Hamilton Historical Volume II, Issue 1: Fall 2022

Hamilton Historical An Undergraduate Journal est. 2020

Volume II, Issue 1: Fall 2022

Peer-reviewed by undergraduates for undergraduates Celebrating rigorous studies in diverse fields of historical inquiry Based out of Hamilton College in Clinton, NY Aleksandra Kollontai (1872-1952) addressing the Second International Conference of Communist Women, June 1921. From Farnsworth, Beatrice Brodsky. “Bolshevism, The Woman Question, and Aleksandra Kollontai.” The American Historical Review 81, no. 2 (1976): 292–316. For more information see Claire Yujie Ji’s paper Mothers Under Socialism: Soviet and Cuban Women’s Experiences with Childcare, c. 1959-1980.

Hamilton Historical Volume II, Issue 1 Fall 2022 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Emma Tomlins LAYOUT CZAR Brian Seiter EDITORIAL CONSULTANT Eric B. Cortés-Kopp PEER EDITORS Isabella Roselli Brooks Bradford Maddie Schink Quinn Brown Carter Myers-Brown Lydia Gross Hannah Jablons Jack Ritzenberg Philip Chivily Katie Rao Erick Christian Felix Tager Liam Garcia-Quish

Nick Fluty

READERS Sammy Smock

Miki Worzel

Editor’s Preface Dear readers, The first issue of our second volume has arrived. Originating under the leadership of Kate Biedermann ‘22 during the Covid-19 pandemic, The Hamilton Historical began as a group of committed History students looking to build a community within the department. Over time, this community we set out to develop has blossomed. This is our third publication in total over two years and we have increased our editorial staff to sixteen students across three class years. We hope to continue to build and foster a community of dedicated historians looking to exchange ideas with their fellow students.

Much of this particular issue examines societal and governmental conflict: conflict surrounding policies on labor and motherhood, conflict within Indian cinematic depictions of Mughal emperors, and colonial conflicts of Otherness. We begin in Vargas Era Brazil, contemplating the implications of politicizing child care among low income women. From there we move on to studies of identity and difference in India and Israel-Palestine. Following which, we look at more globally comparative portrayals of post-colonialism and communism. We close with an examination of the Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery and its troublesome legacy.

We encourage you to engage with and enjoy these essays. Perhaps you’ll learn something new.

Sincerely, Emma Editor-in-Chief

Table of Contents Protecting Motherhood: Poverty, Labor, and Maternalism in Vargas Era Brazil, 1930-1945 Alex Wheeler

1 Identity-Driven Conflict in Indian Film: A Case Study of Mughal Emperor Akbar and Mariam-uz-Zamani Claire Chen 14 History, Nation, and Colonial Difference in Israel-Palestine Quinn Brown 21 Post-Colonial Modifications to the Foucauldian Frame: Said and Stoler Brian Seiter 28 Mothers Under Communism: Soviet and Cuban Women’s Experiences with Childcare, 1959-1980s Claire Yujie Ji

33

An Ode to the Lost Cause in Bronze: The Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery Sumiko Newman

43

Protecting Motherhood Poverty, Labor, and Maternalism in Vargas Era Brazil, 19301945

Alex Wheeler

Wellesley College - Class of 2023

In the mid-twentieth century, Brazil experienced a period of tremendous political, cultural, economic, and intellectual change. The Vargas era (19301945), led by president Getúlio Vargas, who replaced the First Republic (1889-1930)’s regional oligarchical government, sought to modernize Brazil through a populist approach.1 Vargas quickly consolidated federal powers and became the most influential political figure of Brazil’s twentieth century. In the context of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and demographic expansion that altered Brazil’s population—and women’s roles within it—Vargas encouraged an unprecedented national regeneration.2 The Vargas administration’s consistent rhetoric about poor families as the “bedrock” of Brazil’s economy and as fundamental to national progress likewise encouraged social reforms for the working class.3 As Vargas—benevolently known as the “Pai dos Pobres” or “Father of the Poor”—dramatically expanded social and economic rights for workers and women, discussions shifted surrounding women’s reproduction and positionality. Vargas’s Estado Novo (1937-1945) dictatorship further created a welfare state increasingly concentrated on medical science, statecraft, the working class, and maternalism.

Maternalism—defined as intersecting medical, institutional, and cultural discourses with mothers and

women’s child-rearing activities at their core—became a core tenant under Vargas.4 Women’s reproductive capabilities became critical to Brazil’s expanding nation and political agenda, and thus, urban women–especially poor women of color–were increasingly subjected to surveillance. Poor women, symbolized as “mãe desamparadas,” and their children became the primary target for welfare services that sought to financially and medically uplift impoverished mothers. By the 1940s, Vargas had institutionalized maternal-infant health services through government programs such as the Ministry of Education and Public Health (Ministério da Educação e Saúde Pública), National Health Fund (Fundo Nacional de Saúde) and National Institute of Health (Instituto Nacional de Saúde).5 The Brazilian government sponsored a variety of free health and welfare services including breast milk dispensaries, free daycares, and maternal kitchens.6 National governments, as well as private and philanthropic organizations, demonstrated a growing interest in creating a public health infrastructure geared towards the health of poor mothers and their children.

The state viewed efforts to transform maternal health and infant mortality as an investment in children useful to the future nation. Broader processes of biopolitical control pushed urban poor women’s reproductive lives

1 In October 1930, Getúlio Vargas, former governor of Rio Grande do Sul, took control of Brazil through a military junta. While in the First Republic regional oligarchical elites negotiated power sharing that excluded most Brazilians from political participation, Vargas used a populist approach to gain power.

2 In 1940, Brazil’s population was 41,236,315 – a 36 percent increase from 1920 when the population was 30,635,605. Rio de Janeiro had 1,764,141 inhabitants—more than a 50 percent increase from 1920—and São Paulo had 1,326,261 inhabitants—more than a 200 percent increase from 1920. Besse, Susan K. Restructuring patriarchy: the modernization of gender inequality in Brazil, 19141940. Durham, NC: UNC Press Books, 1996, 16.

3 Otovo, Okezi T. “From Mãe Preta to Mãe Desamparada: Maternity and Public Health in Post-Abolition Bahia.” Luso-Brazilian Review 48, no. 2 (2011): 164192, 180.

4 Otovo, Okezi T. Progressive mothers, better babies: Race, public health, and the state in Brazil, 1850-1945, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016.

5 In 1934, Ministry of Education and Public Health director Gustavo Capanema instituted a series of centralizing reforms to clarify public health jurisdictions in urban centers, expand public health to include hospital assistance and medical care, and provide necessary financial support for these programs that clarified the importance of motherhood for state-building. In 1939, follow up legislation put the administration of cities’ public health services in municipal hands. Roth, Cassia. A miscarriage of justice: Women’s reproductive lives and the law in early twentieth-century Brazil. Stanford University Press, 2020, 71-72.

6 Other new services included clinical and in-home birthing assistance, maternal subsidies, prenatal, infant, and child hygiene clinics, and sterilized animal milk dispensaries. Otovo, “Mãe Desamparada,” 179.

2 into sites of institutional regulation and scrutiny that championed progress, but ultimately these changes still maintained existing class, race, and gender hierarchies. The Vargas administration covertly avoided using racial language but nevertheless attempted to unite a post-abolition, multi-racial society into a “nossa raça,” a singular Brazilian race.7 Rather, gender and class became the foundation to construct nossa raça.

Despite systemic disparities in education, income, and political power, the era reinforced an idealistic “racial democracy.”8 Although in Vargas’s era women gained some legal rights and increasingly participated in the urban economy, the ultimate goal remained the same: connect (poor) women’s citizenship and legal rights to their maternal identity for modern state formation. During this period, physicians and female-led philanthropic organizations also began to emphasize the importance of supporting female domestics that could not properly care for their families. Surrounded by Vargas’s rhetoric about the poor and poor mothers as the bedrock of Brazil’s economy, they too envisioned poor mothers as the cornerstone for transforming Brazil into a modern twentieth-century nation. Vargas also created new labor regulations that “protected” female industrial workers. Most female workers, however, who worked as domestic servants, found little to no protection in the Vargas-era labor codes designed for factory employees. Thus, the question arises, if poor women’s primary position was not included in legislative labor reforms enacted during the Vargas regime, how did working women navigate challenging economic circumstances and increased state interventions that prioritized maternalism for Brazil’s modernization but remained ignorant of their lived realities? Fertility control—methods of contraception, abortion, and infanticide—provided one avenue for impoverished working women to navigate their complicated lives and conflicting identities.

The Vargas era, however, criminalized women’s deviations from their nationalistic duty of motherhood and utilized legal methods to promote women’s reproduction. Overall, criminal law, state policies, and philanthropic efforts reveal an expanding, interventionist Brazilian state deeply invested in poor women’s reproduction and maternalism.

7 In Salvador, as many as 70 percent of the population was nonwhite, while in Rio de Janeiro this number was approximately 20 percent. Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 162. Gormley, Melissa Eden. “Motherhood as national service: Race, class and public health policy in Brazil, 1930–1945.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 2006, 83.

8 Otovo, Progressive mothers, 170.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 This paper examining poor mothers, nation building, and public health contributes to historiographies on the centrality of women’s reproduction to state expansion in Latin America.9 In Brazil specifically, rich historiography exists exploring maternal-infant policies and conceptions of motherhood during the early twentieth century. For example, Susan Besse’s seminal work Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil explores the promotion of motherhood as a modern, scientific, and professional activity in the context of privileged Brazilian women’s increasing educational, employment, and political autonomy. Along with June Hahner’s Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women’s Rights in Brazil which details women’s work and suffrage in Brazil, these reforms “restructured,” but did not fundamentally uproot, traditional patriarchal norms. Historians such as Cassia Roth in A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil have recently analyzed the institutionalization of fertility control from a medico-legal perspective using legal cases in Rio de Janeiro, while Ozeki Otovo in Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil has employed a more community-centered methodology to investigating Brazilian maternalism in Bahia. Other scholars have extensively explored labor and economic reforms during the Vargas era from isolated legal, political, or social points of view.10 Molly Ball’s “Wife, Mother, and Worker: The Decision to Work in Early Twentieth-Century São Paulo” discusses how working-class Brazilian women embodied the roles of wife, mother, and worker during the First Republic (18891930). However, the interconnection between state interventions targeting poor women’s dual identities as mothers and workers remains underexplored. No

9 Borges, Dain Edward. The family in Bahia, Brazil, 1870-1945. Stanford University Press, 1992. Afshar, Haleh. Gender and the politics of rights and democracy in Latin America. Eds. Nikki Craske, and Maxine Molyneux. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Friedman, Elisabeth J. Unfinished transitions: Women and the gendered development of democracy in Venezuela, 1936-1996. Penn State Press, 2010. Gender and nation building is explored, among other things, in the following sources: Rodriguez, Julia. Civilizing Argentina: Science, medicine, and the modern state. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2006. Rodríguez, Daniel A. The right to live in health: Medical politics in post-independence Havana. UNC Press Books, 2020. Hochman, Gilberto. The sanitation of Brazil: Nation, state, and public health, 1889-1930. University of Illinois Press, 2016.

10 Wolfe, Joel. Working women, working men: São Paulo & the rise of Brazil’s industrial working class, 1900–1955. Duke University Press, 1993. Also see Levine, Robert M. Father of the poor?: Vargas and his era. Cambridge University Press, 1999; French, John D. Drowning in laws: labor law and Brazilian political culture. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2004. Ball, Molly C. “Wife, Mother, and Worker: The Decision to Work in Early Twentieth-Century São Paulo.”

Journal of Women’s History 29, no. 4 (2017): 109-132.

3 studies have used the Vargas era as its periodization.11 An integrated analysis that combines these historical, socio-structural, medical, and legal methodologies to underscore how various stakeholders conceptualized working women and ideals of maternalism is fundamental to understanding Brazil’s unprecedented modernization under Vargas. This paper builds upon previous work to emphasize the complicated intersections of labor, motherhood, and nationalism and in doing so, provides a new perspective on conceptualizing how the materialist movement interacted with systems of poverty in a growing nation.

This paper analyzes maternalism as it relates to urban poor women in Brazil’s Vargas era. The complex relationships between legal codes, labor policies, physician organizations, female philanthropists, and impoverished working women are examined in the context of women’s changing positions within a modernizing nation. It argues that these impoverished women—particularly women of color—navigated employment and motherhood amid new legislative and labor policies that prioritized maternalism as a means to transform the nation, but ultimately reinforced entrenched class, race, and gender inequalities. While the federal government enacted legal changes to “protect” motherhood, these protections ultimately did not support most Brazilian women who turned to physician-led organizations, female philanthropists, and fertility control practices to balance their conflicting identities. Yet in the end, these initiatives remained largely ineffective at addressing the considerable gap between law and reality.

Women’s Evolving Social Position

Alongside other modernizing nations during the 1930s, Brazilian women re-negotiated their public and private roles and subtly challenged traditional norms. The rise of consumerism allowed women to see themselves in public discourse and modern leisure for the first time.12 As Brazilian women’s literacy and educational opportunities substantially increased, women’s magazines like the Revista Feminina (1914-1927) 11 In The right to live in health: Medical politics in post independence Havana, Daniel Rodriguez explores, among other things, how medical nationalists subordinated economic realities and systemic problems with cultural stereotypes that reinforced gender and class inequalities. No existing literature discusses women as workers and mothers under Vargas.

12 Many middle- and upper-class women started following the fashions and behavior of women they saw in European and American films. Caulfield, Sueann.

In defense of honor: Sexual morality, modernity, and nation in early-twentieth-century Brazil. Duke University Press, 2000.

Protecting Motherhood captured women of all classes and races.13 New jazz clubs, samba schools, and dancing establishments also allowed both popular and elite women to patronize public leisure establishments previously dominated by men.14 While poor women of color had always existed in the public space as slaves or workers, wealthier women emerged more in the public sphere during Vargas. Poor black and brown women’s public visibility was a legacy of slavery that required financially disadvantaged women to find employment outside the private home.

Feminist groups played an essential role in advancing political changes for certain women and appealed to state emphasis on maternalism. Led by middle-class and elite feminists, the Brazilian Federation for Feminine Progress (FBPF) lobbied politicians for equal property rights, economic emancipation, education, professional opportunities, and suffrage.15 In 1932, Vargas nominated FBFP founder Bertha Lutz to help draft the new constitution and the efforts of these progressives were successful: Vargas granted literate women above the age of twenty-one the right to vote, hold office, and serve on juries, regardless of marital status. Women emerged into politics for the first time, although men construed women’s participation as exceptional and motivated by moral outrage, not politics.16 The 1934 Constitution which expanded citizenship to women and formalized Mother’s Day demonstrates Vargas’ national interest in promoting motherhood and his allyship with upper-class feminists that likewise supported maternal and child welfare. Poor women, however, could not participate in the emerging leisure and political scene in the same way as wealthier women because they did not have economic funds or time, and according to June Hahner, “neither ballot boxes nor legal codes meant much.”17 Nevertheless, rapid change and modernization 13 In 1890 only 10.4 percent of Brazilian women were literate. By 1920, however, 54.5 percent of all women in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were literate.

Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 25.

14 Caulfield, Defense of honor, 74.

15 In 1932, advised by lawyers associated with the FBPF, Lutz introduced proposals ultimately incorporated into the 1934 Constitution such as: women’s right to vote and hold office; maternity leave; and a preference for qualified women to manage and administer social assistance programs related to maternal and childhood welfare. The FBPF remained active until 1937 when Vargas established the Estado Novo. Mott, Maria Lucia. “Maternal and Child Welfare, State Policy, and Women’s Philanthropic Activities in Brazil, 1930-45.” In Maternalism reconsidered: Motherhood, welfare and social policy in the twentieth century, ed. Marian van der Klein, 168-189. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012, 177.

16 Weinstein, Barbara. “Inventing the “Mulher Paulista”: Politics, Rebellion, and the Gendering of Brazilian Regional Identities.” Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 1 (2006): 22-49.

17 Hahner, Emancipating the female sex, 169.

4 in urban centers generated conflicting messages regarding women’s role in the progressive nation. In certain aspects, the state welcomed the “modern” woman, but officials, legal practitioners, physicians, and husbands continued to conceptualize women as naturally maternal, sexually chaste, and domestic. Deflowering court cases—centered on issues related to women’s virginity and sexual purity—throughout the 1930s often highlighted that women’s physical weakness and impressionability rendered them susceptible to physical and moral contamination.18 Vargas linked familial definitions of sexual honor to national definitions of sexual virtue and maternal honor.19 The examples above illustrate that as child welfare became a central national issue, women’s social power within the family as expert housewives and mothers became elevated. Nevertheless, women’s increased emergence in the public sphere was not always viewed positively. Their modern positions outside the home remained associated with sexual dishonor, loose morals, and a dissolute lifestyle.20 The modern woman, according to Sueann Caulfield, “disregarded the spatial and moral boundaries of the family, gave up her innocence and naivete in exchange for the knowledge and experience available in public spaces.”21 The Estado Novo, which ended electoral politics and (elite and white) women’s participation in them, further underscores women’s fleeting and shifting positionality, and the state’s control over their legal rights.22 Prevailing gender hierarchies thus undergirded subsequent social and political reforms.

Poor Working Mothers

In the context of the Vargas era’s massive immigration, urbanization, population growth, and economic fluctuations, women out of economic necessity increasingly joined the urban economy.23 A 1942 labor survey found that the majority of female workers, “discouraged by bad working conditions, low pay, and lack of opportunities for advancement,” worked because they had no other choice.24 In factories, women worked

18 Caulfield, Defense of honor, 89.

19 Ibid, 20.

20 Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 98.

21 Caulfield, Defense of honor, 101.

22 Hahner, Emancipating the female sex, 174.

23 After abolition, large numbers of formerly enslaved people left coffee plantations in the interior and migrated to the city at the same time as migrants arrived from Europe. Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 11. For general data on immigration, population growth, and the economy see Father of the poor?: Vargas and his era.

24 Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 162.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1

Figure 1: Map of Brazil highlighting relevant states and cities.

to produce textiles in dark, airless rooms for long hours and little pay.25 Working in the formal labor market, however, helped women achieve their goals and gave them more direct control in family finances.26 Significant changes in female employment emerged in public administration due to the 1934 Constitution. Female employment increased by 671 percent, although socioeconomic status relegated most women to the least prestigious sectors.27 The most popular occupations reported in Vargas-Era census data were factory textiles, domestic services, and “personal services” (e.g., seamstresses).28 The number of women in industrial factories, however, varied nationally. Factory work was not typical in the municipality of Bahia in the northeast, where barely one percent of women found employment in industrial firms, compared to booming coffee centers in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (see Figure 1).29 Across Brazil’s urban centers, most women labored informally as domestic servants. In 1940, 25 According to the 1920 Census, women employed in the industrial sector earned half to two-thirds of men’s salaries. A 1938 survey on average salaries of all adult male and female workers showed that Brazilian women earned less than half as did men. Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 123.

26 Ball, “Wife, Mother, and Worker,” 121.

27 Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 147.

28 In 1940, 189,080 women compared to 101,218 men worked in textiles.

More than 9,2322,500 women worked in unremunerated domestic service while 549,117 women worked in remunerated domestic services and 408,412 women worked in “personal services” such as restaurant services, personal hygiene, and repair of personal items (seamstresses). Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 145.

29 In 1944, Bahia had 87 industrial firms as compared to Recife with 253 firms, Belo Horizonte with 192, Rio de Janeiro with 2,150 firms, and São Paulo with 3,549 firms (see Map 1). Otovo, Progressive mothers, 174.

5 more than 9 million women out of 14 million women in the labor workforce worked in unremunerated domestic services, and 36.1 percent of all nonagricultural women workers in Brazil were employed as domestic servants.30 Prostitution—illegal but relatively common—also provided another avenue for women to earn an income in urban centers. Under Vargas, women’s employment outside the home reflected a larger pattern of conservative social modernization with women occupying positions that extended and complemented their traditional domestic roles.

Employment identifications such as “domestic” were not racially neutral terms. As a direct consequence of Brazil’s long history of slavery, many women of color—who comprised half of the enslaved population on the eve of the abolition of slavery in 1888—continued to labor informally as low-paid, unskilled workers in upper-class homes where they relied on their employers for housing. Relatively privileged (white) working-class women of “good appearance” were more likely to be employed as sales clerks in department stores that catered to wealthier female consumers.31 Thus, the position of women of color as domestic servants reflected deeply rooted power relationships and performances of service that referenced Brazil’s Mulata Velha (Old Black Mammy).32 Race, servitude, and motherhood thus had important implications for where and how women existed within labor systems in early twentieth-century Brazil.

Poor women who entered the urban economy navigated against strong ideologies that working outside the home neglected their prescribed roles as mothers and wives. Many officials, unionists, and reformers held that female employment “posed a serious threat to female virtue, family health, and stability, and public morality.”33 Women’s employment was a “necessary evil, required by the contingencies of modern life” that should neither “change the definition of femininity, nor 30 Although a precise estimate of racial demographics cannot be fully obtained as racial data was excluded in Bahia’s 1920 and 1940 censuses, by 1950, Bahia was 30 percent white, 51 percent parda (brown), and 19 percent black. In 1940, Rio de Janeiro by contrast was 69.1 percent white and 18.1 percent parda. Also, despite numerous problems with census data—the lack of standardization, errors, and significant undercounting of women in the labor force, especially those who worked part-time, irregularly, or in family businesses—the 1920 and 1940 census are the only comprehensive sources available for studying occupational structure in Brazil. Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 141, 238 n47.

31 Caulfield, Defense of honor, 34.

32 Otovo, Okezi T. “Medicalized Motherhood as Race and Place: Bahia 1930s-1940s.” In The Making of Brazil’s Black Mecca: Bahia Reconsidered, ed.

Scott Ickes and Bernd Reiter. Michigan State University Press, 2018; Otovo, “Mãe Desamparada,” 165.

33 Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 80.

Protecting Motherhood transform female consciousness.”34 The newly formed Ministry of Labor in 1930 did not encourage women to be active workers or union members. A 1942 study endorsed by the Ministry of Labor concluded that only a narrow range of jobs did not risk hurting women apt for motherhood.35 Instead, Vargas proudly proclaimed his interest in “protecting women, morally and physically” with special regulations—particularly during the Estado Novo dictatorship that sought to consolidate the family unit. This was a paternalistic welfare state that cared for women because they were “by nature, more fragile” than men and because women nurtured the children and male workers of Brazil.36 For working mothers in household service, mothering responsibilities to their own children existed in tension with the needs of the families for whom they worked.37 Finding a balance between motherhood, childrearing, and domestic or informal labor demands placed Brazilian women in a vulnerable situation. High economic demands for child-rearing, costs of urban living, and workplace commitments made it particularly difficult for poor urban women to raise their own children. An unplanned pregnancy threatened not only a woman’s sexual honor but also her economic survival as many women feared losing their jobs.38 Domestic servants also had little time to devote to their own children and needed to rely more on unsanitary animal milk to supplement long workdays. The Brazilian Federation for Feminine Progress (FBPF) and Lutz did recognize the “double penalty” lower-class women faced between unpaid work at home and paid work in the labor force, and the potential conflict between “protective regulations” and women’s economic independence.39 However, the FBPF never advocated for domestic workers and thus, failed to adequately support many poor women who remained excluded from new laws. Although the Vargas administration gave women legal citizenship rights, social perceptions and economic circumstances created distinct challenges for lower-class working women if they became mothers, compared to upper-class women.

34 Ibid, 132-133.

35 Ibid., 137.

36 Wolfe, Working women, working men, 73.

37 Otovo, “Medicalized Motherhood,” 166.

38 Roth, Cassia. “Policing pregnancy: reproduction, poverty, and the law in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro.” Journal of Women’s History 29, no. 4 (2017): 85-108, 100.

39 Hahner, June Edith. Emancipating the female sex: The struggle for women’s rights in Brazil, 1850-1940. Duke University Press, 1990, 167-168. Gormley, “Motherhood as National Service,” 75.

6

Motherhood as Professional and Patriotic

While women’s roles in public and private spaces expanded, federal and presidential language articulated “protecting” motherhood as the basis of social order and the future of the Brazilian nation. The Vargas administration, and Vargas himself, “elevated [motherhood] to the status of a modern scientific profession: a worthy occupation for the most ambitious modern woman and a challenging undertaking for the best of female minds.”40 Maternal and child welfare received unprecedented federal and presidential attention. For example, in a 1932 Christmas Eve speech Vargas declared that “no other patriotic cause [was] as intimately linked to the perfection of the race and the progress of the nation as the protection and health of children.”41 Clearly, Vargas explicitly utilized a protection framework to codify the importance of maternalism to Brazilian nation building.42 In 1939, Vargas even proposed funding special programs for the “health of mothers and children” by placing a tax on single adults and married couples without children.43 Social rhetoric emphasized motherhood as a woman’s “primordial mission” and “primary vocation,” and the key to solving modern social problems. As such, Vargas institutionalized an elaborate public health system particularly centered around the maternal needs of poor women.44 While the First Republic tended to resolve social problems with police violence, reformers enacted social change through benevolent reforms during the Vargas regime.

