francis Nicholson, 516. See also Lancelot Addison, West Barbary, or, A Short Narrative of the Revolutions of the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco (Oxford: John Wilmot, 1671); Francis Brooks, Barbarian Cruelty, Being a True History of the Distressed Condition of the Christian Capitol under the Tyranny of Mully Ishmael Emperor of Morocco, and King of Fez and Macqueness in Barbary (Boston: S. Phillips, 1700); Charles Sumner, White Slavery in the Barbary States (Boston: William D. Ticknor and Co., 1847); Daniel J. Vitkus, ed., Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 6 Hills, Rock of Contention, 173; Allen Andrews, Proud Fortress: the Fighting Story of Gibraltar (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc, 1959), 25. 7 Hills, Rock of Contention, 173. 8 Bradford, Gibraltar, 44-45. 9 Ibid., 46. 10 Andrews, Proud Fortress, 32. 11 Josep Pla, Gibraltar, trans. by Dora Round. Edited with an introduction by Sir Charles Petrie (London: Hollis & Carter, 1955), 27. 12 Webb, “Francis Nicholson,” 517. 13 “An Exact Journal of the Siege of Tangier: from the First Sitting Down of the Moors before it on March 25, 1680 to the Late Truce, May 19, following. In Three Letters, Written by Three Eye-Witnesses of the Whole Transaction.” Bodleian Library, Oxford (London: Joseph Hindmarsh at the Bull in Cornhill, 1680), 1.

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“Tanger 1690, at a Court-Martial of His Majestys Officers Held by Order from His Excellency the Earl of Middleton,” Tanger, October 12, 1690. Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England. 15 Ibid. My curiosity about British women, garrison life and empire was piqued by Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1994) and “Empire of Virtue: the Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture, 1720-1785,” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone, 128-164 (London: Routledge, 1994); Holly A. Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. 16 British Public Records Office (BPRO), WO 284 Series, 19 December 1720, on an inserted grey page in the bound record book. Other such pieces of grey paper appear in this record series while some scribes chose to make comments in the margins of the book. 17 On 12 November 1726, orders were given that “whatever inhabitant shall deny the having of sailors in their houses when asked for by their officers their doors to be shut for one month or if soldiers shall entertain sailors in their barracks or quarters contrary to orders without leave of their officers they shall be punished by a regimental court martial.” BPRO WO 284 series. One could also argue that this order was enacted to force sailors to patronize the inns and boarding houses of the town. 18 Noel T. St. John Williams, Redcoats and Courtesans: the Birth of the British Army 1660-1690 (London: Brassey’s, 1994), 31. By comparison, in 1713 when Minorca was reduced to “peace-time strength,” “3,600 men, women and children,” the men being presumably injured or superannuated and from five regiments were to be sent back to Britain. Rex Whitworth, Field Marshal Lord Ligonier: a Story of the British Army 1703-1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 31. 19 Chappell, Pepys, Tangier Diaries, 24 20 BPRO, WO 284 Series. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 “No inhabitant to have any quarrel with the Jews if they have any grievances to apply themselves to Col. Hargrove & they shall have justice done them, otherwise shall be sent to the guard.” Ibid. 4 April 1721.

CHAPTER FOUR ‘A TRIFLE DARK’: CONTESTING RACE, GENDER, AND NATION IN EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY PUERTO RICO ELLEN WALSH

In 1924, Victoria Adams, an Anglo-Armenian from Connecticut, applied to the Christian Church to work as a missionary in Puerto Rico. Though two male missionaries on the island, D. P. Barrett and B. W. Morton, had been desperately seeking an additional missionary, they objected to Adams’s appointment on the basis of her color. Eventually, their mainland supervisor over-ruled their objections and sent Adams to Puerto Rico. Undeterred, these men soon sought her dismissal on another basis: scandalous behavior that contravened Puerto Rican norms and the Protestant notion of “consecrated women.” These missionaries were participating in a broad-based, multi-faceted campaign to Americanize Puerto Ricans and they had entered Puerto Rico in 1898 immediately following the United States victory in the SpanishCuban-American War and subsequent occupation of the island. Collaborating with the new colonial state and U.S. commercial interests, missionaries sought not only to convert Puerto Ricans to Protestantism but also to remake them into social beings capable of the “intelligent Christian citizenship” presumed essential to formal association with the U.S. and intrinsic to Protestantism. Americanization both deployed and was shaped by Protestant understandings and practices of race, class, and gender—understandings that, not surprisingly, did not always correlate with those of Puerto Ricans, some of whom resisted impositions of those norms. Such differences, however, existed not only between islanders and mainlanders but also among the mainlanders. Though chroniclers of Americanization frequently

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painted the colonizers with a broad brush, this essay examines conflict that divided missionaries who otherwise envisioned themselves as involved in a joint project: civilizing Puerto Ricans. It reveals the influences of race, gender, and nation in the construction of the category “consecrated woman,” a trope used to determine those women worthy of participating in the civilizing project. The conflict over Victoria Adams’s appointment also illustrates the uses of rhetoric, ideology and alliance-building that a skillful subaltern employed, taking advantage of the fault lines formed by contradictions within the civilizing project itself to gain admittance to and maintain her “right-filled place” in the mission field. From the start of missionary work in the United States republic, the notion of “woman’s work for woman” shaped missionary methods, practices, and goals, although its meaning changed. Protestant women initially had used the term “home mission” to distinguish between domestic and foreign fields, but soon “invested the phrase home mission with ideological significance,” interpreting “the ‘home’ as the ideal Christian home of Victorian rhetoric.”1 As historian Paula Baker notes in her essay on the domestication of politics, women expanded the bounds of the private sphere by redefining home as “anywhere women and children were.” During the Gilded Age, she argues, women again modified the definition of woman’s sphere, rejecting “sentimentality in favor of the scientific and historical” and stressing “how scientific motherhood, if translated into efficient, nonpartisan, and tough-minded public action, could bring social progress.”2 This definition fit well Americanization’s modernizing project, and missionary women in Puerto Rico adopted this “strategic essentialism” to support their claims of female moral authority in order to re-order Puerto Rican social (particularly familial) relations. These missionaries framed their goals not only in terms of religion but in terms of social progress that would bring social and material uplift to all. Central to the missionary project, particular notions of morality were both articulated and constituted through the Protestant ideology of “consecrated” living, which set a standard for both missionaries and Puerto Ricans. Though this ideology applied equally to men and women, the term “consecrated woman” appeared disproportionately in public and private missionary discourse. Missionaries sought to teach not only through Scripture and the pulpit but through the Christian example of their daily lives. Consecrated living required abstaining from intoxicating beverages, gambling, dancing, cursing and sexual activity outside of legally sanctioned marriage. It called for: modesty in dress and behavior; discipline; engagement in physical labor, intellectual endeavors, family, and church matters; discrimination in one’s companions; and cleanliness

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of mind and body—in other words, living according to idealized norms of mainland, white, middle-class behavior. These patriarchal norms assumed the male headed the household and the woman’s primary responsibility was to their family: married women to their nuclear family and unmarried women to a more expansively defined “home,” the larger community. A “life consecrated to the service of the Master” entailed service, selfsacrifice, humility, and, most importantly, a “calling” to “advancing the Kingdom”—characteristics that her opponents claimed were absent in Victoria Adams. Adams was a minister’s daughter born in Armenia where her father, an English missionary, had married her Armenian mother. The family later moved to New Britain, Connecticut, where both parents worked as missionaries. Seeking appointment as a missionary in Puerto Rico, Adams engaged in a several-year correspondence with W. P. Minton, Secretary of the Christian Church Mission Board headquartered in Dayton, Ohio.3 In July 1924, Minton wrote to D. P. Barrett and B. W. Morton, his supervisees in Puerto Rico, that he planned to send Adams to Puerto Rico.4 Familiar with Adams because she had been a classmate of his daughter and son-in-law at Elon College in North Carolina (a school attended by many missionaries and their family members), Barrett objected. Though his daughter spoke well of Adams, he and Morton were “both of the opinion that an american [sic] would be more acceptable in Porto Rico.” He worried that, though Adams spoke “English quite well, she is not white and it is quite probable she would not have the influence that an american [sic] would have.” Barrett explained that they had “had some experiences with the native Porto Ricans who were not white and they were a complete failure.” Barrett’s classification of this Anglo-Armenian as “not white” echoed Social Darwinist racial categories based on phenotype and ethnicity which placed Armenians in a position inferior to that of northern and western Europeans. That system’s rigidity conflicted with Puerto Rico’s more fluid system in which racial categorization depended on additional elements such as class and phenotype. Harder to define absolutely, the more nuanced Puerto Rican configuration comprised—in its most generic schematic—three categories: white, colored (mixed race), and black, based on an ideology of white racial superiority. Puerto Ricans’ attitudes towards and performances of race epitomized the social construction of race. The tripartite system discriminated at the broadest level; more precisely, racial identification occurred along a fluid—but hierarchical—spectrum of distinctions. Social location, hair, bone, and skin shaped assignment to racial categories, based on an ideology of white racial superiority and the

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racial mixing of people of European, African, and Native American descent (mestizaje), developed over centuries of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas.5 Puerto Ricans used many different words to distinguish between gradations of skin color, types of hair, and facial features. These functioned as markers on a pigmentocracy scale. Features identified as African consigned Puerto Ricans to a lower, darker position on the spectrum. In addition to being more numerous and refined than their dominant, mainland counterparts, Puerto Rican racial categories were more permeable. In contrast to the U.S. system, phenotype and physical traits could be superseded by class location. Money “whitened”: a richer, educated Puerto Rican with darker, more African features could be seen as and function as colored or white whereas a similar looking but poorer Puerto Rican could be considered black or colored. In other words, race was classed. The race of Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rican notions of race had confounded missionaries from the start due to the prickly incongruity between metropolitan and Puerto Rican systems of racial classification. Missionaries generally thought in terms of the U.S. binary system of white/black and the one-drop rule of hypodescent—an organizing principle far too crude to encompass Puerto Ricans of all shades. Missionaries easily recognized the subordinate status of those whom both Puerto Ricans and mainlanders considered black but were confused by the mixed group in this sophisticated and unfamiliar calculus of race. This accords with sociologist Jorge Duany’s argument that the main difference between the Puerto Rican and American models of racial stratification was not the treatment of blacks—who were accorded a subordinate status in both societies—but rather the mixed group.6

Victoria Adams’s privileged position as an educated, middle class, mainlander missionary would have shaped Puerto Ricans’ perception of her race—as would their standards for phenotypic markers, which differed from dominant mainlander standards. Given that Adams had functioned as “white” in the fastidiously segregationist Jim Crow southern U.S. and that she belonged to a (decidedly not subordinate) community (Protestant missionaries) associated with the powerful colonial state, Puerto Ricans would have undoubtedly considered her “white.” Barrett and Morton, however, chose to place Adams in the “not white” category. Gender and nation also shaped these categories. For example, Barrett asked Minton to concentrate on finding a woman who knew how to both play and teach the piano and stressed the importance of ascertaining an

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applicant’s “attitude toward dancing, Theater going [original emphasis]” and the trend of their social life in general.7 Applications for missionary positions asked women about their singing and conducting skills and conduciveness to obeying authority. A consecrated woman’s behavior was clearly prescribed and transgressing behavior discursively and practically darkened the transgressor. Additionally, mainland missionaries and other Progressives had been experiencing great anxiety, including fear of “race suicide,” about the increased immigration to the United States from eastern and southern Europe and had mounted campaigns to Americanize those “aliens.” Such tensions—and Armenia’s recent history as part of the Ottoman Empire— likely contributed to Barrett’s and Minton’s framing of Adams as “not American.” In a monograph emphasizing the home missions’ role in unifying the United States, Herman Morse stated that the home mission project “operated to interpret to the alien and the stranger the best in American life...and also to interpret the alien to the country of his adoption.”8 In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the missionaries worked with Native Americans, non-English-speaking immigrants, Mormons, Jews, and African Americans in the South.9 Several missionaries in Puerto Rico had earlier worked in the West or South, revealing unbroken—but not unchanged—threads extending from earlier political, racial, gender and imperial ideologies and practices into the twentieth-century civilizing project. Puerto Rico’s own position was liminal.10 Its unique legal status and the impulse to maintain the notion that the United States, as a republic, did not have empires like the Europeans, had led first to Protestants questioning U.S. intervention in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. At the war’s end, it led mission boards to extensively debate whether Puerto Rico should be designated as a home or foreign mission field.11 In a public address given multiple times, Alice Cox Wood, a prominent Protestant who had visited Puerto Rico, aptly described the paradox of Puerto Rico’s ambiguous status: Mission work in Porto Rico is especially interesting as it so perfectly blends the two terms Home and Foreign Missions. We cannot separate them: The Island belongs to us, but the work is among an alien people.12

Puerto Rico’s home mission designation communicated its colonial status; deliberation of its classification (by both missionaries and the U.S. legal system) echoes the contestation of Adams’s suitability for missionary work.13

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Eleven months after Minton had initially written Morton and Barrett of his plans to send Adams, her appointment was still under discussion. Morton wrote Minton, expressing his agreement with Barrett’s objection, stating that Adams’s “color will always be against her in Porto Rico” and that “these people do not like to have anyone in authority to have any colored blood.” Framing his argument in terms of respecting local custom (racial prejudice), Morton maintained that the mission “had too much to contend with” without trampling “too much upon the customs and desires of the people.” This appears disingenuous at best, because Howard T. Jason, an African American, had by then worked with great success for twenty years in a nearby mission field. Moreover, Morton’s advocacy for local custom regarding race prejudice did not extend to the island’s more fluid construction of race. Morton additionally insisted that “Porto Ricans do not like a single woman over them [emphasis original]” and, questioning Adams’s skills, suggested that Minton send a male missionary to the island and Adams to Japan.14 Minton appeared torn between the Mission Board’s customary practice of giving those in the field a voice in selecting their co-workers, the great need for another missionary and his distress over the nature of the missionaries’ objections. He questioned the men’s perception of Adams as “colored,” arguing that, Her father is English and her mother Armenian and it does not seem to me that either of them could be classed as colored. The very fact that Miss Adams was able to go through the college at Elon…without facing any color difficulty would seem to me to be sufficient proof that she could carry out a good work in Porto Rico.15

Here Minton was referring to the legally sanctioned Jim Crow segregation in the southern United States in which any person perceived as “colored” would not be permitted to teach at or attend a school for white students. In other words, if southern mainlanders considered Adams white, Puerto Ricans—given their more fluid racial hierarchy—would most assuredly also consider her white. Admitting that Adams was a “trifle dark,” Minton nonetheless disagreed that “her color would hurt her down there,” for other missionaries had reported “that some of their very best workers [were] black men.”16 Additionally, he upbraided Morton’s sense of superiority over Puerto Ricans, saying that he did not think that “the national Christians [Puerto Ricans] like to have either men or women missionaries ‘over them’” and preferred the idea of “missionaries working ‘with

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them.’” Morton countered this criticism, suggesting that such an egalitarian relationship was not possible with “native workers”: Rev. Ojeda, here, one of our most liberal pastors was not satisfied until he found out my authority. I have been trying to work “with him” but that didn’t satisfy him[ ]Was I “over him” or “he [over] me.”17

Minton also dismissed Morton’s argument that Puerto Ricans would not accept working under a woman, reminding him that other denominations were doing so. Indeed, single women comprised the majority of missionaries on the island and some of them were in charge of large projects such as nursing schools and settlement houses. Additionally, though not explicitly mentioned, both knew that another female missionary, Olive Williams (who had left the previous year for health reasons, exacerbating the need for another missionary in that area), had had great success working in that same missionary field. She had productive relations with both islanders and mainlanders, establishing industrial workshops, schools, etc. The Christian Church, indeed, granted more power to women than typical of the other denominations in Puerto Rico. Operating from the mission board headquarters in Ohio, Minton turned for advice to Samuel Guy Inman who had significant travel and missionary experience as director of the multi-denominational Committee for Cooperation in Latin America (C.C.L.A.). Explaining the missionaries’ objection to Adams’s color, Minton asked whether sending Adams might be dangerous, stating that since “The young lady has had her heart set on going to Porto Rico for several years…I do not want to refuse her on that ground if it is groundless.”18 Inman responded forthrightly that he could “hardly share the fears of your missionary in Porto Rico that she might not be acceptable in that country” and that “it would be taking race prejudice entirely too far to have a good worker shut out because of simply the color of her skin.” Demonstrating more understanding of Puerto Rican racial categories than Morton and Minton, he commented, Even granting there was some reason for not sending a colored person, yet one who is of dark skin without colored blood should be able to make her way easily enough.

