Harvard University Press Blog

A Conversation with Elizabeth Cobbs about Fearless Women

For Women’s History Month, we are highlighting the work of Elizabeth Cobbs, whose new book Fearless Women shows how the movement for women’s rights has been deeply entwined with the history of the United States since its founding. Cobbs traces the lives of pathbreaking women who, inspired by American ideals, fought for the cause in their own ways. These stories offer valuable lessons for the state of the nation today.

 In Fearless Women, you argue that feminism has been as important in shaping who we are as Americans as were the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression. Why?

Up to now, this fact has not been largely recognized, but my book shows that many of the major achievements that have defined US history are connected with strides in women’s rights and the civic activism of feminists. The Industrial Revolution depended on the creation of a literate labor force—one that female teachers produced after women won the right to attend school. Susan B. Anthony organized the petition campaign that sped passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, and Frances Perkins (the first female member of any presidential cabinet) spearheaded the creation of Social Security and fair labor laws. This list of transformative developments could—and does—go on.

How did you pick the women that you profiled in the book? For instance, you profile Susan B. Anthony but not Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Why?

This was the fun part: deciding whose work was most transformative, or whose own life experience reflected the biggest challenges that American women faced in any given era. In this case, while Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the more famous writer and orator, it was Anthony who literally got the word out. She did the painstaking, relentless, uncompensated, unglamorous work of organizing, year in and year out, sweeping from Maine to California. By the end, she took my breath away. Every chapter presented the same set of choices. Sometimes I picked the more famous individual, but equally often the less famous: someone who made a difference in a new way, like Martha Cotera of Texas, who made women’s rights into a Mexican-American cause during the 1970s.

When you look back at the struggle for women’s rights, can you describe what life was like for the average American woman in 1776? What were the personal consequences of not having specific rights at different points in US history?

Marriage was the key determinant of a woman’s rights in the former English colonies and new nation. An unmarried woman—so long as she was not enslaved or indentured—could own property and sign contracts on her own behalf. But once a woman married, she in effect vanished from the law. Her legal identity was “covered” by her husband. Everything she owned became his, including any children she “gave” him. He had the right to “chastise” her as he saw fit, and even forbid her from leaving the house.

Patriotism and feminism are not usually mentioned in the same breath. Why do you put them together?

The movement for women’s rights began in 1776, as a consequence of the Revolution. People like Abigail Adams saw women’s fight for liberty as directly connected with the larger fight for freedom. In my research, I found that every generation in some way or another linked their goals with the stated promise of America. This fed their convictions—and improved their success. Most considered themselves patriots.

The women’s movement is sometimes criticized as being white-dominated and even racist. What do you make of that as a historian?

Historically, feminists could be racist (and some were) just as Civil Rights activists could be sexist (and some were). This is an easy charge to prove. Much more commonly, however, people in these causes worked together and shared similar values. If I had chosen a man to represent feminism, I would have picked Frederick Douglass. Similarly, a book on abolition could easily feature Susan B. Anthony. To me, the charge that feminism has been a “white” movement betrays a lack of knowledge about the valuable—and valued—contributions of women of color. That knowledge gap, if you will, helped motivate this book.

In writing this book, did you notice unsuccessful as well as successful strategies for expanding women’s rights that might inform the struggle today?

Absolutely! Something that became particularly clear was the turn towards non-partisanship after the US Civil War. Republican and Democratic stalwarts kept trying to suck women into endorsing their candidates, but Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton renounced their ties to Lincoln’s party and turned the movement away from partisanship—a technique that persisted until the vote was won in 1920. That heritage continues in groups like the League of Women Voters, started by Anthony’s protégé, Carrie Chapman Catt. Nonpartisanship or bipartisanship served feminism until the 1980s, when Phyllis Schlafly made opposition to women’s rights a badge of party identity, and Democrats cooperated.

 When you consider the struggle for women’s rights in America today, with the reversal of Roe, do you think that this is the beginning of a significant reversal or a temporary stumbling block?

There are no light switches in history. Long-term trends don’t just turn off. The movement towards greater freedom for all individuals, including women, is nearly 300 years old, so it is hard to see it ending abruptly. If I had to guess, I would call this a setback that could (and should) have been anticipated. Indeed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others worried that the constitutional reasoning behind Roe was susceptible to challenge. Advocates for reproductive choice will now have to undertake the hard campaigning that anti-abortion forces did for decades if they want states to protect rights that the federal government no longer does.

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On Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston

We round out our celebration of Black History Month with an excerpt from Daphne Brooks’s Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award and a Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year. “Vivid, joyful, and heartbreaking in its passionate understanding of soul in all its manifestations,” says Hilton Als, “Liner Notes for the Revolution is itself a new kind of music: propulsive, witty, wise, and true.”