Although the Vargas administration’s urgent address of child welfare concerns originated from a nationalist perspective, it was at least in part a political response to Brazil’s staggering infant mortality rates.

Rapid urbanization, industrialization, and demographic expansion during the Vargas years overwhelmed the urban infrastructure. The general health of the poor presented a large obstacle to Vargas’s plans to trans40 Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 98.

41 Otovo, Progressive mothers, 4.

42 For example, the 1934 Constitution forbade the labor of women in “unhealthy industries.” The Constitution also guaranteed a nationwide minimum wage, eight-hour workday, sixty-hour work week, medical assistance and disability protections, education for the illiterate, and paid annual leaves regardless of sex.

Otovo, Progressive mothers, 168.

43 Wolfe, Working women, working men, 73.

44 Lower-class women’s reproductive lives became increasingly public, while middle- and upper-class women’s reproduction remained private familial events.

Roth, “Policing pregnancy,” 98.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 form Brazil. Even in major cities such as Salvador, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, as many as 300 infants per 1,000 births died before their second birthday.45 While there was noteworthy heterogeneity in cities’ infant mortality rates, especially between Brazil’s two largest cities São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, stillbirth and infant mortality remained a major social problem.46 Maternal mortality was also a pressing health problem.

Maternal mortality rates remained relatively steady at approximately 90 maternal deaths per 10,000 live births throughout the 1930s, but began a rapid and sustained drop in the 1940s as puerperal sepsis deaths decreased.47 In his 1939 Christmas Speech, Vargas again emphasized how the state needed to focus on poor women as mothers and their cost to the nation declaring: “We all know the precarious treatment of pregnant women and the elevated coefficient of newborn mortality above all in the less fortunate classes. [This] problem is directly linked to the progress and the future of the nation.”48 Poor children were indispensable to an imagined productive future, and poor mothers provided essential labor for Brazil’s economy; therefore, maternal and child health was an issue central to the prosperity of the future modern nation. The overwhelming urgency that Vargas displayed for maternalism demonstrates not only a humanitarian concern for combatting high infant mortality but a perceived need to protect motherhood.49

Labor Legislation

Labor reformers in the Vargas era perpetuated gender stereotypes and prioritized women’s reproductive capacity. Labor unions—overwhelmingly male since women traditionally occupied difficult-to-organize, semi-skilled jobs—enacted popular stereotypes to suggest that exposing “fragile” women to heavy phys45 In Rio de Janeiro, stillbirth rates consistently ranged between 70 to 90 stillbirths per 1,000 births between 1890 and 1940. In Salvador, the most proximate data is from 1925 where the state recorded 275 deaths under age one for every 1,000 registered births. Otovo, Progressive mothers, 222. High stillbirth rates were not specific to Brazil. In most of the western world, real downward trends in stillbirth rates only occurred in the 1940s. Also, health data were not accurately recorded at this time and Brazil did not use a uniform definition of stillbirth. Officials combined miscarriages (early fetal demise), antepartum stillbirths (death occurring before delivery), and intrapartum stillbirths (death occurring during delivery) into the category of stillbirth. All infant (and maternal) mortality data must be interpreted carefully. Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 8.

46 Between 1930 and 1936, the rate of stillbirths in São Paulo was consistently lower than Rio de Janeiro with a difference as large as 40 stillbirths per thousand total births. Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 8.

47 Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 96.

48 Delivered by Vargas in December 1939. Quote in Gormley, “Motherhood as National Service,” 88.

49 Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 34.

7 ical labor, unsanitary environments, and morally compromising situations would diminish their reproductive capacity. Male-dominated unionists who represented women often advocated for protective labor legislation that connected working-class women to their maternal responsibilities and privileged men’s space in the labor market. For example, Jose Righetti, a leader of the Textile Factory Workers’ Union in São Paulo, wrote in a letter to Vargas regarding “a ridiculous spectacle that is shameful and revolution: the woman at work in the factory and the husband at home taking care of the domestic chores and bringing the children to the factory gate to be nursed.”50 Although Righetti represented female textile workers, he denigrated women’s industrial participation and believed that women’s proper work was at home. Working-class men, speaking for “their” women, also reiterated upper-class concerns against working-class women who were “wrenched from their true vocation” as housewives and mothers.51 Even other women, such as Maria Kiehl, a social worker in São Paulo, argued in favor of strict protective regulations for women workers because “in the great majority of professions, the obligations of the wife and mother are incompatible with the obligations of that profession.”52 Despite labor leaders and unionists championing new maternalistic policies, domestic divisions of labor were not fully addressed and female employment did not radically challenge gender relations.

Vargas appealed to mounting anxieties about women’s rapidly emerging social position and public presence by creating regulations that safeguarded women and their role as mothers from the dangers and demands of the industrial factory. Restrictions on female labor were introduced in various sanitary codes during the 1920s, but in 1932 the Vargas administration passed definitive laws regarding the conditions of women’s labor. Decree 21.417A established a mandatory maternity leave for four weeks preceding and four weeks following childbirth that was compensated with half pay. The decree also guaranteed women the right to employment following maternity leave and required employers to give nursing mothers two halfhour breaks daily until their infant reached six months of age.53 In plants employing more than thirty women, onsite daycare facilities had to be established. Decree 21.417A also prohibited women from carrying “exces50 Wolfe, Working women, working men, 58.

51 Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 88.

52 Wolfe, Working women, working men, 73.

53 Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 145.

Protecting Motherhood sive” weights and holding “dangerous and unhealthy jobs.”54 Vargas’s legislation reflected the expectation that women giving birth and caring for children trumped wage earning, but also recognized women’s work as critical to Brazil’s progress and industrialization.

Although the Vargas administration was the first to implement policies like Decree 21.417A on a national scope, labor legislation failed to actually protect the majority of Brazilian women. Labor reforms benefiting female factory workers were often not implemented or ignored locally, and most women who labored informally as domestic servants fell outside labor laws enacted throughout the 1930s. Domestic service was specifically disqualified in the century’s preeminent labor legislation, the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho.55 Domestic workers who became pregnant often feared they would lose their jobs, and nursing an infant while working in household service was nearly impossible.56 Therefore, Vargas’ vision of women as mothers rather than wage earners overlooked most Brazilian families who lacked the privilege of workplace autonomy.57 The ideal image of the modern mother at home was overwhelmingly based on gendered divisions of domestic labor and notions of republican motherhood. Social legislation designed to protect women working in industrial positions presumed a wage-labor model that was not the reality for many women. Most poor urban mothers found little to no protection in the Vargas-era labor codes designed for the industrial minority; however, these new laws created workforce expectations and encouraged women to join the rapidly growing industrialization movement.58

The Mãe Desamparada and Prêmio Program

The class-based symbol of the “mãe desamparada”—the poor unprotected woman—represents Vargas’s increasing attention and scrutiny of impoverished women’s maternalistic practices. Far from “desnaturadas” (unnatural), these women became “desamparadas” (without protection): loving, devoted, hard-working mothers “unprotected” by society,

54 Otovo, Progressive mothers, 167.

55 Vargas signed the Consolidação das Leis de Trabalho in 1943. Otovo, Progressive mothers, 175.

56 Otovo, Progressive mothers, 175.

57 Ibid, 167.

58 Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 141.

8 the law, and their children’s fathers.59 During the nineteenth century, social discourse vilified poor working women’s overall lack of hygiene, carelessness, and superstition, claiming that they “compromised Brazil’s future as a nation through the deaths of tens of thousands of their own children per year.”60 In the Vargas era, however, physicians wrote of the “mãe desamparada” in need of protection from the state and private institutions to safely give birth and raise children.

In a 1943 speech, the second president of the Liga Bahiana contra a Mortalidade Infantil (Bahian League Against Infant Mortality, Liga), Dr. Álvaro Bahia, described “inexperienced and naïve girls from the interior attracted by the ease of gaining a domestic service in the capital, or factory workers and domestics.”61 Surrounded by Vargas’ rhetoric about poor families and motherhood as fundamental to national progress, physician reformists shifted their focus to mãe desamparadas as abandoned victims rather than harbingers of disease. They recognized the complex realities of poor working mothers and the idea that lower-class women should raise their own children rather than mothering their charges gained prominence.62 In 1938 Dr. Bahia promoted (poor) women’s “right” to breastfeed: “no measure is more humanitarian or more honest than to ensure the poor mother at the very least the right to breast-feed her own child.”63 While appeasing larger state maternalistic interests, Liga physicians turned their attention to serving the unmet needs of mãe desamparadas.

State-endorsed programs such as the Liga’s “prêmio de amamentação” successfully helped poor domestic servants, but simultaneously reinforced ideas that poor women’s first responsibility should be raising healthy children, not participating in the labor economy.64 In 1934, the Liga, in collaboration with the State of Bahia and the local Santa Casa de Misericórdia, created a “prêmio de amamentação” or breastfeeding

59 Dr. Bahia often called upon the trope of abandoned and single mothers when referring to mãe desamparadas who are the most unprotected and vulnerable women even today. Otovo, Progressive mothers, 119.

60 Otovo, “Mãe Desamparada,” 176.

61 Dr. Álvaro Bahia’s speech was delivered on August 13, 1943, at a local Rotary Club in Salvador de Bahia. “Mãe Desamparada,” 178. For more information about the numerous initiatives of the Bahian League against Infant Mortality, see Otovo, Progressive mothers.

62 Otovo, “Mãe Desamparada,” 178.

63 New labor laws described subsequently did not extend to private homes where most Brazilian women worked and women’s “right” to breastfeeding required cooperation from wealthier employers. Otovo, Progressive mothers, 120.

64 For more details, see Gormley, “Motherhood as National Service” and Besse, Restructuring patriarchy.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 stipend.65 Modeled after the French, this program gave poor women a small cash subsidy in order to promote breastfeeding among women who would have had to otherwise seek employment. Thus, the program prioritized breastfeeding stipends as a better investment for the welfare state and combating infant mortality than female wage labor.66 For example, twenty-four-yearold cook Domingas de Jesus received monthly stipends on the condition she breastfed her newborn twins. By 1941, the state-sponsored prêmio program supported 500 Bahian mothers and their babies both inside and outside the Casa Maternal at the Misericórdia, and by 1945 the number had grown to 1,173 families.67 By 1940, Liga doctors Martagão Gesteira and Bahia noted that mortality rates had fallen well below city averages—to a 4 percent mortality rate—among children benefiting from the prêmio program.68 These data suggest that despite the difficulties of balancing wage-earning with familial duties, poor mothers—overwhelmingly domestics of color—were receptive to maternalistic physician-led programs.69 As impoverished working women attempted to navigate the mid-twentieth-century expansion of the Brazilian state, institutional programs such as the prêmio de amamentação—although they helped financially support mothers— articulated gendered, racialized, and classist power. Mothers in the prêmio program could augment their stipends by serving as a “nutriz” (wet nurse) and donating excess milk to dispensaries.70 Despite historical arguments against poor women’s breast milk as contaminated, uncivilized, and dangerous, the prêmio program made wet nursing acceptable by “sanitizing the process” through scientific maternalism and public supervision.71 Women such 65 The monthly stipend was $30 cruzeiros, which was a low wage but not an insignificant amount of money. Laundresses who worked for the Liga earned $50 cruzeiros monthly and servants working for the Pupiliera earned $40 cruzeiros per month. Otovo, Progressive mothers, 120-121.

66 Otovo, “Mãe Desamparada,” 185.

67 Until 1937, the program was only for women who resided within the Santa Casa de Misericórdia. During this time approximately twenty women could live in the Maternal Shelter and participate in the program at one time. Otovo, Progressive mothers, 123.

68 Otovo, Progressive mothers, 145.

69 Other Liga-sponsored health services were widely used by domestic servants of color. Records from the Third Health Center in Salvador (1933-1934) show that 92 percent of patients were “mestiças, morenas, pardas, and pretas” and 91 percent worked as “domestics.” Otovo, “Mãe Desamparada,” 179. Dozens of mothers also left their infants at the Liga’s Raymundo de Periera and Fernandes Figueroa daycare facilities. Otovo, “Medicalizing Motherhood,” 82.

70 Mothers could earn an additional $1.50 per liter for any excess milk donated to the Julia de Carvalho Milk Dispensary. By 1941, the Liga had facilitated the provision of 10,738 liters of breastmilk to the dispensary. Otovo, Progressive mothers, 124.

71 Otovo, Progressive mothers, 125.

9 as Lidia Santos or Lourença dos Santos contributed as much as $877 cruzeiros and $755 cruzeiros worth of breast milk respectively.72 However, the racial demographics of Brazil’s poorest women and the institutional labeling of these women as nutrizes reiterates problematic associations of race with servitude to elite families. In addition, the prêmio program appealed to notions that state intervention was required to “cure distortions caused by poverty and bring the instinctive relationship between even poor mothers and their children back into equilibrium.”73 Although they expressed justifiable concern over healthy child rearing, Dr. Bahia never directly addressed tensions between employment demands and childcare responsibilities.74 Physician advocates—who ultimately needed elite social and financial support—avoided explicit critiques of domestic servants’ low wages and cultural expectations that domestics subordinate the needs of their own children to the needs of the families who employed them.75 Thus, while the program was undeniably beneficial and life-saving to many impoverished working women, it perpetuated racial ideologies, gendered assumptions, and class prejudices.

Female Philanthropists

In the Vargas era, female philanthropists also began to emphasize the importance of supporting “abandoned” female domestics and participating in state-building amid a transforming industrial landscape. Elite (white) women got directly involved in maternalistic movements because their “unique perspective” made them particularly “qualified” to manage maternal and child welfare programs.76 In the context of a Brazilian society that increasingly encouraged women to be “useful” citizens, charitable work provided privileged women a safe and “patriotic” alternative to paid employment.77 In 1942, President Vargas’s wife, Darcy Vargas, even patronized the Legião Brasileira de Assistência (LBA) as a means to encourage self-sacrificing elite motherhood and inspire activism

72 The official unit of currency in Brazil changed under the Vargas administration in 1942 from milréis (1880-1942) to cruzeiros (1942-1967). The first version of circulating coins of the cruziero portrayed Vargas.

73 Otovo, Progressive mothers, 122.

74 Ibid, 123.

75 Caulfield, Defense of honor, 72.

76 The 1932 Constitution also specifically detailed that “qualified women” should manage and administer social assistance programs related to maternal and childhood welfare. Mott, “Women’s Philanthropic Activities,” 184.

77 Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 155.

Protecting Motherhood among local women.78 During World War II, local LBA chapter president Ruth Vilaboim Aleixo wrote to the Liga several times to request the prêmio for poor and desperate wives with deployed husbands.79 The LBA also helped to establish Darcy Vargas Creche, a large free daycare center. Other organizations such as the Pro-Madre, La Cruzada Pro-Infancia, and Liga das Senhoras Catòlicas proved integral to larger state efforts to transform infant mortality. These charitable organizations, directed by upper-class women and liberally government funded, thus functioned as a mechanism of intra-gender, class-based social policing.

Founded in 1930 by Pérola Byington and Maria Antonieta de Castro, La Cruzada Pro-Infancia is a unique example of a female-led philanthropic organization that worked to support poor women’s motherhood throughout the Vargas administration.80 The organization provided general clinical treatment, infant hygiene, prenatal care, physiotherapy, and nutrition to mothers, and also built and created a Casa Maternal to assist poor single women before and after childbirth.81 La Cruzada defended maternalism under Vargas but differed from other philanthropic efforts in that it was not led by elite women or the Catholic Church.82 In some instances, La Cruzada “took the place of the state,” especially in regard to dispensary services that had previously been unavailable or of poor quality.83 During the early years of Vargas’ regime, La Cruzada offered services for poor women that the Brazilian state could or would not provide.84 La Cruzada protected, assisted, and recognized the rights of all mothers and struggled to ensure that all women, especially those who had typically been overlooked by labor legislation, receive proper maternity care.85 For 78 Although the LBA was initially founded in response to World War II, it expanded to maternal and child welfare assistance. Otovo, Progressive mothers, 188.

79 Otovo, Progressive mothers, 192.

80 La Cruzada Pro Infancia was founded in 1930 in São Paulo with its primary goals focused on maternal education and infant mortality through a social assistance program for both mothers and children. For more than thirty years until her death in 1963, Pérola Byington remained La Cruzada’s managing director, while Maria Antonietta de Castro served as the managing secretary. La Cruzada also had its own magazine and produced important literature on mother and childhood protection. Mott, “Women’s Philanthropic Activities”, 179.

81 Casa Maternal provided temporary shelter for pregnant and single mothers until they recovered from childbirth, advice, and job recommendations. Mott, “Women’s Philanthropic Activities,” 179.

82 Byington descended from a North American family and had extensive experience as a volunteer for the American and Brazilian Red Cross. de Castro came from São Paulo, was single, and had previously been a teacher, sanitary educator, and children’s writer. Mott, “Women’s Philanthropic Activities,” 178-179.

83 Mott, “Women’s Philanthropic Activities,” 185.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid, 183.

10 example, although the project was only implemented in one Brazilian state, Byington tirelessly lobbied the Vargas administration to create an allowance for (single) mothers without breadwinners. She too enacted language of protection when advocating for poor women saying: “social legislation doesn’t protect her. And that is depressing. How can we evaluate the degree of progress of a country, if there isn’t any efficient organization – service standard for maternity?”86 La Cruzada developed strategies to support poor working mothers by opening daycare centers. Byington, however, emphasized the “necessity” (not the right) of mothers to work in her campaigns against child abandonment that justified the opening of daycare centers: “when a woman needs to work out of her home … what does society offer her in exchange for almost abandoning her home and children?”87 Female philanthropists shared the opinion of social reformers who maintained that motherhood, not professionalism, was a woman’s essential role. La Cruzada’s diverse initiatives highlight their efforts to mitigate poor mothers’ unmet needs and advocate for legislative changes on their behalf.

Despite the best of intentions, female philanthropists like women in La Cruzada had limits on how far they were willing to advocate for the poor women of color that they served. While they did sponsor numerous maternalistic initiatives, these women never reconciled their intentions to empower poor mothers with their own domestic employees. No female-led philanthropic organizations advocated for improvements to the historic racialized and gendered domestic services and the actions of these females towards “progress” operated within entrenched social hierarchies. Even Liga physicians such as Dr. Bahia permitted elite women to evade taking direct responsibility for their own practices by utilizing vague and elusive language that distanced employers from problematic accusations that blamed them for the struggles of poor women. Thus, despite their progressive work, their successes fell flat.

Instead, these organizations too were caught in the class-based patriarchal system they were trying to improve.88

Fertility Control

In the context of state-sponsored legislation that failed to support the majority of working women, 86 Ibid, 180.

87 Ibid, 182.

88 Otovo, Progressive mothers, 166.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 some women turned to their own devices when pregnant. Fertility control—defined as contraception, abortion, and infanticide—exemplifies one way that poor urban women could attempt to take control of their poverty-ridden circumstances. Fertility control allowed women to determine when, or whether to have children and therefore, defied ideals of women’s proper sexual behavior and nationalistic duty as mothers. Written law criminalized fertility control. The 1890 Penal Code (in effect until 1940) penalized infanticide with a prison sentence of 6 to 24 years and voluntary abortions with six months to one year.89 However, maternalistic honor clauses reduced prison time for these crimes if the mother “practiced them to save her honor.” These loopholes highlight how even in a nation eager to expand, the state prioritized women’s adherence to gendered sexual standards. The 1940 Penal Code, which redefined infanticide as a crime applying to mothers acting in a “puerperal state,” further perpetuated ideas of female hysteria and cast women as in need of state protection to make rational decisions for themselves, their children, and ultimately the nation.90 Recorded investigations and court cases reveal that fertility control practices continued under the Vargas regime.91 While actual judicial consequences were largely insignificant due to the absence of conclusive evidence, written law and police investigations created stigmas of shame and dishonor that enforced contested notions of gender, honor, and sexuality during Vargas’s expansion of the Brazilian state.92 Amid an expanding Brazilian state that criminalized practices against maternalism in legal codes, working women who controlled their fertility threatened the patriarchal nation-state.93 Situating women’s fertility control practices in the context of social class reveals distinct differences 89 In the 1890 Penal Code, Article 298 defined infanticide and Article 301 defined abortion. Roth, “Policing pregnancy,” 88; Roth, Cassia. “From free womb to criminalized woman: fertility control in Brazilian slavery and freedom.”

Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 269-286, 270.

90 Articles included in the 1940 Penal Code clarified and continued the criminality of abortion. Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 205. For a deeper analysis of how reformist elites used medical theories of female hysteria to maintain women’s inferiority and justified their denial of full citizenship, see Rodriguez, Civilizing Argentina.

91 Information on court cases comes from an analysis of 193 police investigations and court cases under the 1890 Penal Code in Rio de Janeiro, and 39 court cases from Rio de Janeiro and the Supreme Court. The small number of recorded investigations and cases cannot be used to determine the comparative prevalence of fertility control practices (e.g., abortion versus infanticide). Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 21.

92 Forensic exams deemed 53 percent of the 130 investigations of abortion, infanticide, stillbirth, and pregnancy in Rio de Janeiro between 1890 and 1940 non-criminal, and in 12 percent of the cases the police could not identify the woman responsible. Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 92.

93 Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 18.

Protecting Motherhood

11 between women’s prosecution for infanticide and abortion under the 1890 Penal Code.94 While working and middle-class women had access to abortion through expensive clinics and practitioners who provided illegal abortions, socioeconomic status precluded poor women’s access to fertility control methods. Impoverished women who lacked familial or social networks to access contraceptive and abortive knowledge turned to infanticide as their first method of fertility control.95 Legal data from Rio de Janeiro reflects how infanticide remained a function of poverty: women brought to trial for infanticide were most likely to be young, nonwhite, illiterate, single, and employed as live-in domestic servants.96 In 1933, for example, police investigated thirtyfour-year-old parda Maria Dias after she tried to obtain paperwork to bury a miscarried fetus. Dias’s case emphasizes how being a single woman of color employed as a domestic servant who suffered a miscarriage or stillbirth was cause enough for police investigation.97 The public health commissioner, refusing to sign the death certificate because he suspected possible criminal abortion, thus also participated in larger societal policing of (poor) women’s bodies. In contrast, legal cases from Rio de Janeiro show that women involved in abortion cases were more likely to be white, literate, and to earn more than domestic servants. They also worked in higher-paying professions such as actresses, bank tellers, teachers, and dancers. In a 1931 court case prosecuting white dancer Lia Navarro, for example, she explained how she pre-paid a hundred milréis (100$000) for an abortion.98 This legal data aligns with 1940 Census data that show decreased motherhood in wealthy neighborhoods compared to poor neighborhoods.99 In the Vargas years, fertility rates in younger urban generations dropped precipitously compared to fertility rates in Brazil as a whole; however, within a single city, levels of fertility were significantly lower in

94 Information on court cases comes from an analysis of 18 infanticide and 11 abortion trials under the 1890 Penal Code. Roth, “Free womb,” 279. In general, a variety of ‘‘negative’’ social characteristics including informal marriage, migrant status, illiteracy, low-status employment, and race correlated with negative judicial outcomes.

95 Roth, “Free womb,” 278.

96 These claims reflect general trends in cases; there were only seven reported cases of infanticide and abortion in Rio de Janeiro from 1930-1939. Roth, “Free womb,” 272; Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 191.

97 Roth, “Policing pregnancy,” 100.

98 In 1931, this cost was well-above most working-class women and twenty times the monthly price of foodstuffs. In 1942, one milréis (1$000) was worth a dozen loaves of bread. Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 192.

99 Wealthy neighborhoods had a rate of 44.9 percent compared with 57.7 percent in poorer neighborhoods. Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 106.

wealthy neighborhoods than in poor neighborhoods.100 Infanticide’s increased association with poor domestic servants and its increased criminal sentence compared to abortion regulated poor women to greater scrutiny than privileged women.

Poverty and fears surrounding employment remained an important impetus behind abortion and infanticide. In 1932, for example, after a garbage collector found a dead infant in the trash, police questioned eighteen-year-old live-in domestic servant Maria Augusta.101 In the trial, Augusta 1admitted that “with the fear of her bosses knowing that she was a mother, she placed the infant in the trash,” and the autopsy report confirmed the infant’s death by asphyxiation.102 Augusta’s extreme actions exemplify how infanticide could serve as a means for desperate poor women of color to confront an unwanted pregnancy that threatened their participation in the urban economy. While Augusta’s violent death by suicide as she awaited charges precluded her from facing legal consequences, her unfortunate death reiterates how although young women of color attempted to navigate unsurmountable economic insecurities through fertility control, many could not.