He lamented that “the color question has come into Porto Rico since the American influence arrived,” suggesting erroneously that racism had not pre-existed on the island. Ambiguously averring that “we must not acknowledge [the color question] any more than the interests of our work

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would seem to require,” Inman concluded that “how far we are to yield to local prejudices is always open to question.”19 A few months later in October, Barrett and Morton changed their minds and urged Minton to immediately send Adams because both were due furloughs and Mrs. Barrett was seriously ill. This request upset Minton who reminded them that he had conceded to their strong objections against Adams a year ago when she was ready to go to Puerto Rico. He argued that it would be “dangerous” to send her at that point, when, with the Barretts and Mortons on furlough, she would be left “as a new missionary in charge of the whole work.”20 (Missionaries new to a field would generally live with other missionaries for a short time while they acclimated to the physical and social climate and improved their Spanish-language skills.) Adams did not go to Puerto Rico until October of the following year, 1927. Her co-workers, however, renewed their resistance to her appointment. In February 1928, writing from Elon College where he was spending his furlough, Barrett wrote Minton about the “disheartening” stories he had heard about Adams, including her inability to get along with others and habitual questionable behavior.21 From the island, Morton wrote provocative letters maligning Adams. He claimed that Puerto Rico was a “Sodom and Gomorra” for sinners which required that missionaries be “moral and virtuous” and “not contaminate themselves whatsoever.” He accused Adams of failing to meet those standards, of bragging about “meeting with men in the Plaza,” of walking alone at night and being “fresh with every clerk she met.” He reported that “two very ‘worldly’ men” spent the whole day in her house and that she had been absent from church twice when she had been on a picnic with “some of those men.” He also accused Adams of using her home-visiting work to cover clandestine meetings with an unnamed “American gentleman friend” from a nearby sugar mill.22 Meanwhile, in becoming acquainted with her congregants Adams discovered that, before leaving on furlough, Mrs. Barrett had spread word of her disapproval that Adams was not American. Writing Minton, Adams stated that, although Puerto Ricans had no objection to her, nonetheless Mrs. Barrett’s feelings cut her deeply and caused her to reconsider working with such colleagues. Arguing that she was “as much an American as Mrs. Barrett,” Adams questioned whether, if “Christ wasn’t an American, therefore we should not accept His teachings.”23 She thus skillfully used Protestantism’s proclaimed universalism to counter the other missionaries’ nationalist critique of her suitability.

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Matters escalated in May 1928 when Morton further impugned Adams’s morality. After Minton had announced major budget cuts that might preclude the Barretts’ return to Puerto Rico, Morton returned to Canada for health reasons. On his steamship and using language quite extreme for a missionary, Morton wrote Minton that Puerto Ricans considered Adams and her housemates as “nothing but whores” and decried Adams for continuing such behavior despite how it damaged her reputation.24 Disturbed, Minton took the matter before the Mission Board. In preparation, he requested information from Barrett who was still in North Carolina. Surprisingly, Barrett’s attitude had shifted and he defended Adams. He suggested that Morton’s warning could be interpreted not as “any charges whatsoever of immorality” but rather as merely showing “the possibility of [Adams’s] actions being entirely misunderstood by the people she has gone to help,” given that “customs in P.R. are very different from” those on the mainland. Further, Barrett expressed optimism that Adams would do away with “anything and everything that does not help her in her work.” He thus reframed Morton’s comments as timely warnings that Adams needed to change her behavior. With generous understatement and distancing himself from his own earlier assessments, he acknowledged that Morton might have been “somewhat biased in his judgment” of Adams because the two did not get along well.25 Additionally, Minton criticized Morton for his “veiled accusations” and for phrasing “things in such a way that the members of the board could not get at anything tangible,” though he conceded that Morton may have been correct in judging Adams as indiscreet. Minton obtained Morton’s permission to show Adams his accusations with the hope of getting “her to see the folly of [her] course” in order to “save the girl, not only for the work’s sake but for her own sake.”26 Minton confronted Adams with the charges, simultaneously offering her a chance to defend herself and bemoaning how terrible a blow to the church’s influence it would be if “one of her missionaries should be understood to be of the character Mr. Morton says the Porto Ricans are sure to look upon your actions as.”27 Adams resolutely defended herself. Drawing on the missionary establishment’s paternalism, she appealed to Minton “as a father and brother,” asking him to listen to her “with a careful and reasoning way.” She thus emphasized her rationality and invoked his sense of fairness. She emphasized her maltreatment by Morton, comparing it to being treated like an animal. Employing the ideology of self-sacrifice and the rhetoric of vocation, she declared that she had borne such trials only out of willingness to suffer for God’s sake

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and had come to Puerto Rico not to fall in love or enjoy a “worldly life,” but because God “brought me here to do His work, and I am going to do it if I give my life for it.”28 Adams’ responses reflected a shift from nineteenth century gender ideology of “the kind of sublimated ambition-through-domesticity described in sentimental literature” to that of the twentieth century “New Women,” “defined not by their subordination but by their confidence that they had something of their own to offer their fellows.”29 Adams was responding as a modern woman defending her vocation, reputation, and legitimacy. Challenging the argument—and Minton’s fear—that she was alienating the locals, Adams implored him to speak to the Puerto Rican church-workers about her “actions as a christian girl [sic].” Claiming that workers from other denominations also respected her, she noted that she had been placed with “all the lady leaders of Puerto Rico in all the conferences” and was also named to five committees, including a Young People’s Movement Council of which she was the sole female member.30 These missionaries, she persuasively argued, would not have installed her in these positions if they questioned her morality. She also shrewdly sent Minton several letters from Puerto Ricans to give him “an idea of what the Porto Ricans think of me and my work,” as evidence of the respect she had earned—a respect that Morton seemed to have lacked. Adams thus used the credibility of fellow missionaries, Puerto Rican converts, and her denomination’s commitment to comity to build her defense.31 Additionally, Adams skillfully used existing gender norms to counter Morton’s accusations. Again playing on the power of paternalism and its honor code, she confessed that she had restrained herself from involving her father after being so insulted by Morton’s charges, because “he would not stand that word [immoral] used in connection with [her] name.” Instead, she turned to another father-figure, the highly respected Presbyterian minister Rev. Milton Caldwell because he was “a man of understanding” and, in implied contrast to Morton, a “real” Christian. Here Adams implicitly criticizes her church’s failure to protect her as a good father should. Rev. Caldwell reported to Minton that, though Adams had indeed made “some mistakes because of not knowing the Porto Rican viewpoint,” she had ceased such behavior and he affirmed his “entire confidence” in her “becoming a real, strong missionary.”32 Continuing his own “careful investigation,” Minton corresponded with several missionaries and visited Elon College, where he heard “the highest commendation” concerning Adams.33 These findings persuaded him that Adams “no doubt did make some mistakes, but they were mistakes that most anyone especially a

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young person would make under such circumstances.” Adams’s attempts to remedy behavior subject to misinterpretation, he argued, showed that she would be “of real service to the Kingdom.” After Barrett’s return to the island, Rev. Caldwell shared his letter in support of Adams—a strong message, given Caldwell’s prominence. It persuaded Barrett who described the letter as “very just” and Adams as “defenseless” against Morton.”34 Minton informed Barrett that, Careful investigation, including some letters from Porto Rico led me to feel that Mr. Morton did not charge her entirely properly. She has undoubtedly made some mistakes that might be misunderstood by the Porto Ricans, but I feel sure she is making every possible effort to remedy those things and to be of real service to the Kingdom.

He concluded that “the difficulty with Miss Adams was largely due to Mr. Morton’s inability to advise with her in a kindly spirit rather than in a critical way” and gave notice that he was “counting upon [Barrett] to overcome this handicap,” thus placing some responsibility on Barrett for the outcome.35 In October 1928, the mission board formally vindicated Adams: she was indeed a “consecrated woman.”36 How can these events contribute to our understanding of both the civilizing project and the ways that one woman navigated to obtain and maintain her “rightful place” in the missionary field? First, the conflicts over whether Adams’s color should determine whether or not she would be appointed showed that the missionary project was not unitary or monolithic. Inman’s regret that “the color question has come into Porto Rico since the American influence arrived” suggested that some missionaries did not completely accept the ideology of white racial superiority dominant on the mainland. And certainly they did not seek to impose Jim Crow practices on islanders. This allowed Adams to exploit cleavages to her advantage. Second, Inman’s comment that “how far we are to yield to local prejudices is always open to question” implied that even progressive-onthe-color-question missionaries would concede to “local prejudices” if they feared that failing to do so would jeopardize the work—a stance they never took on issues such as gambling, cockfighting, and “illegitimate” marriages, all solidly entrenched local customs. The viability of such a concession reveals the limitations of the missionaries’ universalist claims of equality. It also uncovers the constraints upon some challenges to “local prejudices” and thus the contingency inherent in the success or failure of such challenges.

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Third, the nature of the complaints about Victoria Adams show how race, gender, nationality, and sexuality mutually constituted her as an immoral woman and not as a consecrated woman. However, the process that Minton enacted (assuming innocence, gathering evidence, confronting her with the charges against her) assured that gossip, personal prejudice, and sexism would not, without challenge, irretrievably consign Adams to that “not consecrated” category and thus thwart her desire to work as a missionary. At the same time, Minton’s network of contacts gave evidence of the surveillance of which the missionary community was capable and the social control that they could wield. Victoria Adams, however, skillfully exploited her understanding of and connections within the missionary community, drawing on both mainlanders and Puerto Ricans. She deftly employed the missionary rhetoric of suffering and self-sacrifice (she bore her trials because she was willing to suffer for God), of paternalist relations, of a daughter/woman’s honor (the indirect threat to involve her father, an English—read white— missionary with his own church) and of Christianity’s professed universalism (if “Christ wasn’t an American, therefore we should not accept His teachings”). With their letters, she astutely demonstrated that she had the support of the very “nationals” whom the missionaries were trying to reach —proof of her effectiveness in “advancing the Kingdom.” Finally, this story shows the power and interrelations of two situationally subordinate groups. Puerto Ricans’ support for Adams demonstrated Puerto Rican agency that influenced how the missionary project unfolded on the ground. And Victoria Adams demonstrated not only the plasticity of ideology, but also the many uses of rhetoric, ideology and personal and collective relationships that a resourceful subaltern could exploit by taking advantage of the fault lines formed by contradictions and conflicts within the missionary project.

Notes 1

Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1839 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 6. For a nuanced analysis of race and home mission women in the nineteenth century, see chapter four of Pascoe. 2 Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical Review 89, no. 3. (June 1984): 632. 3 The Christian Church had joined with the Disciples of Christ and the United Brethren to form the United Evangelical Church/Evangélica Unida.

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4 Barrett, the senior missionary, was stationed with his wife and children in Ponce, a southern sugar-growing area and the second largest city on the island. Morton and his wife lived nearby. 5 The scholarship on race and ethnicity in Latin America is extensive. Racial mixing began almost immediately post-Columbus and the conquistadores included people of African descent. The Atlantic slave trade significantly transformed the demography of Latin America as did the “Great Dying” of the indigenous. For the functions, meanings and ideologies of the casta (mixed race groupings) system, see Ilona Katzew, Casta Paintings: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), Chapter 2. 6 For a historical overview of Puerto Ricans’ patterns of racial identification, see Jorge Duany, “Neither White nor Black: The Politics of Race and Ethnicity among Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the U.S. Mainland,” revised version of a paper presented at the Conference on “The Meaning of Race and Blackness in the Americas: Contemporary Perspectives,” Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, February 10-12, 2000. 7 Barrett to Minton, 4 July 1924, letter. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of correspondence of D. P. Barrett, B. W. Morton, and W. P. Minton come from “Iglesia Evángelica Unida, Christian Church, Correspondence 1924-1933,” Seminario Evangélico-Archivo Histórico, Río Piedras, PR, hereafter referred to as IEU-1, SEPR-AH. 8 Hermann N. Morse, Toward a Christian America: The Contribution of Home Mis-sions (New York: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Educa-tion Movement, 1935), 188. 9 Secular progressive settlement house workers did work quite similar to that of the missionaries. Jane Addams, in fact, had sought a non-religious alternative to this kind of work. 10 The Treaty of Paris settling the Spanish-Cuban-American War neither designated Puerto Rico an incorporated territory (which presumed eventual statehood) nor referred to eventual independence (as it did for Cuba and the Philippines). It also codified the misspelling of the island’s name as “Porto Rico,” a mistake not officially corrected by the U.S. Congress until 1932. Puerto Ricans widely and constantly argued about the form their state should take. Some supported statehood, others independence and still others more autonomy under the U.S. state. 11 Most denominations designated it as a home mission field although smaller denominations such as the Disciples of Christ and the Christian Church did not maintain separate foreign and domestic boards but a single administrative mission board. 12 Alice Cox Wood, “An Address on Porto Rico,” from a public speech, The Situation in Porto Rico, 1916, BX 9225 W66 A13, ACCN#90-0727a Box 2, Presbyterian Historical Society. 13 The mission fields in Puerto Rico were governed from the mainland through a well-established administrative structure. Designation as a home mission field assigned responsibility for supporting Protestant schools and hospitals to the

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women’s home mission boards, allowing female missionaries and their mainland counterparts to wield great influence on the project. 14 Morton to Minton, 1 June 1925, letter, IEU-1, SEPR-AH. 15 Minton to Barrett, 16 July 1925, letter, IEU-1, SEPR-AH. 16 Minton to Morton, 9 June 1925, letter, IEU-1, SEPR-AH. 17 Morton to Minton, 26 June 1925, letter. It appears that Morton had a history of power struggles with those he considered subordinate. He had earlier objected to Minton’s direction that he “assist” a Puerto Rican convert: “Possibly I am misunderstanding you here but from your statement it would appear that I am to assist him [Bro. Ojeda] in his [pastoral] work. I don’t ever expect to assist a native worker but he may assist me.” Morton to Minton, 1 Dec. 1924, letter, Ibid. 18 W. P. Minton to Rev. S. G. Inman, June 4, 1926, letter, Correspondencia, William P. Minton and Samuel Guy Inman, 1924-1926,” SEPR-AH. 19 Samuel Guy Inman to W. P. Minton, 14 June 1926, letter, Ibid. 20 Minton to Barrett, 18 October 1926, letter, IEU-1, SEPR-AH. 21 Barrett in Elon, NC to Minton, 20 Feb 1928, letter, IEU-1, SEPR-AH. 22 Morton to Minton, 4 April 1928, letter and 24 April 1928, letter, IEU-1, SEPRAH. Missionaries had close relations, both formal and informal, with mainlander managers and agents of the U.S. corporate owners working in the sugar mills. One mill, for example, paid for a church to be built on its premises and many regularly contributed financially to the various Protestant denominations. 23 V. Adams to H. P. Minton, 18 April 1928, letter, Christian Church, Evangélica Unida, Correspondence 1922-1934, Women Missionaries: Victoria E. Adams, Seminario Evangélico-Archivo Histórico, Río Piedras, PR, hereafter referred to as IEU-2, SEPR-AH. 24 Morton to Minton, letter, 24 May 1928, IEU-1, SEPR-AH. 25 D. P. Barrett to H. P. Minton, 5 June 1928, letter, IEU-1, SEPR-AH. 26 Minton to Barrett at Elon, 13 June 1928, letter, Ibid. 27 W. P. Minton to V. Adams, 20 June 1928, letter, IEU-2, SEPR-AH. 28 V. Adams to W. P. Minton, 2 July 1928, letter, Ibid. 29 Jane H. Hunter, “Women’s Mission in Historical Perspective: American Identity and Christian Internationalism,” in Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960, ed. Barbara ReevesEllington et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 26-27. 30 Adams to Minton, 2 July 1928, letter, IEU-2, SEPR-AH. 31 The historical Protestant churches considered the agreements they made with each other about territorial jurisdictions to be a model of interdenominational cooperation (comity) for a shared goal: evangelization and transformation of Puerto Ricans. 32 Minton to Barrett, 3 August 1928, letter, IEU-1, SEPR-AH. 33 W. P. Minton to D. P. Barrett, 19 July 1928, letter, Ibid. 34 Barrett to Minton, 12 July 1928, letter, Ibid. 35 Minton to Barrett, 19 July 1928, IEU-1, SEPR-AH. 36 W. P. Minton to V. Adams, 18 July 1928, letter, IEU-2, SEPR-AH; W. P. Minton to D. P. Barrett, 3 August 1928, letter, IEU-1, SEPR-AH.

