Volume 30 (Fall 1996) Issue 1
Article Abstracts

Abstract:Jesus Cruz, "An Ambivalent Revolution: The Public and the Private in the Construction of Liberal Spain"

Taking the experience of Spain between 1812 and 1868 as a sample, this article argues against the traditional assumption that European revolutions of the first half of the 1 9th century brought about the end of corporate societies. The argument is based on the analysis of forms of social reproduction of several Spanish families well-known for their commitment to liberal politics. What the author has found is a constant contradiction between their public political allegiances and the way in which they perceived and articulated their private social life. While publicly they defended the value of individual merit, privately they used and promoted familism and patronage as basic mechanisms for social promotion. Many European societies during the same period present similar developments, because the disposition of the elites to implement political changes clashed with the persistence of traditional social structures. This reality has been generally neglected by historians of early 19th century European revolutions who have emphasized changes in the public sphere. The study of the interaction between public and private in the construction of the Spanish liberal state demonstrates the complexities of a historical process that resists the application of uni-dimensional models of interpretation.

Abstract: Susan B. Whitney, "Embracing the Status Quo: French Communists, Young Women and the Popular Front"

This article analyzes the role new approaches to young women and female gender roles played in the French Communist Parry's Popular Front politics. Beginning with the Communists' ambivalent attempts to mobilize young women during the 1920s and early 1930s, it then explores the party's Popular Front attempt to mobilize young women within a new organization, the Union des Jeunes Filles de France (U.J.F.F.). In this organization, Communists appealed to young working women through publications and activities geared to their interests. Communists also replaced previous models of Young Communist feminity and female political activism with new models more consonant with prevailing notions of femininity in France. Thus the ideal Young Communist woman of the Popular Front era was no longer characterized by a commitment to gender-neutral revolutionary action but rather by moral probity, a commitment to marriage and motherhood, and gender-specific public activism. The article argues that this effort to reconfigure femininity and models of female public activism was central to the party's attempt to reposition itself as integral to French politics and culture.

Abstract: Richard Bodek, "The Not-So-Golden Twenties: Everyday Life and Communist Agitprop in Weimar-Era Berlin"

Proletarian youth in Weimar-era Berlin used motifs and symbols from mass culture and working-class culture to contruct intellectual and social identities that would empower them against the almost total impotence dictated by their objective economic situation. One means of self-empowerment was membership in the German Communist Party (KPD) or any of its ancillary organizations. Membership in the Party did not automatically confer class consciousness, but rather was merely one of a number of roughly equivalent choices. By exploring agirprop troupes&emdash;players of revolutionary communist theater&emdash;within their social milieu, this article demonstrates that youth could only understand Party concems and dictates through the prism of their everyday experience.

Abstract: Lynn Malley, "Performing the New Woman: The Komsomolka as Actress and Image in Soviet Youth Theater"

This article examines the presentation of the Komsomolka, the female member of the Communist Youth organization, in Komsomol theaters in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Drawing on the repertoire and performances of the most influential theater for young people, the Leningrad-based Theater for Working-Class Youth (TRAM), the author argues that young women were presented as important but nonetheless unequal members of Soviet society. TRAM plays assigned women subordinate roles as leaders and workers. These plays also devoted considerable attention to the structure of a new Soviet family, where women were less powerful figures than their male partners. While these works do not show women as equal partners in the family, they do hold out the possibility for a redistribution of gender roles. These plays' complex presentation of the new Soviet family perhaps accounted for their widespread popularity among both male and female viewers.

Abstract: Peter Konecny, "Library Hooligans and Others: Law, Order, and Student Culture in Leningrad, 1924-38"

This article examines the presentation by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of idealized standards of social and political conduct for students in Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s, the anathematization of deviance and 'antiSoviet' attitudes among students, and the responses of students to this broad program of social engineering. The state's delineation of appropriate 'socialist virtues" for the student community was achieved both through coercion and the use of incentives. Disciplinary measures and political repression combined with suggestive opportunities for social status and professional advancement as the mechanisms for socialization under the Communist system. However, students also accommodated and resisted state policies through a complex end 'unofficial' culture of their own. The student culture countered and accommodated 'official' socialist culture with its own private rituals and discourse. At the same time, a number of students felt irreconcilable alienation from the state and from the Communist system. Using previously inaccessible and unused archival materials and student newspapers, this articles examines how students attempted to accommodate, conform to and resist the cultural maxims constructed by the Soviet state.