While women like Augusta mentioned fears of unemployment or wanting to provide better for their living children, neither women nor legal practitioners included explicit economic reasoning in court cases related to abortion and infanticide. Fertility control, therefore, should not be conceptualized as an “antithesis of motherhood,” but as a means to understand how low wages, job instability, and economic vulnerability influenced poor domestic workers and women of color’s actions within a maternalistic Brazilian state.103

Conclusion

The Vargas era was a period of unprecedented modernization, industrialization, and urbanization in which numerous legislative reforms advanced women’s social, political, and economic position. While privileged women gained (and subsequently lost) 100 1940 fertility indices for Rio de Janeiro indicate 312 live births per 100 parents in wealthy neighborhoods as compared to 406.5 live births per 100 low-income parents. The percentage of adults who were parents was also much lower in wealthy neighborhoods than in poor neighborhoods (44.9 percent compared with 57.7 percent). Between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, women born in the cohort in which São Paulo became the leading industrial center had lower fertility rates.

Besse, Restructuring patriarchy, 106.

101 Roth, “Policing pregnancy,” 95-96.

102 Ibid, 96.

103 There was a total of six police investigations dealing with public disposals of newborns in the 1930s. Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 201.

12 full citizenship status and emerged in the public leisure scene, working-class women increasingly joined industrial factories and worked as domestic servants, much to the hesitancy of the social elite who upheld concerns that employment interfered with women’s “primary vocation” as mothers. Amid a state focused on consolidating its powers, Vargas adopted maternalism—initiatives with mothers, reproduction, and child-rearing activities at their core—to build the new nation. Presidential and national rhetoric called for the “protection” of motherhood. An altruistic image of Vargas as the “Father of the Poor” further cast Brazilian women as in need of protection and legitimized the necessity of paternal authority. In particular, poor women, symbolized as “mães desamparadas” or unprotected women, became the primary target for welfare interventions. This language to characterize poor women critically highlights a perceived gap between advocates’ protective language and how physicians saw these women in their daily medical interactions.

Although during the Vargas years women saw some legislative improvements surrounding women’s labor such as Decree 21.417A, which established paid maternity leaves for factory employees, the goal remained to connect (poor) women’s legal rights to their maternal identities. Rapid industrialization, combined with concerns regarding high infant and maternal mortality rates, promoted a nation particularly concerned with women’s reproduction and nation building. Labor decrees served as symbols of Vargas’s commitment to maternalism and infant mortality; however, they did little to support many working mothers in cities such as Salvador that had little industrial labor. New labor legislation specifically excluded more than nine million women working unremunerated domestic services.104 Working mothers in domestic services had no legal support if they got pregnant and therefore, there was a disconnect between Vargas’s labor policies and the circumstances of most women. “Protective” policies were limited in their ability to actually protect Brazil’s most vulnerable female populations.

Even when physician and female-led private organizations supported larger state efforts to transform infant mortality and connect structural issues of poverty to working mothers, their initiatives appealed to the Vargas administration’s protective framework and reinforced existing class, gender, and race inequalities. Private organizations like the Liga Baiana contra 104 Brazil’s lack of legal protection for domestic workers reflects politics throughout the world.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 a Mortalidade Infantil and La Cruzada Pro-Infancia provided an impressive number of public health services to supplement a lack of federal efforts, but socioeconomic inequalities remained. Maternalistic advocates such as Dr. Bahia and La Cruzada leader Byington drew upon narrow definitions of “natural” motherhood and prioritized women’s reproduction over earning wages. For example, the Liga’s prêmio de amamentação and its promotion of poor women of color as nutrizes perpetuated colonial ideals of racial servitude. Other female philanthropists supported more superficial solutions such as daycare centers and never addressed their own participation in the classist domestic labor system. Infrastructural and financial constraints meant that these organizations never adequately confronted many health and welfare needs of Brazilian mothers. The Liga, for example, was largely limited to Salvador and its immediate vicinity. The federal government under Vargas had not yet consolidated a true welfare state with national scope and reach.

In 1945, as the Vargas era ended through a coup that established a democratic “Fourth Republic,” infant and maternal mortality remained high.105 However, his expansion of reproductive health infrastructures created the necessary institutional framework for later improvements in maternal and infant mortality that came during the mid-twentieth century.106 Even when women turned to fertility control practices to gain a sense of autonomy, they were criminalized in written law, investigated by the police, and dishonored publicly. While wealthier women could better afford to access abortion and other methods of contraceptive fertility control, poor women were more likely to turn to infanticide for fertility control. Extreme cases like Augusta’s reiterate just how challenging it was for poor urban domestic servants of color to negotiate concurrent financial difficulties, informal wage labor, and infanticide investigations amid a maternalistic nation. Ineffective federal policies made it nearly impossible to navigate their conflicting identities of wife, mother, and worker. In Vargas’ Brazil, labor legislation, criminal law, and private state-endorsed organizations all made strides to promote maternalism and protect motherhood. These initiatives, however, ultimately did not protect women who needed it most—domestic ser105 The end of the Vargas administration was marked by the nation’s transition to democracy with Eurico Dutra sworn in as president in 1946. Data from 1955 shows an average infant mortality rate across Brazil of 136 deaths per 1,000 live births. No infant mortality data could be found between 1940 and 1955. O’Neill, Aaron. “Brazil: Infant Mortality Rate 1955-2020.” Statista, 21 Jun. 2022.

106 Roth, Miscarriage of justice, 82.

13 vants and poor women of color.

Identity-Driven Conflict in Indian Film A Case Study of Mughal Emperor Akbar and Mariam-uz Zamani Claire Chen Vanderbilt University - Class of 2024

In an India where thousands of distinct communities are increasingly connected thanks to the demands of the modern world, one boundary defining interpersonal relationships has yet to be completely broken: endogamy. The data suggests that both inter-caste and interfaith marriages are uncommon; estimates of the prevalence of inter-caste marriage range as high as 12.6 percent, while interfaith marriages remain rare at under 1 percent.1 Accordingly, marriage, as the anchor defining community boundaries, is the subject of particular scrutiny, whether as the inspiration behind India’s periodic outbreaks of communal violence or the recent resurgence of conservative government policies designed to curtail forbidden cross-community association.2 At the same time, the controversial status of these relationships in everyday life makes them a rich source of inspiration within India’s cultural corpus.

Perhaps the most iconic example can be found in the historical marriage alliance between the Mughal emperor Akbar and Mariam-uz-Zamani, the daughter of a Hindu Rajput chief.3 They are prominent fixtures within post-independence Indian cinema, where Akbar and Mariam-uz-Zamani – in this medium, she is known as 1 Vijdan Mohammad Kawoosa, “Age, caste, job, education: What data on couples in India shows,” Hindustan Times, October 3, 2018, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/age-caste-salary-education-what-data-on-couplesin-india-shows/story-LpRr86YXLc2G2jgk0igRBP.html; Neha Sahgal, Jonathan Evans, Ariana Monique Salazar, Kelsey Jo Starr, and Manolo Corichi, “Religious segregation,” Pew Research Center, June 29, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/ religion/2021/06/29/religious-segregation/.

2 OpIndia Staff, “Karnataka: Violence in Koppal over a Hindu boy, in love with a Muslim girl, went to meet her during Muharram, two killed, several injured,” OpIndia, August 11, 2022, https://www.opindia.com/2022/08/karnataka-communal-clashes-break-out-over-an-inter-faith-love-affair/; Lauren Frayer, “In India, boy meets girl, proposes — and gets accused of jihad,” NPR, October 10, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/10/10/1041105988/india-muslim-hindu-interfaith-wedding-conversion.

3 S. Inayat Ali Zaidi, “The Pattern of Matrimonial Ties Between the Kachawaha Clan and the Mughal Ruling Family,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 35 (1974): 132, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44138775.

Jodhaa, and will henceforth be referenced as so – are cemented as an integral component of Indian cultural history. Shahnaz Khan explains that “[a]s the dominant media institution in South Asia, Bombay cinema’s cultural production of narratives, images and spectacle plays a crucial role in the effort to consolidate and project definitions of the nation.”4 For this reason, this investigation aims to contextualize Indian cinematic depictions of Akbar and Jodhaa within India’s contemporary political discourses on identity. To do so, the three post-independence Bombay films of Anarkali (1953), Mughal-e-Azam (1960), and Jodhaa Akbar (2008), in addition to the Hyderabad film Akbar Salim Anarkali (1979), will be examined.

The analysis requires two key clarifications.

First, this investigation is not meant to examine the historical accuracy of Akbar and Jodhaa’s cinematic depictions; rather, this investigation is concerned with how these cinematic interpretations of the pasts interact with modern conceptions of identity. Similarly, while the depictions analyzed are by no means exhaustive, their accessibility means that they provide a valuable case study for further exploration into this topic. The second clarification is that contemporary interpretations of the past are necessarily shaped by other past events, meaning that these films are informed not just by their post-independence status but also by the extended period of colonial British rule following the Mughal collapse. Colonial rule, while not the focus of this investigation, informs the post-independence trends that create the framework from which this investigation interprets religious interaction within the Mughal Empire. Instances in which India’s colonial 4 Shahnaz Khan, “Recovering the past in Jodhaa Akbar: masculinities, femininities and cultural politics in Bombay cinema,” Feminist Review, no. 99 (2011): 131, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41288880.

15 history is particularly relevant for certain topics will be marked for further reference.

It is now necessary to establish this framework.

Per Wendy Doniger, the centralization associated with empire, as in cases such as the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire, did not correspond to a centralization of religious canon. Doniger argues that “religious differences were overridden by differences in language, ethnicity, food, clothing, and much more.”5 However, current historiography reveals differences in how this past is constructed; specifically, Iqtidar Khan’s classifications of three types of Mughal revisionist thought highlight how interpretations of religious dynamics are subject to the constraints of hindsight. He first identifies the “liberal-nationalist” movement, predominant around the time of independence, as a proponent of the idea that the Mughal empire was characterized by “supra-religious” institutions that transcended its religious and cultural divides.6 He describes this movement as a “standard characterization” of the empire by India’s mainstream historians as well as key political figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister.7 Iqtidar Khan then makes a brief digression to describe the “Marxist” system, popular in the 1950s and the 1960s, which argues that the Marxist paradigm of class struggle applies to the historic oppression of “peasants” by the Mughal economic elite.8 Finally, he introduces the “communal thesis,” which contrasts with the strife-minimizing frameworks introduced previously by suggesting that the Mughal Empire is a fundamentally divided society with a Muslim ruling class and a Hindu subclass, a hypothesis that Shahnaz Khan attributes to “divisiveness” between India’s “various ethnic, linguistic and religious groups” beginning in the 1980s.9 Iqtidar Khan notes that central to the popularity of the communal thesis today is the use of “communalized history for political mobilization, by the champions of the Two-Nations Theory in both its ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Hindutva’ garbs.”10 In other words, the communal thesis justifies and reinforces the current political fragmentation of diverse identities.

This investigation examines films by contrast5 Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009), 1191–1192.

6 Iqtidar Alam Khan, “State in the Mughal India: Re-Examining the Myths of a Counter-Vision,” Social Scientist 29, no. 1/2 (2001): 16, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/3518271.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid, 16-17.

9 Iqtidar Khan “State in the Mughal India,” 17-18; Shahnaz Khan, “Recovering the past,” 134.

10 Iqtidar Khan, “State in the Mughal India,” 18.

Identity-Driven Conflict in Indian Film ing the liberal-nationalist theory with the communal theory for two reasons. First, the explicit divergence between these theories provides the most potential for contrast within this investigation, which Iqtidar Khan notes himself when he explains that the communal thesis was “challenged by many of the liberal nationalists; Mahatma Gandhi himself warned against its pernicious implications in 1920.”11 Second, these two theories are particularly valuable for accessing the current implications of this film analysis. As noted previously, the liberal-nationalist framework historically dominated the Indian political mainstream. Meanwhile, the recent popularity of the communal theory has key political implications for today; in fact, Partha Chatterjee describes Hindu communalism as “an entirely modern, rationalist, and historicist” construction whose focus on Hinduism functions not as a statement of religious values but as a political tool of exclusion for religions originating outside the Indian subcontinent.12 Accordingly, the modern implications of a multicultural India inform the liberal-nationalist and the communal frameworks, making these frameworks especially prescient for further analysis.

More specifically, this investigation uses these frameworks to contend that the shift from ethnic- to religious-based conflict framing in cinematic depictions of Akbar and Jodhaa’s relationship mirrors the political developments of broader Indian society. Depictions of Akbar and Jodhaa can be divided into two time-based eras characterized by common themes in conflict framing. The first era, dated before the 1980s, includes films characterized by ethnic-based conflict within the storyline. The second era, which concerns films dated after this turning point, emphasizes religion as both the primary function of identification and as a source of conflict. The narrative trends of the cinematic world reflect contemporaneous political developments: contextualizing the first era of films with Nehru’s political dominance and the second era of films with the development of Hindu communalism demonstrate that, in addition to motivating the depictions of conflict seen on screen, both film eras share the eventual resolution of conflict through unity, reflecting broader attempts by modern Indian society to reinterpret Mughal history to understand the layered identities within Indian society.

11 Ibid.

12 Partha Chatterjee, “History and the Nationalization Of Hinduism,” Social Research 59, no. 1 (1992): 111-149, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40970686, 147-148.

16

Part I: Conflict in the Context of Liberal-nationalism Characteristics of Conflict in Film

The films Anarkali (1953) and Mughal-e-Azam (1960) share confrontations between Akbar and Jodhaa that center around Jodhaa’s ethnic background, resulting in the minimization of the religious differences that characterize both their relationship and the Mughal Empire as a whole. Both films have a similar plot: Salim, the son of Akbar and Jodhaa, finds his own illicit love with Anarkali, a girl whose low social status prevents her from being an appropriate spouse for Salim.

Various plot devices result in Anarkali’s imprisonment by the crown, and in an iconic scene that embodies the sectarian tensions of a multicultural family, Akbar and Jodhaa confront one another about their diverging responses to the rebellion that Salim consequently instigates.

In Anarkali, Akbar and Jodhaa’s extended confrontation about the appropriate reaction to this rebellion draws upon the theme of diverging perspectives based upon ethnic background. Akbar invokes this theme when Jodhaa pleads for Salim’s life; when she starts kneeling, Akbar is visibly upset and demands, “Is that a Rajput woman speaking? A lioness? The Queen of Hindustan?”13 Crucially, Jodhaa’s rhetorical strategy draws upon the difference-minimization phenomenon described previously. She notes, “I don’t want the regime, I don’t want these luxuries! All I want is my son!

Only my son!”14 She continues, “Did we seek favors at temples and mosques… did we invoke the Gods for a son… so that our own forces would one day turn his enemies?”15 Her fundamental conflict is thus self-described as “a Hindu woman [having] forever sacrificed her son for her husband.”16 The Akbar and Jodhaa depicted in Mughal-eAzam face a parallel dilemma. When Akbar demands that Jodhaa ritually hand him the sword he will bring into battle against Salim, he assuages Jodhaa’s hesitation by identifying her with “[the] Rajput[s], [who] epitomise the legacy of women who immolated themselves… [u]pon the pyres of their dead husbands” as an extension of her broader community tradition of 13 Anarkali, directed by Nandlal Jaswantlal (1953; Mumbai, Maharashtra: Filmistan Ltd, 2019), 1:49:00. https://einthusan.tv/movie/watch/6SWl/?lang=hindi.

14 Ibid, 1:49:16.

15 Ibid, 1:49:48.

16 Ibid, 1:50:57.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 marital loyalty.17 This oblique reference to sati ties more broadly into references made toward Jodhaa’s ethnic background; when Jodhaa is visibly conflicted upon holding the sword, Akbar goads her further, describing her as the “daughter of warriors” to emphasize the values she is meant to hold as a member of the Rajput community.18 In a final reference to Jodhaa’s background, Akbar symbolically removes her bindi, which is not only the “mark of a wedded woman” as noted in the movie but also a tradition specific to Hindu women and thus a symbol of her allegiance to her husband; the removal of this mark is what spurs Jodhaa’s affirmation of her ultimate commitment to her husband, wherein she demands that he “give [the bindi] back to me with the red of Salim’s blood.”19 The description of conflict in these films reveals two key implications for identity construction.

First, the common emphasis on Jodhaa’s Rajput background highlights ethnicity as the source of relationship tension. In Anarkali, Akbar identifies strength and uses the metaphor of a lion to establish the dissonance between the traits that Jodhaa displays and the characteristics she is meant to exemplify as a prominent member of her community, reinforcing period-typical associations between the Rajput community and martial ability.20 Akbar thus recalls Jodhaa’s ethnic background as a core component of the fundamental conflict experienced in their relationship. This theme also extends to the relationship conflict shown in Mughal-eAzam through the familiar trope of martial ability, and more interestingly, the identification of the practice of sati with Jodhaa’s ethnic background. Sati, which is typically associated with Hindu communities as a whole yet explicitly characterized in this scene as a demonstration of a Rajput woman’s loyalty, highlights Akbar’s community-specific expectations for Rajput women.21 Because he broaches the topic of Salim’s treachery through the analogy of sati, Akbar orients Jodhaa’s actions through her ethnic background, highlighting its central role in their marital conflict.

The second, and more important, conclusion is that the ethnic dimension of the conflict presented in 17 Mughal-e-Azam, directed by Asif Karim (1960; Mumbai, Maharashtra: Sterling Investment Corporation, 2016), https://einthusan.tv/movie/ watch/6905/?lang=hindi, 1:56:37, 1:57:43.

18 Ibid, 1:58:01.

19 Ibid, 1:58:39, 1:58:42.

20 John T. Hitchcock, “The Idea of the Martial Rajput,” The Journal of American Folklore 71, no. 281 (1958): 216–223, https://www.jstor.org/stable/538557.

21 The practice of sati has a complex colonial history. For more about the practice, see Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

17 these scenes is resolved through the alternative of religious unity. In Anarkali, Jodhaa pleads for Salim’s life by describing him as a blessing from both the Hindu and Muslim religious intermediaries through which she and Akbar had sought a son, expressing to the audience the weight of her obligation to her husband as “a Hindu woman.” Meanwhile, the Jodhaa of Mughal-e-Azam supports her husband following his implicit invocation of the obligations conferred upon the religiously significant ornament of the bindi. In this manner, Jodhaa resolves a conflict, originating in her inability to embody the standards of her ethnic community, through this reminder of a Hindu wife’s loyalty to her husband.

Implications of Conflict Framing

Prior discussion establishes that these films construct ethnicity as a component of conflict creation whereas religion is constructed as a component of conflict resolution. An examination of Iqtidar Khan’s theory of liberal-nationalism revisionism contextualizes the previous section’s second conclusion. The liberal-nationalist revisionist theory, which promotes the minimization of interreligious conflict, is established as a core theme not just in the case study of the confrontation scene in Anarkali but also through the manner in which religious is referenced in the other conflicts of the film; for example, Salim is identified as “a symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity” as the son of a “Moghul” father and a “Rajput” mother.22 Additionally, Akbar himself explicitly invests all of his subjects in Salim’s well-being, as evidenced by his demand for “Hindus to pray in temples” and “Muslims to offer prayers” when Salim is ill.23 The conclusions created from the analysis of Anarkali are also carried into Mughal-e-Azam, where Jodhaa’s loyalty to her husband ultimately prevails following the discourse of the religiously symbolic bindi, making clear the role of religion as a conflict mediator within the film. It is therefore clear that a key implication of the way in which diverging identities both create and solve conflict within both films is the preeminence of the liberal-nationalist theory’s revisionist interpretation of unity through difference in both films.

Even more broadly, the liberal-nationalist theory can be understood in the context of the early Indian approach to nation-building. Specifically, the contemporaneous political developments under Jawaharlal 22 Anarkali, 2:05:40.

23 Ibid, 42:06.

Identity-Driven Conflict in Indian Film Nehru, which encouraged institutional developments that aimed to transcend the use of communal identifiers, explains the liberal-nationalist theory’s revisionist approach to Mughal governance. Chanchal Sharma argues that Nehru formed his political coalition based on the idea that “modernization was required to transform the pre-modern social relations based on ascriptive group identities.”24 Religious tradition became an implicit sign of backwardness: Nehru believed in “the establishment of the scientific institutions” to fix “superstition, religion, rumor and myth,” and is quoted as saying the development of modern technological infrastructure forms “the temples of modern India.”25 What Sharma terms as the “Nehruvian consensus” is thus the contemporaneous political counterpart to the liberal-nationalist revisionist interpretation of Mughal history: both contend that strengthening an India with a myriad of ascriptive identities requires the building of institutions transcending those identities is crucial.

As a result, the trend of film depictions of Akbar and Jodhaa’s conflict resolution through the transcendence of those identities, most notably in how differences are resolved through the particular religious traditions that each brings, demonstrates the dominance of Nehru’s secular political consensus on the mass media of this period.

Part II: Conflict in the Context of Hindu Communalism Characteristics of Conflict in Film

As opposed to ethnicity in the earlier films, the films Akbar Salim Anarkali (1979) and Jodhaa Akbar (2008) depict religious conflict as a central narrative theme in their respective portrayals of Akbar and Jodhaa. Akbar Salim Anarkali is particularly valuable when contrasted with the earlier films because it shares the plotline of Anarkali inspiring Salim’s rebellion, meaning that striking contrasts in the confrontation scene between Akbar and Jodhaa further develop the thematic elements already addressed.

In Akbar Salim Anarkali, Akbar and Jodhaa once again clash over the appropriate response to Salim’s rebellion. Akbar confronts Jodhaa while she is kneeling in prayer before a shrine dedicated to the Hindu deity Krishna and asks her whether she has 24 Chanchal Kumar Sharma, “Rise and Demise of Nehruvian Consensus: A Historical Review,” South Asian Journal of Socio-Political Studies 15, no. 1 (2014): 9, https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/61356/1/MPRA_paper_61356.pdf.

25 Ibid.

18

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1

“forgotten the tradition of a Warrior’s wife” when she does not “present [him] the sword and send [him] off [to battle].”26 As was seen in Mughal-e-Azam, Akbar also makes an oblique reference to the practice of sati following Jodhaa’s hesitation, stating, “Am I seeing a lady who would enter fire with her dead husband?”27 Likewise, the bindi once again takes on a symbolic role in conflict resolution: Jodhaa uses her own blood, cut from Akbar’s sword, to mark his forehead, an inversion of the traditional use of the bindi as a mark of a woman’s marriage bond.28 Jodhaa Akbar is a noted divergence from the films discussed previously; rather than Akbar and Jodhaa as secondary characters in Salim’s love story with Anarkali, this movie centers on their own marriage. Their most notable conflict occurs when Akbar is tricked into banishing Jodhaa after a false rumor that she is in love with a Rajput prince. While ruminating over Jodhaa’s refusal to take him back, he travels undercover to an outdoor market. There, he engages in an etymological debate with market-goers who argue that Akbar and the other Mughals are not “Hindustanis” but rather “outsiders.” Akbar’s entourage protests this label given that he was raised in a “Hindu Rajput home” that qualifies him for the label “Indian.”29 After hearing their complaints, Akbar is inspired to abolish a tax his predecessors had established for Hindu pilgrimages, which proves wildly popular among the various subjects of the Mughal Empire. During a celebration of its abolition, Jodhaa visits Akbar, stating that he has “won [her] heart,” drawing a direct link between Akbar’s treatment of his Hindu subjects and the favor he receives from Jodhaa.30 Three key themes related to religion emerge in these scenes. First, references to Jodhaa’s background are most prominently framed through her religion: she is not just a Rajput, but a Rajput Hindu, a paradigm shift that reflects the increasing prominence of religion as the primary identity descriptor. In Akbar Salim Anarkali, Jodhaa prays at Krishna’s shrine prior to her argument with Akbar; a comparison of this scene with the parallel scene in Mughal-e-Azam shows that she is

now a “warrior’s wife,” not the “daughter of warriors,” and that sati is no longer linked to her specific ethnic origin but referenced more broadly as a general practice. In Jodhaa Akbar, others reference Jodhaa’s religious status as the primary distinction between her and Akbar; Akbar’s marriage to a “Rajput princess” causes particular controversy among his court, and Akbar’s mullah asks him directly, “What compelled you to marry a Hindu?”31 Abkar’s family also describes Jodhaa by her religious status when they ask him whether his marriage to “a Hindu” was capable of bringing “honour.”32 The idea of religious affiliation ties more broadly into the second conclusion, which is that the heightened awareness of this difference instigates film conflicts. The opposition to Akbar and Jodhaa’s relationship is framed around religion in both films, meaning that Jodhaa’s specific ethnic origins are obscured through this religious emphasis.33 More specifically, these films characterize the motivating force behind their marriage as the expedition of the political unification of the subcontinent’s diverse religious communities. In Akbar Salim Anarkali, Salim describes his parents’ marriage as borne out of Akbar’s “[fear that] the Hindu kings [would] dethrone [him],” causing him to “marry a Hindu princess [...] to save [him]self.”34 In Jodhaa Akbar, Akbar’s marriage to Jodhaa is similarly oriented around religion, and the objections of both his religious leader and his family lean heavily into Jodhaa’s status as a Hindu. This framing motivates the manner in which religion is depicted as the catalyst of conflict in the scene analysis at the beginning of this section. The fact that Jodhaa was praying at a Hindu shrine prior to her argument with Akbar in Akbar Salim Anarkali, and the narrative implications of Akbar having antagonistic marketplace conversation with his Hindu subjects after he leaves Jodhaa over her purported intracultural lover in Jodhaa Akbar means that religion in their relationship functions as the primary mechanism of conflict. Accordingly, religion pervades both the context of Akbar and Jodhaa’s individual relationship and also in the implications of that relation-

26 Akbar Salim Anarkali, directed by Rama Rao and Nandamuri Taraka (1979; Hyderabad, Telangana: Ramakrishna Cine Studios, 2016), https://einthusan.tv/ movie/watch/6000/?lang=telugu, 1:36:29, 1:36:54, 1:37:05.