CHAPTER FIVE VIRGINAL MOTHERS AND COMMON PROSTITUTES: POLICING FEMALE SEXUALITY IN IRELAND MORGAN PAIGE DENTON

In 1930, social worker Kathleen Kirwan stated: Ireland, with its religious history and a proper Catholic outlook, ought to offer little scope for prostitution, therefore, the prostitute in circulation in Ireland must be the very lowest type—the deliberate Prostitute—a selfish lawless entity and moral parasite with enormous powers of destruction.1

Kirwan went on to insist that a woman engaged in such a profession was most likely mentally deficient. While Irish nationalists had blamed the existence of prostitutes on the presence of the British army stationed in Ireland, they could no longer do so after the Irish Free State gained independence in 1922.2 As Ireland sought to assert a separate and unique identity on the global stage, the Irish Free State often acted in conjunction with the Catholic Church to define Ireland as a Roman Catholic nation and thus in direct opposition to their former Protestant colonizers.3 The Irish claimed to be uniquely virtuous, their Catholicism placing a special emphasis on sexual purity and veneration of the Virgin Mary. Church and state authorities presented a vision of Ireland that harkened back to an imagined traditional Irish past—a place of rustic, rural Catholic farmers who lived austere but spiritually fulfilled lives, pure in both body and spirit. The existence of prostitutes complicated the establishment of this national narrative, forcing authorities to more clearly delineate proper gender roles within postcolonial Ireland in sexual terms. To promote the belief that women belonged in the domestic sphere as morally pure wives and mothers, the Irish Free State attempted to strengthen laws that would curb public immorality, seeking to control female sexuality as a means to help properly define Irish post-colonial identity.4 Laws against solicitation

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focused on poorer, working class women and their enforcement demonstrates the large gap between the “traditional” values of Irish identity and the reality of many Irish lives in the first half of the twentieth-century. From warnings issued from pulpits around the Free State, clergy made clear not only what was wrong with the current state of the nation’s morals, but also created the ideal standard to which Irish citizens should be held. More often than not, the onus for this ideal standard fell on women, both in their roles as mothers and daughters. Although marriage was considered “The Bedrock of the Society” and the foundation upon which Irish families were built, there was little mention of the father’s role in raising a proper family beyond economic support.5 Women were responsible for the household’s moral state, expected to be obedient wives and exemplary mothers, modeling proper behavior through their own virtue. According to the Bishop of Ardagh, Catholic mothers were responsible for that “pearl of great price—the unsullied innocence of their daughters.”6 The Bishop admonished both parents to protect their children, but mothers especially needed “to uphold and hand down untarnished to those who come after them our country’s glorious heritage of female modesty and chastity.” Thus, mothers who permitted their daughters to act immodestly were not only bad Christians but bad Irish citizens. By linking the spiritual, social and political duties of Irish women, clergy constructed a discourse whereby Irish female identity centered on the opposing aspects of motherhood and chastity embodied in the figure of the Virgin Mary. The acceptable path for an Irish woman was to remain sexually pure until marriage when she would then produce, and suitably raise, the next generation of good Irish citizens. For the Bishop of Tuam “true Irish Catholics” venerated the Virgin Mary as “a model for mothers and for virgins.”7 The social respectability of the Irish nation, then, rested on the social respectability of its women. For all “the great body” of Irish girls who were “true daughters of Mary Immaculate,” Ireland also had “the daughters of Eve who were prepared to eat forbidden fruit and to sell their self-respect and good name for a base passing pleasure.”8 The passing pleasures of attending dances or the cinema could potentially corrupt Irish women’s sexuality. Cardinal MacRory summed up the problems facing the emerging Irish nation thusly: It is feared that the traditional purity of the Irish maiden, so long her greatest charm and proudest title to fame, is seriously threatened, unless a change for the better come soon.9

For those young women whose purity had been more than simply threatened, the Church’s solution was both protection and penance.10

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Women who had engaged in sexual activities outside of marriage had “fallen” from God’s grace and were thus in need of repentance. Fallen women could be placed back into the community fold through a regime of penitence that sought to purify and strengthen them against further moral lapses.11 Church rhetoric perceived women as victims either of a cunning seducer who had manipulated their innocence or of their own overwhelming passions. While a “first fall” was forgivable, women who continued to disobey Church teachings on chastity and the sanctity of marriage were moved into the far more perilous category of the “second fall.” These women no longer deserved Catholic charity and could be dealt with roughly through prison and state institutions since their presence was a danger to the moral fiber of Irish communities. While not all women who fell were prostitutes, prostitutes were always fallen women. That is, any woman who engaged in extra-marital sex had fallen; the only distinction for a woman labeled a prostitute was her acceptance of payment for the sexual act. For many clergy, prostitution presented the next logical step for a fallen girl—friendless and shamed, she often lacked the resources to prevent a second fall and could easily slip into the debased life of a prostitute. Reverend Richard Devane, a priest actively involved in rescue work in the 1920s, articulated this view, dividing the profession of prostitution into either “the exploiters or the exploited.”12 The exploiters were brothelkeepers, pimps and procurers who took advantage of young prostitutes for their own gain. Prostitutes themselves most often came from the exploited category, mainly from the “ranks of the unmarried mother who is oftentimes cast off and denied shelter by her own family.”13 While Devane did agree with Kathleen Kirwan that some prostitutes were mentally deficient, he viewed the majority as victims in need of special protection from state authorities. Devane saw the need for both punitive and protective measures to save fallen women, calling for more severe laws aimed at the exploiter class (such as higher penalties for brothel-keeping and procuring) and raising the age of consent to eighteen years to discourage men from seducing young women. In order to prevent the potential further corruption of women who had experienced only one “fall,” he suggested young prostitutes should be kept away from hardened criminals in prison and instead housed in separate institutions if arrested.14 Devane and other clergymen pushed the Free State to legislate based on these categories of sexually active women, hoping to prevent moral lapses through protective measures but also seeking punitive measures for women who defied the ideological ideal of chaste wife and mother. Devane admitted that a small number of prostitutes could not be rescued

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as they preferred the lifestyle and for such women prison was quite suitable. Although Devane worked with prostitutes, their own opinions did not emerge in his commentary. Streetwalkers were rarely consulted by either clergy or lay society as to their motives or needs. The historian, however, can glimpse their agency through prostitutes’ interaction with the Irish legal system, a system designed with the intent to marginalize them from mainstream society. In fact, lay opinion mirrored clerical concerns calling for new moral legislation. Various rescue societies, social workers, and women’s organizations lobbied the Department of Justice for reform.15 In response to these calls, the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts and Juvenile Prostitution, or the Carrigan Committee, as it became known, was formed in June 1930.16 The purpose of the Carrigan Committee was to revise the existing laws regarding sexual offences in Ireland. In the process of collecting data to revise the law, the Committee soon took on the role of defining sexual behavior, having to define what constituted a sexual offence and how severely it would be punished. The Committee focused on protecting fallen women it deemed deserving and accepted the expert testimony by Devane, Kirwan and others that the “confirmed prostitute” could not be rehabilitated.17 Such views found backing from various medical experts who testified that Irish womanhood was distinct from other nationalities, especially from that of England.18 Female temperament in Ireland was more “trusting” and innocent, according to Doctors Delia Moclair Horne and Dorothy Stopford Price of the Committee of Medical Women.19 The “softer temperaments” of Irish girls meant that they were less able to fend off the advances of wily young men who could lure them into sexual indiscretions with promises of marriage.20 This argument allowed Irish authorities to preclude notions of female sexual agency and view Irish women as innocent victims with “proper” intentions of marriage. Emily Buchanan, who worked with fallen women at the Protestant Magdalen Asylum on Leeson Street in Dublin, echoed Devane and claimed that, The majority of girls become prostitutes because having once fallen, and become the mother of an illegitimate child, very little is done to help them in their trouble.21

First fall unwed mothers lost employment opportunities and had little choice but to turn to the streets. These women were innocent victims in need of protection from seducers and also from the “deliberate prostitutes”

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mentioned by Kirwan. Miss Chenevix, representing the Irish Women Workers Union, told the Carrigan Committee it was essential that in Unions, County Homes, etc. girls with one baby should be kept apart from girls with several illegitimate children, as the influence of the latter is undesirable.22

The need to categorize and separate first falls from second falls demonstrated the belief that prostitutes could morally contaminate others simply by their presence. Many witnesses considered second falls beyond hope due to mental instability. Miss Cruice, representing St. Patrick’s Guild, an organization with a mission to aid in the welfare of unwanted children, wrote of her dealings with one single mother: This is her second fall and although I found her truthful and honest enough on the first occasion, it proves that she is morally very instable when there is repetition of her fall. It is very difficult to help girls of this type and really the Dublin Union [a public workhouse] is quite good enough for most of them.23

This analysis of both unwed motherhood and prostitution crossed denominational lines in Ireland. Protestants also participated in the Carrigan Committee meetings albeit in smaller numbers than Catholics who represented the majority of the nation’s population. As seen above, witnesses such as Dr. Dorothy Stopford Price and Emily Buchanan demonstrated similar concerns regarding the necessity of protecting Irish female youth as their Catholic counterparts.24 While the Protestant community in Ireland reflected different opinions than the Catholic majority on particular issues such as divorce, in matters of policing female sexuality and especially regarding female prostitution, their approach was often consistent with one another.25 Historian Leanne McCormick documented the “considerable unity across the religious and political spectrum in relation to female sexuality” in Northern Ireland during this period.26 She argues that both Protestant and Catholic discourses emphasized the role of Irish women as wives and mothers as their most important contribution to the nation-state.27 The religious hierarchies of both denominations therefore sought to protect the virtue of Irish women.28 In the Irish Free State, this overlap between Protestant and Catholic attitudes toward gender roles was also evident. However, as noted above, calls to amend laws in independent Ireland often proceeded within the context of re-building Irish postcolonial identity, and the dominant discourses of Irish society remained firmly set along Catholic lines.

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Thus, the resulting consensus of the Carrigan Committee established a hierarchy of Irish purity to determine which women were deserving of state and religious aid. Both clergy and laity felt the need to protect and rehabilitate the first fall unwed mother or prostitute as the two issues were often conflated in the testimonies. Victims of seduction, however, needed to be separated from those women who fell a second time or who continued in the life of a prostitute of their own volition. Multiple demonstrations of behavior outside the acceptable sexual norms of heterosexual marriage proved that a woman was, at best, irredeemable and undeserving of help, and, at worst, mentally deficient and even unfit to claim an Irish identity. The dichotomous images of prostitutes that emerged from both clerical and lay sources during the process of amending the Criminal Law Amendment Act, that of fallen woman or source of immoral contagion, allowed the Irish Free State to cope with the continued existence of prostitution in Ireland despite the departure of the British. This way, only a small number of Irish women were “hardened” prostitutes, while most were simply exemplary of Irish female innocence. Authorities ignored the fact that this meant that there must be Irish men doing the seducing. Passed on the 20th of February, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1935 made it an offence for a “common prostitute” to solicit on a public street, the testimony of one policeman providing sufficient evidence for arrest.29 The legal term “common prostitute,” however, remained undefined in the law. This ambiguity gave wide powers of interpretation to members of the Garda Síochána, the Irish police force. Ultimately, individual Garda decided what constituted solicitation and who was guilty of the offense. In essence, Garda created the definition of common prostitute through whom they chose to arrest, the main component in that choice being gender. While none of the statutes defined common prostitute as solely female, very few men were arrested as prostitutes in the Irish Free State.30 Garda established that common prostitute equated to a woman with a potentially subversive presence in the public sphere, most likely a working class streetwalker. Prostitutes on the streets, then, contended with the interpretation of Catholic morality from individual policemen as well as from the district justices who heard their cases before Ireland’s district courts. As a summary offence, solicitation was tried without the benefit of a jury, and verdicts, like arrests, were determined solely by men. The actions of these public servants served to re-enforce and re-create the acceptable sexual boundaries for Irish women and establish the working parameters of public morality in relation to Irish prostitutes. But the very presence of prostitutes in public arenas served to challenge these

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parameters and the actions taken by prostitutes further re-defined the extent to which Garda would interfere in public morality. Garda arrested women for a series of behaviors deemed criminal such as being drunk and disorderly, using obscene language, or obstructing public thoroughfares, often in conjunction with a solicitation charge. If a woman deviated from proper behavior by drinking to excess or loitering on a street at night, this exposed her to further charges of criminality the next time she encountered a Garda who “knew” her. In essence, Garda had the power to police all women in the public sphere but generally confined this power to working class women whose need to earn a living often placed them more frequently under Garda observation. Once in sight of law enforcement, Garda judged if a woman’s actions constituted solicitation. According to English common law, solicitation was simply “some gesture, act, or words addressed to a prospective customer or contact.”31 In fact, prostitution itself was defined as an offer of sex for payment. In the 1918 case R. v. de Munck, the judge asserted: “prostitution is proved if it be shown that a woman offers her body commonly for lewdness for payment in return.”32 The justice determined it was unimportant whether sex, or payment for sex, actually occurred as well as whether the members of the proposed transaction actually intended to fulfill the offered services. Therefore, a defendant who argued he or she did not intend to follow through on the proposed act of sex for money was still guilty of solicitation under the law.33 Thus, prostitution equated to the offer of venal sex; the offer itself considered solicitation. If all women in public could be subject to whims of a Garda’s personal opinion regarding which specific actions constituted solicitation, arrest records must be viewed with the knowledge that they contain Garda’s assessments of who was a common prostitute. Yet, whether a woman was unequivocally a prostitute or not, it is important to note that these women were treated by the courts as prostitutes and, given multiple arrests and women’s own admissions to prostitution in appeals, it is likely that many were exchanging sexual favors for money and advertising this by appearing on public streets. Of course, some prostitutes, especially those with an upper class clientele or who operated in well-hidden brothels, escaped police detection. Upper class prostitutes who could ply their trade in the privacy of apartments, elite restaurants or exclusive clubs operated tenuously within the law given that the act of prostitution itself was not illegal. Hence, a prostitute who remained in the private sphere could avoid state interference as the definition of common prostitute became equated with public streetwalkers.