The little women lurk at the very heart of the modern, the place where Zora Neale Hurston and her girl Ethel [Waters] are keeping the beat. And of course, they were friends, that Zora and Ethel. It may have taken some time to meet each other “across the footlights,” as Hurston put it in her memoir, but once they connected through their mutual friend Carl Van Vechten, the bond between this untrained singer and a woman referred to by some as “the Voice of an Era” was strong and intimate. Aesthetically too, they had more in common than one might think. Born in Philadelphia and raised in a multicultural, working-class neighborhood where, as Waters puts it, “whites, blacks, and yellows, were outcasts…together,” she made use of an “elephant memory and gift of mimicry” in school. As feminist blues archivist Rosetta Reitz contends, “It was this magnificent ear and the awareness that there was authority in language, that gave Ethel Waters an edge which she used to empower her life.”

Like Hurston, she mastered the art of multilingual colloquialisms and phrasings, assumed multiple personas in her vocal performances, and finessed the art of deeply performative storytelling as she crafted a distinctly theatrical, vaudevillian style of blues singing that was magnetic and lasting. Only her peer, the passionately adored stage ingenue Florence Mills (whose 1927 premature death rocked Harlem), could match Waters in this regard, having ushered in the 1920s as “the agent of the modern spirit of unmasked feeling.” Of Waters, Hurston would marvel, “She is one of the strangest bundles of people that I have ever met. You can just see the different folks wrapped up in her if you associate with her long. Just like watching an open fire—the color and shape of her personality is never the same twice. She has extraordinary talents which her lack of formal education prevents her from displaying.” Listen to her burning up the scene with her slinky 1926 smash, “Shake That Thing,” and you’ll know what Hurston’s talking about. Dolling out double entendres left and right, Waters shifts personas with the turn of a phrase. She’s the swinging seductress one moment and the cool cultural observer the next. “Now it ain’t no Charleston, ain’t no Pigeon Wing,” she assures,

Nobody has to give you no lessons, to shake that thing
When everybody can shake that thing
Oh, I mean, shake that thing!
I’m gettin’ tired of telling you how to shake that thing!
Oooh, oooh, with this kind of music, who wouldn’t shake that thing?

Ascendant as the queen of Black 1920s vaudeville, Waters knew how to work the drama and suspense in a jook-joint hot number celebrating the joys of carnal movement. Hers is an anthem that condenses the shifting energies of an epoch encapsulating mammoth change: migrated Black peoples spilling into northern cities, bursting with socioeconomic aspiration and artistic ambition, revolting against the norms that had historically sought to violently police their profit as well as their pleasures. In other words, all that “shaking” was evocative of the tumult in Waters’s midst. As Saidiya Hartman points out, she “made music” out of the “noise” all around her in her adopted city of New York, soaking up and translating into her own sonic language “the sounds of life, the loving and fighting and laughter and suffering,” all the while “describ[ing] the deprivation and vitality of cramped living from the inside” of her own Harlem flat.

Both Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston believed that the Black body, that their own kinesthetic bodies, could serve as prodigious and vital instruments in their musical endeavors. While Waters’s massive breakthrough hit “Shake That Thing” (first performed in 1925 at the Plantation Club) would take the sexual energy of the jook (a realm Hurston refers to as the pinnacle of Black theatricality in her 1934 “Characteristics of Negro Expression” essay) to its ludic extreme, Hurston would also put her body to work not only as a narrative device, an instrument to convey big ideas about the dynamism of Black life, but as a form of performative epistemology called on to reference and revivify the cultural and historical memory of the work song archive. And crucial to this epistemology was an emphasis on the beautifully unpredictable idiosyncrasies manifest in her own voice both caught on tape and loudly leaving its imprint on her own indelible, discursive style. Like Hopkins before her, Hurston pursued the preservation and cultivation of voice—but in this case, it was her own rather than a literary character’s that once again revolutionized Black sound writing as well as the relevance, meaning, and value of recording Black women’s vocality.

That Hurston not only theorized the sounds in her scholarship and incorporated them in her folk concerts but also performed them herself makes plain the ways that she embraced the act of singing as an extension of her critical ethnographic work. Zora’s singing traverses the presumptive boundaries between Diana Taylor’s conception of the archive and the repertoire, “the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice / knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).” Zora’s singing intervenes in what she believed to be the so called hegemony of Harlem Renaissance Black concert hall culture with its refined music, sounds that she abhorred for, in her opinion, watering down the voices of the folk.

Traveling Black

All this month we are celebrating Black History Month with excerpts from some of our recent books. In Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance, a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 and a book that Ibram X. Kendi calls "extraordinary," Mia Bay provides a riveting, character-rich account of racial segregation in America that reveals just how central travel restrictions were to the creation of Jim Crow laws.