27 Ibid, 1:37:30.

28 Ibid, 1:38:37.

29 Jodhaa Akbar, directed by Ashutosh Gowarike (2008; Mumbai, Maharashtra: Ashutosh Gowariker Productions Private Limited, 2017), https://einthusan.tv/ movie/watch/7854/?lang=hindi, 2:28:32.

30 Ibid, 2:38:13.

31 Ibid, 1:12:56, 1:14:14.

32 Ibid, 1:23:10.

33 This religiously-motivated characterization of Akbar’s marriage is particularly striking when compared to dynastic marriage patterns under Akbar in historical practice, where alliances were contracted with the women of various Rajput clans and not with the Hindu community more broadly. For more information see Afzal Husain, “Marriages Among Mughal Nobles as an Index of Status and Aristocratic Integration,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 33 (1971): 306, http:// www.jstor.org/stable/44145346.

34 Akbar Salim Anarkali, 1:30:53.

19 ship within the society that they inhabit.

Third, and most importantly, conflict is resolved through religious mediation, a theme that is shared with the first era of films discussed. More specifically, Akbar and Jodhaa’s marriage, while subject to the cross-community controversies described in the previous paragraph, use these community symbols to mediate their conflicts. Akbar Salim Anarkali orients Jodhaa’s loyalties to her husband as shown in the sati and bindi scenes, both of which are Hindu symbols appropriated to demonstrate Jodhaa’s loyalty to a specific individual. Meanwhile, Jodhaa Akbar explicitly notes that Jodhaa’s favor is won through a political policy that benefitted Hindus of the empire as a whole, not just Jodhaa’s Rajput kingdom. Religion as a conflict mediator thus remains a central theme for films in the second period.

Implications of Conflict Framing

Iqtidar Khan’s description of the communal thesis, which orients the Mughal Empire as one defined by religious identity, explains why conflict in the latter two movies is oriented through religion rather than ethnicity. The simplification of Akbar and Jodhaa’s identities into Muslim and Hindu, respectively, ties into the first two conclusions of the previous section by reinforcing the idea of religious affiliation as the dominant marker of identity as opposed to the ethnic, regional, linguistic, or tribal ties used previously. Likewise, the political benefits of Akbar and Jodhaa’s marriage are represented through this religious lens instead of the specific political alliance between two states that happen to be majority-Muslim or majority-Hindu, minimizing the historical competition between both various Rajput kingdoms and between the Rajputs and other Hindu dynasties of the subcontinent at the time.35 The retroactive characterization of unified religious identity during the Mughal period highlights the communal lens through which these films were received, explaining the unique characteristics of films in this later period.36 At the same time, the third conclusion of the previous section, that of conflict resolution through religion, is at odds with Iqtidar Khan’s characterization of com35 Both intra-Rajput conflict and Rajput-Maratha competition was contemporaneous with the Mughal Empire. For more information, see Arya Ramchandra G. Tiwari, “Some Gaps in the History of Rajasthan,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 23 (1960): 184–185, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44137537.

36 Communalism in the modern day have been shaped significantly by colonial British interpretations of Indian identities. For more about this practice, see Gyanendra Pandey, Construction of Communalism In Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Identity-Driven Conflict in Indian Film munal revisionism, which envisions a “fundamentally divided society” along these lines. Accordingly, an examination of the concurrent historical developments will explain the position of religion as both the origin of conflict and the solution to intercommunity dispute.

Several key events are widely accepted as explanations for the development of communalism in the 1980s and its subsequent entrenchment in the political and social rhetoric of the modern day. Arvind Rajagopal argues that the ruling Indian National Congress Party faced two key crises in the 1980s that informed the breakdown of the old social order: the collapse of centralized, state-planned Nehruvian economics combined with the political paralysis caused by the 1975 Emergency gave Hindu nationalists the opportunity to “address the crisis of political legitimation” by creating alternatives through economic liberalization and religious populism.37 Surya Upadhyay and Rowena Robinson credit the increasing popularity of this inflammatory sectarianism to “affirmative action, rising political and economic power of Muslims, and secessionist movements in Assam, Punjab and Kashmir were perceived as an attack on the domination of the upper castes.”38 The authors also note that the development of new technology allowed the dissemination of these ideas to the nation as a whole: items such as cassettes and private television “altered its [communalism’s] reach exponentially,” most notably in the case of the national broadcast of the Ramayana (1987).39 This broadcast had two effects: first, the standardization of the many indigenous variants of the story canonized preexisting casteist and linguistic hierarchies, and second, the show served as inspiration for Hindu nationalist politicians capitalizing on Rama’s newfound status as an icon of popular culture, the demolition of the Babri Masjid being the most prominent example.40 Sharma’s conclusion that “there has been a high degree of politicization of communal and caste cleavages since the 1990s” is therefore self-evident after this examination of the historical events concurrent to the development of communalism.41 Finally, these films must be surveyed through 37 Arvind Rajagopal, Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 32–34.

38 Surya Prakash Upadhyay and Rowena Robinson, “Revisiting Communalism and Fundamentalism in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 36 (2012), 53, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41720111.

39 Ibid.

40 Rajagopal, Politics After Television, 30.

41 Sharma, “Rise and Demise of Nehruvian Consensus,” 12.

20 the lens of viewership, especially given their controversy among communalists for their depiction of cross-religious relationships. In fact, this examination reveals the motivating factors behind religion’s status as a conflict resolver in all of the films explored. The literature examines this characterization in Jodhaa Akbar, where Shanaz Khan argues that the ahistorical erasure of religious conflict within Akbar’s reign, most notably with the massacre of civilians at the Rajput fort Chittor, are dropped by a “sanitized and Hinduized” narrative promoting Akbar as palatable ruler for “middle-class Hindu India.”42 The narrative trend of religion as a solution to conflict is therefore an expression of audience awareness, explaining why the story of Akbar and Jodhaa is so compelling of a story in Indian film as a whole. Indeed, the marketplace scene in Jodhaa Akbar, when Akbar’s entourage argues that “[Akbar] is as much of an Indian as you [Hindus] are,” demonstrates why Akbar and Jodhaa’s story has endured in films from independence into the modern day.43 The audience is left with the impression that an idealized India is a home for thousands of communities, Hindu or Muslim, Rajput or Timurid, and beyond.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 mately familiar.

In fact, it is this broader context of religious controversy from which this investigation’s analysis draws its broader value. Communal violence remains a tragic reality in India; recent statistics show that from 2016 to 2020, communal disputes motivated over three thousand riots.44 As community boundaries are defined ad entrenched, the Indian state must face this sectarianism as questions of belonging develop from the reality of a multiethnic, religiously diverse populace. Yet as the boundary-breaking Akbar and Jodhaa of India’s cinematic world have demonstrated, resolving such conflict is possible: embracing the strength found in the differences that define India provides a path of reconciliation for the many communities that call India home.Mughal Empire. Instances in which India’s colonial history is particularly relevant for certain topics will be marked for further reference.

Conclusion

An examination of the depictions of Akbar and Jodhaa in cinema reveals the importance of studying film narratives in the context of the structures informing the process of their development. This investigation has established three key conclusions based on the differences observed between Nehru-era films and films created as communalism increased in political popularity. First, a holistic analysis of these films demonstrates the growing importance of religious affiliation as both the primary identity marker for characters and as plot device driving narrative conflict; conflict in films gradually shifts from an ethnic to religious in nature. Second, these films reflect broader societal narratives that shape media depictions of controversial practices such as cross-religious marriages, most notably in their allusions to the contemporary political ideologies of the time. Third, and most importantly, the medium of film reflects the idealized cultural narratives of wider Indian society. Conflicts in films of all periods are paradoxically solved through religion, which remains the most polarizing identifier of the modern day and an enduring point of controversy with which the audience is inti42 Shahnaz Khan, “Recovering the past,” 140–141.

43 Jodhaa Akbar, 2:28:42.

44 The Wire Staff, “India Witnessed 3,399 Cases of Communal or Religious Rioting Between 2016 and 2020,” The Wire, March 29, 2022, https://thewire.in/ government/india-commuanl-religious-riots-2016-2020.

History, Nation, and Colonial Difference in Israel-Palestine

Quinn Brown Hamilton College - Class of 2024

The Israel-Palestine conflict is often portrayed as a battle of two competing nations, one Jewish and the other Arab. Both nationalisms stake the claim to the same land based on their understanding of national history, histories that do not recognize the claims of the other. However, what is perhaps most interesting about these antagonistic nationalisms is as of the writing of this paper there has been a definitive winner, Israel, and a definitive loser, Palestine. To discuss these two competing national projects, I will focus mostly on Baruch Kimmerling’s The Invention and Decline of Israeliness and Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity.

Both works identify Zionism and Palestinian nationalism as formed at least partially due to their relation to one another. Notably, both works were released in the years following the Oslo accords, linking the two works temporally. In recognizing that the conflict and the role of scholarship in it is ongoing, this paper will pay particular attention to the role of politics in the writing of scholarship surrounding the conflict. It is a goal of this paper to offer a few potential options to tackle this issue of politics while understanding that the writing of such histories is expressly political. In order to contend with the political realities of the conflict, this paper will be guided by two prominent theorists of nationalism, Partha Chatterjee and his work The Nation and its Fragments and Prasenjit Duara and his work Rescuing History From the Nation. This paper will show how Chatterjee’s analysis of colonial and post-colonial nationalism may serve as a model to describe nationalisms in Israel-Palestine, while Duara’s method of bifurcated history may provide a path forward for further scholarship on the region.

In his seminal work The Nation and its Framents published in 1993, Partha Chatterjee posits the question: “Does it serve any useful analytical purpose

to make a distinction between the colonial state and the forms of the modern state?”1 Chatterjee argues that understanding the colonial state is crucial to understanding the modern state as both employ a common strategy for the deployment of Foucault’s modern regime of disciplinary power; which he terms the rule of colonial difference.2 Chatterjee draws on sources from around the turn of the 20th century including documents of the colonial state (Britain) and the colonized people (Bengalis). Chatterjee’s rule of colonial difference was realized through British policy in colonial Bengal, where the legitimacy of colonial rule was embedded in a belief that the history, culture, and racial characteristics of the colonized population were at odds with the ability for liberal self-rule.3 Ultimately, Chatterjee argues that the difference that legitimated colonial rule and defined the identity of the colonizer is also used by Bengali nationalists to define their own legitimacy as a nation-state. It is through perceived difference, not a specific set of cultural, racial, or linguistic similarities, that a community defines itself in relation to an other.

According to Chatterjee, the development of nationalism stakes its claim on the inner, spiritual sphere before holding any sort of official political power even within a colonial state where there is total domination of the “outer,” material sphere by a foreign power.4 Chatterjee sees the development of Bengali nationalisms as a project of mediation by the Bengali middle class, who negotiate both under the colonial state and act as the main driver in creation of nationalist culture and social institutions.5 It is through the mediation 1 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 14.

2 Ibid, 18.

3 Ibid, 16.

4 Ibid, 6.

5 Ibid, 35.

22 of culture by the Bengali middle class that the nation stakes its claim to sovereignty within the inner spiritual sphere. Chatterjee identifies three major themes to the mediation of culture: the appropriation of the popular, the classicization of tradition, and the structure of the hegemonic domain of nationalism.6 Through each theme, nationalist mediation seeks to create an identity which is ultimately the same strategy used by the colonizer to deploy colonial difference. Chatterjee argues that the formation of a national identity and the modern nation-state are based on a perceived difference between the both external and internal others. In this way, the rule of colonial difference is applicable to both the colonial state and the anti-colonial national movement as both depend on difference to stake their claim on sovereignty.

While Chatterjee identifies the fundamental ways in which the relational identity of nationalism is created through the rule of colonial difference, he does not provide any coherent method to study history outside of the confines of the nation. Through Duara’s method of bifurcated history and his own discussion of nationalism, the question of the role of scholarship in politics and politics in scholarship may be answered. Duara’s method of bifurcated history attempts to recognize the linear, Enlightenment History that pervades all national histories and appropriates the past to fit present needs.7 This method can in turn recover historicity or at least become self-conscious of the repressive telos of national histories. While Chatterjee identifies difference as the key driver in the formation of national identities, it is Duara’s method that can provide a way to study the past that does not conform to the telos of the nation.

First, this paper will discuss the dominant colonial nationalism of Israel through the scholarship of Baruch Kimmerling. Much of Kimmerling’s argument revolves around the events that surround 1948: the establishment of the state of Israel in the former Palestinian mandate; the subsequent war against most of the established Arab states; the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians; and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jewish migrants into the newly established state. Kimmerling argues that a homogeneous Israeli identity was formed after the war in part as a continuation of Yishuv identity during the mandate period and new identity building efforts of the secular

6 Ibid, 72-74.

7 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History From the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 Ashkenazic hegemony.8 Kimmerling claims this process was driven by a secular elite of colonizers from Eastern Europe who built hegemony through invented traditions based in the secularized Jewish bible and the military.9 Importantly, the hegemonic Israeliness described by Kimmerling required more than the invention of tradition; it emerged through the construction of external and internal others that defined the national identity to a previously disparate population with few ties to one another. Israel’s external others are obvious given the near continuous conflict between the state of Israel and its Arab neighbors. However, after Israeli victory in 1948 and mass migrations to Israel by Jews from around the world – including other parts of the Middle East – the homogeneous Israeli identity was threatened by internal others such as ultra-orthodox, sephardim, and Israeli-Arabs.10 Kimmerling outlines a clear intention of the secular, Ashkenazic Israeli elite to form the boundaries of the nation through the exclusion of others and the creation of a hegemonic identity of Israeliness defined by the dominant elite culture.

The creation of a hegemonic identity based on elite culture and defined by boundaries created through othering is precisely the method that Chatterjee outlines in his own work. However, in his own piece Chatterjee focuses on the efforts of an elite working within a colonial state instead of an elite working for a colonial state. Given the parallels in building hegemony, this process further begs Chatterjee’s provocative question I posited earlier in this paper: “Does it serve any useful analytical purpose to make a distinction between the colonial state and the forms of the modern state?”11 Kimmerling does not go as far as Chatterjee to say Israeli nationalism is based solely on the definition of external and internal, however, his discussion of how elites mediate the creation of the nation is strikingly similar. While Kimmerling’s framework for discussing Israeli identity is indeed different from Chatterjee’s discussion of anti-colonial nationalism, many of the same themes are clear as both necessitate othering through mediation of an elite as key to the formation of a hegemonic national identity. Next, I will provide an example of how Kimmerling’s analysis reveals how Chatterjee’s discussion of mediation legitimizes the nation through the rule of colonial difference.

8 Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 89.

9 Ibid, 101-103.

10 Ibid, 106.

11 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation, 14.

23 Kimmerling does not make a claim on the origins of Israeli nationalism, instead he analyzes the ways in which Israeli identity has in part been formed through the mediation of a particular Zionist mythos and historiography. Kimmerling argues that understanding the ways in which history factors into Israeli identity is key to discussing Israeli identity. In his own words, “In Israel, even more than in any other society, the past, present, and future are intermingled; collective memory is considered objective history, and history is a powerful weapon, used both in domestic struggles and external conflict.”12 The nationalist histories of Israel described by Kimmerling assume a whole metahistory of Israel that begins with God’s promise to Abraham that his descendants would inherit the land of Canaan.13 In Israeli nationalist historiography, the classical age begins with the conquest of Canaan by Joshua and continues through the reigns of kings David and Solomon. The classical period is then followed by a period of decline and eventual expulsion from the land of Israel. Importantly, the majority of the period following the diaspora is defined by Muslim rule in Israel which constitutes the dark ages of this period. The formation of the Israeli state returns Israel to greatness following this long period of foreign occupation.14 The period of Muslim rule over Eretz-Israel is the darkest and longest in the Israeli conception of the dark period, but also the context for the birth of the modern nation of Israel. The Zionist narrative described by Kimmerling presents one way in which mediation can form identity.

Chatterjee points to how Kimmerling describes the use of history in Zionist discourse in one of his themes of mediation, the classicization of tradition. Chatterjee’s classicization of tradition regards a nationalist historiography which is based on European enlightenment narratives of a classical age, decline to a dark age, and a return to greatness through the formation of the nation-state. Chatterjee uses the mediation of history in Bengal to show how nationalist histories are emplotted in this European narrative. In Bengal, the Vedic age was classicized, the period of Muslim rule was seen as the era of decline, and the future state of India was a return to greatness.15 While Kimmerling does not use the same vocabulary as Chatterjee he is getting at the same idea as his analysis mirrors Chatterjee’s concep12 Kimmerling, The Invention, 16.

13 Ibid, 16-17.

14 Ibid, 17-39.

15 Chatterjee, The Nation, 98.

History, Nation, and Colonial Difference tualization of Bengali nationalist history. The emplotment of nationalist history such that the nation is both the end of history and a return to greatness is central to the nationalist project. It enforces the rule of colonial difference where Palestinians can be subjugated because in the eyes of the colonizer, they cannot enable the emergence of a modern Jewish nation.

In a fundamental rejection to Zionist narratives that the land of Palestine was sparsely inhabited and that Palestinian identity never did and does not exist, Rashid Khalidi argues that a concrete Palestinian identity was formed far prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. Khalidi argues that the origins of a unique Palestinian national identity were formed in the years just before World War I as press restriction in the Ottoman empire were lifted following the restoration of the constitution and Zionist settlement increased. This rising identity competed with several other extra-national identities, including pan-Arabism and Islam, and was codified in the years directly following World War I as the British took direct control of the region.16 Much of Khalidi’s argument draws from Benedict Anderson’s framework for the creation of an imagined national community.17 He focuses large portions of his book on how elite institutions, such as schools and the press, provided the context in which national identity could be developed. However, Khalidi does support some of his argument on subaltern movements in his chapter on peasant resistance to Zionism. He argues that this opposition to Zionism was shared by both the elite and the peasantry leading to a common identity.18 Despite Khalidi’s discussion of Palestinian identity in relation to anti-Zionism, he argues that Zionism simply accelerated the development of nationalism and was not causal.19 Instead of making difference the key factor in identity formation, Khalidi leans on Anderson and argues that Palestine was created through common values such as a belief in Palestine as a holy land and a tradition of urban patriotism.20 Here it is important to note the role of politics within Khalidi’s work. Zionist scholarship has often claimed that Palestinian identity never existed independently of Israel and therefore is not “real” or at least not legitimate. Khalidi is ultimately confined by his own 16 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 143.

17 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 1991).

18 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 117.

19 Ibid, 172.

20 Ibid, 150-154.

24 political beliefs as he is unable to take up Chatterjee’s rule of difference because he fears it would be used as a tool to discredit the existence of Palestinian identity.21 Despite this fear, almost all of Khalidi’s work is based on the relationship between Zionism and Palestinian identity. While Khalidi uses Anderson’s concept of a shared identity created through elite mediation, Chatterjee would argue that the mediation of culture leads to a development of nationalism through the definition of the other. While I am sympathetic to Khalidi’s political constraints, his work would be enhanced by a full acceptance of the rule of colonial difference which is apparent throughout his work even if he is not directly applying it.

Just as Kimmerling notes 1948 as key to the rise of Israeliness, Khalidi notes 1948 as key to Palestinian identity in subsequent years. Known as al-Nakba or “the Catastrophe” to Palestinians, the failure to resist Zionist military forces and the forced removal of much of the Palestinian population became a shared memory amongst Palestinians.22 Following al-Nakba a new portrayal of Palestian identity entered the popular consciousness, the narrative of failure as triumph.23 Palestinian identity came to be defined through a history of constant struggle and defeat.24 This identity was pushed through the mediation of popular culture by the nationalist elite represented largely by the PLO after its emergence in the 1960s. This popular imagination depicted Palestinian resistence throughout history as in the arab revolt of 1936-39, al-Nakba, and later the defeat of PLO forces at al-Karama as glorious defeats by highlighting the bravery of Palestinian soldiers.25 While the underdog narrative is convincing given the reality that Palestine’s defeat was contingent on superior colonial military forces, the narrative entered the national consciousness in sanitized form. The victory in defeat narrative promoted by the nationalist elite was cleansed of any negativity and emphasized the heroic resistance. Additionally, the blame was always shifted onto others such as imperial powers like Britain and the United States, but also onto other Arab nations, defining the boundaries of the nation through othering.

The popular narrative of victory in defeat illustrates how the national community is maintained through the appropriation of the popular to develop national identi21 Ibid, 147.

22 Ibid, 194.

23 Ibid, 195.

24 Ibid, 200.

25 Ibid, 196.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 ty through difference.

The appropriation of the popular is one of Chatterjee’s main themes of mediation through which the boundaries of the nation are codified. In The Nation and Its Fragments, Chatterjee discusses the appropriation of the popular in relation to Bengali literature which presents certain representations of popular symbols like Ramakrsna in a sanitized fashion.26 The popular is the “repository of natural truth” that represents the nation and is made to shine through the mediation of an “enlightened” nationalist elite.27 This theme is reflected in the narrative of the victory in defeat presented by the Palestinian nationalist elite. The symbol of the Palestinian underdog is sanitized through complete elimination of responsibility for failure and idealized through its undying resistance to colonialism even in the face of certain defeat. It is made to represent the Palestinian people as proud resistors to domination, when in reality it reinforces the elite as the sole guardians of national identity. As Khalidi describes, the narrative of victory in defeat presents Palestinians as in constant conflict both with the others of colonial powers but also against other Arab nations.28 In presenting this constant and inevitable conflict the nation is maintained through mobilization against the other. Khalidi is particularly careful in discussing this issue of narrative due to the potentially damaging political arguments that can be made. To be clear, I am not saying that the Arabs of Palestine are not victims of colonial oppression and their plight is due to a failure of leadership, I am simply describing how cultural mediation by elites sanitizes the popular in order to establish the boundaries of the nation.

While Chatterjee’s framework is useful to understand the nation as an identity formed through difference and legitimized in the spiritual sphere, it offers no method to study identity outside of the repressive nation. Chatterjee’s argument is built upon his assumption that the nation is sovereign in the spiritual before it can achieve statehood within the material.29 Even though Chatterjee points to the spiritual as the realm of interest, much of his argument in fact revolves around how the material can influence the spiritual through elite mediation. Both Kimmerling and Khalidi also focus their attention on the material, with Kimmerling’s focus on state mediation and Khalidi’s dependence on 26 Chatterjee, The Nation, 72-73.

27 Ibid, 73.

28 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 197-198.

29 Chatterjee, The Nation, 6.

25

History, Nation, and Colonial Difference

print culture. In focusing on the material for evidence of spiritual sovereignty all three scholars place the formation of the nation-state at the end of their historical narrative. Kimmerling’s concept of Israeliness places the nation at the center as a sovereign Israel is defined by the use of state and elite mediation to create and maintain a hegemonic national identity. Khalidi is also bound by the national telos as he presents Palestine as a nation without a state where the Palestinian identity is sovereign but materially dominated by Israel. Despite their failure to point somewhere outside of the nation’s boundaries all three scholars do understand that the nation is not the totalizing identity it claims to be. Chatterjee, Kimmerling, and Khalidi all recognize other identities within the nation that reveal the fragility of the national identity and provide a path forward to study identities outside of the nationalist telos.