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Court records show that throughout the 1920s and 1930s, solicitation arrests targeted streetwalkers with primarily working class associations. While the women themselves are listed as unemployed, or having “no business,” the people who enter into sureties on their behalf were from various working-class backgrounds listing occupations such as laborer, docker, carpenter, dealer, cab-owner, bootmaker, horse dealer, hotel porter, seaman, coal carrier, tailor, and coachbuilder.34 A geography of prostitution emerged from the arrests, or at least a geography of where Garda expected to find prostitutes, as a set of parameters where these women spent their time. In the cities of Dublin and Cork, high traffic areas took center stage. The quays were frequented especially Eden, Custom, and Ormand Quays in Dublin and Merchant, Anderson, Victoria, and St. Patrick’s Quays in Cork. O’Connell Bridge, as the main route connecting the north and south sides of Dublin, was a frequent place of arrest connecting as it did the two halves of the streetwalkers’ world centering upon Kildare, Dawson Street to St. Stephen’s Green in the south and primarily bordering Parnell, Cathal Brugha and Marlborough and Abbey Streets in the north. The main road inside Phoenix Park was another area where prostitutes plied their trade. In Cork, women were arrested within Morrison’s Island (between the quays) mainly on Oliver Plunkett Street, Maylor Street, Parnell Place, and South Mall as well as the side streets running between them. A sense of precariousness embodies the court records, not only because the women often have no permanent residence, or “no fixed abode” as it is listed upon arrest but also because, regardless of whether these women gave the police a permanent address, mobility proved a key component to the life of a streetwalker. Women could be arrested after having solicited in multiple locations on one night or re-arrested by Garda at different locals within the above geographic boundaries. In Cork, Margaret Staunton appeared in court on September 17, 1945 for two counts of loitering for the purposes of prostitution perpetrated on different dates and at different locales. The first charge, on the 9th of that month, occurred at Winthrop Street, a side street connected to the main thoroughfare of Oliver Plunkett Street which, incidentally, became the site of Staunton’s second count of prostitution on September 14. It is not clear if Garda Donovan, the complainant in the case, held Staunton on each night listed or if he observed her multiple times yet arrested her only once.35 Garda worked in similar patterns in Dublin, arresting woman for soliciting in multiple yet adjoining areas. Both Christina Devine and Delia O’Neill were charged with being common prostitutes on both Eden Quay and Lower O’Connell Streets within one arrest. O’Neill’s charge also

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included Lower Abbey Street.36 According to Garda O’Driscoll, Eileen Fagan solicited at Abbey Street, Beresford Place, and Custom House Quay all during one day.37 Like the above streets in Cork, these two avenues connected and were highly trafficked. Clearly, despite the possibility that they might be trailed by Garda, women continued to pursue a livelihood as streetwalkers and, if Garda arrests are to be believed, appear to have done so for long hours in busy, commercial districts. Since the 1935 Act did not demand corroborating evidence, the majority of cases list only one Garda as a complainant whose word that he witnessed a woman soliciting was enough to obtain a conviction. At other times, the word of his compatriots bolstered his case. Garda P. Flaherty had Garda McCloskey appear at court as a second respondent when Margaret McGlynn appealed her solicitation case.38 As established via common law, it was not necessary to catch a prostitute “in the act” or even receiving payment. Garda simply had to be convinced that a woman’s purpose on a public street was immoral. In one case, the woman arrested was no longer even on a public street. Margaret Rafter was accused of stealing the wallet of a Corporal James Morris on the June 21, 1946. On the 24th, Garda Flaherty saw Rafter in the College Bar on Townshend Street where he asked her to come outside and speak with him. Thereupon he arrested her both for stealing and for soliciting on O’Connell Bridge three days before. Obviously, Flaherty had not witnessed Rafter soliciting directly or most likely would have made an arrest upon seeing her that night. Instead, he took the word of Corporal Morris for both charges. Nevertheless, having been convicted the previous February for solicitation, Rafter was sentenced to three months imprisonment for solicitation and six months with hard labor for stealing. Like many women in the court records, Rafter did not meekly accept her conviction. Although she refused to make a statement to the police, she appealed her case and both convictions were reversed on appeal, perhaps demonstrating the weakness of the cases against her. Rafter also had the good fortune that the solitary “necessary witness” to her crimes, presumably Corporal Morris, “had left Éire.”39 Rafter reappeared in court two years after the above case, convicted again of being a common prostitute and appealing a six month prison term. Just as before, the court had “noted” Rafter’s “prior convictions” and used them as evidence to substantiate her guilt.40 Convicted once for solicitation, then, a woman was labeled a common prostitute and assumed guilty until proven innocent. Familiarity with a woman’s past allowed many Garda to presume misconduct based on her reputation as a known prostitute. This did not, however, mean that women were without recourse

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to appeal such sentences, although the more often convicted, the less likely that an appeal would be successful. Still, for women without criminal records, being seen in the company of common prostitutes could be detrimental. In a 1926 solicitation case, Garda Denis Durkan charged Mary Rainey and Josephine Ward with being common prostitutes and soliciting at Parnell Place. Rainey, who had no prior arrests and gave a fixed address, never appeared in the court records again.41 Ward, on the other hand, was known to Garda, having been arrested a month earlier as a common prostitute.42 A month following her joint arrest with Rainey, she would again be picked up for drunkenness and serve fourteen days in prison. Garda Durkan’s familiarity with Ward may have been a factor in his arrest of the two women. While one cannot state for certain if Rainey did or did not solicit on the day in question in the company of Ward, her case was dismissed by the justice who had regard to “the previous good character of the Defendant[s] it is inexpedient to inflict any punishment.”43 Ward meanwhile continued to come under scrutiny, the court assessing her as a “rogue vagabond” following another charge of solicitation in 1927. The Gardaí could also utilize the predetermined assessment of a woman’s virtue or lack thereof to ascertain the guilt of criminals who exploited prostitutes. In cases of men charged with living off the earnings of prostitution, the Gardaí merely asserted their knowledge of a woman’s past reputation as a common prostitute to infer the guilt of men often seen in their company. Speaking of Harriet Sinclair in 1928, Garda Buckley stated: “I have known her over 3 years. She is a prostitute. I know she has been convicted as a common prostitute for soliciting.” Still, he did not produce her charge sheet or a list of convictions in the case which indicted her husband for living off her earnings.44 Similarly, Garda Daniel Brosnan testified to his two year acquaintance with a Christina McCann whom he knew “to be a prostitute during that time.”45 Brosnan had “seen her nearly every night in a café in Lr. O’Connell St. in company with other prostitutes.” Brosnan did not refer to seeing McCann solicit or if he himself arrested her for that crime at some specific date and time. Instead, McCann’s association with other prostitutes in an area known for prostitution condemned her character as disreputable and provided enough evidence to arrest a man who occupied a room with her in the city. Clearly, McCann loitered in the wrong place at the wrong time and with the wrong people. By patrolling similar locations and looking for recognizable women, Garda constructed a self-fulfilling model for finding and identifying prostitutes. They looked for women creating disturbances on public streets, whether this was through solicitation or other deviant behaviors.

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With the exception of larceny and assault, crimes such as drunk and disorderly conduct, using obscene language, wandering with no visible means of assistance, and obstruction fell under the jurisdiction of public nuisance law. These behaviors, like solicitation, became criminal only in the public sphere. During the first twenty-two years of the Gardaí’s policing of Cork, two-thirds of their solicitation arrests featured these other crimes. By far the most common charge accompanying that of solicitation, drunk and disorderly conduct, featured in the charge sheets of roughly a quarter of all woman arrested for solicitation in Cork.46 Just as the label common prostitute clung to a woman arrested once for solicitation, women accused of these other crimes acquired a higher level of scrutiny from authorities and this increased the likelihood that a woman would also be charged with solicitation. This pattern of arrests can also be interpreted as a demonstration that poverty, addiction, and violence often accompanied the lives of streetwalkers. Garda arrested Christina Stout for drunk and disorderly fifteen times between 1924 and 1941, her usual sentence being twenty shillings or serving fourteen days in the Cork gaol.47 Stout’s solitary charge of solicitation did not occur until 1939 and was dismissed on merits. Meanwhile, Kate Purcell garnered the same number of arrests as Stout but only during an eight year period from 1928 to 1936. Like Stout, Purcell only had one arrest for solicitation, although the charge led to conviction and the typical sentence of either paying a forty shilling fine or serving one month in jail. Another woman in the Cork records, Kate Carroll, arrested a staggering seventy-nine times over a thirty-five year period, demonstrated an extreme history of alcoholism. Drunk and disorderly charges accounted for seventy of those arrests, eleven in 1923 alone. The following year, Carroll’s first solicitation charge was dismissed on merits. She did not fare so well with her next solicitation arrest in 1928 for which she served a one month sentence. Altogether, Carroll acquired six arrests for solicitation, the last of which occurred in 1933. Carroll went on, however, to be detained almost every year following for drunk and disorderly conduct.48 Usually listed in her cases as having no fixed abode, Carroll resided in the Cork District Hospital at the time of her last arrest in 1958.49 While it cannot be stated with certainty that alcoholism led to prostitution in this case or vice versa, it is clear that for Carroll and other women in the court records, Garda viewed alcohol consumption often in conjunction with prostitution. The Gardaí were not alone in their correlation and many moral reformers marked an explicit link between alcoholism and prostitution. Frank Duff, the founder of the lay rescue society, the Legion of Mary,

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often cited alcohol as a staple in the lives of prostitutes. Of the prostitutes who resided in Monto, the infamous red-light district located in the north side of Dublin, Duff observed: “Drink, more than any other circumstance, had held them anchored in the sea of sorrow. Could they ever be torn loose from its masterful hold?”50 Brothel prostitution encouraged the use of alcohol by their clientele. Most of Monto’s brothels operated as shebeens, the Irish term for an unlicensed establishment that sold liquor illegally. Madams made large profits by overcharging for both hard liquor and beer. While madams would not have been pleased with prostitutes who heavily abused alcohol, they did not oppose prostitutes who used it as a means used to cope with the harshness and uncertainly of their lives. Several Monto prostitutes told Duff of their reliance on drink, leading Duff to remark: Indeed, the very mention of a drink made half of those around me thirsty for one! They argued from their own case. They were accustomed to many drinks every day—every hour, some of them. They needed them. How could they survive a whole day without a single one?

In fact, Duff determined this was the “chief difficulty” in their conversion to a moral life.51 Duff’s concern extended to the use of methylated spirits, a grave problem among the poor. Methylated spirits, or alcohol with additives that made it unpleasant and unsafe to consume, could be produced more cheaply than regular alcohol which would be taxed as an intoxicating substance. Manufacturers produced it as a fuel and cleaning agent.52 According to a 1924 article in the Dublin Evening Mail, the drive to curb consumption of the spirits had unintended consequences: the additives, being too strong, made the substance being sold too noxious to even use for its external purposes.53 In spite of such dangers, some people continued to consume methylated spirits; newspapers printed denouncements of the practice well into the 1930s.54 As late as 1949, the problem manifested itself among the lower classes. That year, Kate Hayes was sentenced to two months in jail for drinking methylated spirits on a street in Cork.55 Duff despaired at ever reclaiming the souls of several Monto prostitutes after witnessing them passing around a bottle of the spirits “just as if the Blessed Sacrament were being carried round a room full of good people.”56 In fact, Daisy Warner, one prostitute who “made herself deliberately drunk each day as preparation for her street life,” disrupted life at the Sancta Maria, the rescue hostel set up by the Legion of Mary. Warner, able to refrain from alcohol use during the religious retreat that preceded her

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entrance into life at the hostel, returned very drunk to the house one night and, taking offence to a comment made by another woman, pounced on her. According to Duff, Like a veritable tigress she threw herself upon the offending one and overwhelmed her by a volley of blows and kicks. Then she turned vengefully on a couple who had tried to separate her from her prey, and in a few moments she had beaten them into a like submission.57

Eventually subdued on this occasion, Warner repeated her behavior some time later. This time, returning drunk to the hostel, she broke a glass picture frame and repeatedly bit a St. Vincent de Paul brother sent to help restrain her. She finally capitulated after those in the hostel threw water over her.58 Warner exemplifies the type of raucous and disruptive prostitute Garda tried to restrict from public streets and also how difficult prostitutes could be to police or silence. Warner, like other prostitutes in the Legion’s hostel, sought help when she considered it necessary, leaving and entering the hostel of her own accord. Although the Legionaries expected women to behave modestly and chastely while in the hostel, they still found it necessary to make certain accommodations for the female residents. The hostel allowed cigarette smoking, for example, and also gave women free time outside the hostel’s confines although this could lead to episodes like the one above. While some women did successfully reform, according to Legion reports, by marrying, becoming nuns, or entering “suitable” employment like domestic service, some streetwalkers did not wholeheartedly accept the lifestyle of sacrifice, repentance and purity preached by Legionaries and returned to the streets. Although fewer streetwalkers were convicted of assault than they were of drunk and disorderly, these crimes featured in the lives of several women, exhibiting direct opposition to the interference of the state in their lives.59 In Cork, Mary White was charged with solicitation, drunk and disorderly as well as assaulting a Garda in the execution of his duties.60 Kate Carroll had the same three charges in 1928.61 In addition to fighting off an arresting Garda, many women were accused of stealing money from men. John C. Barry accused Nora Fawcett of stealing £5 from him; Denis O’Donoghue accused Annie Keane of stealing £3 of his property.62 As seen with the larceny case of Margaret Rafter discussed above, men often accused a prostitute of stealing, knowing his own association with her, even if he appeared as her client, remained legal. Despite calls to criminalize the clientele of prostitution, neither the 1935 Act nor the statutes prior to that Act’s implementation made this aspect illegal.

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Corporal Morris committed no crime if indeed he had engaged the services of Rafter as a prostitute. Duff reported that many prostitutes in Monto stole from drunken men whenever possible and that “this organized, methodical robbery was an integral part of the system…it constituted the most lucrative source of local revenue” even beyond that of shebeening or prostitution itself.63 A further possibility existed that clients could not always be trusted to pay and some prostitutes accused of pilfering from men may have been taking what they felt they were owed. In the Cork district courts, only one case featured a convicted prostitute who had committed larceny against another woman. In 1925, Christina Stout was sentenced to three months in jail for stealing some of Mary Sheehan’s clothing. Stout has agreed to be tried summarily rather than in a circuit court in front of a jury. When tried summarily, women usually received sentences of three, four, or six months, on par with that of solicitation. Therefore, women faced similar consequences whether they were accused of solicitation or larceny (or both) and may have weighed the benefits of each accordingly, stealing or prostituting for survival as different situations arose. In general, though, Garda accused more women of public nuisance crimes in conjunction with prostitution than those accused of assault or larceny. After the crime of drunk and disorderly, women were most often charged with using obscene language, wandering with no visible means of support, and obstruction. For example, Mary Cleary paid a fine of twentyone shillings for using obscene language but served a month in jail for the solicitation charge alongside it.64 Margaret Geoghegan, on the other hand, spent one month in jail for loitering for the purpose of prostitution and using obscene language at Fisher’s Lane.65 Garda later charged Geoghegan with “wandering abroad without having any visible means of subsistence,” having her pledge good behavior for a year and enter into a recognizance of £5.66 Unfortunately, court records provide no further information of just how Geoghegan attracted Garda attention by wandering in the public streets or the kinds of language Garda determined as “obscene.” The crime of obstruction further exemplifies the extensive powers of interpretation endowed upon the Gardaí. In 1930, Annie Duffy was charged with “using obscene language on public street,” along with “obstructing public footpath by accosting passengers thereon” yet the purpose of her obstruction does not appear in the records.67 Essentially, the boundaries between obstruction and solicitation blurred on several occasions as individual Garda determined which crime had occurred. While a woman might obstruct a man’s path in order to solicit, women could also obstruct paths for other purposes such as begging. In 1931,

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Garda later charged Duffy with obstructing and begging. Garda charged Margaret Foley, however, with “obstruction by loitering and loitering for the purposes of prostitution,” fining her twenty-one shillings for obstruction while the court dismissed the solicitation charge.68 Similarly, Elizabeth Coffey stood before the court in 1946 accused of loitering for prostitution on Maylor Street and obstructing a footpath on the same.69 Did these women blatantly approach and thus obstruct men within full sight of Garda? Did Garda view obstruction in these cases as a more blatant extension of solicitation? Without further details surrounding the circumstances of arrests, it is impossible to say. Yet, not all solicitation arrests are accompanied with a charge of obstruction. Therefore, if women did not always directly accost men on the street in order to obtain a solicitation charge, Garda must have interpreted the gestures of actions encompassing solicitation rather freely. Ultimately, as the overlap between obstruction and solicitation charges demonstrates, Garda attempted to maintain public order in the streets by policing deviant female behavior of all kinds, not only the act of solicitation. Yet Garda also classified deviant women together, often rearresting the same women on various charges. Since only a third of the women arrested for solicitation had this as a solitary charge, it is clear that once a woman was charged with one type of deviancy, Garda often thought her capable of others including prostitution. Garda perceived many women as common prostitutes if they did not outwardly conform to other standards of conduct beyond sexual morality. Women should exhibit the characteristics of sobriety, honesty, deference to authority, and, probably most paramount, modesty. Those who did not were arrested for drunk and disorderly, larceny, assault and solicitation. Garda did not evaluate these crimes solely on their observation of a woman’s actions on a single day but used a variety of factors including assumptions about her lifestyle choices and her prior reputation. Appearing on the streets alone at night, or in the company of other undesirable women or men, drinking in public, using foul language, frequenting avenues or pubs considered disreputable were all markers of women who failed to conform to Garda standards of virtuous womanhood. Due to this emphasis on public deviancy, the profile of a typical common prostitute equated with that of a working class streetwalker. The court records reveal a small, unsettled and unruly world in which streetwalkers in Dublin and Cork operated. These women were poor and vulnerable to the great powers of categorization and prosecution given to the Gardaí, but were not necessarily complacent in their disenfranchised position, as assaults on arresting policemen prove. Prostitutes also refused

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to cooperate with Garda by more subtle means, using aliases or moving the venue for their solicitation indoors and therefore outside the jurisdiction of existing solicitation law which stipulated the necessity of a “public thoroughfare” for the crime to occur. At times, women could plead their case under the Probation of Offenders Act which suggested leniency in the form of probation for first time offenders. District Justices could use this act on repeat offenders as well. Margaret Geoghegan convinced the court that she should receive probation rather than a jail sentence for “wandering abroad” despite her prior convictions for solicitation. Some women, as we have seen above, appealed their solicitation convictions. Bridie McAteer pled ill health and a desire to reform in her 1953 case appealing both a larceny and solicitation charge. Reasoning “My lord I do not want to be like this all my life, as I want to get a home for myself, it is not young I be getting” and promising “I will lead a good life in the future, you will never see me in Court again,” McAteer was unfortunately unsuccessful in converting her case and her charge of larceny perhaps seen as more serious than a sole charge of solicitation.70 Kathleen McDonald, however, was more successful in 1948. She employed a solicitor and claimed that while she may have been loitering, she was not soliciting. The court overturned her six month sentence.71 Still, for prostitutes to construct their own identities within an independent Ireland, they had to navigate a hegemonic discourse that could either victimize or demonize them. Despite attempts by Church and state authorities to neatly categorize and suppress common prostitutes in an effort to promote virginal mothers as ideal Irish female citizens, prostitutes made efforts to resist such categorization even while being forced to work within its confines. Their continued existence in postcolonial Ireland obliged state and clerical authorities to clarify the acceptable norms of Irish female sexuality and act to police those who deviated from them. They employed a myriad of strategies to avoid or frustrate the legal arm of the state—their own agency evident in their appeal cases and statements to the police. Kathleen McDonald won her appeal in part by claiming she was only loitering and not soliciting. For Garda, however, the two concepts were usually one as they defined women as prostitutes based on their own perceptions of the intent of women in public spaces. Thus, defining women based on their sexual behavior meant more state intrusion not only into the lives of prostitutes but all Irish women, as female sexuality was used as a site to articulate and demonstrate the image of postcolonial Ireland as a nation of moral superiority. .

