Day 6 Issues in Modern America January 23, 2002
1. Names. Group B, your second round for Tuesday. A week from Tuesday, discussion of Platoon, early-90’s Vietnam movie, and more on Vietnam and its impact. What if we showed it Sunday night, Feb. 3? A second time?
Note on web site: I’m working with LS on adding links to my class notes and to the links you’ve turned up so far, which I think will be quite helpful as people turn to research for your projects. And of course it’s time to think seriously about what your project might be. See syllabus for guidelines and suggestions; we’ve mentioned and discussed a lot of topics already that would be good ones for further study, as well.
2. Today I have the impulse to change the routine a bit.
Break into groups—one for each respondent. You’re the leader—talk to the group about your response and web research, first. Then discuss their reactions, both to your response and to the reading in general As a group, decide on two or three questions/statements to share with the class for further discussion when we get back together. You can navigate to your web site if you like.
Bring the laptop so people can check websites if they like.
http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/unheard_voices/collections/work/
Site with large collection of “unheard voices”—primary documents from women,
working people, others whose lives are often left out of history.
Jamie Burke
I enclose two short web sites,
relating to women during World War II:
http://www.nara.gov./exhall/powers/women.html
http://www.lib.noaa.gov/edocs/women/women2.jpg
They show some posters
encouraging women to work in factories.
Ewa Budzynska
http://www.eugenevdebs.com/ On Eugene
Debs, socialist, activist and organizer.
Eric
Burdette
The web site that I found was on the first comprehensive cultural history of North America's largest and most inclusive labor organization of the nineteenth century [the Knights of Labor]. It was the only nineteenth-century labor organization to make an effort to organize African Americans, women, and unskilled workers on an equal basis with white craftsmen.
http://www.takver.com/history/secsoc02.htm
Matt Chiles
My website, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/jones/MotherJones.html, is one of many websites about Mary Harris Jones. It gives a little more information than a few of the other sites I came across. This site asks and tries to answer the question Who Was "Mother Jones?"
Tony Cleveland
The Ludlow mine strike of 1914, the government killed 13 women and children. I found this strike in particular very interesting, and I looked it up at http://www.radio4all.org/anarchy/ludlow.html only to find out that there was a lot more to it.
Lisa Bard
Here is my website dealing
with the reading for Jan 24, 2002:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jupton.htm
Chapter 7: Workers, industrial revolution, urbanization, poverty, inequity, labor organizing and resistance, violence, etc.
What do principles like freedom, opportunity, equality, democracy actually mean? Those terms are still being defined and redefined today. In defense of freedom we’re keeping our enemies in cages in Cuba . . .
Jefferson and the ideal of the small farmer. The industrial revolution and the shift to worker/employer relations—80% self-employed in 1880, 20% by 1920. (141)
Wage slavery—is this just a bad-conscience accusation by defenders of slavery? Well, partly, surely. But conditions were indeed terrible, hours long, housing bad, wages low, prospects grim.
142: “Anyone caught permanently in a wage-earning position, lacking property and security for old age, was not a free person.”
Inequality: rise of the industrial rich, late 19th century. We know about this; did you know that the most substantial welfare program of the time was veterans’ benefits?
Workers’ movements: the Knights of Labor, 144-5. The Haymarket Affair, demonstration for the 8-hour day.
A.F.L., Gompers, organized mainly skilled white males.
IWW, the Wobblies, pacifist and class-conscious.
Mother Jones and other socialists.
Farm organizing and the populist movement, 147.
Middle class reformers like Samuel Jones , Jane Addams, Nelson O. Nelson.
Debs and the Socialist movement. The Pullman strike of 1894. “While there is a lower class, I am in it . . .” (151)
Federal responses: corporations as legal persons, most govt. action on the side of business. Socialists and radical critics in U.S. marginalized even further after WW I and Russian revolution.
Ongoing question: how much inequality can a society tolerate before it becomes unacceptably unstable and violent? Worker/CEO inequities have skyrocketed in the last twenty years.
Much, much more might be said on this subject; we’ll return to it, with Roger and Me and elsewhere along the way.
Chapter 8: Gender and gender inequities. Gender as social construction, 156.
157: on “warrior societies” and their qualities: male dominance, hierarchy, authoritarianism, lost of social violence. Rape and domestic abuse—shocking levels. Causes? Life problems? Biology? Simply a social choice that “works”? “Men in power make choices for violence,” says Andrea Dworkin, though she’s not exactly a middle-of-the-road theorist.
These paragraphs also could use a lot of unpacking and further qualification and analysis. But how about the idea that the power imbalance between sexes “traps both men and women in a limited range of behaviors”? I think it’s true; I also think that there’s been major change in the last thirty years or so. Again, we’ll talk more about Where We Are later on . . .
Varieties of gender relationships: agrarian patriarchy, separate spheres, companionate marriage, 159 ff. Separate cultural world, close same-sex bonds between both men and women. Alternatives to conventional thinking, the Quakers, the Great Peace of Deganawidah (again).
The separate sphere system, with industrial revolution and rise of wage work. Men the active, public business world, women home and church. The “angel in the house,” the “haven in a heartless world,” all that stuff.
The Seneca Falls declaration on the rights of women. Early feminist movement, parallel to abolition movement.
164 the Muscular Christianity stuff of late century, sports, the military; rise of “masculinity” as value; sports as sanctioning violence, “hyper-masculine and hostile towards women.” Analogies with military are not hard to notice.
Side note: anybody note the odd statistic about beer consumption on 166? There must be some kind of typo, or lack of clarity . . .
The early-century movements for temperance and the vote. The anti-saloon movement, the WCTU. Prohibition 1919, suffrage 1920. Addams and Gilman, tensions between individualism and community values, about whether women have “essential” traits that would improve society if allowed more play.
But, as Carol Tavris asks, is there something essential different in men’s and women’s natures?
Rapid redefinitions of gender roles in WW II and following, leading to the crisis of the 50s. Tompkins on the limits of men’s roles, 170, derived from Westerns and sports.
Friedan and the Feminine Mystique. Feminism and Vietnam as war for being tough and a winner. Continuing controversy about domestic violence, right to carry a gun, etc.
The need for courage, on the part of all, if we’re to create more equal gender constructions.