In 1922  Joseph K. Bowler told a reporter for the Chicago Defender that he never ventured to the South without a “Jim Crow traveling kit.” Designed to allow Bowler, a minister who lived in Massachusetts, to travel through segregated states in relative comfort, the kit included “a pair of soiled overalls purchased from an auto mechanic, a miniature gasoline stove and a small table top the size of a scrub board.” The contents of Bowler’s kit vividly illustrate some of the indignities and discomforts that Black travelers could expect to encounter in the “colored” railroad cars of his era. He wore the overalls, he explained, to avoid the expense of “soiling” good clothes in the “dirty Jim Crow coaches.” They protected him from the tobacco juice that white conductors and news vendors often spat on the seats, and were especially useful in “parts of the Mississippi [where] the white farmers use the Jim Crow coaches as luggage cars in which to transport chickens and hogs.” The stove and table top allowed him to prepare and eat meals. They were key components of his kit, given that “the dining car is a closed corporation as far as our people are concerned.” “White people below the Mason Dixon line maintain that we are animals, virtually camels, and can go without food or water fors everal days,” noted the intrepid traveler, who both carried and cooked all the food he consumed on his journey. If he had not, he explained, he would have had to “sneak into the back of some depot like a little poodle and ask for some food,” or “risk being shot to death by invading a dining car to secure my meals.”

Many Black travelers shared Bowler’s concerns—whether or not they chose to wear dirty overalls and carry stoves. African Americans loathed segregated streetcars and railway compartments more than virtually any other form of segregation. In the research for his detailed account of race relations in the American South, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (1908), journalist Ray Stannard Baker found that “no other point of contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes as the Jim Crow car.” A third of a century later, Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, in his monumental study The American Dilemma (1944), made the same point: “It is a common observation that the Jim Crow Car is resented more bitterly among Negroes than most other forms of segregation.”

By the 1940s African Americans did not have to travel by train. They had new options to choose from, but they found all of them problematic. The intercity bus lines that first began operating in the late 1920s offered an afford­able alternative to traveling by rail, but during their early years of operation many bus companies refused to serve Black passengers. Even after the courts forced them to, they did so “only grudgingly and in the most uncomfortable seats.” “If you think riding a Jim Crow car out of the South is no fun,” wrote one Black traveler in 1943, “you should try bumping along on the back wheel of a bus, with the odors of the motor keeping you restless.”

Cars initially seemed to offer those who could afford them an escape from the humiliations of Jim Crow travel. But while Black motorists could choose their own seats in their own cars, they could not expect to be treated with respect once they stepped outside their vehicles. “It used to be that black people only took a trip [if] some body died or was dying,” remembered Chicago Tribune columnist Jeannye Thornton in 1972. Driving usually involved a “nonstop trip,” because hotels and motels that accepted Black guests were almost impossible to find. Even rest stops were hard to locate: “Bathrooms were always at the next service in the next town 50 miles down the road and when you finally got there, they were always separate and filthy.” African American travelers ended up driving “all night [and] sometimes traveling to a big city before even considering stopping to stretch.” Not only were road­side accommodations unappealing, driving through the South could be dangerous. “Who knows what could happen to a black family with northern license plates traveling some lonely road?”

Even travel by air was far from free of discrimination. Flying itself was never subject to southern segregation laws, but in the early days of air travel some airlines refused to carry Black passengers, and others assigned them to segregated seats. And when they escaped segregation in the air, Black flyers often encountered it on the ground. Southern airports had segregated waiting rooms, restaurants, and restrooms, and the taxis and ground transportation services that carried passengers to and from airports were divided by race.

American identity has long been defined by mobility and the freedom of the open road, but African Americans have never fully shared in that freedom. Travel segregation began on the stagecoaches and steamships of the North­east—the nation’s earliest common carriers—and moved from there to rail­roads, train stations, restaurants, roadside rest stops, and gas station rest­rooms, all of which were eventually segregated by law in the South. As new modes of transportation and accommodations developed, new forms of segregation followed.

The Origin Story of Black Education

To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve chosen excerpts from our books that reflect varied aspects of the Black experience. Fittingly, our first excerpt comes from a book about historian and educator Carter Woodson, the founder of Black History Month. The Los Angeles Review of Books praised Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis R. Givens, saying it “would make Woodson, the ever-rigorous teacher, proud.”

Before Emancipation, the enslaved had to gain their education by “snatching learning in forbidden fields,” as Woodson characterized it. The black abolitionist and teacher Francis Ellen Watkins Harper explained that some tried “to steal a little from the book. And put words together, and learn by hook or crook.” Acquiring knowledge was a criminal act. As Frederick Douglass’s master put it, a slave who learned to read and write against the will of his master was tantamount to “running away with himself.” Stealing one’s self in this way meant that the literate slave was a fugitive slave: to secretly acquire literacy—for religious, practical, and intellectual ends (or, perhaps, especially as leisurely activity)—was akin to black flight from the sites of their enslavement.

Antiliteracy laws targeting black people were older than the United States itself. The first law of this kind was a slave code enacted in 1740 in reaction to the Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. This code, which was meant to improve surveillance of the enslaved, listed writing among other illegal activities. Black people’s disallowance from the realm of educational opportunity anteceded the birth of the nation. This prohibition was absorbed into the dominant ideology of the nation, even as American common schools were established after American independence for the purpose of training a responsible citizenry; thus, conceptions of citizenship emerged as a metonym for whiteness. The antiblack sentiments that justified slavery justified excluding black Americans from citizenship and from schools—this antagonism was not an anomaly but was, in fact, a structural feature.