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Notes 1

National Archives, Ireland (NAI), Department of Justice 90/4/14. Memorandum sent to the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts and Juvenile Prostitution, dated 16 November 1930. Kirwan would testify before the Committee in January of 1931 as a representative of the Legion of Mary, a Catholic lay society. 2 Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society (Cambridge University Press, 2007), chapter five. 3 Since sources in this article span from the 1920s to the 1950s, I at times use “Ireland” as a generic name for the nation. Ireland has been officially the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1937, Éire from 1937 to 1949 and from 1949 until today, the Republic of Ireland. 4 Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, “Power Gender and Identity in the Irish Free State,” Journal of Women’s History, 6 & 7, no. 4 & 1 (Winter/Spring 1995): 117–136. Valiulis argues that it is common for postcolonial states to seek control of their female populations as a means to articulate their newly gained power, especially if factors such as economic dependency make control of other political issues more difficult. 5 Irish Independent, March 3, 1930, 8. The quoted headline was followed by an article in which Irish bishops discussed the problem of temporary marriages becoming a common occurrence within Ireland. See also “National Synod of Irish Hierarchy,” September 6, 1930. This article announces the publication in booklet form of the topics of discussion at the Synod which occurred August 2–15, 1927. The section of women’s tradition is titled “Modesty That is Their Inheritance.” 6 NAI, Department of the Taoiseach, s 6134. Bishop of Ardagh in Longford Leader January 21, 1931. This Taoiseach file contains the clippings from multiple newspapers that reported Lenten pastorals. 7 Ibid., Most Rev. Dr. Gilmartin, Archbishop of Tuam in The Connacht Tribune. February 21, 1931. 8 Ibid., Most Rev. Dr. Gilmartin further stated that women should “inspire respect for their sex by their reserve and modesty.” 9 Ibid., Cardinal MacRory in The Derry Journal, February 10, 1931. He also stated that the “deplorable evil” of dances “is a reproach to the frail name of our nation.” 10 Ibid., Most Rev. Dr. Gilmartin. 11 This was the rationale behind Magdalen asylums—institutions run by women religious originally to rehabilitate prostitutes but later catered to various women considered by clergy to be sexually immoral. See James Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) and Maria Luddy, Prostitution, chapter three. 12 NAI, Department of Justice, H 266/40, 1924 “Memorandum on Law and Proposed Legislation Dealing with Social Moral Problems,” given to Department of Justice. 13 Ibid.

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14 Ibid. Devane specifically referred to Good Shepherd Homes, Magdalen Asylums run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, as suitable places to reform prostitutes. 15 Examples of these societies are the Legion of Mary, the Irish Women Workers Union, National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Irish Women Citizens and Local Government Association, St. Patrick’s Guild, Saor an Leanbh, Irish Women’s Doctors Committee and representatives from Protestant Magdalen Asylums. 16 The Committee was known after its chairman William C. Carrigan, K.C. 17 NAI, Department of Justice 90/4/1. Carrigan Committee Minute Book, 13. Miss J. Dodd, representing the Irish Women Citizen’s and Local Government Association testified “it was almost impossible to reclaim a confirmed prostitute.” Very Rev. John Flanagan testified “But hardened prostitutes—say girls up to 21 years who had been 4 or 5 years at the trade—should not be sent to the Borstal suggested. These are incurable and should be sent to prison.” Ibid., 51. 18 NAI, Department of the Taoiseach, s 5998. Margaret Gavan Duffy and Dr. Ita Brady compare Irish girls to Latin girls, stating that Latin girls are kept more strictly despite their higher level of sophistication, 60. 19 Ibid. In the Carrigan Report, Dr. Russell’s testimony as well as that of Dr. Delia Horne and Dr. Dorothy Stopfrod Price uses the word “trusting.” See also JUS 90/4/1. Committee Minute Book, 35-36. Testimony of Dr. Delia Moclair Horne and Dr. Dorothy Stopford Price. 20 Ibid. Margaret Gavan Duffy and Dr. Ita Brady, Ibid., 60. See also Dr. Russell’s testimony. 21 NAI, Department of Justice 90/4/28. Contained in memo sent with a letter to the Committee on 18 September 1930. 22 Ibid., 90/4/24. See also 90/4/1 Committee Minutes, 20, where Miss Cruice of St. Patrick’s Guild states similar opinions regarding unmarried mothers. 23 Ibid., 90/46. Files on St. Patrick’s Guild given in evidence to the Carrigan Committee. Letter from Miss Cruice to Dr. Cook of North Circular Road, 23 April 1929. 24 NAI, Department of the Taoiseach, s 5998, See the list of witnesses to the Carrigan Report. 25 Caitriona Beaumont, “Women, Citizenship and Catholicism in the Irish Free State, 1922–1948,”in Women’s History Review 6, no. 4 (1997): 563–585. 26 Leanne McCormack, Regulating Sexuality: Women in Twentieth-Century Northern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 1. 27 Ibid., 100. 28 Ibid., 103. 29 Under Section Sixteen, titled “Suppression of Prostitution,” a first offence for solicitation garnered a fine not to exceed ǧ2, with subsequent convictions garnering prison sentences not to exceed six months. 30 Luddy, Prostitution, 243 Appendix 1. Between 1927 and 1940, seven men were arrested for prostitution. These statistics are culled from Saorstát Éireann Statistical Historical Abstract, the Report of the Ministry of Home Affairs on the

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Administration of Local Government Services and reflect arrests for prostitution within the whole of the Free State. 31 Thomas O’Malley, Sexual Offences: Law, Policy, and Punishments (Dublin: Round Hall, Sweet & Maxwell, 1996), 186. 32 O’Malley, 185. He notes that “lewdness” in the 1918 definition was replaced by “sexual purposes” in the English Criminal Draft Code and that women did not have to engage in “normal sexual intercourse” for prostitution to have occurred or have taken any sexual act to completion. 33 Conor Hanly, An Introduction to Irish Criminal Law (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2006), 388. 34 Appeal Files to the Dublin Circuit Court (AFDCC). Other occupations listed in the appeals files were tennis club groundsman, boardinghouse owner, scaffolder, car parker, licensed vinter, refreshment house owner, shopkeeper, canteen worker, lorry driver, building contractor, and even a sergeant in the defense forces. Women who gave sureties were listed most often by their marital status—i.e. married or widowed—though a few had occupations listed such as domestic or restaurant owner. 35 District Court Minute Books, Cork (DCMBC) 1945. Staunton was sentenced to a forty shilling fine or a one month prison term for each charge. She served the prison term for both. 36 Appeal Books to the Dublin Circuit Court (ABDCC). Devine, 4 March 1948, O’Neill, 26 January 1948. 37 AFDCC, #113, March 1949. 38 ABDCC, 1946–47. 39 AFDCC, 1946 #143–334. 40 ABDCC, March 1948–January 1950. #198. 8 June 1948. 41 DCMBC Jan. 1926–March 1926, # 267 & 268. Rainey listed her address as 29 Dublin Street, Cork, and another Mary Rainey does not appear (with or without that address) in the records. This does not expunge the possibility of aliases. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. Outcome given for both defendants. 44 State Files Central Criminal Court, November, 1928, #8. 45 State Files Dublin Circuit Court, 1946, #72. 46 DCMBC. Of the one hundred twenty-eight women arrested between 1922 and 1959 in Cork, thirty-four were also charged with drunk and disorderly or being drunk and incapable of taking care of themselves, or about 26% of the total. 47 DCMBC. 48 DCMBC. Carroll was arrested thirty-two times between 1935 and 1958. Carroll was not arrested in 1944 and 1945 and her 1946 arrest indicated she was residing in the Sancta Maria Hostel on Dyke Parade, perhaps obtaining help to stay off the streets. Following that arrest though, Carroll returned to being listed as “no fixed abode” until 1958. 49 In 1924, the Cork workhouse on Douglas Road, which opened in 1841 to provide relief for the destitute poor, shifted (in name only) to the Cork County Home and District Hospital (today it is St. Finbarr’s Hospital). It is likely that a

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destitute Kate Carroll ended her days as a ward of the state. Catherine Shanahan, “Landmark day for the city’s maternity services,” Irish Examiner, March 24, 2007. 50 Frank Duff, Miracles on Tap (Bay Shore, New York: Monfort Publications, 1961), 53. 51 Ibid, 65.He notes drink was the “toughest objection” to entering a rescue hostel. 52 Usually methanol is added to the alcohol, a toxic chemical originally produced from distilling wood (sometimes known as wood alcohol). Methanol is responsible for the adjective methylated. It is toxic to humans and can cause blindness and death. At times, non-toxic substances can be added to alcohol to make it taste bitter but do not make it toxic. I assume that, since it is referred to as methylated spirits in Ireland and not as denatured alcohol, the government added methanol as additive rather than only a substance causing bitter taste. 53 “New Methylated Spirit Danger,” Dublin Evening Mail, December 12, 1924, 3. The paper reported authorities looking into fixing the matter. 54 “Sale of Methylated Spirits,” Dublin Evening Mail, 24 February 1925, 5. “ Drink Evil in Ireland,” Irish Independent, 14 June 1934, 5. The 1925 article recounted a shopkeeper fined ǧ10 for violating the 1924 Intoxicating Liquor Act by selling methlylated spirits to a person prohibited. The 1934 article feature the Catholic Total Abstinence Federation railing against the evils of methylated spirits and wine. 55 DCMBC.March 1949–June 1949, #700. 56 Duff, 144–145. 57 Ibid., 75. 58 Ibid., 146–150. Warner then sat sullen in the hall until she asked for her bleeding hand to be bandaged. 59 DCMBC. Roughly about six percent of women arrested for solicitation in Cork were also charged with assault, while seven percent were charged with larceny. 60 Ibid. December 1926. #175–176. White given one month for prost, one month for drunk and disorderly—to be served after the first and then 2 months for the assault. 61 Ibid. August 1928–January 1929, #15-17. 62 Ibid. July 1942–October 1942, #22. Annie Keane Fawcett’s conviction order loose in the minute book of May 1953–December 1953, March 1953–December 1953. 63 Duff, 118. 64 DCMBC, November 1949–January 1950, #859 and 860. 65 Ibid. March 1942–May 1942, #471 and 472. The records do not state if the one month conviction for each charge was to be served concurrently or consecutively. 66 Ibid. November 1945–January 1946, # 307. 67 Ibid. February 1930–May 1930 #243. 68 Ibid. November 1945–January 1946 1945 # 456 and 457. Foley paid the fine on 12 January 1946. One month was listed if she could not pay. The dismissed solicitation charge was under the Probation of Offenders Act. 69 Ibid. May 1946–August 1946 #144 and 145. 70 AFDCC 1953. 71 Ibid., 1948, # 338.

CHAPTER SIX PROCREATING A SUPERIOR AMERICA WITHOUT POOR JANE, GRACE OR DORIS B.: FEMALE FIELD WORKERS, THE EUGENICS AND PUBLIC HEALTH MOVEMENTS, AND THE REGULATION OF SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE BEHAVIOR TINA M. KIBBE

On May 2, 1927 the world witnessed two enthusiastic displays of American ingenuity, persistence, and commitment toward accomplishing ground-breaking goals. The newly established Army Air Corps completed its 22,000 mile goodwill tour of twenty-five Central and South American countries and landed at Bolling Field in Washington D.C. A crowd of thousands, including President Coolidge, cabinet members and diplomats from Central and South America, cheerfully greeted the returning aviators. The Pan American Goodwill mission took messages of friendship from the United States to the governments and people of Central and South America, promoted commercial aviation, forged new aerial navigation routes through the Americas and was meant to be illustrative of both great humanitarianism and national superiority that the United States was proud to exhibit.1 Three miles away, on that same day in the same city of Washington, D.C., the United States Supreme Court meted out its own brand of “humanitarianism” in the oft-cited case of Buck v. Bell 274 U.S. 200 (1927). In the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.2

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With this opinion, the Supreme Court legalized forced sterilization in the United States, marking the culmination of efforts by American political, intellectual and social leaders to prevent what they viewed as racial and societal degeneration and to convince Americans that the science of eugenics, in conjunction with advances in medicine, offered effective solutions to improve society by denying reproductive rights to women like Jane, Grace and Doris B. This landmark decision illustrated the intersection of eugenics, public health and the body while also highlighting the gendered nature of medical and eugenic policies and practices. The Court based its decision in Buck v. Bell on the precedent set in Jacobson v. Massachusetts 197 U.S. 11(1905), which upheld the authority of the state to enact compulsory vaccination laws through its “unquestioned power to preserve and protect public health.”3 The Court=s decision in Jacobson asserted that the rights of an individual must at times be subordinated to the common welfare. To many this seemed a basic bargain of civilizationΧthat an individual must give up some personal freedom in exchange for the benefits of belonging to a civilized society. Justice Holmes reiterated this “bargain” in the ruling of the Court in Buck by extending the power of the state to cover the cutting of fallopian tubes stating that, as in the Jacobson case, this ruling was constitutionally valid and was beneficial to both the individual and society. The explicit reference to cutting the fallopian tubes, not the vasa deferentia in males, reveals the extent to which gender influenced ideas of precisely whose bodies should be the primary targets for reproductive regulation. The Buck decision also affirmed the police powers of the state to intrude upon and regulate individual sexual and reproductive behavior in the name of improving and protecting society as whole. Thus, while the United States used the Pan American Goodwill mission as a way to create outward signs of power and fitness, inward doubts about the fitness of the American population were beginning to lead to activist reforms. Utilizing the authoritative and powerful language of science and medicine, the eugenics movement and, in perhaps less obvious ways, public health sought to implement means of drawing distinctions between “fit” and “unfit” citizens. Both movements attempted not only to establish negative eugenics policies but to positively “fit” the American male and female body. This paper examines how the eugenics and public health movements often worked in tandem to construct women=s bodies and sought to direct fit women toward marriage and reproduction as well as attempting to constrain unfit women from doing so, all in an effort to manage the genetic fitness of the American population to create a “superior” society.

