September 25, 2009
John Adams and Masculine Sexual Identity
Thomas A. Foster, DePaul University
Commentator: John D'Emilio, University of Illinois at Chicago

In August 1776 John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that he had proposed that the image for the seal of the new nation be the “Choice of Hercules.” Referencing the classical allegory of choosing virtue over vice, Adams selected a particularly masculine, heroic figure to represent public and private virtue. For him, the image captured both the heart of the nation and also, as we shall see, his view of manhood. That Adams chose a decidedly manly figure to illustrate what was increasingly becoming associated with womanhood, private virtue, indicates his view that manliness included so-called feminine traits, including chastity and self-restraint.

Relatively few early modern American men left sustained commentary about their sexual behaviors and identities, and John Adams is no exception. Yet his voluminous surviving letters, personal diaries, and autobiography reveal glimpses of his views of masculine sexual identity – much of which was articulated both explicitly and implicitly via the figure of Hercules. Like most eighteenth-century Americans, Adams did not view self-retrained manliness as weak or effeminate. This essay demonstrates that Adams utilized the mythic figure of Hercules to embody his notion of masculine virtue, paying close attention to the sexual component of Adams’s beliefs.

October 30, 2009
Women, Violence, and Race in the Movements against Rape and Abortion
Commentator: Christine Stansell, University of Chicago  
Interracial Rape in the 1960s: Race and Sexual Equality in Maryland's Giles-Johnson Case
Catherine O. Jacquet, University of Illinois at Chicago
 
Beginning in the 1950s, civil rights defense teams increasingly relied on the trope of the lying white woman when defending black men against accusations of interracial rape.  Using then-popular medico-legal theories that pathologized white women as neurotic and/or nymphomaniacs, this strategy effectively pitted black men as a group against white women as a group, trading one problematic stereotype (the black beast rapist) for another (the lying white woman). This paper looks at the Giles-Johnson case, a 1961 case of black-on-white sexual violence in Maryland that gained substantial local and national attention, to analyze the racialized and sexualized constructions that came to dominant interracial rape prosecutions by the 1960s.  Beginning in the 1950s, civil rights defense teams increasingly relied on the trope of the lying white woman when defending black men against accusations of interracial rape.  Using then-popular medico-legal theories that pathologized white women as neurotic and/or nymphomaniacs, this strategy effectively pitted black men as a group against white women as a group, trading one problematic stereotype (the black beast rapist) for another (the lying white woman). This paper looks at the Giles-Johnson case, a 1961 case of black-on-white sexual violence in Maryland that gained substantial local and national attention, to analyze the racialized and sexualized constructions that came to dominant interracial rape prosecutions by the 1960s. 

Women, Gender, and Violence in the Anti-Abortion Movement, 1990-2000
Karissa Haugeberg, University of Iowa

When U.S. antiabortion violence spiked in the 1990s, many attributed the use of extreme tactics to the influx of evangelical Christian men into the movement.  My research suggests that women had an instrumental role in perpetrating and justifying antiabortion violence during this period.  Women used violent tactics, including bombing clinics and shooting abortion providers.  In the extremist wing of the movement, women delivered speeches and wrote articles justifying violence, often in religious terms.  Meanwhile, women in the professionalized wing of the movement remained remarkably silent as activists began killing abortion providers.  I hope to reveal how the diverse groups of women who comprised the U.S. antiabortion movement during the 1990s participated in and responded to the proliferation of violence.

November 13, 2009
Targeting Women in the 1950s
 Commentator: Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Loyola University

An Odd, Emotional Girl: How Psychological Profiling and Gender Shaped Security Risk Assessment Elizabeth Collins, Triton College

This paper explores the case of Marcia Harrison, a federal employee fired from the State Department in 1951. Harrison’s case is notable because she was one of only two employees on McCarthy’s list to have been fired as a security risk. The case was complex. Like many targets of the second red scare, she dabbled in left wing groups in the late 1930s. But in the end, she lost her job not because of her actions but because of her “personality.” My larger research contends that red scare politics and gender conservatism were interlocking ideologies. Furthermore, cases involving women cannot be fully explained without engaging questions of gender. In this article I will argue that psychological profiling and gender conservatism played a central role in providing grounds to terminate Harrison’s employment.

"Let Her Eat Out": The Politics of Gender and Domesticity in the Postwar Restaurant
Nicolaas Mink, University of Wisconsin–Madison

By the 1950s, the terms “Eating out,” “and “Dining out” had entered the popular lexicon, suggesting that many white, middle-class Americans were increasingly using restaurant dining as a way to escape the confines of their suburban home. This type of culinary escapism is quite remarkable considering that through World War II the restaurant industry worked tirelessly to present what was now called dining out as an ideological, culinary, and physical extension of dining rituals performed in the home. While centering my analysis on the foods and foodways that restaurants produced, my paper argues that this new culture of dining out had both expected and unexpected consequences for women, gender, and families. As one might expect, this culture enhanced the gendered fantasies extant in the postwar period. At the same time, however, the new consumer ideals that restaurants shaped and reshaped created a world that subverted feminine culinary authority--an authority that is often seen as unchallenged during this era.