Antiliteracy laws and the intellectual surveillance that accompanied them left great marks on the politics of black education. They enforced the idea that blacks were outside the social contract of American society—inconceivable as fully human, citizen, or student. Many enslaved and free blacks subverted these legal mandates by acquiring literacy through fugitive tactics—leaving a mark of equal or greater consequence.While the overwhelming majority of blacks were illiterate under slavery, approximately 10 percent learned to read and/or write; suggesting that literate slaves were not so unusual as to be unknown to other blacks. These literate slaves were recognized as leaders with a practical skill set that benefitted their community.

How did the 10 percent of blacks who learned to read and write in the South before Emancipation gain the gift of literacy? As Woodson recounted time and again in his writings: “Negroes themselves…stole away to secret places at night to study.” The historical record documents black Americans climbing into holes in the ground under the cover of night, attending schools run by free blacks, “playing school” with white children, “stealin’ a meetin’” in the woods, and trading food for lessons, among other covert means. In her remarkable narrative of black education in the antebellum South and early in Emancipation, Heather Williams reveals that black people were self-taught and their own biggest advocates for education, in slavery and in freedom.

Frederick Douglass, raised in Maryland between the 1820s and 1830s, represents the best-known example of learning in secret. Left alone to look after the master’s house, he employed his own version of fugitive pedagogy. He spent his time “writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy book, copying what he had written.” Douglass wrote in the margins of the Webster Spelling Book, populating these in-between spaces with words he appropriated and mimicked, turning them toward his own semantic and political ends. Woodson’s nearby home state of Virginia passed laws prohibiting education for enslaved and free blacks as early as 1819. This legal precedent was reinforced through subsequent acts passed in Virginia leading up to Emancipation. In April 1831, for instance, an act was passed declaring “that all meetings of free negroes or mulattoes, at any schoolhouse, church, meetinghouse or other place for teaching them reading or writing, either in the day or night, under whatever pretext, shall be deemed and considered as an unlawful assembly.” The law then authorized whippings “at the discretion of any justice of the peace, not exceeding twenty lashes.” Such legislation, and the sentiments of antiliteracy ideology, became nearly universal in the South. When the Civil War began, black Americans challenged the prohibition of their mental elevation. Their efforts to learn expanded in formal and public ways; they initiated “native schools” in the Contraband Camps, which prefigured the Freedmen’s Bureau schools, and then the first public school system in the US South.

With the end of the Civil War came “jubilee,” as the formerly enslaved described the biblical time of freedom. No longer in bondage, black people across the South performed their first acts of freedom by occupying the classroom. Booker T. Washington recalled a “whole race trying to go to school,” and he noted: “Few were too young, and none were too old, to make the attempt to learn. As fast as any kind of teachers could be secured, not only were day-schools filled, but night schools as well.” The rush to the schoolhouse transcended any single location. Washington’s narrative described blacks’ quest for education throughout all the Southern states.

Once legally permitted to become educated in the postbellum South, black Americans continued to experience violence and other forms of opposition to their efforts. Yet they continued to resist in the best ways they knew how. Even as black education developed institutionally through the endeavors of blacks themselves and also in conjunction with white northern church denominations and philanthropists, black Americans nonetheless pursued critical parts of their educational lives in secret. As a class of political actors, black students and teachers emerged as persuasive advocates in fundraising for their respective institutions. And like black preachers, teachers (or, more expansively, Negroes “who had some learning”) were important leaders in black communities, not just because of their professional status but also as stokers and caretakers of the freedom dreams that helped initiate their escape from bondage. Black Americans shared an “equal rights” vision that remained unfulfilled. This vision fueled the emergence of black equal rights leagues and other organizational entities representative of black life during Reconstruction and the decades to follow. Black teachers’ associations reflected this collective drive on the part of a segment of leaders who signified the living history presented in Carter G. Woodson’s first classrooms.

Black people’s fugitive pedagogy lent itself to an origin story of black freedom. It was a central part of the general strike initiated by the absconded slaves who refused the political economic arrangement of slavery when they fled the plantations during the war. As a framework for learning, it contested ideas of black inferiority, while rejecting the superexploitation and ownership of black people as fungible laborers. The black schools and teachers after the war, by their very existence, symbolized the refutation of a knowledge realm that debased them, educational institutions that excluded them, and curricula that portrayed them as always already subjugated and “narratively condemned.” Fugitive pedagogy framed black educational life from the time of slavery through Jim Crow as a narrative plot that transcended the limited world in which black folks found themselves. It became more than a teaching method—more than utilitarian skills to be learned. Instead teaching and learning themselves continued to be “a means of escape,” as Woodson wrote. Education would guide blacks in pursuit of a new world and a new way of being; it was a total critique of the current order. Black Americans passed this narrative on as a panacea for social ills, and it heavily informed both politics and values after Emancipation. Carried over from slavery, fugitive pedagogy reflected the general story of black people’s shared past and present. In the postbellum era, black Americans continued to live their educational lives through the frame of this origin story. It continued to structure the relationship between education and the black political struggle more broadly. Woodson himself contributed to this long memory of education’s role in black America’s quest for freedom and justice.