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Women Assessing Women’s Fitness to Procreate Women working as eugenics field workers and public health nurses operated as agents on the front lines, collecting information about individuals and families based on job-specific training, as well as on value-laden subjective assessments informed by their own belief systems and cultural norms. Because the home was the natural purview of women, according to public health physicians and eugenics leaders, they would be ideal surveyors of homes and families. Moreover, both the leading American eugenicist Charles Davenport and the Eugenics Record Office director Henry Goddard believed women to be better suited to conducting interviews and eliciting personal information from strangers.4 These assessments contributed to definitions of “fit” and “unfit” within a larger framework of notions of normality. Eugenicists and public health authorities used this information to formulate policies and practices in an effort to manage the “fit” and the “unfit.” They constructed a discourse about “fitness” based on a system of production and reproduction of knowledge between “field” agents and medical and scientific “experts.” In other words, “legitimate” facts about what constituted “fitness” based on scientific objectivity were actually representations based on subjective processes of the experts constructing them.5 These representations then became central in the organization and “naturalization” of existing social hierarchies and systems of power relations. 6 Women played an integral role in the construction of the aberrant female body as they categorized and processed other women’s appearance and behavior. Public health nurses and eugenics field workers, the vast majority of whom were women, comprised the front lines of sorting out the normal and the abnormal. Eugenics field workers often labeled women they viewed as unfit as “feebleminded,” “stupid,” and “immoral.” For example, in 1915 eugenics field worker Sadie Devitt took one look at the three-room home of Grace, a young woman living in Fairbault, Minnesota, and wrote in her notebook that it was “filthily kept.” Grace shared the house with her mother, father, and six siblings. Devitt interviewed the family and labeled Grace’s parents as “more or less defective” while then labeling the mother specifically as “feebleminded, a moron type” who was “very obese and coarse looking with considerable growth of long hair on her face which makes her repulsive.” After completing her assessment of the family, Devitt collected information about Grace from neighbors and teachers, including one who stated that she was “stupid and dull in school, hard to control” and always wanting to be “out on the street with the boys at all hours.”7 This was a typical eugenics field worker interview to trace

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“defective” genetic material throughout familial lines in order to construct a family pedigree.8 Grace and her family were but a few examples of the thousands who were subjectively assessed by eugenics field workers who traveled throughout various communities identifying and categorizing physical, mental and social traits of individuals and families to submit to the Eugenics Record Office for the purpose sorting out “unfit” individuals from “fit” ones. To those studying them, the descriptions and labels given to these women essentially became their identities. As such, women=s bodies and behavior became sites where eugenics and public health discourse intersected concerning the defective and diseased elements of American society as well as becoming potential targets for eugenic and public health remedies. According to the American Public Health Association, public health nursing responsibilities included inspecting patients and their homes, as well as raising the standards of familial health and hygiene for the purposes of a happier and more efficient citizenry. The APHA hoped to “evolve high enough standards to attract and keep students who are acceptable women.”9 The public health nurse, claimed physician Ira Wile, was the “handmaiden of preventative medicine” and the “agency for communal protection.”10 In 1920, public health nurse Edna Foley warned that the “mental equipment” must always be taken into consideration while trying to “preach the gospel of hygiene” to patients while out in communities. In addition, added Foley, individuals’ confidence and cooperation must be gained in order to educate them on the “correct and normal” preventive measures against the spread of diseaseΧincluding disease or deficiency spread through heredity. Foley, taking great pride in her work as a “keen observer and student of psychic changes,” believed her patient to be plagued with a mental disorder because he “simply did not appreciate” the information she offered him before he ordered her out of his home.11 Public health nurses, like eugenics field workers, traveled out into communities, paying particular attention to those they considered “backward, ignorant, and stupid,” and assumed the role not only of nurse but also of “diplomat, reformer, and judge.” These nurses felt called to the “noble service” and “high purpose” of teaching people “right living.”12 The United States Public Health Service proclaimed that the “diagnosis and grading of defectives” was a “long step towards prevention” of the reproduction of their kind.13 Public health nurses played a vital role in recognizing and collecting information about disease and defects of individuals as well as recommending appropriate care.14 This also involved establishing normative standards of hygiene and included educating people about appropriate sexual and reproductive behavior.

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Because the home was the natural purview of women, according to public health physicians and eugenics leaders, they would be ideal surveyors of homes and families. Eugenicists and public health authorities, as well as other social and political leaders, worked to regulate and “normalize” sexual and reproductive behavior. This meant that sex and procreation should only occur within marriage. Eugenics field workers made elaborate notations of any sexual behavior deviating from that which they considered normative. Public health nurses linked abhorrent sexual behavior with immoral living and venereal disease. Eugenics field workers’ reports and public health nurses’ case notes reflected their own middle-class sensibilities. Field workers’ and nurses’ disapproval of sexuality and reproductive habits among those already presupposed as substandard informed their scientific and medical evaluation of individual “fitness,” as well as standards of living. These subjective reports also interpreted and defined deviant sexual behavior and overly large families as signs of hereditary defectiveness. For example, in completing a family pedigree a eugenics field worker noted that Jane, was “talkative and effusiveΨknown for her sharp tongue and her vile temper.” Moreover, the field worker believed that Jane “made every effort to impress me with [her] child=s love for her and struck me as a very insincere and untrustworthy woman.” When conducting an interview with a former teacher of Jane’s, the field worker learned that Jane would leave school with boys as many times as she could. The teacher concluded that Jane had her “first idiot child before she had gotten married because of her loose ways.” The teacher’s final complaint described Jane as “so bad that clothes could not be kept on her if her hands were not tied.”15 Jane’s brother Sam is described as “not knowing enough to chew gum.” The field worker was told that Sam “attempted intercourse with the daughter of his new wife,” so the young girl, who informants described as a “troublemaker,” was removed from the home and placed in a reformatory.16 The fact that the young girl was sent away is evidence that women were the primary targets of the regulation of sexual behavior. A public health nurse made a notation while visiting an expectant mother, Doris B., who already had four children all under the age of seven, that the woman was “most likely a prostituteΨand feebleminded.” On Doris’s plan of care, the nurse noted that the children were “malnourished, crippled, feeblemindedΨand should be sent to the appropriate schools for crippled and idiot children” Finally, the nurse concluded that because Doris was so feebleminded that she because could not control her “sexual immoral ways,” she should be most definitely considered a candidate for sterilization.17

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In the first decades of the twentieth century, women, especially working-class and immigrant women, became increasingly visible in public spaces as both workers and consumers. Many members of the elite and middle-classes viewed these women as threats to traditional morality. Moreover, the ideology of the home and family as the foundation for a stable, civilized society seemed by many to be in jeopardy. Working women, in particular, pushed the boundaries of society in an effort to create their own vision of socio-economic independence and, in doing so, threatened to undermine established class and gender hierarchies. As American society struggled to renegotiate gender relations, women were often portrayed as either reproducers of a healthy, fit society or, in stark contrast, as the very embodiment of its destruction. The family and future generations of superior stock were at risk of being contaminated, a concern shared by eugenicists, public health authorities and many members of the elite and middle-classes. Thus, women and women’s bodies became significant in the discourse of what constituted acceptable societal norms.

A Male-dominated Scientific Discourse on Assessing Women’s Fitness to Procreate From the inception of both movements, eugenics and public health, even before they were known by those exact names, shared connections that were woven into the very fabric of their ideals, methods and goals. Although the two movements were at times at odds on some matters, at least on the surface, more often than not they intersected at significant issues and had much more in common than has heretofore been examined. As the twentieth century progressed, the two movements increasingly espoused the importance of improving the nation’s biological health and fitness using similar rhetoric. Therefore, eugenics ideals of the public’s health and welfare remained almost indistinguishable from those of public health as both movements framed their goal of improving the nation’s health and fitness in positive terms. Physician and founder of the Yale Department of Public Health, Charles-Edward Winslow expressed this view when he defined public health as: The science and the art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical and mental health and efficiency through organized community efforts for the sanitation of the environment, the control of community infections, the education of the individual in the principles of personal hygiene, providing for the eugenic propagation of the race, the organization of medical and nursing service for the early diagnosis and preventative treatment of disease, and the development of the social

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machinery which will insure to every individual of the community a standard of living adequate for the maintenance of health.18

The institution of marriage provided a perfect venue as both a restrictive measure to prohibit society’s “unfit” from entering it and as a conduit for channeling “fit” citizens to fulfill their duty to reproduce the nation’s future generations. An essential tenet to protect society became stabilizing one of the basic building blocks of civilization, the family. This meant encouraging fit Americans to marry and propagate by using various prescriptive literatures while simultaneously working to prevent the unfit from reproducing their kind. Charles Davenport proclaimed that in order to create a healthier race, “marriage matings should be made more wisely.”19 Constructing fit and unfit female bodies became a means to accomplishing these goals. In order to create representations of the ideal woman and mother, eugenicists and public health professionals constructed fit and healthy female bodies by contrasting them with deviant ones. Public health physician Dr. Walter Fernald claimed that feebleminded women were “sources of debauchery and licentiousness” who would “pollute the lives of boys” and “disseminate disease” throughout the community. In addition, these women were “centers of corruption” who, in spite of high infant mortality rates, gave birth to large numbers of defective children.20 Eugenicists played upon the fears of many of the middle and upper classes that defective strains of genetic material would infect civilized society as a result of the prolific reproduction of the unfit. Dr. Amos Butler declared that one “perverted woman” could spread throughout a community “an immoral pestilence which will affect the homes of all classes, even the most intelligent and refined.”21 Eugenicist Charles Davenport envisioned a warehouse of “human pedigrees” of all families sorted out because of their vital importance for the “mating of hereditary potentialities, among the upper levels of human stock” that would be invaluable in their “conscious endeavors for race betterment.” Equally important, believed Davenport and other eugenicists, these pedigrees would form “a basis for an organized society” to prevent “worthless human strains, from reproducing their kind.”22 Many eugenicists shared the belief that this information would also be of “use by the state undoubtedly, at some future timeΨin its work of regulating human production.”23 The information obtained by eugenics field workers and relayed back to eugenicists thus became the integral first step in the process of the sorting of the American population. Eugenicists and public health authorities, as well as other social and political leaders, worked to regulate and “normalize” sexual and reproductive

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behavior. This meant that sex and procreation should only occur within marriage. Eugenics field workers made elaborate notations of any sexual behavior deviating from that which they considered normative. Public health nurses linked abhorrent sexual behavior with immoral living and venereal disease. Eugenics field workers’ reports and public health nurses’ case notes reflected their own middle-class sensibilities. Field workers’ and nurses’ disapproval of sexuality and reproductive habits among those already presupposed as substandard informed their scientific and medical evaluation of individual “fitness” as well as standards of living. These subjective reports also interpreted and defined deviant sexual behavior and overly large families as signs of hereditary defectiveness.

Racial Crime: Refusal to Procreate? While eugenics and public health experts worked to construct representations of the defective and deviant female body, the healthy and fit woman and mother emerged in contrast. As opposed to being repulsive, dirty, stupid, and immoral, fit women were attractive, clean, intelligent, and moral. The best women were those “favored by nature in physique, intelligence, and character,” traits that were “unchangeable, beneficent facts of biology.”24 After sorting out the fit from the unfit, both eugenics and public health experts embarked on campaigns to direct the fit women to fulfill their responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. Leading eugenicists and health officials worried that the best stocks of educated women chose careers instead of marriage and motherhood. In fact, both movements frequently commented on statistics showing that about fifty percent of female college graduates did not marry at all and those who did marry had low birth rates. Thus, by not marrying these women had their “deepest instincts thwarted and their most heartfelt longings unheeded and unanswered” and should be encouraged to follow the more appropriate, fulfilling path toward marriage and motherhood.25 In addition, one survey claimed that ninety-three percent of women believed that to “live apart from little children was to be deprived of one of life’s greatest joys,” while sixty-nine percent felt that a woman only finds “her truest self-expression through her husband and her children.”26 Even President Theodore Roosevelt challenged fit women to live up to their responsibilities and evoked sociologist Edward Ross’s term “race suicide” to draw attention to the fact that the “white race not only risked losing power but faced possible extinction” if the superior in society did not fulfill their duty to out-reproduce those who were unfit.27 Furthermore, declared Roosevelt, women must “recognize that the greatest thing for any woman to do is to

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be a good wife and mother.” Women of good stock who refused to take on this important responsibility, he claimed, were essentially “race criminals.”28 Eugenicists claimed that modern knowledge of heredity confirmed the family and not the individual as the true unit of society.29 A leading social hygiene physician, Prince Morrow, claimed that the majority of women clung to the “old-fashioned idea that through motherhood and family, the nature of woman finds its highest and finest expression.”30 As such, prescriptive literature urged that fit women, as their “department of essential service, be willing to rear children and bring them up in health, strength, and moral well-being.”31 Biologist C. W. Saleeby attempted to appeal to feminists with his principles of “eugenic feminism,” in which women should take it upon themselves to be “primarily the chief means by which the race is continued, and should consider this their first and most important work in the world.” Saleeby believed that the training and education of girls and young women should be specialized to fit them for this work.32

Race Crime: “Unfit” Procreation? As eugenics and public health experts worked to encourage fit women to marry and procreate, they simultaneously sought ways to restrict marriage and reproduction of genetically flawed women in an effort to eliminate “defectives” in future generations. Before sterilization laws and Buck v. Bell, marriage restriction laws became an effective means to improve the genetic fitness of the population. The United States led the world in marriage restriction laws which were based on various factors such as age, kinship, race, and health. The majority of state laws included specific provisions that prohibited marriage for anyone deemed an idiot, insane, feebleminded as well as anyone afflicted with venereal disease.33 In 1896 Connecticut became the first state to enact such a strictly eugenic law which stated that “no man or woman either of whom is epileptic, imbecile, or feebleminded” could “intermarry, or live together as husband or wife, when the woman is under forty-five years of age.”34 Most northern and western states quickly followed suit and soon more than half of the states in the Union had imposed new marriage restrictions or amended old ones to prohibit the marriage of persons considered defective. In the second decade of the twentieth century, eugenics and public health proponents championed campaigns for premarital health and fitness examinations; by 1918 thirty-two states had passed statutes

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mandating medical examinations for certain groups of persons, including prostitutes, inmates, vagrants.35

Eugenecists Sadie and Edna vs. Jane, Grace and Doris B: What is the Good of Procreation? Although at times at odds, the eugenics and public health movements often overlapped in goals, methods, programs and personnel as well as sharing much of the same discourse with regard to the “diseased” and defective elements they viewed as harmful to American society. Eugenics proponents and public health experts constructed and manipulated representations of bodies in an effort to establish normative standards of behavior. These constructed bodies then became sites where political contests were waged to determine those who should be considered worthy citizens versus those whose rights should be subordinated for the common good. Thus, under the powerful signs of science and medicine, eugenics and public health experts pathologized appearance and behavior through the credible language of health and hygiene to determine who would be eligible not only to enjoy the rewards of living in a civilized society but who would also bear the responsibility of reproducing future generations of valuable citizens. In the words of Rupert Blue, the Surgeon General of the United States Public Health Service in 1919, One of the most important tasks of the day is to supervise children so that when they reached manhood and womanhood they would be physically prepared to carry on the important duties imposed upon them by citizenship in our great nation.36

Eugenics field workers brought eugenics into people’s homes. They interviewed families, administered mental tests, evaluated hereditary fitness and gathered explicit information about sex and sexual relations. In addition, they worked to sort and categorize individuals, reporting their findings to eugenics leaders, who then shared information with other science and medical experts. Public health nurses brought notions of cleanliness and “right living” into people’s homes. They sought to identify defective or diseased individuals in the communities but they also wanted to establish normative behaviors especially those behaviors relating to sex and reproduction. Many male eugenicists and public health physicians believed field work and nursing to be woman’s work. As “natural” caretakers, they believed that women made the best choice as field agents to gain access into homes and garner the confidence of their informants. However, these women were much more than mere collectors of information.

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Eugenics field workers and public health nurses were keenly aware of their positions as professionals and as women. Utilizing both of these advantages, they did gain access into homes and obtained information that may not have otherwise been gained. They also made observations through a gendered lens noting especially appearance and behavior of other women. In the end, however, they became the eyes on the ground for making the initial determination of what should be “fit” and “unfit.” Their contribution to the definitions of fitness and knowledge base of information used to label and categorize bodies and behaviors was integral to the formulation of later policies and practices. The categorization of bodies then reinforced structures of power in which these experts, influenced by their own values and beliefs, determined and delineated how groups of people should be hierarchically organized. This structure then established the parameters for the definition of normal by setting the standard against which new groups were measured. The organization of the established hierarchy created a structure of superior and inferior bodies, inferior types of individuals. The influences of experts’ own values reflect the extent to which middle-class notions of appropriate modes of behavior and appearance interacted with the discourse of scientific knowledge. This knowledge was not created in a vacuum; rather, scientific knowledge and its cultural context constantly interacted and reinforced each other. Eugenicists and public health authorities used the information collected by the field workers to create and expand the language of what constituted “fit” and “unfit.” Information channeled from public health nurses was used to set parameters of “normal, acceptable” behavior, including sexual and reproductive behavior. After establishing the criteria to distinguish between “fit” and “unfit,” eugenicists and public health authorities worked to create on-the-ground policies and practices for channeling individuals into appropriate venues depending on their “fitness” level while at the same time publicly promoting the eugenic ideal couched in the language of health and fitness to American society at large. In doing so, representations of defective and diseased bodies established a connection to a larger system of societal control by members of the white middleclass in an effort to manage the genetic fitness of the population.