As Chatterjee, Kimmerling, and Khalidi have shown, historical narratives are weaponized by nationalist elites both to provide support for national identity and to provide legitimacy to the nation-state as the end of history. This relationship between the nation and history is the key issue that Prasenjit Duara explores in Rescuing History From the Nation. Duara’s intervention revolves around a critique of Enlightenment History, which he describes as history that models historical narratives on evolution, where the narrative is linear and results in a particular end goal.30 Duara argues that national histories are invariably bound in a repressive telos where the nation is both the sole and constant subject of history as well as the final destination of the narrative.31 By leaning on the work of Paul Ricouer, Duara further critiques how Enlightenment History considers the concept of time. The subject of history, in this case the nation, is “a metaphysical unity devised to address the aporias in the experience of linear time.”32 By creating a narrative in which the nation is both the subject of history and the end of it, national histories falsely portray a unified grand narrative that both legitimizes the nation-state as the heir and goal of history. In order to break from the repressive telos of the nation, Duara develops his method of bifurcated history. Bifurcation points at the reality that history is both “transmitted forward in a linear fashion” and “dispersed in space and time.”33 Through recognition of this dispersal, bifurcation can assist the historian in

critically analyzing how historical narratives are appropriated to fit the present which in turn may allow recovery of historicity or at least a recognition of appropriation.34 Critical to Duara’s method of bifurcated history is his discussion of the nation as a relational identity created through the formation and maintenance of hard and soft boundaries. Duara argues that the imagined community of the nation is not a modern phenomenon and is instead simply another form of community built through the formation of hard boundaries in relation to an other.35 Duara further argues that these boundaries are unstable as soft boundaries can become hard boundaries and vice versa. Duara uses the term discent to describe the process through which soft boundaries are hardened. This concept is an amalgamation of the two terms “descent” and “dissent” which critically describe how history is appropriated by the national telos.36 To explicate this term, Duara discusses Manchu identity during the rule of the Qing dynasty. In this case Duara shows how the Manchu Qianlong emperor traced the descent of the Manchu clans from the first peoples of the northeast and the dissent of Manchu traditions to the Han Chinese traditions.37 In constructing this narrative of discent the Qianlong emperor hardens the previously soft boundary between Manchu and Han Chinese identity, constructing Manchu identity in relation to the other. In tracking narratives of discent through bifurcation, history can be “rescued” from the nation by deconstructing the telos of national history.

The centrality of the year 1948 to both Kimmerling and Khalidi’s arguments privileges the narrative of the nation by constructing an analysis around the date which signifies both the formation of the state of Israel and al-Nakba. In privileging 1948 as fundamental to understanding the identity of Israelis and Palestinians, Khalidi and Kimmerling make the nation the key subject in their narrative. Both Kimmerling’s and Khalidi’s arguments could be strengthened through engagement in Duara’s conceptualization of nationalism as a relational identity, defined by the creation of hard boundaries formed through narratives of discent.

Kimmerling recognizes the claimed descent of Israelis from the biblical Israelites and the dissent to other groups through the traditions of the Jewish people and European socialism, while Khalidi recognizes claimed

30 Duara, Rescuing History, 4.

31 Ibid, 27-29.

32 Ibid, 29.

33 Ibid, 5.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid, 8.

36 Ibid, 66.

37 Ibid, 67.

26 descent from the Arab population that inhabited the region for centuries and dissent to Jews and other Arabs through their own specific national identity. It would be constructive for both authors to analyze how these narratives of discent may form hard boundaries from pre-existing soft boundaries in the region of Israel-Palestine.

While Duara’s method of bifurcated history offers a critique of Kimmerling and Khalidi, it also offers an avenue for future study of Israel-Palestine. Now I will offer a few suggestions for where a bifurcated history of identity in the region might be directed. The terms Palestinian and Israeli are often associated with the religious traditions of Islam and Judaism. In order to write a bifurcated history the association of religion with the nation must be explored. Ultimately both Kimmerling and Khalidi stress that religion is not the sole binding quality for either nationalist narrative as both nations contain some level of religious diversity. In binding these identities to specific religious groups, history actively participates in the creation of narratives of discent and in turn solidifies the soft boundaries that exist within Israeli and Palestinian identity. Through bifurcation the appropriation of this narrative may be recognized and analyzed. The association of these identities with religion further begs the fundamental question of why Palestinian identity is not open. Khalidi discusses how Palestinian identity is in fact not fixed on religion despite common misconception as Christians and Muslims both identify as Palestinians. By studying how Palestinian identity may act as an open concept through bifurcated history we can rescue a level of historicity from the telos of the nation.

By breaking from the use of Israeli and Palestinian as synonymous with religion and treating Palestinian as an open identity, historians can identify a subject of history other than the nation. One potential subject is the land of Israel-Palestine which is claimed by both Palestinians and Israelis and is considered holy by all three Abrahamic traditions. Both Kimmerling and Khalidi express the important symbol that the land provides in the formation of Palestinian and Israeli identity throughout their work. Specifically, the city of Jerusalem is stressed as symbolic by both authors due to its holy sites and centrality to the biblical narrative.

Placing land as the subject of history may be difficult as Khalidi explains, land and place names are often appropriated by the nationalist project.38 However, by 38 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 14-16.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 writing histories of place rather than histories of the nation, scholars may be more capable of tracking the appropriation and dispersal of historical narratives.

As Duara describes in his discussion of nationalism, history is at the heart of the nationalist project as historical narrative provides legitimacy to the nation-state. As with all scholarship of nationalism but particularly in the case of Israel-Palestine, the issue of politics pervades scholarly discourse. Kimmerling and Khalidi wrote their pieces of scholarship in the years directly following the Oslo accords when Israel recognized the existence of Palestinian identity for the first time.39 At this point the opportunity for the realization of a Palestinian state was never closer before or since.

The influence of politics on both authors is striking and apparent through the differences in Kimmerling’s work on the colonial power Israel and Khalidi’s work on the anti-colonial Palestine.

Because Kimmerling studies the dominant political power in the region, he is able to distance himself from the politics of the region. Kimmerling by no means projects a particularly nationalist narrative as he includes in his analysis the critical issues of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism that would be absent in a nationalist narrative.40 However, his analysis is largely presented as objective and uninterested in the meta-cognitive role of politics in the study of the region. In contrast, Khalidi’s discussion of Palestinian identity is explicitly political in nature. Khalidi is constantly vigilant in the role of scholarly work in politics and how his and other works may be appropriated to support either colonial domination, or the anti-colonial nationalist. One of Khalidi’s main concerns is countering the common trope presented by Israel that Palestinian identity is not real or is in some way artificial.41 Because of the potential for political appropriation, Khalidi does not fully commit to difference as the key factor of national identity and limits his discussion of competing identities. Even while he is critical of the Palestinian leadership, his work is limited through his participation in a nationalist narrative by placing the nation as the subject of history. By displacing the nation as the subject of history or at least recognizing it, the issues of Khalidi’s politicization and Kimmerlings lack of interest in how politics affect scholarly discourse may be dealt with more completely.

The historiography of nationalism can help his39 Ibid, 201.

40 Kimmerling, The Invention, 40.

41 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 177.

27 torians deepen the understanding of the political and humanitarian issues faced in Israel-Palestine. In deepening our understanding of how these two competing nationalisms have developed, we can better understand the conflict and support opportunities for a humanitarian solution. Khalidi and Kimmerling provide interesting and useful analyses of nationalism in the region and reading their scholarship through Chatterjee’s conceptual framework enlightens historians to these opposed nationalist identities. However, it is through Duara’s method of bifurcated history that the study of identities in the region of Israel-Palestine can be directed in the future. Further research on Israel-Palestine through Duara’s method may be enlightening to the historiography of nationalism as Israel and Palestine occupy a distinct place within many non-nationalist identities such as Christianity and Arabism to name a few. In bringing together studies of Palestinian and Israeli identity we can better understand the role of politics in the scholarship of nationalism as well as the role of scholarship in politics.

History, Nation, and Colonial Difference

Post-Colonial Modifications to the Foucauldian Frame Edward Said and Ann Stoler Brian Seiter Hamilton College - Class of 2024

Michel Foucault’s work can be described as the history of the construction of modern selves. Foucault charts this history through an analysis of the discontinuous ruptures, reorderings, distinctions, and constructions of the discourses animating societies rather than through traditional, linear, Nation-centric methodologies of history. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault explains his untraditional historical methodology, which strives to generate effective, genealogical histories and abandon linear continuity, striving to understand events within their own discontinuity, “in terms of their [...] unique characteristics [and...] acute manifestations.”1 Through this, Foucault establishes various histories and genealogies detailing how madness, criminality, and sexuality within Europe constructed the modern self. Elsewhere, Foucault clarifies his project on the modern self further and asserts that it is based upon the correlation of three axes: “the formation of forms of knowledge (savoirs), the normativity of behavior, and the constitution of the subject’s modes of being.”2 These axes will be referred to as (1) the will to knowledge, (2) normative knowledge specification, and (3) the biopower of the normalizing society. Correlating these axes allows Foucault’s work to embody a broad theoretical project of discursive, genealogical analysis of knowledge, power and history rather than definitive, linear, and nationalistic understandings.

Foucault did not conceive of his project as declarative “historical facts,” but as an “invitation[...] for those who may eventually do the same thing.”3 Responses to this Foucauldian invitation have proliferated across 1 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), Language, Counter-memory, Practice, Cornell University Press (1977), 154.

2 Foucault, “12 January 1983,” The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the college de France 1982-1983, edited by Frédérik Gros, Palgrave MacMillan (2008), 41.

3 Foucault, Remarks on Marx, New York: Semiotext(e) (1991), 40.

academia and underpin humanities scholarship of the last century.

One crucial impact of Foucault is the field of postcolonial studies. Edward Said’s Orientalism and Ann Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire are seminal works that draw heavily on Foucault’s analytical model. Through discourse analysis, Said and Stoler demonstrate how colonialism, empire, and race are related to Foucault’s European axes of analysis. Said and Stoler argue that race and colonialism are necessary points of focus in analysis of European discourses like discipline, sexuality and the European self. While Said, a literary critic, and Stoler, a historian of institutions and intellectualism, have differing methodologies and foci, they share a similar critique of Foucault: that Foucault’s work is limited by his Eurocentrism. Foucault touched on race, colonialism, and empire, but he never fully analyzed the topics and their genealogies, nor recognized the reciprocally constitutive relation between Europe and its colonies that Said and Stoler emphasized. Foucault saw colonialism and race as redeployments of European discourses, not as related discursive fields constituted by and constitutive of Europe. Said and Stoler diverge from Foucault’s historical understanding, but they do not debunk the analytical axes of the Foucauldian project; rather, Said and Stoler fill and amend the project’s Eurocentric errors.

Edward Said’s Orientalism provides detailed analysis of how discourse defined not only the Orient, but Europe, “Europeanness,” and the western self.4 In his “Introduction,” Said nominally recognizes that his work is indebted to Foucault and states that his “notion of a discourse as described [...] in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish” is particular4 Edward Said, Orientalism, Vintage Books (1979).

29

Post-Colonial Modifications

ly useful within his work in Orientalism.5 The discourse of Orientalism encompasses the relational matrices of scholarship and power through which the West imagined, understood, studied, controlled, and constituted the East and its people.6 In contrast to Foucault, Said emphasizes that the construction of the Orient was crucial to how the Occident (or the West) understood, defined, and constituted itself through relational, rather than comparative, juxtaposition.7 Although he does not explicitly recognize Foucault’s axes of analysis, they are present within his work and illuminate similarities and differences within the conception and use of these axes to highlight both the value of and issues within Foucault’s work.

With her Race and the Education of Desire, Stoler represents a touchstone through which one can triangulate and analyze Foucault alongside Said.8 Stoler builds upon the framework and ideas of Foucault’s History of Sexuality and his 1976 Lectures by incorporating colonialism, race, and empire into them; thus, refining both Foucault and Stoler’s own ideas.9 While Said’s connection and “theoretical debt” to Foucault is acknowledged in Orientalism, Stoler is more direct about how her work on colonialism, race, gender, and education is a Foucault effect; the connection is analyzed rather than assumed. Stoler aimed to move forward through Foucault, rather than merely taking his work as inspiration. In describing this, Stoler states: I pursue [...] a critique of Foucalt’s chronologies [...] not to quibble over dates but [...] to argue that the discursive and practical field in which nineteenth-century bourgeois sexuality [and self] emerged was situated on an imperial landscape where the cultural accoutrements [sic] of bourgeois distinction were partially shaped through contrasts forged in the politics and language of race.10 Thus, Stoler builds her own argument by challenging the Eurocentrism of Foucault’s understanding of the hermeneutics of the self. In this process, Stoler identifies and analyzes the discourse concerning sexuality and the self through Foucault’s axes, albeit not in the 5 Edward Said, Orientalism, “Introduction,” 3, 23.

6 Edward Said, Orientalism, “Introduction,” 1-28.

7 Edward Said, Orientalism, 2-3.

8 Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Duke University Press (1995).

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid, 5.

distinct nominal forms identified above.

The first axis of Foucault’s discourse analysis is the will to knowledge. Foucault outlines this axis in his early works “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” and “The Discourse on Language.”11 In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault posits that knowledge/power is intrinsically connected to a search for truth manifested in endless multiplication of individual and collective knowledge.12 In “The Discourse on Language,” Foucault states that the will to truth is a longstanding principle of exclusion within discourse that delineates what knowledge assists in realizing truth and what does not.13 Demonstrative of the correlation of Foucault’s axes within these early works, he advances this will to knowledge/truth by connecting it to normativity and the construction of subjectivity and self. This same correlation is present in both of Foucault’s seminal works, in his exposition of “examination” within Discipline and Punish, and “confession” in The History of Sexuality.14 I submit that Foucault’s Eurocentric reading of the will to knowledge concerning discipline, sexuality, and the European self blurs and obscures the interrelated nature of European and colonial discourses. This is evident when Foucault’s will to knowledge is triangulated with the work of Said and Stoler.

Similar to Foucault, a crucial point of focus within Said’s Orientalism is the Orientalist will to knowledge. This axis is demonstrated within Said’s analysis of European imagination and creation of literature, scholarship, and geography about the Orient, Occident, and the relationship between them. This is seen in the “Introduction” to Said’s work and specifically within Part 1, “The Scope of Orientalism.”15 Said, like Foucault, identifies that a will to knowledge does not exist in a vacuum and is a crucial, constitutive component of normativity and the construction of the self and subjectivity. Said states that “the growth of knowledge [is] far from [...] merely additive or cumulative, [but rather] a process of selective accumulation, displacement, deletion, rearrangement, and insistence

11 Foucault Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), Language, Counter-memory, Practice, Cornell University Press (1977), and Foucault, “The Discourse on Language” (1970), The Archaeology of Knowledge, Pantheon Books, (1972).

12 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 163-164.

13 Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” 218.

14 Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, “Discipline: Docile Bodies,” (1975), 135-169, and Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol 1: An Introduction, “Scientia Sexualis,” (1976), 53-73.

15 Edward Said, Orientalism, “Introduction,” 1-28, and “Pt. 1 The Scope Orientalism,” 31-110.

30 within what has been called a research consensus.”16 Thus, the will to knowledge Said studies is the imaginative, scholarly, and administrative urge to add to this consensus by expanding, rearranging, and constituting knowledge within the limits of normativity and biopower. Unlike Foucault who saw the European consensus as formulated within Eurocentric bracketing, Said’s Orientalism challenges Eurocentrism by showing that Europe’s own conceptions of knowledge, norm, and self are inseparable from those in the discourse of Orientalism and its colonial possessions in the East.

Similar to Said, Stoler aims to show the will to knowledge in the relational and constitutive realities of these discursive consensuses. Stoler is more stylistically consonant with Foucault than Said, as suggested in my description of her project being largely a critical reading and extension of The History of Sexuality and Foucault’s 1976 Lectures. Stoler charitably notes that race, colonialism and its gendered representations within the discourse of sexuality are outside of Foucault’s scope of analysis and expertise.17 She cautions against this Eurocentrism, stating that Foucault’s genealogy of racism and its connections to normativity, sexuality, and the self are paradoxical and should not be followed with “exegetical care, but rather to explore how his insights might inform our own.”18 Stoler argues that Foucault’s interpretation of the will to knowledge within colonial discourses as redeployments of European discourses is a far less favorable conception than a mutually constitutive understanding of the related will to knowledge between European and colonial discourses. Stoler then builds upon this conception of will by emphasizing its relation to normativity and the construction of self in terms of sexuality, gender, and race throughout Race and the Education of Desire.

Stoler’s redeployment of the will to knowledge refines and extends the applicability of both Foucault’s and Said’s discursive frameworks.

The next axis of Foucault’s frame is the creations and specifications of normativity. I submit that Foucault’s Eurocentric analysis of normativity within discipline, sexuality, and society fails to recognize the importance of colonial encounter, Orientalism, race, and gender. Foucault’s project seeks to understand the power of discontinuous, discursive formations in both 16 Edward Said, Orientalism, “Pt. 2 Orientalist Structures and Restructures,” 176.

17 Ann Stoler, Race and The Education of Desire, “Toward a Genealogy of Racisms,” 91.

18 Ibid.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 productive and repressive functions. Normativity is a crucial axis which allows for analysis of the discontinuous nature of power within discursive formations, their events and knowledge.19 The connection between this axis and the will to knowledge is outlined above, but it is crucial to note that Foucault extends normativity towards his third axis by stating that, amidst modernity, normativity no longer constitutes the individual as solely an object of power, but “as [ the] effect and object of power, [and the] effect and object of knowledge.”20 Thus, normal and abnormal forms constitute a web of hierarchized relations where the normal forms the privileged example and aim of power, while the abnormal becomes the opposite — unproductive to society’s power. This correlated axis is seen again within Discipline and Punishment and The History of Sexuality, as the delinquent within discipline and the pervert within sexuality respectively.21 As expressed in “Society Must be Defended” and Foucault’s other 1976 Lectures on the genealogy of racisms, Foucault understood normativity within the discourses of colonialism and race as outward extensions of European normativity rather than the mutually constitutive relation set forth

by Said and Stoler.22 Said’s focus in Orientalism was outlining and analyzing how the discourse of Orientalism is understood, structured, and restructured through imagining, understanding, and manifesting normativity. Said argues that knowledge within the discourse of Orientalism was tethered to the constructions of a Western normal form and an Oriental abnormal form in juxtaposition.23 Through charting literature, early Orientalist scholarship, and imaginative geography, Said argues that the West defined itself as modern, industrial, and scientific against the backwards, stagnant, and spiritual Orient.24 Said follows this through the structuring, restructuring, and eventual manifestation of the discourse of Orientalism demonstrating the role of normativity in shaping imperialism.25 Directly addressing Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish, Said states that the backwardness, degeneracy, and incivility of 19 Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” 229.

20 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 192.

21 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, “Illegalities and delinquency,” 257-292, and Foucault, The History of Sexuality, “Domain,” 103-114.

22 Foucault, 17 “March 1976,” in “Society Must be Defended,” Picador Publishing Company (1997), 238-264.

23 Edward Said, Orientalism. “Introduction,” 1-28.

24 Edward Said, Orientalism, “Pt 1. The Scope of Orientalism,” 31-110.

25 Edward Said, Orientalism, “Pt. 2 Orientalist Structures and Restructures,” 111-197, and “Latent and Manifest Orientalism,” 201-225.

31 the Orient were constructed within the same field of “biological determinism and moral-political admonishment” as Europeanness.26 Thus, in Orientalism Said utilizes Foucault’s correlated axes, but in a way that saw the discourses of race and colonialism as mutually constitutive to the modern self rather than a Eurocentric one-way transmission.

In Race and The Education of Desire, normativity is a privileged point in Stoler’s analysis of the mutually constitutive relation between the European and Colonial discourses, colonialism, race, sexuality, and gender. Stoler identifies the crucial role of normativity within discourse and its “productive sites” in her analysis of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, the 1976 Lectures, and the Foucauldian project.27 Stoler agrees with the value of analyzing normativity in correlation with Foucault’s other axes, but simultaneously disagrees with Foucault’s Eurocentric understanding of normativity. Stoler contests Foucault’s conception of the normal and abnormal forms embedded within racism, colonialism, and aspects of gender as extensions of European normativity.28 Stoler argues that “normalization [...] drives racism,” sexuality, and gender and that Foucault’s conception did not recognize the “constitutive” importance of nation, empire, and gender within “the cultivation of the bourgeois self and its sexual deployments.”29 Rather than conceptualizing European normativity as the product of insular European knowledge production and Colonial normativity as its extension and emphasis, Stoler demarcates a reciprocal relationship between Europe and the places and people it colonized.

The last crucial axis of Foucault’s theorization is the manner in which biopower – in its techniques, institutions, and local centers – constructs the modern self. Foucault’s analytical frame of the normalizing society and its biopower is illuminating, but eurocentrism limits Foucault’s grasp of the impact of Orientalism, colonialism, and race on biopower and the construction of self. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault coins the term biopower as the representation of power over the life of society and its individuals.30 In his lecture “Governmentality,” Foucault refines this understanding by arguing that this power is constituted by two 26 Edward Said, Orientalism, “Latent and Manifest Orientalism,” 207.

27 Ann Stoler, Race and The Education of Desire, 92.

28 Ann Stoler, Race and The Education of Desire, “Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves,” 95-136.

29 Ibid, 135-136.

30 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” 133-159.

Post-Colonial Modifications techniques which operate on separate, non-conflicting levels of society: discipline over individuals and their bodies, and regulation over the populations of societies.31 In “Society Must be Defended,” Foucault argues that this biopower constitutes the normalizing society with the power to “make live and let die” is the distinct, stratified manifestation of the discourses of modernity.32 Alongside the will to knowledge and normativity, Foucualt claims biopower is a crucial component of the modern self.

In Orientalism, Said concludes by focusing on the impact of Orientalism’s manifestation in the construction of both Oriental and European selves. At the time that Said was working on Orientalism, Foucault had not coined the term biopower yet. However, Said’s analysis of the manifestation of Orientalism in the technical points of scholarship, sexuality, and politics is strikingly consonant with Foucault’s biopower and its correlation with the modern self.33 Said states that in the 19th and 20th centuries the discursive framework encompassing the discourse of Orientalism transitioned from a scholarly and comparably latent form to a more administrative, political, and material manifestation.34 This manifestation of Orientalism was constructed through technical and institutional extensions of power on education, sexuality, politics, and identity in both the West and East. Thus, Said identifies the inseparability of Orientalism, colonialism, and race from the construction and subjection of the modern self that is central to the Foucauldian project.

The analytical axis of biopower is also a crucial, nominal component of Stoler’s The Race and the Education of Desire. Stoler directly critiques Foucault’s Eurocentric conception of biopower by incorporating the relations and institutions of imperial race and sexuality into Foucault’s biopower. After having analyzed Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Foucault’s 1976 Lectures, Stoler analyzed the will to knowledge, normativity, and, crucially here, the biopower of modernity in the correlated techniques and identities of education, sexuality, race, gender, and desire.35 Through the analysis of biopower alongside the other axes in terms 31 Foucault, “Governmentality,” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago University Press (1991) 87-104.

32 Foucault, “17 March 1976,” in “Society Must be Defended,” 241.

33 Edward Said, Orientalism, “Latent and Manifest Orientalism,” 201-225.

34 Ibid, 205-206.

35 Ann Stoler, Race and The Education of Desire, “Cultivating Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves,” 95-136, “Domestic Subversions and Children’s Sexuality,” 137-164, and “The Education of Desire and the Repressive Hypothesis,” 165-195.

32 of the constitution of the modern self and subjectivity, Stoler argues that Foucault’s project is improved when the “micromanagement of domestic life [is...] seen less as an affirmation of bourgeois hegemony than as a contested and transgressive site of it.”36 Moreover, the colonial relation with whiteness, race, sexuality and gender can be seen “the colonies as more than sites of exploitation but as ‘laboratories of modernity.’”37 These laboratories exist within a similar imaginative, biological, scientific, and discursive realm from which modern power willed, normalized, and manifested itself within and through Europe and its colonies. While Europe is indeed privileged in this broad construction of power, that does not disqualify the value of studying the laboratories of modernity of colonialism, gender, and sexuality from outside a Eurocentric lens.