Nicole Fleetwood and Monica Muñoz Martinez Awarded MacArthur Fellowships

Harvard University Press congratulates its authors Nicole Fleetwood and Monica Muñoz Martinez for being named to the 2021 class of 25 MacArthur Fellows. The prestigious no-strings-attached $625,000 awards are given to individuals “who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

Fleetwood’s book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which won the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, is a powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system. In it, she shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender.

Fleetwood also curated a similarly titled exhibition (which includes art that appears in the book) by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists at MoMa PS1 that opened last year.

She’ll use a portion of the award money to bring the exhibition to other parts of the country.

“To me, one of the great gifts for people who go to the show or read the book is that it challenges their assumptions about who’s incarcerated, why they are incarcerated, and what they do with their time,” Fleetwood told the New York Times.

A multiple award-winner, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas by Martinez is a moving account of a little-known period of state-sponsored racial terror inflicted on ethnic Mexicans in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. It details how between 1910 and 1920, vigilantes and law enforcement—including the renowned Texas Rangers—killed Mexican residents with impunity. The full extent of the violence was known only to the relatives of the victims. Martinez turns to the keepers of this history to tell this riveting and disturbing untold story.

The relevance of this history to what has happened at the border during the past couple of years has not gone unnoticed. The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote that the book is “a reminder that government brutality on the border is nothing new.”

“As a historian who studies histories of racist violence, and who studies the long struggle for civil rights and for social justice, it is unsettling every day to see so many of the dangerous patterns from the past repeating,” Martinez said in the same New York Times article.

“We are living in a moment where there are organized efforts to restrict rights: Voting rights, reproductive rights, you could talk about immigration all afternoon. There is so much at stake.”

Celebrating Pride Month, Part II

To celebrate Pride Month, we are highlighting excerpts from books that explore the lives and experiences of the LGBT+ community. This second excerpt comes from How To Be Gay, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, in which David M. Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a way of being that gay men must learn from one another to become who they are. 

The official line of the post-Stonewall gay movement in the United States has gone something like this: “We are not freaks or monsters. We are the same as you: we are ordinary, decent people. In fact, we are just like heterosexuals except for what we do in bed (which is nobody’s business but our own—and, anyway, the less said about it, the better).”

For a short time, around the birth of the “queer” movement at the turn of the 1990s, it became fashionable to claim the opposite. Those who embraced a queer identity (or non-identity) used to take a line that exactly reversed the official post-Stonewall one: “We queers are totally unlike anyone else; we do not resemble you at all. We are completely different from heterosexuals—except for what we do in bed (which is more or less what everyone does in bed, with some minor, insignificant variations).”

But that queer fashion didn’t last long, and a lot of lesbians and gay men in the United States…have now gone back to claiming that gay people are defined, if at all, only by a non-standard sexual preference which in and of itself does not strictly correlate with any other feature of the personality. In all other aspects of their lives, gay people are the same as everyone else. (That tendency may actually reflect a recent development of international scope, what Rogers Brubaker has called “the return of assimilation.”) In American popular usage nowadays, to be sure, the word “gay” may mean “stereotypically gay” or “culturally gay,” while men who are defined by their sexuality, by the sex they have with men, are more likely to be termed “homosexual.” But in the official language of the gay movement, “gay” remains an identity marker attached to sexual preference. To be gay, according to this latter outlook, is to have a sexuality, a sexual orientation; it is not to have a distinctive culture or psychology or social practice or inner life, or anything else that is different from the norm. Especially if—in the case of gay men—that difference implies any identification with women or femininity. Merely to question this doctrine is to risk conjuring up the dread specter of sexual inversion, opening the door to a return of Victorian psychiatry, with all its ancient prejudices about the congenital abnormality and psychopathology and gender deviance of gay men.

But so long as we cling to the notion that gayness is reducible to same-sex sexual object-choice, that it has nothing to do with how we live or what we like, that our homosexuality is completely formed prior to and independent of any exposure to gay culture—and so long as we hold to that belief as to a kind of dogma—then the persistence of gay culture will remain a perpetual embarrassment, as well as an insoluble analytic puzzle.

Celebrating Pride Month

To celebrate Pride Month, we are highlighting excerpts from books that explore the lives and experiences of the LGBT+ community. Nathaniel Frank’s Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America tells the dramatic story of the struggle for same-sex couples to legally marry, something that is now taken for granted. Below, he describes the beginnings of the gay rights movement.