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Notes 1

Carlisle Bargerson, “Coolidge Greets Good Will Fliers Reaching Capital,” Washington Post, May 3, 1927; “President Greets Good-Will Fliers,” New York Times, May 3, 1927; “Eaker’s Pan-American Mission,” Air Force Magazine, (September 1986). 2 Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). 3 Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905). 4 Amy Sue Bix, “Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers: ‘Women’s Work’ in Biology,” Social Studies of Science 27 (August 1997): 632-37; Nicole Hahn Rafter, ed., White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877-1919 (Boston: Northeastern Press, 1988), 19-22. 5 This is based on Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 9. 6 Jacqueline Urla and Jennifer Terry, “Introduction: Mapping Embodied Deviance,” in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 3-4; Garland E. Allen, “The Misuse of Biological Hierarchies: The American Eugenics Movement, 1900-1940,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 5 (June 1983): 106-107. 7 S. C. Devitt (1915), Series VII: Field Worker Files, Box 1. Eugenics Record Office Archives, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 8 The pejorative terms including “defective” and “deviant” were used interchangeably throughout this time period by eugenicists, public health officials, and social commentators alike. For the sake of readability, hereafter I will not put these words in quotation marks unless they are direct quotes or for emphasis. 9 Alta Dines, “The Relation of the Public Health Nurse to the Practicing Physician,” American Journal of Public Health 14, no. 2 (February 1924): 112-13. 10 Ira S. Wile, “The Relation of the Public Health Nurse to the Practicing Physician,” American Journal of Public Health 14, no. 2 (February 1924): 106. 11 Edna L. Foley, “Am I a Public Health Nurse?” The American Journal of Nursing 20 (January 1920): 321; “Public Health Notes,” American Journal of Public Health 11 (June 1921): 579. 12 S. J. Crumbine, “The Socialization of Preventive Medicine Through the Public Health Nurse,” The American Journal of Nursing 19 (September 1919): 918. 13 “The Preventive Aspect of Mental Deficiency,” The American Journal of Public Health 9 (September 1919): 714); “Public Health Notes,” The American Journal of Public Health 2 (June 1921): 579. 14 Emma R. Cross, “My Year’s Work,” The American Journal of Nursing 22 (January 1922): 286-287. 15 Marie Curial, (1915), Field Worker Files, Call Number MS COLL 77, Series VII, Folder M.T. Curial, Eugenics Record Office, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 16 “The Curtiss-Fuller Pedigree” Charles Davenport Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 17 A.O. Peters, “Point of View of the City Health Officer,” American Journal of

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Public Health 15 (November 1925): 981. 18 C. E. A. Winslow, “What is Public Health?” American Journal of Public Health 18 (August 1928): 1020. 19 Charles Davenport, “Euthenics and Eugenics,” Eugenics Record Office (n.d.). American Philosophical Society, Charles Davenport Papers, Series I, Folder 2. 20 Public Education Association of New York, Special Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded, The Feeble Minded in New York (New York, 1911), 17. 21 Amos Butler, “A Notable Factor of Social Degeneration,” Science 14, no. 351 (September 1901): 445. 22 “Four Motives for the Human Pedigree Study,” Eugenical News 3 (July 1918): 54. 23 “Field Work at Middletown, Connecticut,” Eugenical News 3 (July 1918): 54. 24 “Urging Woman to Lift the Race,” New York Times, November 19, 1911. 25 “Fecundity of Collegians,” Eugenical News 1, no. 10 (October 1916): 71; “Marriage and Fecundity of College Women,” Eugenical News 4, no.1 (January 1919): 7; “College Women and Marriage,” Eugenical News 6, no. 1 (January 1925): 8; “Education and Publicity,” American Journal of Public Health 15, no. 9 (September 1925): 841. 26 “Y. W. C. A. Girls Believe in Eugenics,” Eugenical News 12, no. 1 (January 1927). 27 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 201. 28 Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 11. 29 “Training Daughters”, Eugenical News 2, no. 10 (October 1917): 78. 30 Prince A. Morrow, “The Sex Problem,” American Social Hygiene Association Papers, Social Welfare History Archives Center, Box 3, Folder 2. 31 “Training Daughters,” Eugenical News 2, no. 10 (October 1917): 78. 32 “Urging Woman to Lift the Race,” New York Times, November 19, 1911. 33 Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 99; Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 22. 34 Larson, Sex, Race and Science, 22. 35 Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 26. 36 Rupert Blue, “Urgent Public Health Needs of the Nation,” American Journal of Public Health 9, no. 2 (February 1919): 100.

CHAPTER SEVEN SLOWLY BREAKING AWAY: THE TOLEDO WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION AND SHIFTING IDEOLOGIES OF WOMANHOOD IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHELSEA GRIFFIS

In Toledo, Ohio, there were numerous women’s suffrage organizations that fought for a federal amendment to give women the right to vote. One of them was the Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association (TWSA), a group of women whose sole goal was to push for women’s suffrage in Toledo. Its members were important because they pushed for support at the grassroots level, a key to federal success, and because they were ideologically on the cusp between the prevalent Cult of Domesticity and the emerging understanding of the New Woman. 1 In this way, the story of these women is important. They not only help historians understand changes within the suffrage movement; these women also help us see changes in their understanding of who women were and what women were supposed to be. The pursuit for a federal amendment to the United States Constitution granting women suffrage has a rocky history. The first time that such a piece of legislation came to the United States Senate was in December of 1868 by Senator S. C. Pomeroy (Kansas)2. The measure was introduced annually and finally brought to a vote by both houses for the first time in March of 1914. Both houses opposed the proposed amendment with a Senate vote of thirty-four in favor and thirty-five against and a House of Representatives vote, in January of 1915, of one hundred seventy-four in favor and two hundred four against.3 Though the amendment did not succeed, it was clear that passage was at last within reach. The votes were close, almost split down the middle, and it was clear that the tactics used

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by the various women’s suffrage organizations were working or, if nothing else, that the times were changing. Before the 1915 Congressional vote, a few states allowed women to vote in federal, state, or municipal elections. Although more states allowed women to vote after 1915, the real turn of events occurred after the 1919 Women’s Suffrage Amendment went to the states. While state legislatures ratified the amendment one after another, there was often discussion and disagreement. Nonetheless, on August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified by the necessary 36 states and became part of the Constitution.4 This story is familiar to historians of women in the United States. Multitudes of books have been written about the struggle for the federal amendment so it is not necessary to go into detail about the women involved and the tactics used.5 What must be noted, though, is activity at the federal level was not the sole reason that the suffrage movement was strong enough to push for successful passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Local organizations, the women involved in them, and the strategies and tactics that they used were key to the success of the women’s suffrage movement. Larger groups, like the National American Woman Suffrage Association, would not have gained their power without local organizations and local administrative units. State support was also necessary to rally amendment supporters to the cause of ratifying the federal amendment. Therefore, TWSA was an integral part of the amendment’s successful passage. In respect to its organizational structure, the TWSA was no different than the majority of women’s suffrage organizations. It was allied with and under the auspices of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. NAWSA pushed the passage of the federal amendment state by state in addition to their activities at the federal level through the Congressional Union and later the National Women’s Party.6 The TWSA also allied with the Political Equality League of Lucas County, Ohio, (Toledo is the county seat of Lucas County) a group with a goal that was evident from its name alone. TWSA women followed Roberts’ Rules of Order, elected their officers such as President and Secretary, and had scheduled meeting times with precisely kept minutes.7 These minutes are integral to any study of the TWSA. They were kept at every meeting and documented the amount of money in the treasury, any administrative business such as elections of new officers, and detailed business discussed at the meeting. The women who recorded these minutes left much information not only about actual organizational tactics but also about the ideology of the women involved.8

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Even though the TWSA was founded in 1869, the first archived meeting in this set of minutes of the Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association occurred on December 4, 1912, a little over two years before Congress considered a federal amendment to the Constitution. Minutes are available from this date until February 3, 1915 when TWSA officially merged with the Political Equality League of Lucas County and no longer was simply allied with the group.9 This alone notes the interconnected network of women’s suffrage organizations that were dotted across Toledo, Ohio, Lucas County and the northwest Ohio area. The minutes also note the various organization activities of the TWSA. The women raised money through bake sales and putting on theatrical productions about suffrage. With this money they purchased flowers, buttons, and leaflets to pass out to local citizens in order to inform women and male voters about the necessity of women’s suffrage.10 These were tactics which allowed women entry into political activism without breaking out of the traditional gender roles which assigned them to the maintenance of home and hearth. In these ways, the women of the TWSA operated by the gendered cultural roles that historians call the Cult of Domesticity. The social construction of the Cult of Domesticity was first enunciated by Barbara Welter in her 1966 article “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” Though Welter referred to the ideology as the Cult of True Womanhood, the Cult of Domesticity has been used interchangeably by a number of historians of women’s history. The Cult of Domesticity set the standard for how a woman should envision herself and, consequently, how a woman should present herself and act. Though Welter’s discussion of the cult only goes to the year 1860, the Cult of Domesticity reigned over women’s lives for years before 1820 and for years to come, certainly up to 1920 at the least.11 Welter isolates four traits that women were supposed to embody: “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.”12 These four traits ruled over women’s lives and had significant impact on their relationships with men, with other women, with their families and with society as a whole. In order to be seen as pious, pure, domestic and submissive, women were not to participate in the public realm of politics. In fact, Welter notes that women were not even supposed to have much of a life outside of the home as the domestic sphere was thought to be the proper one for women. These different societal stipulations placed on women were there to make sure that they stayed in the home and allowed societal power to rest in the hands of men.13 To this end, the Cult of Domesticity had a significant impact on the type of tactics that women in suffrage organizations used.

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In terms of ideology, women who were members of the TWSA chose tactics that were solidly grounded in the culture of domesticity. This is evident in the ways in which they interacted with each other and in the different tactics they chose to interact with society. The women used a bake sale to raise money. Bake sales were allowable because baking was a weekly or daily activity for most women who remained in the domestic sphere and thus well within the normal expectation of womanly behavior. TWSA members also focused on education to persuade people to support suffrage.14 Members of TWSA chose to educate the public through leaflets as a way of spreading their views, another tactic that was considered normal and acceptable and well within their domestic sphere. Since the era of Republican Motherhood was enunciated after the Revolutionary War it was commonly understood that women’s proper roles included educating others about morality and social responsibility.15 TWSA women also pushed their ministers to speak on women’s suffrage following the concept that a True Woman was supposed to be pious and religiously involved.16 Also, of the few members who were noted by name in the meeting minutes, all of them were married. The women refer to each other by their married names, such as “Mrs. Upton” and “Mrs. Schauss.”17 While this is normal for polite and formal conversation of the time, the use of the salutation “Mrs.” instead of “Miss” denotes adherence to traditional values of the importance of marriage. Finally, the members were urged to always remain polite and never lose their temper which can be equated to being told to remain ladylike at all times.18 By applying the ideological framework of the Cult of Domesticity to the Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association, one is able to see the different ways that the women exercised power in the public sphere while still adhering to the societal norms imposed upon them. Like most women’s suffrage associations, TWSA members used petitioning more than any other form of activism. American women actively petitioned ever since the fight for abolition. By 1912, petitioning had become a traditional form of political involvement for women.19 TWSA members wrote, signed and distributed petitions during the entirety of their women’s suffrage campaign. Between 1912 and 1915 petitions were mentioned in the meeting minutes at least six different times. Petitions were taken to all events including the plays and bake sales and one was even distributed to the Farmer’s Institute at Berkeley.20 Petitioning was a tool of political activism that TWSA women deemed theirs to use according to traditional gendered political behavior. The Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association also adhered to common ideas of womanhood with the side projects they took on. In October of

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1912 the women decided that they were not going to ally themselves with or participate in any cause other than suffrage.21 Members were urged to bring sacrifices of time and pleasure and to give their devotion to the cause undividedly…[to] Work with our might for Woman Suffrage only— till we have conquered and our sex made free.22

Despite this declaration, the women did not stick simply to suffrage. Throughout the three-year span of archived meeting minutes, TWSA women participated with numerous other organizations and causes but all of them fit within the confines of traditional gender roles. In January of 1913 the Legislative Committee, whose job it was to keep an eye on proposed legislation, asked that the group keep their ears open for any legislation concerning mothers’ pensions, women’s minimum wage and any legislation concerning women and girls.23 In January of 1914 TWSA women boycotted impure milk in conjunction with the Housewives League.24 These two examples note the ways that women in TWSA were politically active but only about those items that were within women’s sphere. While the women of the Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association still acted out gender roles in accordance to the Cult of Domesticity, they also showed traits of new ideas about the meaning and behaviors of womanhood. During the early twentieth century, understandings about women’s roles and placement in society were in flux. The age of the “New Woman” was dawning. This concept is best enunciated by Jean V. Matthews in her book The Rise of the New Woman: The Women’s Movement in America, 1875-1930. The New Woman was not a complete break from the Cult of Domesticity; it was a new understanding of the ideology that gave women more freedom, individuality and personal power. The New Woman wanted to get out of women’s private, domestic sphere and participate in men’s public spheres of politics, business and the arts. Although these women did not strive for complete social and political equality, they did want a stronger congruence between the rights of men and the rights of women. The New Woman was rebellious—she wanted freer access to politics, education and her own sexuality. She, above all else, wanted a greater position in the society around her.25 While the women of the TWSA did not completely break away from the ideology of the Cult of Domesticity, some of their activities showed their evolution toward the burgeoning ideology of the New Woman. They broke away from women’s private sphere in important ways even if only slowly and partially. TWSA women were not the epitome of the Gibson Girl but they did begin to use new ideas about womanhood to their

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advantage.26 They evinced new ideas about womanhood through the activities they participated in, the words that they spoke and, especially, through alliance with other women who they, as a group, found influential. The women of the TWSA participated in many activities that show them to be examples of the New Women. The women addressed street meetings of local labor unions, actively participating in the public world of men and breaking away from the Cult of Domesticity. This worked out to their advantage as the unions that they spoke to later approved a women’s suffrage plank as part of their legislative platforms.27 The members wrote numerous letters to legislative leaders asking them to approve women’s suffrage whenever it came up for a vote. They wrote to members of Toledo’s legislatures, to their state and federal congressmen, and TWSA President Elizabeth Schauss even wrote to President Woodrow Wilson asking him to demand a special session of Congress to debate the suffrage amendment.28 Easily, though, the activity that drew TWSA members furthest away from the Cult of Domesticity was their support of fellow member Emma K. Rinehart who ran for a seat on the school board. Stepping into the political scene, the public realm of men, was not unheard of as Jeannette Rankin had already been elected to Congress in Montana but it was still outside of the norm especially outside of the Western states. Though Rinehart ended up losing her bid, her actions and the support of the group as a whole showed the city of Toledo that these women were willing to step out of the passive private sphere, exchange the Cult of Domesticity for the ideology of a New Womanhood, and participate in new positions of public leadership within the political body.29 Information discerned from TWSA women’s lives outside of the organization shows they were not committed to maintaining the traditional boundaries of the Cult of Domesticity. While none of these women can be called radicals, the leaders of the TWSA broke out of women’s private sphere. Elizabeth Schauss, President of TWSA, was a Spiritualist reverend and former state factory inspector. In a 1910 speech, Schauss directly connected women’s lack of suffrage to the existence of inequality of pay between men and women and child labor. She argued women would strike down these two social ills if only they had the right to vote. Harriet Taylor Upton, an ally of TWSA and Ohio Woman Suffrage Association officer, later became the first female Vice President of the Republican National Committee. These two examples show how TWSA women and their allies were willing to vocally fight for greater equality with men, even if it meant stepping out of the Cult of Domesticity and into the greater political arena of the New Woman.30