The analysis of the Foucauldian project and the discursive, genealogical, and effective history within it reveals the value of Foucault’s work. Foucault’s method of discourse analysis directly challenges what historian Pransenjit Duara, writing in a different context, describes as traditional, linear history tied to the nation and its misguided premises of a united, self-same, national, modern, and distinctly Western subject evolving through time despite the Eurocentric bracketing of Foucault’s work.38 Foucault’s three analytical axes of (1) the will to knowledge, (2) normative knowledge specification, and (3) the constitution of the subject through the techniques, institutions, and local centers of the biopower of the normalizing society are crucial to this understanding. They constitute the effective history which synthesizes the complex manifestations of power within society and contextualizes them amidst a discontinuous hierarchy of placement rather than through the reductionist, linear, and comparative lens of traditional scholarship. Foucault’s effects, the work of Said and Stoler, highlight, refine, and demonstrate how the Foucauldian project of the hermeneutics of the modern Western self can be expanded by incorporating understandings of Orientalist colonialism, race, gender, and other discourses that were conspicuously absent from Foucault’s works. My analysis of the discourse between Foucault and his effects clearly shows that the value of Said and Stoler is invigorated by their use of the try-parse Foucauldian axis, while the Foucauldian 36 Ann Stoler, Race and The Education of Desire, “Cultivating Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves,” 110.

37 Ann Stoler, Race and The Education of Desire, “Colonial Studies,” 15.

38 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, “Part 1: Introduction,” University of Chicago Press (1995), 4.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 project, unshackled from Europe, is allowed to evolve into the hermeneutics of the modern subject. Thus, the value of the Foucauldian frame and his axes of analysis becomes clear; Foucault’s discursive, genealogical history presents a critical frame for understanding history that is not limited by the Eurocentric bracketing of his own project.

The Foucauldian project and its three principal axes, once unshackled from Eurocentrism, can be manifested into studies with very different analytical foci such as modernity, gender, the roles of women, tradition, religion, and nationality to name a few critical constructions. Through this, the proliferation of Foucault’s invitation and its effects amass and refine a critical body of effective knowledge; but one that remains within discontinuity and discourse and does not claim the totalistic understandings or truth — which, in my view, typify the anonymous neoliberal enemy of post-modern academia — present within the transcendental truths of Kant, the economic theorizations of Marx, the psychoanalytics of Freud, and the empiricism of Lockean or Keynesian economic law. Foucault, his invitation, and his effects transcend, clarify, and make critically informative the Nietzsche-inspired nihilistic tendencies so clearly evident within his work.

Reflecting on this candidly, Foucault exclaimed that “I am a moralist inasmuch as I think one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence, that in which man’s freedom consists, is never to accept anything as definitive, sacrosanct, self-evident, or fixed.”39

39 Foucault, About the Beginnings of The Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College (1980), “Interview with Michel Foucault: 3 November 1980,” The University of Chicago Press (2016), 127.

Mothers Under Communism Soviet and Cuban Women’s Experiences with Childcare, 1959-1980s Claire Yujie Ji Tufts University - Class of 2023

“The Great October Revolution…raised the peasant woman to the honourable position of a free citizen equal in every respect, and now enslaved only… by still persisting family traditions and mores,” wrote Alexandra Kollontai, a notable Russian revolutionary and women’s advocate, in 1919.1 Forty-seven years later, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, another prominent figure in the history of socialism, remarked that women’s role had been historically reduced solely to reproduction, which, in turn, “enslaved [women] to a series of chores within the home.”2 Although situated in different historical periods and national contexts, both Kollontai and Castro agreed that family traditions and household responsibilities had “enslaved” women in their respective societies. Both also suggested that state-imposed socialist experimentation was crucial to liberating women from domestic oppression.

However, despite pushing for an appealing agenda of women’s emancipation, both Soviet and Cuban societies perpetuated traditional gender norms in their respective societies. How did this glaring contradiction occur? What did it reveal about the limitations of the Communist Party leadership in deploying gender as a central mechanism and resource in socialist state-building processes? Moreover, how did women react to state-directed gender policies? How did these responses inform their decision to advocate for a traditional notion of womanhood and motherhood both in line with and in opposition to top-down gender narratives?

1 Alexandra Kollontai, “On the History of the Movement of Women Workers in Russia,” trans. Sally Ryan and Chris Clayton, Marxists Internet Archive, last modified 2006, accessed August 23, 2022, https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1919/history.htm.

2 Fidel Castro, “The Revolution Within the Revolution,” speech presented at the Fifth National Plenary of the Federation of Cuban Women, Sandino Stadium, Santa Clara, Cuba, December 9, 1966, in Women and the Cuban Revolution: Speeches & documents by Fidel Castro, Vilma Espín & others, ed. Elizabeth Stone (New York, NY: Pathfinder Press, 1981), 52.

Focusing on childcare, traditionally a women’s area of concern, this paper critically engages with these research questions. Childcare was identified by Soviet and Cuban socialist leaders as a major factor contributing to women’s historically inferior societal position.3 These leaders saw childcare as a problem because the lack of childcare options outside the home could severely inhibit women’s social, economic, and political participation in the public sphere. Therefore, an indepth examination of women’s experience with childcare in state socialist structures can shed light on disparities between the rhetoric motivating state policies to realize women’s emancipation and women’s actual experience with these socialist practices. These disparities, in turn, provided critical conditions for women to demonstrate their agentic thinking and behaviors to engage with state narratives in a gendered realm.

Carefully engaging a wide range of primary and secondary sources, this paper argues that socialism created contradictions for women in the USSR and Cuba from 1959 to the 1980s. On one hand, socialist states claimed to emancipate women from gendered oppression and indeed allowed women to exert their economic, social, and political influence outside of the household. On the other hand, the central socialist leadership reproduced traditional gender norms by emphasizing a specific kind of “motherhood” that justified women’s suitability to engage in childcare in both the public and private spheres. Additionally, despite proposing legal frameworks that encouraged men’s equal participation in childcare, the actual institutional implementation of these empowering mechanisms often fell short and continued to impose a highly gendered reality where 3 Alexandra Kollontai, “Socialism and the Family,” trans. Alix Holt, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/socialism-family.htm; Castro, “The Revolution Within the Revolution,” speech, 50.

34 women shouldered the most labor-intensive childcare responsibilities.

This paper also posits that Soviet and Cuban women both identified with and against their states in the face of top-down gender discourses on childcare.

Ultimately, however, they too perpetuated traditional gender norms in their respective socialist societies.

Women’s agency unfolded in two nearly contradictory ways: (1) their advocacy for a self-empowering state-socialist notion of motherhood that also allowed them to retain their traditional maternal virtues; (2) their individual and collective efforts to resist the state-led radical disruption of traditional gender roles and gender spheres. Rather than defending the standard assumption that women, like other social groups, succumbed to the overpowering presence of socialist states, I argue that they actively engaged with top-down state politics on gender and family, which allowed them to explore and address their structural empowerment and disempowerment accordingly. An in-depth analysis of the interactive relationship of women and socialist states in debating and creating socialist gender narratives illuminates diverse expressions of agency, legitimacy, the self, and statehood that remain widely under-explored in the existing scholarship.

Comparatively studying the USSR and Cuba is important due both to their roles as notable socialist societies and to their substantial influence on the global, political and social development in the late 20th century. The USSR was history’s first socialist country and the role model for many others worldwide, while Cuba greatly inspired leftist movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, in part due to Cuba’s own history of centuries of colonial and imperial exploitation. From 1959 to the 1980s, the USSR and Cuba approached socialist development with radically different attitudes.

After decades of real-life experimentation with socialism, which was fraught with purges, deportations, and forced displacement, the USSR was nearing the end of its enthusiasm for ideological purity and preferred pragmatism and stability to radical changes. Cuba, as a much younger socialist state who had just won a legendary victory against the U.S.-backed Batista regime, was still propelled by a strong revolutionary fervor to build a socialist utopia. The two states’ recent historical trajectories played an important role in shaping their attitudes toward women, as well as women’s responses to these socialist practices.

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History of Childcare in the USSR and Cuba

The profound interest of socialist leaders in realizing gender equality traces its root to the original communist theories produced by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. According to Engels, capitalism precipitated the privatization of land and property, which prompted men to impose strict control over their wives’ bodies to avoid passing their wealth to illegitimate sons. Women thus became a form of private property because men were empowered to bind them to marriage contracts and penalize them for adultery.4 Men’s subjugation of women through capitalism was also manifested in their treatment of women as “mere instruments of production” whose most important function was to reproduce labor for the accumulation of capital.5 Therefore, Marx and Engels believed that socialism, with the primary goal of overthrowing material-based capitalism as a system of exploitation and injustice, would naturally free women from centuries of domestic oppression.

Echoing Marx’s and Engels’ call for women’s emancipation, in 1920, Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai vowed to free women from domestic oppression by encouraging them to join the productive labor force as well as social and political discourses.6 To relieve women from childcare responsibilities, Kollontai proposed that the socialist state would care for children in state-run childcare facilities. She believed that a robust nationwide childcare system would allow women to pursue economic independence and political participation without being bound to childcare responsibilities at home.7 However, the newly founded socialist state struggled to finance the complete transfer of childcare responsibilities from families to public institutions.8 Therefore, women still had to retain their traditional role as childcare providers. In addition to structural inadequacy, in the 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s industrial and military development agenda demanded women’s 4 Frederick Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” trans. Brian Baggins, Mark Harris, and Martin Swayne, Marxists Internet Archive, last modified 2021, accessed August 23, 2022, https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/.

5 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the socialist Party,” trans.

Brian Baggins and Andy Blunden, Marxists Internet Archive, last modified 2004, accessed August 23, 2022, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/socialist-manifesto/.

6 Kollontai, “Socialism and the Family,” Marxists Internet Archive.

7 Alexandra Kollontai, “The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Socialist Woman,” Marxists Internet Archive, last modified 2001, https://www.marxists. org/archive/kollonta/1926/autobiography.htm.

8 Susan Jacoby, Inside Soviet Schools (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1974), 31.

35 mass incorporation into the productive labor force, exacerbating women’s dual burden as workers and mothers.9 Moreover, as a result of the profound demographic shifts caused by World War II and the purges in which several million Soviet men were killed, Soviet households continued to overburden women with duties within and outside the family sphere.10 After Stalin’s demise, Nikita Khrushchev proposed to expand childcare services, but the problem of a nationwide lack of childcare facilities persisted in the post-Stalinist era.11 Besides the inadequate childcare system, Soviet women faced another dilemma: the unwillingness of their husbands to share childcare responsibilities even though state media claimed otherwise.12 As a difficult reality continued to overshadow revolutionary ideals, women struggled with the discrepancy between the state’s promise of improving the quality of their lives and the real-life experience of shouldering the dual burden of productive labor and childcare responsibilities.

In Cuba, Fidel Castro and Vilma Espín believed that the suffering of Cuban women was rooted in the dual effects of class exploitation and sexual oppression, both of which were exacerbated by the island’s historical memory of Spanish colonialism and capitalist development under the U.S.-backed Batista regime.13 Espín argued that the Cuban Revolution would liberate Cuban women from these multilayered forms of oppression by encouraging them to participate in social, economic, and political activities.14 Castro echoed Espín’s belief and cited the importance of building a solid material base so that a mass construction of staterun childcare facilities would eventually free women from being “enslaved” by childcare responsibilities.15 Based on these revolutionary ideals, the Cuban leadership set up the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) in 1960 to oversee the creation of state-run nurseries collectively called Children’s Circles. However, like the USSR, Cuba also faced the dilemma of a 9 Kristen Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 41.

10 Jacoby, Inside Soviet Schools, 33.

11 Ibid, 33-34.

12 Oleg Dmitriev and Leonid Pechnikov, “The Young Fathers Step Out,” Soviet Women, December 1968.

13 Vilma Espín, “The Early Years,” in Women and the Cuban Revolution: Speeches & documents by Fidel Castro, Vilma Espín & others, ed. Elizabeth Stone (New York, NY: Pathfinder Press, 1981), 36; Castro, “The Revolution Within the Revolution,” speech, 51.

14 Espín, “The Early Years,” 40.

15 Castro, “The Revolution Within the Revolution,” speech, 52-53.

Mothers Under Communism severe shortage of childcare facilities to meet all working mothers’ needs, thus forcing women to assume the double role of workers and mothers.16 A decade after the revolution, the Cuban leadership passed the Family Code of 1975, which legally bound all men and women to the obligation of sharing childcare responsibilities at home. However, due to insufficient enforcement mechanisms, the Code inadvertently victimized divorced mothers and mothers who were neither workers nor students. The disparity between the ideal and the reality complicated women’s perception of their overall experience with socialism.

The Notion of “Motherhood” in State-building Processes Motherhood in the Public Sphere

Even though socialist states such as the USSR and Cuba intended to function as surrogate parents by taking over many childcare responsibilities, the notion of “motherhood” was by no means eliminated from public discourses.17 State-run childcare facilities expected women to raise new generations of youth, who were of utmost importance for the future of these socialist societies. In the USSR, the making of the socialist “New Man” formed part of the statewide effort in the “political socialization” of Soviet citizens, which sought to instill in the youth basic socialist norms and values, such as “maintaining loyalty to the nation and observing behavioral patterns accepted by the [socialist] society and the culture.”18 In Cuba, the “New Man” was expected to contribute to the state’s collective well-being by upholding the revolutionary consciousness fundamentally rooted in the belief that their human will could triumph over socioeconomic hardship.19 Due to the importance of the “New Man” to both states’ political agendas, the USSR and Cuba strategically allured women to work at childcare facilities, providing the double-layered reasoning that they could contribute to critical socialist state-building processes and obtain their empowerment by participating in productive labor.

16 Lois M. Smith and Alfred Padula, Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), 133.

17 Zhidkova, “Family, Divorce, and Comrades’ Courts,” in And They Lived Happily Ever After: Norms and Everyday Practices of Family and Parenthood in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by Helene Carlback, Yulia Gradskova, and Zhanna Kravchenko. (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2012), 51.

18 Yinghong Cheng, Creating the New Man: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 26-27.

19 Ibid, 136-137.

36

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However, despite the official claim to free women from domestic care work, socialist leadership in both countries contradicted their own belief by designating childcare as women’s area of expertise and making public childcare work much less financially valued than other professions. Despite turning childcare into a public issue, state-sponsored childcare facilities continued to be overwhelmingly dominated by women. According to a list compiled in the USSR in 1970, 98% of daycare personnel in the country were women.20 Similarly, almost all childcare employees in Cuba were women.21 By staffing childcare facilities with female workers, women’s perceived function as the more nurturing sex remained unchanged. Even though socialist states set out to change women’s role in society, they ended up reinforcing standard gender norms. Additionally, by encouraging the enrollment of women in state-run childcare systems, the Soviet and Cuban leadership essentially converted traditionally unpaid domestic labor to paid productive labor. However, childcare workers were paid significantly lower wages than most professions. The salaries of childcare workers consistently dropped below 100 rubles a month compared to the average Soviet worker’s wage of more than 140 rubles a month.22 Salaries of daycare personnel in Cuba also remained low despite rising educational requirements for childcare workers over the years.23 Economically undervalued jobs in state-run childcare facilities showed that traditional women’s work, such as childcare, was still considered inferior to other jobs despite being converted to part of the paid productive labor.

Nonetheless, many female childcare workers continued to embrace motherhood in the public sphere despite their daily financial challenges. One explanation of the surprising disparity between the grim financial conditions of childcare workers and their extraordinary devotion to their work was their advocacy for a socialist moral compass. Clementina Serra, the Director of Children’s Circles, believed that the “fundamental job” of childcare workers was to produce the “New Man” who would be “healthy, physically and mentally well-formed,” and “capable of making the new society.”24 She remarked that raising young children in Children’s Circles and helping them develop these

favorable traits associated with the “New Man” was a “collective kind of happiness…much greater than the personal kind.”25 Therefore, even though childcare work was not economically valuable, it was considered socially significant for female childcare workers who actively adapted to state-sanctioned gender narratives surrounding public motherhood.

Similarly, an essential function of Soviet daycare centers was to develop citizens who would identify with the ideals of the state, such as equality and collectivism.26 Mrs. Chkheidze, the manager of a Soviet Georgian kindergarten, upheld these socialist principles by pointing out that childcare workers would dedicate love and attention to all children regardless of their family background. Children’s reactions to the presence of childcare workers attested to Mrs. Chkheidze’s words: their faces “lit up with pleasure and interest rather than nervousness” – a sign that most childcare employees did try their best to provide a pleasant environment for the children.27 The “pleasure” and “interest” displayed by these young children showed that they had developed affectionate bonds with their dedicated and loving teachers.

Therefore, it appears that these “mothers” of the “New Man” attempted to justify their low-paid jobs by citing the importance of their work in upholding socialist principles. However, the persistent failure to address the problem that childcare received little material recognition in the public sphere was an alarming sign that, from the viewpoint of the socialist state, traditional women’s work was still considered less valuable than traditional men’s work. By making women believe that their childcare efforts were morally important but economically unimportant, the socialist states reproduced the long-criticized capitalist narrative that reduces women to the singular function of a “mere instrument of production” whose uncompensated care work was cognitively naturalized over time.28 Despite the official claim to achieve gender equality by incorporating women into the productive labor force to cultivate the “New Man,” the gendered connotation attached to public childcare, which was recognized by both the socialist states and the women, became a significant structural barrier to challenging traditional gender norms in both the USSR and Cuba.

20 Hansson and Lidén, Moscow Women, 27.

21 Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 133.

22 Jacoby, Inside Soviet Schools, 58.

23 Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 133.

24 Randall, Cuban Women Now, 132-133.

25 Ibid, 124.

26 Jacoby, Inside Soviet Schools, 46.

27 Ibid, 50-52.

28 Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Socialist Party,” Marxists Internet Archive.

37

Motherhood in the Private Sphere

Besides advertising the importance of childcare in the public sphere, the USSR and Cuba also actively promoted motherhood in the private sphere by disproportionately emphasizing women’s role as childcare providers in the household. Meanwhile, Soviet and Cuban women echoed this state-directed gender narrative and proceeded to embrace domestic motherhood as a personal obligation and a source of empowerment.

Considering the importance to both countries of consistently producing the “New Man,” the Soviet and Cuban leadership each developed specific notions of domestic motherhood, which they expected mothers to adhere to. In the USSR, the state tried to promote “good” child-rearing tactics for women by berating them. In Soviet Women, a state-run magazine, an article titled “Good Habits Begin Early” went to great lengths to reprimand mothers for disrupting a child’s character formation by, for example, failing to develop the child’s risk-taking behaviors.29 Konstantin Likharyov, the father of a national figure-skating champion, sneered at mothers and grandmothers for “overdressing” their children in the winter, which he believed would inhibit children’s development of strong and healthy bodies.

“On such occasions,” Likharyov wrote, “I invariably feel inclined to ask the mothers and grandmothers of these youngsters why they themselves don’t dress in the same way, especially since they don’t jump and run about as children do.”30 The fact that a man was invited to discuss what “proper” child-rearing strategies should look like in a state-run magazine ironically reflected the gendered reality where men, who rarely participated in laborious childcare responsibilities, merely took women’s child-rearing efforts for granted.

In response to the state’s criticism, many Soviet women were determined to highlight their responsible motherhood at home. They believed that a capable mother had to be a socialist role model for her children. Liza, a Soviet Russian woman, remarked that a good socialist mother had to “suffer the sorrows of her people” to morally guide her children in a socialist society.31 Another Russian woman, Lyalya, pointed out that “the most important thing” a mother needed was to “orient her child in life.” To do so, the mother had to join the productive labor force to show her child the 29 Z. Istomina, “Good Habits Begin Early,” Soviet Women, January 1959, 19-20.

30 Konstantin Likharyov, “A Hint to Mothers and Grandmothers,” Soviet Women, January 1960, 27-28.

31 Hansson and Lidén, Moscow Women, 16.

Mothers Under Communism socialist merit of hard work.32 These Soviet women’s conception of responsible motherhood exposed the mutual influence that state propaganda and women’s perception of their role in socialism had on each other: the state’s instruction on the “right way” to raise children prompted women to embrace motherhood as a crucial responsibility in the state’s socialist development. In turn, women’s acknowledgment of their gendered role in childcare motivated the state to reinforce a traditional notion of domestic motherhood.

Like that of the USSR, the Cuban leadership also underscored the importance of motherhood in the household. However, unlike Soviet Women, Mujeres, Cuba’s state-run magazine, was more interested in delivering practical child-rearing knowledge to Cuban women than in dismissing them as incompetent mothers. For example, a column called “Mom Wants to Know” used brief passages to instruct women on how to cope with various childcare challenges. Its writers acknowledged how cumbersome childcare could be, thus making Cuban women feel that their childcare labor was seen and appreciated by the state. A short passage titled “Cut the Baby’s Nails” started with the following sentences: “What a big challenge for the new mom! The baby is restless, the little feet hidden and the delicate nails like rose petals represent a tremendous problem for the mom.”33 Recognizing that childcare tasks such as cutting babies’ nails could be a “big challenge” and a “tremendous problem” for mothers, the Cuban state appealed to women that the socialist leadership acknowledged their hardship and was willing to support them in difficult childcare situations.

The difference in the Soviet and Cuban states’ attitudes toward women can be explained by their reactions to recent historical memories: after experiencing decades of hardships and turmoil, Soviet leaders had little patience or enthusiasm in cultivating a mutually respectful relationship with women. Cuba, with its keen interest in maintaining “revolutionary consciousness” as the ideological foundation of the state, still ran on its revolutionary zeal to work toward the goal of achieving gender equality by proactively regarding mothers as important actors in the country’s state-building process.

Even though Cuban propaganda seemed less condescending than that of its Soviet counterpart in educating women on proper childcare, the impact of state propaganda on Cuban women’s perception of mother32 Ibid, 36.

33 “CORTAR LAS UÑITAS” [Cut the Baby’s Nails], Mujeres, August 1971, 37.

38 hood was no different from that of the Soviet state on Soviet women. Many Cuban women naturally included family responsibilities, such as childcare, in their definition of “work.”34 Especially with the continued absence of childcare facilities over the years, women began to see emancipation as returning to the domestic sphere so that they would no longer take on the double role of salaried workers and childcare providers.35 Notably, Cuban women embraced their domestic motherhood as a source “not of servitude but of power in the family, community, and nation.”36 These women were convinced that their willingness to stay at home was itself meaningful to the Cuban Revolution. Nevertheless, the power that Cuban women associated with domestic motherhood reinforced the gendered division of labor by designating domestic work such as childcare as women’s realm of expertise. Despite the official claim to free women from childcare responsibilities at home, the USSR and Cuba played an important role in creating a notion of domestic motherhood in which women were responsible for cultivating future citizens of socialism. Women in both countries also considered childcare to be essential to their definition of motherhood from which they drew pride and power. The socialist states’ gendered portrayal of women as primary childcare providers in the household and women’s willing acceptance of such arrangements perpetuated traditional gender norms in both countries.

Childcare Responsibilities under Legal Frameworks

While the USSR and Cuba highlighted the importance of motherhood in both the public and private spheres, socialist leaders in both countries never wholly dismissed critical discussions about men’s role in childcare. Since both states struggled to provide nationwide childcare due to perpetual economic difficulties, legal structures were developed to encourage men’s participation at home to relieve women’s childcare pressure. However, despite the passage of the Family Law of 1968, Soviet families reinforced traditional gender norms by designating men and women different childcare tasks in line with each sex’s perceived functions and capacities. In Cuba, the Family Code of 1975 failed to protect divorced mothers and mothers who were neither workers nor students. The consequences 34 Osmond, “Women Factory Workers in Contemporary Cuba,” 11.

35 Ibid, 15.

36 Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 140.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 of these critical flaws of the Code reproduced traditional gender norms that failed to be addressed by the Cuban leadership.

On June 27, 1968, the Soviet leadership passed the “Fundamental Principles of Legislation of the USSR and Union Republics on Marriage and the Family.”

In the legislation, Article 18 stressed the importance of men’s participation in childcare: “The father and mother shall have equal rights and duties with respect to their children.”37 With a specific reference to “the father” as a crucial figure in child-rearing efforts, the clause advocated an equal share of childcare responsibilities between men and women. In the same year the legislation was passed, Soviet Women, the state-run magazine, started highlighting fathers’ role in childcare. In a song titled “The Young Fathers Step Out,” the lyrics wrote, “On the boulevards, green branches gather, where underneath them each happy young father takes his round-faced young toddler in hand…all’s peace and quiet in our dwelling, and misfortune from people is banned, if in Daddy’s broad palm warmly nestling, lies a mischievous youngster’s small hand.”

The lyrics exalting fathers’ engagement in childcare were placed on the same page as a photograph in which two young fathers affectionately watched their babies in cradles.38 Despite the official efforts to promote men’s participation in childcare, the clauses failed to provide specific instructions on how childcare labor should be divided at home, thereby contributing to the creation of male and female domains in childcare based on the traditional understanding of each sex’s inherent traits.