For homophiles of the 1950s, identifying as gay was almost always a risky and radical act, even if their ensuing demands were “merely” to be treated like everyone else. The first gay Americans to picket the White House without hiding were bluntly challenging the status quo even if their suits and dresses marked them as conventional, as did their engagement with traditional centers of political power. Defying views of gay people as sick, immoral, criminal, and disloyal was revelatory, but it could be undertaken with the goal of replacing such views with approval by churches, doctors, politicians, and the law. Conventional tactics do not always mean limited goals, and vice versa, since an activist can adopt an incremental approach as a strategy with the ultimate goal being radical change. Liberating Americans from traditional constraints on sex and other roles had the potential not just to be transgressive, disruptive, and destabilizing but also to serve as a safety valve for social pressures, thus spurring reform instead of revolution. There was a fine line between self-respect and respectability, and the process of throwing off internalized shame was often helped along by winning the imprimatur of others. And legalizing marriage for same-sex couples, some early advocates recognized, could be transformative, even as it also reaffirmed the role of the state in both governing private relationships and neglecting the needs of single people.

Such ideological and strategic tensions help explain the context for what happened on the hot summer night of Friday, June 27, 1969. A motley bunch of 200 drag queens, cross- dressing lesbians, hustlers, students, tony gay men, and what one admirer called “flaming faggot types” had gathered, as they often did, at the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York City’s West Village. That afternoon and into the night, 20,000 fans and well-wishers had lined up outside the Frank Campbell funeral home uptown to say goodbye to Judy Garland, the gay icon whose life had ended with a barbiturate overdose in London the previous week. Some at the Stonewall Inn may have been toasting her memory (more than one had used “Judy Garland” as a nom de plume when signing in at the door, a practice required because the bar branded itself a private “bottle club” instead of a public establishment that would need a liquor license) when, just after midnight, a group of police officers filed in to raid the place. Normally the authorities gave the owners, who were associated with the Mafia, a warning before their raids, but for whatever reason, that night’s intrusion was a surprise. And for whatever reason—the cumulative weight of decades of derision and persecution, the inspiration of a new generation of youthful protestors, the rebellious spirit of the 1960s, the collective sadness and anger over Judy Garland’s death—this time the patrons fought back.

As the police began hauling off a few employees and drag queens in paddy wagons—wearing gender-atypical clothing was still illegal in New York—the crowd spontaneously erupted. The city during this period was not the well-kempt model of urban luxury it later became, and the small park across the street was littered with bottles and other debris that the throng gleefully converted into weapons. They hurled whatever they could get their hands on—including a parking meter they yanked from its socket—shattering windows and driving many of the raiding police inside for cover. When other officers turned a fire hose on the demonstrators, someone cried, “Grab it, grab his cock!” while others yelled, “Gay power!” The protestors taunted the raiders with references to the regular payoffs the corrupt police took from the mob bosses who owned the bars. Early on, a cross-dressing, biracial lesbian, Stormé DeLarverie, struck a police officer in retaliation, she said, for being hit. By the end of the night, four officers had been injured and many others had been terrorized. “There was never any time that I felt more scared than then,” recalled one of the leading police officials, who said their guns had been trained on the door from inside. “You have no idea how close we came to killing somebody.”

No one died, but a movement was born—or reached its rebellious adolescence. It was no doubt indebted and deeply connected to the rudimentary efforts of Mattachine [Society] and Daughters of Bilitis during the previous decade, but it was newly emboldened in palpable and ultimately enduring ways. The unrest continued for several nights that summer, as hundreds of additional gay and non-gay participants and curiosity-seekers, including press, made their way to Christopher Street. One was the gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who noticed right away a change in gay men’s bearing and poise. “The guys there were so beautiful,” he said. “They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.” Other gay observers echoed the sentiment, calling the event a “homosexual revolution” that young activists should study and carry forward into the anti-gay churches, psychiatric offices, “councils of the U.S. Government,” and city and state legislatures that “make our manner of love-making a crime.” Many saw Stonewall, even then, as part of something bigger, “a larger revolution sweeping through all segments of society” that carried the promise of upending long-standing forms of repression and prejudice.

Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Part II

In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’re showcasing titles that document the Asian American experience. Our second excerpt comes from Beth Lew-Williams’s prize-winning book The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, which historian Richard White describes as “a powerful argument about racial violence that could not be more timely.”

Monday night, Gong was asleep in his tent when the vigilantes returned without warning in the darkness. “So many shot fired it sounded all same [as] China New Year,” he told a coroner’s jury a few days later. As bullets blew holes through the workers’ tents, all was chaos. Gong ran for the forest, hunkered down at a safe distance, and watched as the tents burned. He returned to the camp to find the bodies of men he had labored beside only hours before. There was thirty-five-year-old Fung Wai, shot in the chest, and thirty-two-year-old Mong Goat, shot in the belly. Beside the bodies was a gravely wounded man, Yung Son. “Yung Son was shot through left arm, through both thighs and through ankle,” testified Gong. After Yung passed the next morning, the Chinese packed up their remaining possessions and took the road out of Squak Valley.