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TWSA women showed their New Woman culture in numerous speeches and comments during meetings and in the public realm. In a speech given at an unnamed event in 1914, the TWSA speaker noted that “taxation without representation is just as good a war-cry now as it was in 1774.” The speech further referenced the lack of economic rights that a woman had over almost all aspects of her life. In the end, the speaker called out to a common humanity between men and women, a reference to the ideas of equality inherent in the concept of the New Woman.31 The members of TWSA also publicly voiced their grievances over the mistreatment of women at the March 3, 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D. C. They urged “government investigation and intervention regarding the treatment received by the representative womanhood” during the suffrage parade, treatment that included verbal and physical abuse heaped upon female paraders.32 Finally, TWSA women communicated with many famous suffragists who were considered New Women or at least women who broke away from the mold of the Cult of Domesticity. When the Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association was looking for a speaker for their annual event in 1912, they were ambitious enough to ask two internationally known suffragists, Jane Addams and Inez Milholland to speak, although both declined.33 Inez Milholland was the epitome of the New Woman who was publicly and politically active and sexually free. A radical in her own time because of her views about her freedom as an individual, Milholland became the standard bearer for the famous suffrage parade of 1913, riding a white horse and wearing a white gown.34 Though Jane Addams was best known for her work at Hull House she was also a supporter of women’s suffrage. While her work at Hull House was generally considered to be within women’s sphere of social housekeeping, her later pacifism was not. Even after she was made a pariah for her stance against the war, the TWSA still supported her, asking her again to speak at their annual meeting in 1914, though there is no indication that she accepted the offer.35 TWSA members themselves were pacifists as well. In September of 1914 the women participated in Toledo’s annual Labor Day parade and they chose to wear all white with black armbands to symbolize their opposition to the war.36 The clearest indication that the Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association members were breaking away from the Cult of Domesticity was their interest in and support of Emmeline Pankhurst. Pankhurst was the leading suffragist in the British campaign and by all accounts her tactics were considered radical and contrary to the traditional ideology of womanhood. By supporting hunger strikes, breaking windows, and actively rallying

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support for women’s equality and suffrage, Pankhurst proved she thought women needed to enter the political sphere and leave the ideology of True Womanhood.37 Pankhurst’s close friend Brenda Francklyn spoke with TWSA members during their November 1913 meeting and gave them the reasons that British suffrage had become so militant. Francklyn cited the present forms of education in England, the enforced self-support of over a million women, the part taken by women in politics of the day, and the unjust laws now in force

as some of the few reasons why British suffrage and women’s suffrage in general was so necessary. This must have been moving to the members as the meeting minutes indicate that the members spoke of Pankhurst with sympathy and camaraderie. They also felt that the reasons were just for the actions that were committed.38 This solidarity with Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffrage tactics she used shows that the women of the TWSA leaned towards the ideology of the New Woman. This is further exposed by the fact that in later years, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, as led by Carrie Chapman Catt and as mother organization to TWSA, scorned the militant actions of the National Women’s Party led by Alice Paul who received her suffrage training in Britain at the hands of Pankhurst.39 TWSA women were clearly of a different generation than Carrie Chapman Catt for they were more New Women rather than followers of the Cult of Domesticity. By looking at the Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association through the frameworks of the Cult of Domesticity and the ideology of the New Woman, one can see the members of a pivotal generation whose actions embodied traits of both. These women did not completely break out of domestic molds but they were not completely restrained by them either. By accepting certain parts of the gender roles embodied by the New Woman, TWSA members showed they were on the cusp of changing ideologies about womanhood. Also, they prove that the transition from the Cult of Domesticity to the ideology of the New Woman was not clean and smooth. It took time, small actions, and individual women to change the understanding of what a woman was supposed to be. By embodying both concepts of womanhood at the same time, the members of the Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association showed that, even though they were still traditionally feminine women whose lives were centered in the private sphere of the home, they were willing to claim a right to participate in the public political sphere. In this way they were able to be fight for what they believed in, women’s suffrage, while still practicing gender roles in a society where gender roles were in flux. Through this flux, women

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constructed a new sense of self that was not quite traditional but was not quite radical. For early twentieth century society, these women chose to define modern womanhood as a mix between the past and the future.

Notes 1

There is some confusion in terms in the historiography of this period. The Cult of Domesticity and the Cult of True Womanhood are interchangeable terms, so for the purposes of this paper I will use the term Cult of Domesticity. While Barbara Welter coined the Cult of True Womanhood in the article discussed below, the great majority of historians utilize the Cult of Domesticity to extend the ideology past the Civil War. For an example of the use of the Cult of Domesticity, especially in describing women’s transitional ideology, see Kathy Piess, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 2 www.nwhm.org/education-resources/history/woman-suffrage.timeline/; www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/A_Vote_For_Women.htm. accessed on July 15, 2012. 3 Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), 278. 4 Susan E. Barber with Barbara Orbach Natanson, “One Hundred Years toward Suffrage: An Overview,” http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfwhtml/vfwtl.html (accessed on February 26, 2010). 5 Flexner’s Century of Struggle is the best place to go for general information about the women’s suffrage movement. In addition, readers may want to consider referencing local studies, such as Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, Votes for Women!: The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation (Knoxville, University of Texas Press, 1995). 6 For more on the National American Woman Suffrage Association see Flexner, Century of Struggle. For more on the Congressional Union and the National Women’s Party, see Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 7 Bylaws of the Political Equality League of Lucas Co. Ohio, Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association Records, The Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections, The University of Toledo Libraries, Folder 2. (TWSA) 8 Sadly, one thing that the recording secretaries did not keep close notation of was the number of members present at each meeting. The first archived minutes from December 4, 1912 note that there were seven members present at the meeting, though the secretary does not note whether this included officers. After this date the times that the secretary recorded how many members were present are few and far between. For this reason, this paper does not make the claim that the ideological orientation discussed was representative of the whole, or even majority, of Toledo women but simply the undisclosed number that were present at the meetings.

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4 December, 1912 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 1 and 3 February, 1915 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 10 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 11 The number of women’s history books that discuss the impact of the Cult of Domesticity after 1860 are limitless. Even during the Progressive Era, including the timeframe in discussion for this paper, historians have found the cult was in full effect and in traces. See Jean V. Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman: The Women’s Movement in America, 1875-1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003) and Jean H. Baker, Sisters: The Lives of American Suffragists (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). 12 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 152. 13 Ibid., 152-154. 14 May and 5 June 1912 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 15 Described most clearly by Judith Sargent Murray, advocates of Republican Motherhood argued women’s greatest purpose was educating their children to be good, virtuous citizens. In order to do so, they believed women must have greater access to higher levels of education. For a good understanding of the concept of Republican Motherhood and its ramifications on society, see Sheila L. Skemp, Judith Sargent Murray: a Brief Biography with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998). 16 3 April 1912 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 17 Correspondence of Elizabeth Schauss, 13 March, 1914, TWSA, Folder 3. 18 3 April, 1912 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 19 Eleanor Flexner discusses petitioning in great detail in Century of Struggle. 20 Meeting Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 21 2 October, 1912 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 22 Correspondence of Elizabeth Schauss, 13 March, 1914, TWSA, Folder 3. 23 8 January, 1913 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. For more information on European mother’s movements, including maternalist policies, see Seth Michel and Sonya Koven, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Policies and the Origins of Welfare (New York: Routledge, 1993). 24 7 January 1914 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. Fights for clean milk were common during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Milk was often unpasteurized and full of bacteria, making many children and babies sick, sometimes resulting in death. 25 Jean V. Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman. 26 The Gibson Girl was the standard bearer of new ideas about womanhood. For more information see Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 27 5 June, 1912 Minutes and 4 September 1912 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 28 12 April 1913, 7 May 1913 and 6 May 1914 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 29 3 September 1913 and 5 November 1913 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 30 National American Woman Suffrage Association, Fortieth Annual Report of the National American Woman….Google E-Book. Retrieved from https://play.goo-

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gle.com/store/books/details?id=A38EAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-A38EAAAAYAA J&rdot=1(accessed on July 22, 2012), p.132; Ida Husted Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage, V, Project Gutenberg E-Book, prepared by Richard J. Shiffer. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29878/29878-h/29878-h.htm on July 27.2012. 31 Speech Notes, TWSA, Folder 5. 32 5 March 1913 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 33 May 1912 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 34 For a biography of Milholland and her connection to the ideology of the New Woman, see Linda J. Lumsden, Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 35 April 1914 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. For more on Jane Addams and her pacifism see Maurice Hamington, The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 36 2 September 1914 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 37 For more information on Pankhurst and her suffrage beliefs, see Paula Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst (London: Routledge, 2002). 38 5 November 1913 Minutes, TWSA, Folder 5. 39 For more information on the animosity between NAWSA and the NWP, see Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

CONTRIBUTORS

Jenni Shelton teaches courses in European and World History at Bryant and Stratton College and Cuyahoga Community College. She earned a master’s degree in European History from Cleveland State University in 2010 and plans to pursue a second graduate degree in theology in the near future. Her research interests include the political and spiritual leadership roles of women in the early modern Catholic Church, Spanish women writers, and gender theory. Jenni is also a freelance web designer and editor. Jennifer M. Tobin earned her doctorate in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary History, with fields in British Empire, World History, and Women’s Studies at West Virginia University where she wrote her dissertation entitled, “The Livingstons of Liberty Hall: Changes and Restrictions of Gender in Eighteenth-Century America.” She also holds a graduate certificate in women’s studies and an M.A. in American Colonial/Revolutionary History. Jennifer’s research interests are focused on the “stories” of history and the importance of the individual in influencing time periods. Ellen Walsh received her doctorate in history from the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently revising her monograph entitled “‘Advancing the Kingdom’: Missionaries and Americanization in Puerto Rico, 18981930” which examines cultural imperialism through interactions between mainland Protestant missionaries and Puerto Ricans. In it she analyzes how race, class, and gender mediated colonizing relations as well as responses to the contradictions, contestations, and shifting nature of the civilizing project. Her training in Latin American and Atlantic history, in addition to feminist theory, shapes her research interests which include imperialism, social movements; race, class and gender; identity construction; and the circulations of people, practices, and ideologies. Morgan Paige Denton is a doctoral candidate in history at the University at Buffalo where she specializes in modern Ireland and gender studies. She is completing a dissertation entitled “Open Secrets: Prostitution and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Irish Society” which explores the

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social and cultural dynamics of female prostitution and its implications on Irish understandings of gender and national identity. Tina M. Kibbe is a doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo. She specializes in the history of eugenics and public health in the United States. Tina is currently completing her dissertation, “In ‘Fitness’ and in Health: Eugenics, Public Health, and Marriage in the United States,” which investigates the connections of the eugenics and public health movements in the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century and their attempt to use the institution of marriage to create a biologically “fit” citizenry. Chelsea Griffis is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio, who completed her Master’s degree at the same institution. She is currently writing her dissertation which analyzes American women of the political right and their varied responses to the Equal Rights Amendment from 1972 to 1982. When she is not writing, Chelsea teaches classes on the modern United States and Women’s history. Marsha R. Robinson is a graduate of Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Central Connecticut State University, and the Ohio State University where she earned her doctorate in history. In addition to being the author of Matriarchy, Patriarchy and Imperial Security in Africa: Explaining Riots in Europe and Violence in Africa, she has presented at international conferences in the U.S. Nigeria and Norway. Currently, she is working on a monograph about comparative sustainable development systems in addition to developing the Inverting History with Microhistory series.

INDEX

Abuse 18, 39, 40, 42, 46, 61 Adams, Victoria 51-62 Addams, Jane 105 African American 30, 53, 54, 55, 56 American Public Health Association 88 Augustinian Recollect 13, 15, 16, 18, 19 Barrett, D. P. 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61 Barrett, Mrs. 58 Bishop, see priest Body-field 40, 86 Brothel 67, 71, 76 Brother 16, 17, 18, 19, 59 Buchanan, Emily 69 Buck v. Bell 86, 92 Cadiz, Spain 38, 39 Carrigan Committee 68, 69, 70 Catholic 38, 39, 65, 66, 69, 70 Chastity 65, 66, 67, 70, 77, 80 Children 16, 17, 19, 27, 28, 29, 31, 37, 39, 44, 66, 69, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94 Clements, Elizabeth 42, 43, 46 Committee of Medical Women 68 Congressional Union 100 Consecrated woman 51, 52, 53, 55, 61, 62 Convent 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19 Court 26, 27, 32, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80 Courts martial 37, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47 Criminal Law Amendment Act 68, 70 Criminals 16 Daughter 19, 25, 27, 28, 53, 62, 66 Davenport, Charles 87, 91 de Jésus, Isabel 13-19

Department of Justice 68 Deputy husband 23, 28, 29, 31, 32 Domesticity, Cult of 23, 26, 31, 60, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106 Doris B 89 Dowry 16, 19, 25, 38 Dutch 23-32, 38, 39 Elon College 53, 56, 58, 60 Pankhurst, Emmeline 105, 106 Employer, 51, 53 Employment, 18, 19, 44 Eugenics 86-95 Eugenics field workers 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95 Eugenics Record Office 87, 88 Fallen woman 67, 68, 69, 70 Father 53, 56, 59, 60, 62 Female plaintiff 26, 27, 42, 43, 47 Female trader/proprietor/pawn 46 Feme covert 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, Feme sole/independent women 31, 42-43, 44 Fit/unfit 85-95 Foley, Edna 88 Forced sterilization 86, 93 Franklin, Bridgett 42, 43, 44, 46 Garda Síochána 71-75, 77-80 Geneva Convention 42, 39 Geoghegan, Margaret 78, 80 Gibraltar 37-44, 47 Goddard, Henry 87 Governor 28, 29, 39, 41, 44, 46 Grace 87, 88 Hoardenbroeck, Margaret 32 Home mission 52, 55, 95 Horne, Delia Moclair 68 Husband 16, 17, 19, 23-32, 74 Ignacio, Francisco 13, 16

114 Illiteracy/literacy 13, 14 Indigent 13 Milholland, Inez 105 Irish Free State 65, 69, 70 Irish Women Workers Union 69 Jacobson v. Massachusetts 86 Jane 89 Jason, Howard T. 56 Jim Crow 54, 56, 61 Justinian Code 24 la Madre de Dios, Isabel 13 Law 23-32, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 70, 72, 74, 80 Legion of Mary 75, 76 Livingston, Alida Schuyler Van Rensselaer 23-32 Madwoman, see mental illness Magdalen Asylum 68 Manus 24, 25 Marriage 16, 17, 19, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 86, 91, 92, 93 Mental illness 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 85, 87, 88, 91-95 Military 37-48 Milton Caldwell 60, 61 Minton, W. P. 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 Monk, see priest Morton, W. W. 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61 Mother 16, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 80, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93 National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) 100, 104 National Women’s Party 100, 106 New Woman 60, 99, 103, 104, 105, 106 Nineteenth Amendment 100 Nun, see women religious Partner-wife 23, 24, 28, 31, 32 Passive 37 Petitions/other political activities 28, 101, 102, 103 Physicians 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94 Piety 18, 66, 101

Index Political Equality League 100, 101 Power of attorney 29, 32 Presbyterian 24, Price, Dorothy Stopford 68, 69 Priest 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 39, 40, 66, 67 Property 25, 27, 28, 29, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47 Prostitute, see Sex Worker Pub/brewery/tavern 30, 44, 45, 76, 78, 79 Public health nurses 87, 88, 92, 94, 95 Puerto Rico 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61 Quaker 24 Race suicide/race crime 55, 92, 93 Race/phenotype/physical traits 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 62 Rafter, Margaret 73, 77, 78 Rapine 37, 38, 39, 40 Republican Motherhood 102 Rinehart, Emma 104 Role of women 41, 42, 53, 101, 102, 103, 106 Roosevelt, Theodore 92 Savage, Mrs. 42, 43, 45, 47 Schauss, Mrs. Elizabeth 102, 104 Sexual intercourse 16, 37, 39, 40, 52, 62, 86, 88, 92, 94, 95 Sex-worker 42, 45, 46, 65-80 Shebeen, see pub Shinford, Mrs. Elizabeth 42, 43, 44, 46, 47 Social Darwinist 53 Social status 19, 44, 56, 90 Soldier/sailor 37-48 Solicitation 65, 70-75, 77-80 Son 25, 32 Submission 42, Suffrage 99-107 Sutler/victualer 29, 44, Tangier, Morocco 37, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47

Women Who Belong Toledo Woman’s Suffrage Association 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106 Toledo, Ohio 99, 100, 101, 104, 105 Toledo, Spain 13, 15 United States Public Health Service 88, 94 Upton, Mrs. Harriet Taylor 102, 104 Van Rensselaer, Maria 32 Vida de la Venerable Madre Isabel de Jesús 13, 14

115

Visions 15, 17, 18, 19, 27 Widow, widower 16, 25, 28, 42, 44, 45 Wife 16, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30, 32, 37, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 67, 74 Woman’s work 52, 87-90 Women as entrepreneurs, merchants, traders 26, 27, 31, 32 Women religious/religiosa 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19