One belief was that a father should be responsible for sharing his interests and knowledge with his children to prepare them for future engagement in socially meaningful productive work.39 The reason men were seen as a better fit for children’s personal and professional development was that, in Soviet Russian woman Sonya’s words, “women are always tired [from their dual burden as workers and family caregivers], but men have time to devote to learning, to developing.”40 Similarly noted by Olya, the female protagonist of Natasha Baranskaya’s renowned novel A Week Like Any 37 “FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF LEGISLATION OF THE USSR AND UNION REPUBLICS ON MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY,” in Soviet Legal System: Selected Contemporary Legislation and Documents, comp. William E. Butler (New York, NY: Oceana Publications, 1978), 456.

38 Dmitriev and Pechnikov, “The Young Fathers Step Out,” Soviet Women, December 1968.

39 Hansson and Lidén, Moscow Women, 36.

40 Ibid, 60.

39 Other, her husband Dima had the luxury to “drink his tea slowly and look at the papers” while she had to wash their children’s clothes after work.41 The expectation for women to take on the more laborious childcare tasks perpetuated the grim reality in which women had limited time and opportunities to pursue their personal development. This consequence of a gendered division of labor in childcare remained unchallenged due to women’s perception that their husbands were better equipped with the knowledge to prepare their children for personally and professionally enriched lives.

Another perceived function of men’s role in childcare was to display socially useful masculine traits. According to Soviet Russian woman Nadezhda Pavlovna, the family “would lose a great deal” if fathers assumed the “tender” and nurturing role of mothers. If fathers exhibited feminine traits such as “stroking the children’s hair,” then children would not learn masculine traits that were seen as beneficial in real life.42 The favorable masculine traits identified by the Soviet Russian woman Natasha included courage and risk-taking behaviors.43 Since masculinity was also synonymous with authority, fathers were expected to punitively discipline children rather than resort to the maternal function of “nurturing” and “indulging” them.44 By advocating for a profoundly traditional notion of masculinity as an essential aspect of men’s contribution to childcare, women staunchly defended the merits of accentuating traditional gender roles in Soviet households.

Compared to its socialist predecessor, Cuba stipulated more radical policies on gender equality in family relationships in its 1975 Family Code by specifying the necessity of men sharing housework and childcare responsibilities with their wives. In a section titled “Of the Rights and Duties Between Spouses,” Article 26 wrote, “both spouses are obligated to…cooperate with each other in the education, formation, and guidance of their children in line with the principles of the socialist moral.” Article 27 specified what this cooperation looked like: even if only one spouse contributed to family subsistence through domestic labor, the other was expected to provide full economic support “without being relieved of the duty of cooperating with housework and childcare.” Article 28 addressed 41 Natalya Baranskaya, “A Week Like Any Other,” trans. Pieta Monks, in A Week Like Any Other (Seattle, WA: The Seal Press, 1990), 24.

42 Hansson and Lidén, Moscow Women, 89.

43 Ibid, 167.

44 Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1980-1991 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 387.

Mothers Under Communism an important issue that the USSR failed to recognize by acknowledging that women’s double role as workers and mothers would prevent them from engaging in meaningful personal development. The clause stated, “both spouses have the right to exercise their professions or crafts…but in all cases, they will take care to organize their home life so that such activities be coordinated with the fulfillment of the obligations imposed by this Code.”45 Compared to the oversimplicity of the legal language in the USSR’s family legislation, Cuba’s Family Code delved into concrete details to outline specific expectations for fathers and mothers to coordinate with each other in childcare activities.

Under this legal structure, Cuba was ready to embark on a revolutionary journey to radically challenge traditional gender roles at home. After the passage of the Family Code in 1975, Mujeres, the state-run magazine, designed a new column called “Education of the Parents,” followed by an illustrated icon of a father, a mother, and a child.46 The column mainly instructed parents on coordinating their childcare responsibilities regardless of the nature of the task. The state propaganda noticeably impacted Cuban society: scholars found that Cuban men expressed “appropriate opinions” about undertaking childcare responsibilities at home.47 Margaret Randall once overheard a male neighbor who said, “I’ve always believed in helping my wife…I cook, clean, have taken care of our children and our grandchildren.”48 Randall also found it “impressive” that many fathers displayed rich knowledge and genuine interest in learning how to care for their children in state-run prenatal education sessions.49 Despite its visible merits, the Family Code’s most significant shortcoming was its lack of universal applicability to the very women it was supposed to protect. Clauses in “Of the Rights and Duties Between Spouses,” in fact, legally applied only to wives and mothers working or studying outside the household.50 Hence, women who did not have stable employment or were not pursuing a degree would not benefit from the Code and could risk being bound to their traditional role as childcare providers without their husbands’ support.

45 “LEY No. 1289 CÓDIGO DE LA FAMILIA” [Family Code - Law No. 1289], Observatorio de Igualdad de Género de América Latina y el Caribe, last modified February 14, 1975, accessed August 23, 2022, https://oig.cepal.org/sites/default/ files/1975_ley1289_cub.pdf.

46 “Educación de Padres” [Education of Parents], Mujeres, December 1975, 72.

47 Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 141.

48 Randall, Women in Cuba, 39-40.

49 Ibid, 73.

50 Ibid, 41.

40

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1

The Code also disadvantaged divorced women, despite legal mechanisms encouraging women to take their husbands to court for violations of the Code.51 Even if a woman successfully divorced her husband due to the latter’s failure to adhere to the Code, children were almost always left with the mother after the dissolution of a marriage. This perpetuated the divorced woman’s double role as a worker and as a mother as she was forced to work to support her children financially and carry out all childcare tasks all by herself, especially when the Code had yet to develop adequate mechanisms to ensure financial childcare support from the father.52 Due to their limited ability to provide nationwide childcare, both states developed legal frameworks to employ the participation of men in domestic work such as childcare. However, the real-life implementation of these legislations reproduced traditional gender norms in both states. In the USSR, many families took up different aspects of childcare in line with a gendered interpretation of each sex’s perceived functions, which reinforced a traditional understanding of male and female virtues. Although Cuba developed more specific and radical legislation than its Soviet counterpart, the law disadvantaged non-working mothers, non-student mothers, and divorced mothers who were not entitled to the benefits outlined by the Code, thereby perpetuating traditional gender norms in these families. Meanwhile, it is worth highlighting that both the USSR and Cuba turned to men’s roles in households only when it became clear that the official childcare systems outside the home were not fully adequate. Women’s consistent lack of childcare support, coupled with the fragility of family legislation, reveal the socialist states’ limited capacities to translate their political agendas on women’s empowerment into successful implementation of social and legal mechanisms dedicated to gender equality. In response to having to continue performing laborious childcare work under the supposedly revolutionary legal frameworks, women often acquiesced to the status quo and embraced the sustenance of traditional gender roles in society.

Women’s Resistance to State Narratives

While Soviet and Cuban women frequently advo-

51 Ibid, 40.

52 Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 161.

cated for state-imposed gender narratives on childcare, their conventional understanding of womanhood and motherhood also conflicted with the socialist states’ gender campaigns in two major ways: the prioritization of domestic care work over productive labor and women’s unwillingness to incorporate men into childcare responsibilities.

First, despite their inherent ethnic differences, many Soviet women yearned to preserve their femininity by resisting the state’s encouragement of women to take on traditionally male jobs outside the household. Aina, a Soviet Latvian woman, complained that the Soviet system “took femininity away from her” and made women behave like “half-men” by engaging in productive labor.53 Maija, another Soviet Latvian woman, added, “In the future…women should not be like me, maybe not so masculine as I am…Our women have always done men’s work, even in ‘normal’ average families.”54 Ekaterina Mironova, a Soviet Russian political dissident, also sneered at the idea of women engaging in productive labor and remarked that “the society in which women must develop mountains of muscles to prove themselves seems ridiculous.”55 By associating masculinity with productive labor outside the household, these women advocated a traditional division of labor between the sexes. They felt uncomfortable about traditional femininity being challenged

by Soviet socialism that demanded them to join the male domain of the productive labor force. Therefore, in their opinion, only through the restoration of the traditional gender role in which fathers were the breadwinners and mothers were the domestic care providers could a harmonious balance between the sexes be re-established.

Scholars observed similar sentiments among ordinary women in Cuba: domestic work and childcare frequently took precedence if women had to choose between jobs and family care.56 Although many Cuban women proudly embraced paid employment as a source of strength and empowerment, their primary motivation to participate in the labor force was “family betterment” because they grounded their feminine virtues in their traditional role as family caregivers.57 With the continued shortage of childcare facilities in the 53 Maija Runcis, “The Latvian Family Experience with Sovietization,” in And They Lived Happily Ever After, 137.

54 Ibid.

55 Mironova, “About the New Americans,” 128.

56 Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 142-143.

57 Randall, Cuban Women Now, 46-47; Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 143.

41 country, many Cuban women preferred staying home to attend to their husbands’ and children’s needs rather than participating in the public labor force. Therefore, despite the official efforts to emancipate women from the domestic sphere, many still considered their identity as women to be fundamentally rooted in the household, especially during times of structural failures and economic difficulties. Like their Soviet counterparts, many Cuban women believed that taking up their traditional feminine role of caregivers would restore domestic and social stability, which was perceived to be tipped up by socialist experiments in the country.

Soviet and Cuban women’s resistance to the state socialist notion of womanhood and motherhood was a logical consequence of their struggles to adapt to radical socialist practices in societies where traditional gender norms had been deeply ingrained for centuries.

Compounded by the harsh reality in which they were perpetually exhausted from carrying out both productive and domestic labor, many women preferred returning to the household to be relieved of such burdens and find comfort in their perceived sphere of influence.

Women’s resistance to radical gender policies, therefore, constituted part of the broader form of political opposition to the extensive intervention of socialist states in all aspects of social life.

Women also demonstrated their agency in associating domestic labor with femininity by assigning men negative characteristics that deemed them unfit for childcare, despite legal mechanisms encouraging men to participate in this care work. In the USSR, women most commonly associated alcoholism with men.

When asked about her husband’s role in family life, Maija complained, “My husband was like this…he didn’t like to work, but he liked to drink.”58 Liza added, “Here there are very few responsible fathers; they all drink too much. A woman can’t really leave a child in the care of a man on whom she can’t depend and who may start drinking.”59 Soviet women’s consistent portrayal of fathers as irresponsible alcoholics prompted them to embrace their traditional role as primary childcare providers out of fear that these fathers would harm their children’s upbringing. Women’s determination to guard their power in the private sphere, combined with a lack of options for “male self-realization” due to the paternalistic presence of the Soviet state in family matters, ultimately excluded men from household respon58 Runcis, “The Latvian Family Experience with Sovietization,” 135.

59 Hansson and Lidén, Moscow Women, 14.

Mothers Under Communism sibilities such as childcare.60 Cuban women frequently associated men with irresponsibility and idleness. Many women were worried that the Family Code of 1975 might exacerbate their burden in the private sphere because they saw men as “essentially lazy and unreliable” who would not get childcare work done.61 When debating whether fathers should participate in daycare activities or care for sick children, female delegates at the 1985 FMC congress objected to the proposal, citing the concern that men might use this extra time to avoid work or for “womanizing.”62 The deep-rooted image of an irresponsible and idle father contributed to the practical difficulty of the Family Code by making Cuban women less willing to share childcare affairs with men, whom they believed could have a disturbing influence on children’s upbringing. This, in turn, reinforced women’s traditional role in childcare and perpetuated the conventional belief that childcare should essentially be women’s realm of concern. In both Soviet and Cuban cases, women demonstrated their agency against the state socialist beliefs in the transformative re-making of humans by displaying the firm conviction that men could not change their undesirable behaviors to support childcare work.

Soviet and Cuban women, despite being the targets of gender equality socialist principles, played an important role in the reproduction of traditional gender norms in childcare by resisting top-down state agendas of incorporating women into the productive force and stipulating that men participated in childcare. These socialist women highlighted their agency by offering alternative interpretations of womanhood and motherhood that challenged the hegemonic state discourse.

Conclusion

During a turbulent time in human history, socialism appealed to many people around the world as a solution to institutionalized discrimination and exploitation encapsulated in various forms of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. As a historically marginalized group in many societies, women became an important target that the socialist leadership claimed to empower under their rule. To relieve women from childcare responsibilities, which were considered a major form of oppression toward women, the USSR 60 Zhidkova, “Family, Divorce, and Comrades’ Courts,” 58; Runcis, “The Latvian Family Experience with Sovietization,” 123.

61 Smith and Padula, Sex and Revolution, 141.

62 Ibid, 134-135.

42 and Cuba promised women that they would build staterun childcare facilities so that the latter would be free from their traditional role as childcare providers. The socialist leadership in both countries also encouraged men’s participation in childcare to offset the impact of a severe shortage of childcare facilities and further the goal of gender equality.

This paper explored how state policies and gender discourses around childcare shaped women’s lives in the USSR and Cuba. Examining various primary and secondary sources revealed profound contradictions between the socialist states’ conception of women’s emancipation and women’s real-life experiences with state goals. The socialist states’ forceful attempts to eradicate traditional gender norms paradoxically resulted in the continuing adherence to these values, the perpetuation of which also conditioned the failure of the Communist Party leadership to achieve true gender equality. The disparity between the ideal and the reality revealed that many social and political actors in socialist societies not only sustained but also actively reproduced traditional gender norms.

First, the fact that public childcare jobs were disproportionately dominated by women and were extremely underpaid indicates that socialist leadership in the USSR and Cuba continued to regard childcare as economically undervalued “women’s work.” The socialist states also contradicted their goal of challenging traditional gender norms by encouraging women to embrace domestic motherhood. Additionally, the Soviet and Cuban states created family laws that promoted men’s input in childcare responsibilities but inadvertently contributed to the reproduction of traditional gender norms in both countries: in the USSR, the vagueness of the Family Law of 1968 prompted couples to divide childcare duties based on a gendered understanding of each parent’s perceived child-rearing capacities. In Cuba, the lack of universal applicability of the Family Code of 1975 forced Cuban women who were not protected by the Code to resume their traditional role as primary childcare providers in the household.

Despite facing critical challenges created by these top-down gender campaigns, many Soviet and Cuban women embraced state-sanctioned socialist motherhood and womanhood. At the same time, they also identified against the socialist states’ initiatives by proclaiming a traditional understanding of femininity rooted in domestic labor and designating negative characteristics to men that made them appear unfit for

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 childcare. Women’s agentic thinking and behaviors, therefore, were encapsulated in this paradoxical pattern in which they simultaneously identified with and against the socialist states in their own contention over what constituted socialist women and mothers. A comparative analysis allows us to see how similar forms of historical agency in the gender dimension were constructed and manifested in different national contexts and to problematize the powers and vulnerabilities of states in instituting a hegemonic gender discourse under distinct conditions.

An Ode to the Lost Cause in Bronze The Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery Sumiko Newman Hamilton College - Class of 2024

Before the burials of thousands of fallen American soldiers and American politicians including President John F. Kennedy and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bater Ginsberg sanctified its grounds, the land of Arlington National Cemetery belonged to the Custis family. In 1857, George Washington Custis, adopted son of President George Washington and the owner of the Arlington estate, died and named his son-in-law Robert E. Lee as the executor of the land.1 At the time, the house on the property existed as a shrine to George Washington and the attached plantation as a showcase of idealized white southern living. The estate did not remain in the hands of the Lees for long. Before the Civil War ended, the Union Army occupied the land and ultimately the United States government purchased the estate.2 This purchase occurred as a result of the Act for the Collection of Taxes in the Insurrectionary Districts enacted by Congress in 1862. This legislation imposed a property tax on all land in “insurrectionary” areas of the country that had to be paid in person by the legal owner of the property. Following failure to pay taxes due to health reasons, the United States government purchased the estate by President Abraham Lincoln’s order on January 11, 1864, giving it title to the land and structures on it.3 Thus the Virginian estate was not originally conceived as a commemorative landscape. Instead, the U.S. Army began burying Union soldiers on the grounds of Arlington out of necessity. In May of 1864, the surrounding cemeteries reached near capacity and Arlington became an essential burial site for the lives lost during the Civil War. The cemetery held mostly

Union graves, yet there existed some Confederate burials that were notably marked as the resting place of “rebel” soldiers.4 Arlington National Cemetery is an example of the increasingly popular decision to move cemeteries from churches and the center of cities to suburban parks that began in the nineteenth century.5 Throughout its many sections of buried soldiers, Arlington holds dozens of monuments and memorials.

Unlike the graves organized in rows that populated most sections, concentric rings of graves fill Section 16. At the center of these rings of 482 Confederate graves stands a thirty-two foot monument, a historical embodiment of the racism and white supremist sentiments that galvanized the Confederacy over a century ago, and recently found a new voice at the “Unite the Right” rally. Despite the monument’s unapologetic pro-slavery and pro-Confederate ideology, it has garnered limited attention from the American public in the century prior to the rally and subsequent National Defense Authorization Act of 2021. This low profile may seem surprising considering its message, however, one must note the location of the monument. The bodies of dead U.S. soldiers hallowed the grounds, granting the monument an air of invulnerability. Even as other physical tributes to the Confederacy became arenas of political unrest in recent years, the sanctity of the cemetery somewhat exempted the Arlington Memorial from protest or desecration.

The introduction of Confederate dead to the Arlington cemetery began after the bloodshed of the Spanish-American War, a conflict which inspired national unity and pride. Just two weeks after the conclusion of the conflict on December 14, 1898, Pres-

1 Micki McElya, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 20.

2 Ibid, 29.

3 Ibid, 38-39.

4 Ibid, 110.

5 Peter Gardella, American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 193 https://search.ebscohost.com/login. aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=664237&site=ehost-live&scope=site

44 ident William McKinley visited the chambers of the Georgia House of Representatives for a “Peace Jubilee.”6 In his celebration speech, McKinley touted a new era for the nation, asserting that “sectional lines no longer mark the map of the United States.” As a sign of this progress, the President announced that “in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers.”7 This announcement from the Commander-in-Chief legitimized this cause and inspired Confederate advocacy groups around the country to seek a new, worthy home for their dead. Years later, at the laying of the Confederate Monument at Arlington, Colonel Hailey Herbert claimed that these celebrations marked “not only peace with Spain, but signified everlasting peace between the North and South.”8 On June 5, 1899, the United Confederate Veterans (U.C.V.) petitioned President McKinley to officially support the removal of Confederate bodies scattered in graves in the Washington D.C. area and rebury them in a designated, isolated section of Arlington National Cemetery. The members of the U.C.V. expressed that they found it offensive that their soldiers were mixed in with Union dead and “negro combatants.” The President endorsed the plan and a year later Congress appropriated $2,500 for the removals of the Confederate soldiers and their reburial to Arlington.9 Although the U.C.V. supported this plan, Confederate women’s organizations, notably the United Daughters of the Confederacy (U.D.C.), originally opposed the decision, as they viewed Arlington as thoroughly federalized land of the Union. They understood the plan as an interference with their work in caring for, building monuments to, and bringing Confederate soldiers to their home states.10 Notwithstanding this opposition, the government went through with the plan.

In 1903, the first Confederate Memorial Day ceremony was held in the newly designated confederate section, 16. Members of various Confederate groups gathered at the plot of land in a celebration of the grand message of “peace for the living and honor to the dead” for

6 Ibid, 197.

7 “The President in Atlanta,” The New York Times, December 15, 1898, https:// timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1898/12/15/102529433.html?pageNumber=1 8 Hilary A. Herbert, “History of the Arlington Confederate Monument” (Washington, D.C: B.S. Adams, 1914), 30.

9 McElya, The Politics of Mourning, 151.

10 Ibid, 152-153.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 all southerners, past and present.11 There would have been no confusion over which dead they came to commemorate; the marble Confederate gravestones had a distinct design from their Union counterparts, with a pointed top rather than a round one.12 As a gesture of support, President Theodore Roosevelt sent a floral arrangement to decorate the graves, beginning the annual tradition of presidential recognition of the Confederate dead through sending a wreath to Section 16.13 President Roosevelt’s gesture and the plot of land still did not satiate the Confederate groups, so the focus of these organizations soon turned to the bare mound of dirt at the center of the sections concentric rings of graves. Southern organizations began competing to fill that space with a grand monument to the surrounded Confederate dead. These advocates understood this project as a monument to the Lost Cause narrative, with their contributions as “seven years of patriotic toil.”14 The Lost Cause is an “American legend,” created “to foster a heroic image of secession and the war so that the Confederates would have salvaged at least their honor from the all encompassing defeat.”15 The U.D.C., which had become the leading Lost Cause organization, would eventually succeed in this endeavor and those in the organization who had originally campaigned against the creation of Section 16 would abandon their oppositional stance.16 Mrs. Magnus Thompson, the then-president of the Washington D.C. Division of the U.D.C. and wife of a Confederate veteran, took it upon herself to request permission from Secretary of War William H. Taft to erect a monument in the cemetery on March 4th, 1906. He approved of this request, but gave supervisal authority to the War Department of both the structure and inscription.17 In November of that year, Mrs. Thompson called a meeting of Confederate organizations in D.C., which resulted in the formation of the Arlington Confederate Monument Association (A.M.C.A.) consisting of local Daughters and notable 11 Karen L. Cox, “The Confederate Monument at Arlington” in Monuments To The Lost Cause: Women, Art, And The Landscapes Of Southern Memory (Knoxville: University Tennessee Press, 2003), 154.

12 Michelle A. Krowl, “‘In the Spirit of Fraternity’: The United States Government and the Burial of Confederate Dead at Arlington National Cemetery, 18641914,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 111, no. 2 (2003): 166, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4250101.

13 McElya, The Politics of Mourning, 159.

14 Herbert, “History of the Arlington Confederate Monument,” 65.

15 Alan Nolan, “The Anatomy of a Myth” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 14.

16 Herbert, “History of the Arlington Confederate Monument,” 8.

17 Ibid, 9.

45

An Ode to the Lost Cause in Bronze

veterans.18 The U.D.C. also agreed to donate $500 to jumpstart the project. As a result of her passion for the project and years of advocacy, Mrs. Thompson herself was buried at the base of the monument years later.

Immediately after their formation, the A.M.C.A., began a fundraising campaign, in which they appealed to readers’ sympathy for and pride in the South. As reported in a November 19, 1906 Washington Post article, the Association made an appeal to all Confederate organizations to “contribute in sums of $10 to $30 to this patriotic work.”19 In their plea they explained that visitors of Arlington Cemetery “will find monuments almost innumerable to the Union dead,” but when they come to the Confederate section “they will see a mound in the center— how long will they find that mound vacant?”20 Even with these emotional solicitation efforts, the group raised only a little more than one thousand dollars in the first year. President-General Lizzie George Henderson of the U.D.C. observed this slow progress and in June of 1907 appeared before the A.M.C.A. leadership in Washington to propose a plan, suggesting that the Association should and the upcoming U.D.C. Convention and ask the Daughters to take over the work of erecting the monument.21 Colonel Hilary A. Herbert, a United Confederate Veterans (U.C.V.) member and acting Chairman of the A.M.C.A.’s Executive Committee, explained that the Association recognized “the magnitude and real import of the great task they had undertaken grew upon them” and believed “there was wisdom in Mrs. Henderson’s suggestion.”22 At the next assembly of the U.D.C., Colonel Herbert sought the Daughters’ aid in the monument’s completion and suggested they take over the scheme “without restriction.”23 He recommended that delegates from the U.D.C. chapters in Washington manage the project and that an advisory board of men would provide financial guidance when needed. The Daughters unanimously agreed to this plan, giving them full responsibility for the monument. The A.M.C.A. under-

went a radical reconstruction, including a restructuring of leadership. This group of women were recognized as a “fund-raising powerhouse,” granting them control over great sums of money and creative license to a statue being reported on throughout the nation.24 The undertaking was a major step in the perpetuation of a tradition of monument building begun by Ladies’ Memorial Associations that emerged immediately after the war, ushering southern women out of the domestic sphere and into the public sphere through activism.25 While the U.D.C. was well-equipped for the job, the Arlington project still posed a great challenge to the Daughters. Local monuments, generally of individual Confederate soldiers, ranged in cost from $1,000 to $4,000 for the U.D.C. to erect. In comparison, the Arlington monument required approximately $64,000 to complete.26 The U.D.C. met this amount through impressive individual donations and creative public funding efforts. In July 1907, The Washington Post reported that Thomas F. Ryan, a business tycoon from New York, donated $10,000 to the monument’s fund.