Gong stayed behind, minding the bodies of the three who died, bringing shell casings to the local sheriff as evidence, and serving as a witness in the coroner’s inquest and criminal trial. He had been defenseless against the mob, but now he could fight for retribution. In emotional testimony, Gong tried to convey the anguish of Yung’s death. He told the jury that “[Yung] was sorry to die. Got a son [at] home, too young, no one to send him money. [Yung] did not talk much, but hollered through the night.” Even in the courtroom, Gong proved powerless. He knew the men who had died, but nothing of the shooters. All he could say was, “Monday night white men come to kill Chinamen.” Who were these “white men”? Why did they kill the “Chinamen”? Gong did not know.

For the Chinese, this is how the violence began, with shock, fear, and lingering questions. Histories of violence, however, rarely start this way. It is difficult to begin the history of anti-Chinese violence with its victims because the story of racial violence is, inevitably, a narrative of action and reaction, perpetrator and prey. Searching for cause and effect, history favors stories of people who instigate events over those who suffer the aftermath. The Chinese make unnatural protagonists because they did not set these violent episodes in motion, nor did they hold the power to stop them. They also make problematic narrators because, like Gong, they often could not name their attackers or pinpoint their motivations.

Racial violence against the Chinese relied on the power of surprise. The Chinese did not know when threats would turn to violence, what form the violence would take, or when it would end. While vigilantes sometimes depended on bullets to rid their community of Chinese, they often expelled them through threats alone. To fully understand the potency of this psychological violence, we must start our exploration of racial violence with the Chinese, adopt their vulnerable state of ignorance, and attempt to understand what it means to live in terror.

Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’re showcasing titles that document the Asian American experience. This week we have an excerpt from Duncan Ryūken Williams’s Los Angeles Times bestseller, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. George Takei called it “A must-read for anyone interested in the implacable quest for civil liberties, social and racial justice, religious freedom, and American belonging.”

Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, FBI agents showed up at the Kimura family’s farmhouse to question her father. Nobuichi Kimura, Masumi’s father, was carrying a shotgun when he answered the door and, seeing the gun, the agents wrestled him to the floor. Minutes later, Masumi arrived home from school, only to find her father pinned down by one agent and another pointing a gun at her mother’s head. Her parents, who had immigrated from Wakayama Prefecture in Japan some years earlier, were trying in their broken English to explain the gun to the agents. Though terrified, Masumi’s English was better than that of her parents. She translated the agent’s questions to her father, who explained he had been preparing to shoot rabbits in the garden when they had arrived. Temporarily satisfied, the agents left. But in subsequent weeks they returned to the Kimura home to conduct further interrogations concerning Mr. Kimura’s leadership at the Buddhist association, which was seen as aligned too closely with Japan and potentially a threat to national security.

It was in this climate of growing suspicion and hostility that Masumi’s father decided to take steps to prove the family’s loyalty to America. One day shortly after that first FBI visit, Masumi was performing her daily chore of lighting the furnace next to their Japanese-style bathtub when her father entered the room. He was carrying items he had found throughout the house that had Japanese language inscriptions or “Made in Japan” written on them. Among them were Masumi’s precious Hinamatsuri dolls, which had been given to her on Girl’s Day. As tears rolled down her cheeks, she watched him throw the dolls and all the other Japanese artifacts into the fire.

Her father did not burn everything, however. He could not bring himself to destroy the bound edition of Buddhist sutras that had been handed down through generations of the family. Instead, he asked his wife to find boxes and some Japanese kimono cloth while he went outside and dug a hole behind their garage with a backhoe. After wrapping the Buddhist scriptures and the minutes of board meetings from the Madera Buddhist Association in the kimono cloth, he placed them in tin rice-cracker boxes, carefully lowered them into the hole, and covered them with dirt. By burying them next to the garage, he hoped to be able to find and recover them at some later date.

Shortly thereafter, in April 1942, the Kimuras were ordered to report to the Fresno Assembly Center, which had been set up at the local county fairgrounds. They ended up having to sell their farm to their neighbors for less than one-twentieth of its market value, and, after depositing a single suitcase of their most valued remaining possessions at the Fresno Buddhist Temple for safekeeping, they arrived at the center, where they were quartered in a horse stable designated Barrack E-17-2. They were however more fortunate than the majority of Japanese Americans. Instead of being transferred to one of the more permanent WRA incarceration camps, the Kimuras were among the handful of families approved to join work programs east of the military zone, so they ended up in Utah, where they worked as cheap farm labor for the duration of the war.

After the war ended, the Kimura family returned to Madera in the hopes that they would be able to buy their farm back and recover their home. But the new owners demanded a sum ten times greater than what the Kimuras had accepted for the farm three years earlier. They had also torn down the garage, making it impossible for the Kimuras to find the precious belongings they had buried near it. Their single suitcase of valuables, which had been stored away for safekeeping, had been lost as well when vandals ransacked the Fresno Buddhist Temple during the war. Unable to raise the money to buy back the farm, the Kimuras went to live with relatives in Los Angeles.