Abstract: Jacquelyn C. Miller, "An 'Uncommon Tranquility of Mind': Emotional Self-Control and the Construction of a Middle-Class Identity in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia"

This essay is a study of the creation of a middle-class identity in eighteenthcentury Philadelphia during the yellomfever epidemic of 1793. Given that this epidemic produced a wide variety of documentation, this event provides the historian with a window onto the values, sensibilities, and behaviors of those who either aspired to, or defined themselves as part of, the middle class. It is clear from these sources that an overriding feature of eighteenthcentury middle-class life was an interest in health preservation through selfrestraint, with an emphasis on emotional self-control. Navigating between extremes of control and release, bourgeois Philadelphians attempted to walk a fine line between repression and expression. Little evidence can be found in these writings that Philadelphians presented differing standards of behavior for men and women. Consequently, this study complicates the existing literature that has emphasized the dichotomy of male rationality and female emotionality in middle-class culture. Middle-class Philadelphians tended to portray servants and other members of the lower class instead of middle-class women as irrational and incapable of controlling their passions. It was they, then, who became the "other" against whom middle-class individuals came to define themselves.

Abstract: Daniel A. Cohen, "Miss Reed and the Superiors: The Contradictions of Convent Life in Antebellum America"

This article examines the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts that was destroyed by a Protestant working-class mob in 1834, and compares the experiences of Rebecca Reed, an impoverished farmer's daughter whose allegations against the nuns reportedly helped instigate the riot, with those of the two Superiors of the Ursuline community. It suggests that tensions and conflicts within the Charlestown convent and between the nuns and their Bishop&emdash;along with broader class and gender anxieties in antebellum society&emdash;may have had nearly as much to do with the demise of the Ursuline community as purely sectarian hostilities between Protestants and Catholics. The essay's formal thesis is that the experiences of Reed and the Ursulines expose two fundamental contradictions in convent life in antebellum America: a contradiction between the personal pride and ambition of many of the women who entered convents and the monastic virtues of humility and obedience to which they were expected to conform, and an even more explosive contradiction between dominant antebellum gender norms (variously designated as "domesticity," "separate spheres," or "True Womanhood") and the essential structure of convent life. It is largely based on antebellum newspapers, polemical publications spawned by the riot, and unpublished Catholic correspondence and diocesan records.

Abstract: Mary A. Procida, "A Tale Begun in Other Days: British Travelers in Tibet in the Late-Nineteenth Century"

This article examines travel narratives written by British men and women who ventured into Tibet at the end of the nineteenth century. Tlbet was, in the latenineteenth century, one of the last regions unexplored by Europeans. Because of Tlbet's physical and imaginative distance from Western civilization, British travelers in Tlbet felt free to abandon restricitive European customs and to refashion their self-identity. Male and female authors used the psychological freedom thus afforded by Tlbetan travel to create new ideas of gendered behavior that would, nonetheless, still be acceptable to the British reading public. Both men and women drew on patterns of common pre-adolescent behavior to expand the boundaries of gender identity. The women travelers presented themselves as intrepid, capable, tomboyish explorers. The men modeled themselves on the young heroes of schoolboy fiction. The narratives composed for the British reading public thus offered new ideas of acceptably masculine and feminine behavior.

Abstract: Richard Lindstrom, "'Not From the Land Side, But From the Flag Side': Native American Responses to the Wanamaker Expedition of 1913"

Led by Joseph K. Dixon, a former Baptist minister and self-proclaimed "expert" on the Indian, the 1913 "Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship to the North American Indian" was a series of flag-raising ceremonies held at Indian reservations throughout the United States. The ceremonies, designed to promote loyalty to the United States and its flag, from the perspective of the non-lndians who promoted them also espoused an image of Native Americans that demanded the adoption of Anglo-American cultural practices as the price for the continued survival of a "vanishing" Indian race. Viewed from the perspective of the Native Americans at whom the ceremonies were directed, the Wanamaker Expedition provides an example of the way that Native Americans could manipulate the meanings and messages of such events to promote ends more relevant to their daily lives. Through the efforts of Native Americans to make the Wanamaker Expedition an event meaningful to their lives, the ceremonies, meant only to promote loyalty to the American flag, soon came to address such issues as control of reservation resources, land tenure, and Native Americans' own conceptions of their identity and future.

Abstract: Richard Price, "Languages of Revisionism: Historians and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britian"

Recent work in the popular politics of nineteenth-century Britain has been concerned to deny the importance of class divisions and to emphasise the con' tinuities in popular political ideologies. Although there are differences among the main schools of revisionism, they share key common themes: privileging continuity over change, emphasising the seamless unity between elite and popular politics, and deproblematizing the question ot political authority. This essay is concemed to assess whether the different revisionist approaches provide better frameworks of historical analysis than the paradigms they seek to replace. Thus, the essay critically examines some of the most important statements of this revisionist scholarship and interrogates their shared approaches and assumptions.