He applauded the project and his contribution tripled the amount collected by the A.M.C.A. at this point.27 The Daughters also employed commercial ventures to assist in their fundraising by endorsing the production of items and then collecting a share of the profits when sold. For example, in 1910, a member from Florence, Alabama, created and copyrighted a design for Confederate Christmas seals. Although it remains unclear how many of them were actually bought, the U.D.C. printed several million to be sold for the monument’s fund.28 Chapters also implemented ‘penny collections’ within their state’s schools, instructing students and teachers and students to bring in pennies on specific days to be contributed to the Arlington memorial fund.

In 1909, the North Carolina State Director sent $346 in pennies to the treasurer of the A.M.C.A.29 The Daughters were determined to raise sufficient funds for the Arlington monument as it served as a public symbol of the white South’s devotion to their

18 Karen L. Cox, “The Monument Builders” in Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019), 53, https://search.ebscohost. com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=174279&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

19 “Funds Needed for Shaft: Confederate Memorial Association Makes Appeal for Money,” The Washington Post, Nov 19, 1906, https://www.proquest.com/ historical-newspapers/funds-needed-shaft/docview/144659413/se-2?accountid=11264.

20 Ibid.

21 Herbert, “History of the Arlington Confederate Monument,” 9.

22 Ibid, 11.

23 Ibid, 12.

24 Cox, “The Confederate Monument at Arlington” in Monuments To The Lost Cause, 151.

25 Cox, “The Monument Builders” in Dixie’s Daughters, 49.

26 Ibid, 56.

27 “Ryan Contributes $10,000: Millionaire Aids Project to Honor Confederate Dead,” The Washington Post, July 26, 1907, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/ryan-contributes-10-000/docview/144761484/se-2?accountid=11264.

28 Cox, “The Monument Builders” in Dixie’s Daughters, 58-59.

29 United Daughters of the Confederacy, Minutes of the Tenth Annual Convention of the Daughters of the Confederacy, North Carolina Division (Raleigh, N.C.: Capital Printing Co., 1906), 26, 78, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=nc01.ark:/13960/t2b863d60&view=1up&seq=670&skin=2021&q1=penny

46 veterans and the ideals of the Lost Cause. The placement of the monument on federal grounds functioned as a sign that the principles of white southerners should be accepted by the rest of the nation.30 Colonel Hilary Herbert proudly noted that during the first year of the U.D.C.’s campaign, the survivors of the Twenty-Third New Jersey Regiment made a donation to the fund— an indication of “brotherly love” between the veterans of both sides.31 U.D.C. chapters throughout the South placed immense importance on the endeavor as part of the process of reconciliation with the North. At North Carolina’s 12th Annual Conference, the Division President proclaimed that by erecting the monument “nothing can do more in the future to disabuse the minds of the people of that false idea that we were ‘rebels’ and traitors.”32 The U.D.C. and their counterparts strove not to compromise with the North, but to have their Southern values and mythical history accepted as patriotic.

In November of 1910, the Daughters signed a contract with the well-known sculptor Sir Moses Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran from Richmond, Virginia. He fought for the Confederacy at the Battle of New Market in 1864, making the Arlington Memorial a personal endeavor.33 Ezekiel never actively sought out the U.D.C., however, when he was summoned by the group, he already had a design in mind for the monument that followed the theme of “peace for the living and honor to the dead.”34 His allegorical tribute to the Confederacy doubled as a personal symbol of camaraderie with his fallen fellow soldiers. At the unveiling of the cornerstone, the U.D.C. hosted a ceremony during which the drama and attendance of the event displayed the continued enthusiasm felt by politicians and Confederate activists alike years since the project’s inception. On the afternoon of November 12, 1912, spectators and honored guests headed to Section 16 for a series of celebratory speeches and musical performances. The plot of land was decorated with an abundance of flowers, as well as with alternating Federal and Confederate flags.35 Among other well-known 30 Cox, “The Monument Builders” in Dixie’s Daughters, 50.

31 Cox, “The Confederate Monument at Arlington” in Monuments To The Lost Cause, 152.

32 United Daughters of the Confederacy, Minutes of the Twelfth Annual Convention of the Daughters of the Confederacy, North Carolina Division (Raleigh, N.C.: Capital Printing Co., 1909), 16.

33 Peter Adam Nash, The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor, Arcadian Knight (New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 24.

34 Herbert, “History of the Arlington Confederate Monument,” 15.

35 Ibid, 27.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 Southern characters, Mary Custis Lee, the daughter of General Lee, had the honor of laying the cornerstone.

The decision to include her in this honor was most likely an ode to the history of the land. Robert E. Lee had served as the executor rather than owner of the land, however, these details had lost their significance.36 The proponents of the Lost Cause understood the graves and monument as standing on Lee’s land, and thus fundamentally on their land.37 As the last speaker, Colonel William Jennings Bryan, a Democratic politician, declared to the crowd: “in this throbbing heart of the nation’s political life the monument whose corner-stone we lay today will stand as a visible proof of the harmony and concord that make our nation one.”38 The advocates of the monument viewed the sacred plot of land in the nation’s capital as integral to the South’s past, and the North’s acceptance of the monument as a sign that they approved of their claim to this narrative.

In the evening after the ceremony in the cemetery, the guests gathered in Continental Hall for a reception. The reception recognized the efforts of the U.D.C. and to gather in anticipation and excitement for the soon-to-be-built monument. Colonel Herbert, the Master of Ceremonies, told the crowd “it was the mother instinct, the love of the living and the desire to care for them, as much as the wish to perpetuate the memory of the dead, that brought together the Daughters of the Confederacy.”39 He wished to draw parallels between the devotion of the U.D.C. and the Daughters of the American Revolution, who hosted this reception.

By referring to their “mother instinct,” Herbert insinuated that the monument was a natural manifestation of their love for the South, similar to the Daughters of the American Revolution’s enthusiasm for the nation’s founding. Rather than framing the monument as a political or sectarian statement, Herbert and the other speechmakers flaunted it as an inevitable product of nationalistic affection.

With this focus on the role of Southern women in the maintenance of the Lost Cause and its monuments, it was appropriate that the Confederate Memorial featured a grand female figure. The monument stands at 32 feet high, with the top third displaying a southward facing woman dressed in classical attire.

She holds a laurel wreath in her left hand to offer to the Confederate dead buried below her. In her right 36 McElya, The Politics of Mourning, 20.

37 Ibid, 167.

38 Herbert, “History of the Arlington Confederate Monument,” 36.

39 Ibid, 24.

47 hand is a pruning hook and at her feet is a plow, together serving as a literal representation of the biblical inscription written beneath her.40 The biblical quotation comes from the prophet Isaiah: “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” This implied that the southern people, honorable even in defeat, are ready and willing to lay down their weapons and turn to peaceful endeavors.

This idea is furthered by Colonel Herbert’s explanation that the classical female figure represented the South in a moment after she “survived her struggle for constitutional rights” and now “returns to the pursuits of peace.”41 This woman personified an idealized reading of Southern principles during the Civil War, and the U.D.C. epitomized a living continuation of this role.

Directly below the classical woman is a plinth embossed with four cinerary urns, each symbolizing a year of the war. Immediately below this is a frieze of shields bearing the coats of arms for each Confederate state and Maryland, which Ezekiel included because of the resources the state provided to the South during the conflict.42 The monument makers characterized Kentucky and Missouri as part of the Confederacy, even though they were technically border states during the war. The inclusion of these border states revealed the assumptious understanding of the Confederate advocates that being included in their faction was a privilege to be memorialized.

A frieze of over thirty life-size figures wraps around the middle section of the monument. Although the monument is situated at the center of hundreds of graves, its purpose was to transcend the dead and stand as a “history in bronze,” portraying “the South as she was in 1861-1865.”43 At the front of the frieze directly below the figure of the South, one sees a depiction of Athena, the Greek goddess of war. Several spirits of war are carved behind the goddess, sounding their trumpets in a call to southerners to aid their suffering mother. The surrounding figures of the frieze are the individuals who answered this call to defense.44 In addition to the depiction at the top of the structure, a smaller female personification of the South bends to the ground, only gaining support by the grasp of Athena. She is twisted downward with her breast exposed, 40 McElya, The Politics of Mourning, 168.

41 Herbert, “History of the Arlington Confederate Monument,” 75.

42 Cox, “The Confederate Monument at Arlington” in Monuments To The Lost Cause, 154.

43 Herbert, “History of the Arlington Confederate Monument,” 76.

44 Cox, “The Confederate Monument at Arlington” in Monuments To The Lost Cause, 154.

An Ode to the Lost Cause in Bronze while holding onto a shield labeled ‘The Constitution.’

The figure’s positioning and her exposed skin told the viewer that during the years of the war, the South persisted, regardless of her vulnerability. Ezekiel also embraced the Lost Cause trope of the boundless sacrifices made by southern families. The monument depicts a scene of a clergyman and his wife bidding goodbye to their son as he departs to join the fighting, issuing a subtle reference to the perceived piety of the Confederate cause. Alongside this is a scene of a young woman tying a sash around her husband turned soldier.45 This symbol of female sacrifice in the name of the South can be understood as a parallel to the sacrifices of time and money made by the U.D.C. women in order to erect the monument itself.

The frieze contains two Black figures that both presented propagandic messages of racial harmony under slavery. A young Black man, wearing a kepi, marches in the back of a group of white soldiers. The others are armed, but notably the Black man carries no visible weapon. His inclusion served to prove Black support of the Confederacy, but excluding a weapon would soothe fears of Black male aggression. One can also see an enslaved woman with a young child pulling at her dress receiving a baby from a soldier as he presumably leaves to fight. Ezekiel depicted her as a “mammy,” a character of a “de-sexed, overweight, dowdy, dark Black woman” that held a dominant role in antebellum culture and beyond.46 These scenes are quintessential examples of the “faithful slave” image that served as an effort to rationalize the inhumane system of labor and consequentially held a prominent status within the Confederate myth.47 In addition to the Bible quote discussed above, several other inscriptions cover the monument. On the southward side reads “To Our Dead Heroes by The United Daughters of the Confederacy.” This front-facing inscription publicized the Daughter’s central role in the creation of the monument and overall maintenance of Confederate memory. Directly below this dedication is the latin phrase “victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton,” or “the victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato.”48 This quote comes 45 Herbert, “History of the Arlington Confederate Monument,” 77.

46 Charles Reagan Wilson, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Myth, Manners, and Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) 4: 243.

47 Nolan, “The Anatomy of a Myth,” 16.

48 “Confederate Memorial,” Arlington National Cemetery, accessed April 1, 2022, https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Explore/Monuments-and-Memorials/ Confederate-Memorial

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from the epic poem Pharsalia, written by Lucan about the Roman Civil War. When read within the context of the poem, author Jamie Malanowski explained that the excerpt is a “sneaky little Latin phrase essentially saying ‘we were right and you were wrong, and we’ll always be right and you’ll always be wrong.”49 It rendered the South’s secession as a noble cause and added to the classical influences seen on the upper sections of the structure. Seen on the northward side of the base is “not for fame, not for place or for rank, not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity; but in simple obedience to duty as they understood it these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all- and died.” This description of a Confederate soldier who heroically sacrificed his life for a noble purpose is a central theme of the Lost Cause.50 They served not as traitors to the U.S., instead as devotees to a higher purpose. By evoking the idea of death within a space honoring the fallen, the monument makers fortified the Lost Cause narrative using the untouchable nature of sacred ground.

Less than two years after the laying of the cornerstone, the A.M.C.A. and U.D.C. were ready to unveil the completed monument.. As reported on by The Washington Post prior to the event, the suggestions of national unity faced a brief threat. President Woodrow Wilson declined an invitation to the Grand Army of the Republic’s (G.A.R.), an organization of Union Army veterans, memorial exercises at Arlington, after he had accepted the invitation to the Confederate Monument unveiling. In response to this semblance of favoritism towards the Confederates, there were fears that the G.A.R. would not attend the Arlington festivities.

However, the President alleviated the concern by attending the G.A.R.’s Memorial Day observances, and thus assuring the unveiling would be “in the presence and with the help of the soldiers who fought in the ranks of the Blue.”51 A few days after these dramatics on the afternoon of June 4, 1914, a reported crowd of over 4,000 spectators attended the unveiling ceremony held at the base of the monument in Arlington National Cemetery.52 As the crowd filled Section 16, the Fifth Cavalry

Band played both “Star-Spangled Banner” and “Dixie.”

About 450 U.S. Senate and House members, as well as Veterans from both Union and Confederate armies attended.53 The Washington Post described this bipartisan showing as “the enemies of ‘61 [pledging] the full measure of friendship which 1914 has brought.”54 The featured speakers of the ceremony included: General Washington Gardner, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic; General Bennett Young, the Commander-in-Chief of the U.C.V.; and Colonel Robert E. Lee, grandson of the Confederate General.

In his address, General Bennett proclaimed to the spectators, “true patriotism does not require that either the North or South should give up its ideals. Are they not stronger and better for each maintaining its devotion to the history and achievements of those who fought?”55 The sentiment of his speech and the several others on this day revealed the Confederate groups’ efforts to design the ceremony and the monument to set forth their Lost Cause narrative as equally legitimate as the North’s narrative of American history.

After a series of speeches with similar messages of Southern pride and sectional reconciliation, the eleven year old grandson of Colonel Herbert pulled the cord to remove the Confederate and American flags draped around the monument in a grand reveal.56 At every opening event of the U.D.C. monuments, a young child was chosen to unveil the structure, as the Daughters envisioned each project as a symbolic endeavor to connect past generations with future generations of Southerns. Mississippian Daisy McLaurin Stevens, the President-General of the U.D.C. at the time, then approached the speaker stand to usher in the concluding section of the ceremony. After thanking the other Daughters and Moses Ezekiel, she presented the monument to President Woodrow Wilson: “I surrender this monument into your keeping, and through you to that of the nation.”57 The President accepted the statue, voicing his pride in taking part in an occasion that aligned with his policies perpetuating inequality for Black Americans, including institutionalized segregation. Thus, his endorsement of the Arlington mon-

49 Steven I. Weiss, “You Won’t Believe What the Government Spends on Confederate Graves,” The Atlantic, July 19, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/ politics/archive/2013/07/government-spending-confederate-graves/277931/ 50 Nolan, “The Anatomy of a Myth,” 17.

51 “Peace Dove Returns: G.A.R. Will Attend Unveiling of Confederate Shaft,” The Washington Post, May 31, 1914, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/peace-dove-returns/docview/145332472/se-2?accountid=11264 52 “Gray and Blue Join: Unite in Unveiling Great Confederate Monument,” The Washington Post, June 05, 1914. https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/gray-blue-join/docview/145322049/se-2?accountid=11264

53 “Peace Dove Returns: G.A.R. Will Attend Unveiling of Confederate Shaft,” The Washington Post.

54 “Gray and Blue Join: Unite in Unveiling Great Confederate Monument,” The Washington Post.

55 Herbert, “History of the Arlington Confederate Monument,” 52.

56 “Child to Bare Memorial: Col. Herbert’s Grandson Will Unveil Monument to Confederates,” The Washington Post, June 3, 1914, https://www.proquest.com/ docview/145321990?accountid=11264 57 Herbert, “History of the Arlington Confederate Monument,” 69.

49 ument that read like a “three-dimensional pro-Confederate text” further displayed to the American public that a white supremacist South could live on without compromise.58 At the time of the unveiling, most members of the U.D.C. did not truly believe that harmony existed between the North and the South.59 Yet, the Arlington monument symbolized the Confederate advocates’ longing to be recognized as patriotic by the rest of the nation in terms of reconciliation acceptable to the white South. The U.D.C. believed the monument illustrated that the region’s defense of states’ rights was not a defense of slavery, but instead evidence of a commitment to constitutional principle.60 This undertaking is explicitly seen in the frieze with the female figure of the South grasping onto a shield engraved with “The Constitution.” The monument honored the Confederate dead, while also standing as a token of defiance by its justification of the South’s actions on land where thousands of northerners frequented daily.61 For the years to follow, the monument and Section 16 of Arlington Cemetery served as touchstones for the Lost Cause. At the base of the monument, Confederate groups such as the U.D.C. and U.C.V. organized annual celebrations on the first Sunday in June for Confederate Memorial Day (which is also the anniversary of Jefferson Davis’s birthday).62 These celebrations aligned with the tone and subject matter of the monument’s unveiling ceremony in 1914. Speakers lauded the unity of the nation and the sacrifices made by the Confederate soldiers buried beneath their feet.

In 1925, The Washington Post reported that President Calvin Coolidge sent a wreath to the monument, keeping with the tradition begun by President Roosevelt on the first Confederate Memorial Day.63 A year prior to this, President Coolidge actually attended the celebrations at Section 16 in person and delivered his “The United Nation” address. In reference to Arlington National Cemetery, he declared: “here, in a place set aside for the resting place of those who have performed mil58 Cox, “The Monument Builders” in Dixie’s Daughters, 71.

59 Ibid, 71.

60 Ibid, 68.

61 Ibid.

62 “Deep Homage Paid to Heroes of Gray: Dixie Land’s Memorial Day Observed in Arlington at Confederate Monument,” The Washington Post, June 6, 1921, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/deep-homage-paid-heroes-gray/docview/145900966/se-2?accountid=11264.

63 “Confederate War Dead Honored by 600 at Arlington: Col. Magnus Thompson Delivers Principal Address in Memorial,” The Washington Post (1923-1954), June 8, 1925, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/ confederate-war-dead-honored-600-at-arlington/docview/149603778/se-2?accountid=11264

An Ode to the Lost Cause in Bronze itary duty, both make a final bivouac.”64 In a speech centered around national unity, President Coolidge spoke of the land as an equalizing force. He deemed the divergent motivations behind the Confederacy and the Union irrelevant, as the soldiers on both sides hallowed the ground on which he stood. This sentiment of national solidarity in the name of the dead continued until the following century with little reported controversy.

The Confederate Monument at Arlington reentered national discussion in 2009 during the presidency of Barack Obama. Two days prior to Memorial Day, a group of several dozen university professors and scholars released a letter to President Obama imploring him not to send a wreath to the Confederate Monument.

President George H. W. Bush during his presidential term changed the tradition by sending a wreath on Memorial Day, rather than on Jefferson Davis’s birthday, also celebrated as Confederate Memorial Day. In the letter to Obama, the authors argue that “when the president of the United States of America enhances the prestige of this monument and of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, he strengthens a group working to set back America’s progress in race relations.”65 Despite these pleas, President Obama sent a wreath to the monument. However, he also sent a wreath to the African American Civil War Memorial that commemorates more than 200,000 Black Americans who fought for the North in the Civil War.66 The President’s decision to uphold the tradition of honoring Ezekiel’s creation was in fact interpreted as a sign of respect for the white Southern cause. At the annual commemoration of the Confederate Monument a week later on June 7, 2009, the gesture was referenced by the event’s main speaker Ronald F. Maxwell, a filmmaker and Civil War enthusiast. Maxwell praised President Obama for his decision to disregard the letter and keep with the tradition of past presidents.

He claimed that the “monument is dedicated simply to, Our Dead Heroes.”67 In saying this, Maxwell ignored the true intent of the monument to rewrite Southern history in a glorification of slavery, and upheld the 64 “The United Nation,” Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, accessed April 3, 2022, https://coolidgefoundation.org/resources/the-united-nation/ 65 “Text of Letter to President Obama,” ABC News, May 22, 2009, https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=7658404&page=1 66 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “‘They Answered a Call,’ Obama Says of Veterans,” The New York Times, May 25, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/us/ politics/26wreath.html 67 Ronald Maxwell, “On the Occasion of President Obama’s Wreath for the Confederate Memorial,” Huff Post, May 25, 2011, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ on-the-occasion-of-presid_b_212674

50 false history promoted by the U.D.C..68 The controversy over Confederate monuments became fatal in August of 2017. On August 12th, hundreds of white nationalists and their supporters rallied over plans to remove a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, VA. This “Unite the Right” rally was met with counter-protesters and the ensuing violence led to Virginia’s governor declaring a state of emergency. In this chaos, a car drove into a crowd of counter-protesters marching through the downtown neighborhood, resulting in the death of Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old Charlottesville woman, and over a dozen injured people.69 The white nationalists carried Confederate flags and chanted slogans like “white lives matter.” The events in Charlottesville were part of a larger reckoning with racial injustice and police-brutality in the U.S. that put symbols of the Confederacy in the center of national debate. Throughout the South, protesters vandalized and forcibly removed dozens of monuments of and in honor of members of the Confederacy.70 In the midst of these protests and scrutiny over relics of a dark American past, the Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery became part of national discourse once again.

After witnessing the “Unite the Right” rally and the expressions of white supremacy that erupted in Charlottesville, the granddaughter of Moses Ezekiel, Judith Ezekiel, was filled with disgust. In response, she decided to post a message on Facebook addressed to all the other relatives of the sculptor. She wrote that it was now time to discuss the fate of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. Family members responded to Judith Ezekiel’s post with enthusiasm, and after twelve hours of debate on a family group chat that spanned five different time zones, a consensus emerged. The twenty-two descendants of the sculptor Moses Ezekiel signed a letter sent to The Washington Post calling for their ancestor’s monument to be removed from Arlington Cemetery. These family members, ranging from ages 20 to 90, asserted that the statue “intended to rewrite history to justify the Confederacy and the subsequent racist Jim Crow

68 Ibid.

69 Andrew Katz, “Unrest in Virginia,” Time, accessed April 3, 2022, https://time. com/charlottesville-white-nationalist-rally-clashes/ 70 Marc Fisher, “Confederate statues: In 2020, a renewed battle in America’s enduring Civil War,” The Washington Post, June 11, 2020, https://www. washingtonpost.com/history/2020/06/11/confederate-statues-attacked-protesters-george-floyd/

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. II | Issue 1 laws.”71 They recognized and applauded Ezekiel’s artistic skills, yet the signatories asked for the larger than life monument to be removed from the National Cemetery and stowed in a museum where its overt pro-slavery messages could be contextualized and barred from haunting the hallowed grounds of Arlington.72 In response to the calls to take down the monument following the events at Charlottesville, Arlington National Cemetery’s superintendent, Charles Alexander Jr., explained in a statement that neither he nor the cemetery’s executive director, Karen Durham-Aguilera, held any authority over the fate of the statue.73 Originally, the U.S. War Department held control over the monument, but after the governmental organization that came with the National Security Act of 1947, the Department of Defense (D.O.D.) took on that responsibility.74 The charge of the D.O.D. meant that neither the cemetery nor any private entity held any authority over the future of the Confederate monument. The fate of the monument at Arlington was addressed on January 1, 2021 when President Joe Biden signed the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act into law. This legislation appropriated and set forth policies and programs for the D.O.D. to undertake during the fiscal year.75 In particular, Section 370 of the act established the Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorates the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America, also referred to as the Naming Commission.

Paragraph (a) of Section 370 described the broad goal of this commission: Removal.--Not later than three years after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall implement the plan submitted by the commission described in paragraph (b) and remove all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate 71 T. Rees Shapiro, “Descendants of Rebel Sculptor: Remove Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery,” The Washington Post, August 18, 2017, http://wapo.st/2fRvbPM?tid=ss_mail 72 Ibid.

73 Ian Shapira, “At Arlington Cemetery, a Confederate Monument to the South And Slavery Still Stands,” The Washington Post, July 5, 2020, https://www. washingtonpost.com/history/2020/07/05/arlington-cemetery-confederate-monument-slavery/.

74 “National Security Act of 1947,” Office of the Historian, accessed April 18, 2022, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/national-security-act 75 U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Armed Services, William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, HR 6395, 116th Cong., 2nd sess., https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/housebill/6395

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An Ode to the Lost Cause in Bronze the Confederate States of America (commonly referred to as the ``Confederacy’’) or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America from all assets of the Department of Defense.76

As an asset of the D.O.D. with explicit commemoration of the Confederacy, the Arlington Memorial “will not remain there,” according to the Vice Chairman of the Naming Commission, Ty Seidule. What will happen to the statue after it is removed from Arlington National Cemetery is still unknown; among other potential fates, it could be melted down, put in a museum, or even given to the U.D.C.. What is known for certain is by 2024 the Arlington National Cemetery will no longer hold this towering ode to slavery and its defenders.

It can be inferred that the sanctity of the grounds prevented any protests around or desecration of the monument throughout the nation’s ongoing reckoning with symbols of the Confederacy. The burials of soldiers from the American Revolution to the Iraq War hallowed the grounds, giving the white Southern doctrine legitimacy for over a century. The U.D.C. succeeded in suspending the Lost Cause in bronze for several generations of Southerners to behold, however, the government has at last recognized the destructiveness of their work. The ideology that animated the U.D.C. in 1914 remains present in the minds of many Americans today, as made clear by the events in Charlottesville. Taking down monuments is not an erasure of history, but rather a signal to all U.S. citizens that the Confederate cause was not an American cause.

76 Ibid.

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