This story, told to me in the gardens of my advisor’s widow, has stayed with me over the years. Though just one among tens of thousands of stories of Japanese American Buddhist families during World War II, it encapsulates both the loss and the hope that made possible the birth of an American form of Buddhism. Though the Kimuras were willing to let go of their Japanese national identity by burning objects symbolically linked to Japan, the one thing they refused to erase was their Buddhist faith. Indeed, they ended up quite literally placing Buddhism into the soil of America for safekeeping. Like Senzaki and many others, their actions demonstrated their firm conviction that their adopted homeland would one day be a place where their faith could grow and flourish.

Q&A with T. H. Breen, author of The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America

In most histories of the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers are foregrounded. In The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America, T. H. Breen recovers the forgotten history of our nation’s true founders—ordinary Americans. We spoke with him about what he discovered while writing the book, and what relevance it might have to today’s politics.

What was your goal in writing this book?

My research alerted me to a missing piece in our understanding of the American Revolution.  What has been long ignored in familiar accounts of the nation’s founding are the ordinary men and women who sustained resistance to Great Britain over eight years of war. After all, they were the ones who made huge personal sacrifices and risked physical harm. It seemed curious to me how rarely they appeared in the revolutionary story.

Although the challenge was difficult, I wanted to do more than offer just another history of a handful of founding fathers guiding the country to independence or to chronicle once again the abstract philosophic principles that allegedly inspired revolutionary leaders. 

Rather, I intended to recover how ordinary Americans living in small communities gave meaning to the events that transformed their lives. The Will of the People introduces readers to forgotten revolutionaries who at various moments during the conflict were consumed by fear, who were desperate even after the fighting began for reconciliation with Great Britain, who were anxious about the possible betrayal of former allies who seemed more interested in personal wealth than in creating a just society, and who were tempted by the appeal of revenge against neighbors who had sided with the king.

How did you reconstruct the revolutionary experience of ordinary Americans?

The sources for a history of ordinary revolutionaries are different from those that we associate with the biographies of the Founding Fathers. Letters and diaries were helpful but frustratingly rare. What was most important in opening the world of these people were the newspapers. Although newspapers had been around for a long time, they took on powerful new significance during the imperial crisis. Contributors to the journals expressed their hopes and fears about military success, about the dangers posed by real and imaged domestic enemies, about runaway inflation, and about the welfare of sons and fathers who served as militiamen or Continental soldiers.

Reports of resistance in one town were communicated to people in other towns—distant strangers—and the information provided readers with a sense of confidence that other Americans were supporting a common cause. It was in the pages of the newspapers that I encountered people struggling to enforce revolution by serving on committees of safety and observation. It quickly became clear to me that for most Americans the committees were the effective face of revolution.

How does your book change how we ordinarily think about the American Revolution?

It introduces the element of process to the revolutionary story. Ordinary Americans did not initially resist Great Britain in the name of independence, much less, in the hope of creating a new republic or democratic polity. The goal in 1774 and 1775 was persuading parliament to radically reform obnoxious imperial policies. People wanted to restore the old order under conditions that allowed for proper American representation. 

But parliament refused to back down. As effective British authority in the countryside—from Georgia to New Hampshire—collapsed, new men came forward to guide local affairs. They found themselves making decisions about other Americans, about who was an enemy, about recruitment of soldiers, and about relations with state and congressional authorities. 

This was a moment of transition in the entire character of the revolution. The people who served on the committees of safety found themselves speaking in the name of the people. The point is that no one set out to form a republican form of government, much less a democratic one, but during the course of the revolution, Americans created a republican structure that no one had anticipated. It happened as a practical response to the challenge of war.

Is there anything about your book that is relevant to the political situation today?

I was struck by how the meaning of words fundamental to our shared political vocabulary have changed radically over the last two centuries. Liberty provides a good example of this shift. For the revolutionaries, liberty was the essential element for the preservation of freedom. They claimed that it encouraged innovation; it was a source of prosperity. 

But those who praised liberty so highly also described it almost as a volatile chemical that might at any moment explode. They insisted that uncontrolled liberty might lead to licentiousness, to a belief that liberty allowed ordinary people do whatever they wanted to do. Too much liberty was another term for anarchy. 

What the revolutionaries repeatedly declared was that liberty involved social responsibility, an obligation to defend the rights of other members of the community. It was certainly not a justification for extreme individualism. As one revolutionary writer explained, “Liberty is frequently used to denote a power of doing as we please, or of executing our acts of choice.”  We must reject that kind of thinking, he observed, because “civil liberty does not consist in a freedom from all law and government, but rather, in a freedom from unjust law and tyrannical government.”

The people who sustained revolutionary resistance would have found it hard to understand modern Americans who define liberty as the right to do whatever they please during a time of national crisis.