January 22, 2010
The Contested Body of Mollie Fancher: Lay Authority and the Hysteria Diagnosis
Adrienne Phelps Coco, University of Illinois at Chicago
Commentator: Kim Nielsen, University of Wisconsin–Green Bay

Through the biography of Mollie Fancher, a late nineteenth-century invalid from Brooklyn whose reported mystical abilities sparked international controversy, this paper will examine the authority of lay people in the pre-Freudian hysteria diagnosis. The diagnostic criterion of hysterical temperament—excessive displays of emotion, vulgarity, deceptiveness, selfishness, and an untrained mind—gave laypeople the opportunity to challenge medical knowledge because doctors did not have full authority over the judgment of character. Ordinary people could assert their own “expert” opinions on someone’s temperament based on their personal knowledge and reputation. As Mollie’s case demonstrates, the conflation of personal reputation with medical symptoms in the hysteria diagnosis created the possibility for people who did not manifest the hysterical temperament to resist being diagnosed with the disease and to assert their own interpretations of their bodies.

February 19, 2010
The Long Civil Rights Movement in Chicago: Ann Harrigan and Women's Catholic Interracialism, 1933-1948
Karen Johnson, University of Illinois at Chicago
Commentator: Jane Dailey, University of Chicago 

In 1942, Ann Harrigan, the Catholic daughter of Irish immigrants, left her job as a New York City school teacher and moved to Chicago’s black belt to open Friendship House to work for interracial justice. Harrigan emulated the saints of old as she struggled to subjugate her body to her religious ideals. In doing so she obtained power to speak for interracialism among whites and challenged many of the priests and laypeople who fought to keep blacks out of their parishes. Harrigan’s story highlights the contours of Catholic interracialism and the intersection of race, religion, and the body in civil rights activism.

March 19, 2010
New Approaches to Second-Wave Feminism, 1964-1984
"The ERA is Their Bag, Agriculture is Mine": Midwestern Agrarian Feminists in the Second Wave, 1964-1984
Jenny Barker-Devine, Illinois College

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Midwestern farm women cultivated agrarian feminisms as a homegrown response to distinctly rural issues. By the late 1970s, inequitable inheritance policies, deteriorating economic conditions, the mechanization of agriculture, and rural depopulation threatened “family” farming operations. Women debated solutions in the farm press and formed female-led organizations that emphasized women’s roles as producers, farm laborers, and vital contributors to the wellness of farm families. In doing so, they challenged assumptions that farming was a purely male profession and demanded that male agricultural leaders utilize female voices to speak for the agricultural community as a whole.

Race Matters? African American Women, Feminism, and Consciousness-Raising in 1970s Chicago
Voichita Nachescu, Grand Valley State University

Consciousness-raising groups, the preferred organizing method of Second Wave feminism, have been misrepresented as including primarily white women. In my paper, I revisit this narrative. I focus on the National Alliance of Black Feminists, which was active in Chicago between 1976 and 1982 and organized consciousness-raising groups for Black women and men. I argue that consciousness-raising groups and assertiveness-training seminars played a crucial part in the life of the organization, offering African American women a way of enacting feminism in their daily lives and within their communities.

 Commentator: Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Loyola University Chicago

April 23, 2010
Reading Married Love:  History, Heterosexuality, and Marriage in the Inter-war Years
Lisa Sigel, DePaul University
Commentator: Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska University of Illinois at Chicago

Letters written to Marie Stopes in response to the publication of her books, particularly Married Love (1918) and Wise Parenthood (1919). were written for a reason—to get particular sexual advice, to get (legal) birth control, to get (semi-illegal or illegal) abortions, to get a sense of how one’s behaviors fit into the scale of normality—so they are not un-self-conscious productions of people’s sexual histories. Nonetheless they are an extraordinary valuable way of seeing how men and women began to organize their own sexual stories and began to set themselves out as sexual beings—as individuals both acted against and as acting, as responding to information and as creating information. This paper explores the ways that men and women adopted, adapted, rewrote their sexual histories and the history of sexuality to self-consciously fashion new identities for themselves. Though individuals showed themselves as mechanistic, naive, and ill-informed, they nonetheless developed a belief in the redemptive powers of heterosexual union and actively engaged with the process of change. Thus, this paper will show the ways readers reinvented and reconfigured the stories at their disposal to chart out a brave new world of marital satisfaction.

At the turn of the 20th century, “women’s departments” were found in banks across the US. Banking was increasingly being conducted in large impersonal bureaucracies, rather than small personal institutions. Complaints by customers, male as well as female, about the service provided (or not) by bank employees were rampant. Women’s departments stressed the special services they offered (such as helping women learn to balance their bank accounts). It appears that the practices developed for and by women may have been adopted by male bankers in the ensuing years. Just as the interaction of women’s voluntary associations and politics functioned to “domesticate politics,” these departments (and the women involved) worked to domesticate American business.

  
Murder for Love, Journalism for Bylines: The Colorful Career of Jazz Age Chicago's Premier Crime Woman Reporter
Genevieve G. McBride, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Stephen R. Byers, Marquette University
Commentator: Susan Levine, University of Illinois at Chicago

The 1920s were really the “roaring ’20s” in Chicago where mobsters ruled and journalists were hardbitten. This paper examines the career of one of those journalists, Ione Quinby of the Chicago Evening Post. Quinby, the only woman on the news staff at the Post, was to carve a special niche as the city’s “foremost” crime reporter as well as a feature writer who would befriend actresses, boxers, royalty, and gangsters, including Al Capone. Her specialty was writing about women murderers. Her story shows a side of Chicago journalism seldom covered. This paper includes a content analysis of all her bylined Post stories. 

 Commentator: Margaret Rung, Roosevelt University

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