Volume 33 (Winter 1999) Issue 2
Article Abstracts

Abstract: Janet Golden, "'An Argument That Goes Back to the Womb': The Demedicalization of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, 1973-1992"

This article provides a cultural history of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) from its naming in 1973 until the 1990s, when it began to be cited in appeals from death-row inmates. It argues that FAS was demedicalized as physicians gradually lost the cultural authority to frame its public meaning. Under the leadership of government officials and legal professionals, and in response to growing public mistrust of the medicalization of deviance, FAS came to be understood not as a cluster of precisely delineated symptoms, but as a social deformity that expressed the moral failings of mothers and marked their children as politically marginal and potentially dangerous. Critical to this reframing of FAS was its identification with a racial minority - Native Americans - its interpretation as an expression of maternal/fetal conflict, and its economic and social costs. In charting the demedicalization of FAS popular portrayals of the syndrome as well as professional literatures are examined.

Abstract: Jessica Warner, Frank Ivis, "'Damn You, You Informing Bitch,' Vox populi and the unmaking of the Gin Act of 1736"

This study examines the interaction between legislation and popular culture, with a particular emphasis on the extent to which popular resistance undermined enforcement of the Gin Act of 1736. It is argued that popular resistance, while significant, had no effect on policy until members of the middle classes intervened in an attempt to restore the social relations that had existed before the Act took effect. It was only at this point that the Act became a dead letter. In this role members of the middle classes functioned as mediators between two cultures, one plebeian, the other patrician. As such, our findings suggest that the dialectic of plebeian culture and patrician culture, as variously articulated by E.P. Thompson, may be excessively stark, especially when applied to a setting as dense and heterogenous as early Hanoverian London. Our findings also suggest that working men and women in the capital worked and socialized side by side, sometimes as drinking companions, and sometimes as professional informers.

Abstract: Pablo Piccato, "Politics and the Technology of Honor: Dueling in Turn-Of-The-Century Mexico"

Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, dueling became increasingly frequent among Mexican elite men. The duel was associated with modem science and the cosmopolitan culture of the national ruling class. Authorities refused to prosecute duelists. The translation and production of texts on dueling, as well as the influence of some experienced duelists, conveyed to public men the importance of a technology of honor. This technology, which involved the use of pistols and the knowledge of codes of dueling, sought to establish a space in which all members of the political elite, regardless of their ideological affiliation, could claim the same kind of honor. After the 1910 Revolution, as violence became widely associated with politics, duels became less frequent, but the concern among public men about honor and virility expressed by violence remained visible in political life, as witnessed by several episodes in Congress.

The technology of honor was a central piece in the construction of a modem public sphere in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexico. It granted equality to educated men, while excluding women and the poor from having a voice in politics. These lacked honor because they could not legitimately use violence to defend it.

Abstract: Jill Fields, "'Fighting the Corsetless Evil': Shaping Corsets and Culture, 1900-1930"

During the nineteenth century virtually all free-born women in the United States wore corsets. Yet from mid-century onward, the purpose and meaning of the corset generated heated debate. In the early twentieth century, these debates intensified as women began to reject Victorian restrictions upon their mobility. Corset defenders gained a powerful new ally in 1907, the well-organized Corset Manufacturers Association. Arguments supporting corset use changed as a result.

Manufacturers and retailers instituted new merchandising tactics to resist the "corsetless evil" and disseminated pro-corset ideologies culled from dominant discourses about race, nation, and female inferiority. "Scientific" methods of corset-fitting blamed discomfort on fit rather than on the garment itself. Transmitted by saleswomen to customers, corset-fitting theories constructed the female body as inherently flawed and in need of corsets to correct "figure faults." However, companies produced lighter, flexible "sports" and "dancing" corsets and marketed the girdle as the modem shaping garment in response to women's desires for more comfort in dress and for clothing geared to their new active public lives.

By 1930, the shapely "womanly" figure returned to fashion. Corset debates, waged with words and bodies, reveal how the corset works as an instrument of cultural hegemony. U.S. manufacturers and retailers were forced to adapt, but also fought to control fashion changes.

Abstract: Jessica Kross, "Mansions, Men, Women, and the Creation of Multiple Publics in Eighteenth-Century British North America"

The evolution of the many-roomed mansion in colonial British America permitted the creation of multiple public spaces within the house itself. Using the theoretical insights of Jargen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Karen Hansen on the nature of the kinds of publics possible in the eighteenth century, this article demonstrates how real as opposed to theoretical publics arose. As outside space and mansions formed a continuum from "public public space" to "private public space," mansions permitted elite men to control "private public space." For elite men mansions provided a social geography wherein the range of alternative publics broadened. However, that process marginalized women by trivializing the ways that heterosocial social space was used and relegating female homosocial space to the mansion's political, economic, intellectual, and psychological periphery. The eighteenth-century mansion provided gendered spaces which facilitated the integration of elite men into local, provincial, and international publics but which simultaneously contributed to a wider segregation of men and women and the exclusion of women from the political, economic, and intellectual world beyond the house. In the nineteenth century these patterns would become legitimized for the middle classes through the ideology of domesticity and the notion of "separate spheres."

Abstract: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, "How to Behave Sensitively: Prescriptions for Interracial Conduct from the 1960s to the 1990s"

The U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s sought not only to tear down legal barriers to black equality but also to eradicate the myriad written and unwritten rules that formed the protocol of the racial caste system of segregation. This article argues that, despite this revolt and the simultaneous attack on formality and authority in the 1960s, a new concern with an etiquette of race took hold. This concern is manifested in a variety of kinds of sources, from fiction to diversity training materials. The nature and quantity of prescriptions reveal that the late-twentieth century must be understood as a period of uneasy transition to integration, a time fraught with new anxieties and unresolved tensions. This article suggests that both the new prescriptions and the new anxieties need to be analyzed in the context of long?term shifts in emotional style and management, as laid out by several theorists discussed here, and the erosion of a sense of what the moral underpinnings of manners might be, at least ideally. The wayward attempts to articulate evermore elaborate etiquette rules for interracial interactions are considered as part of a larger civility crisis.

Abstract: Andrew Wiese, "Black Housing, White Finance: African American Housing and Home Ownership in Evanston, Illinois, before 1940"

A case study of African American housing and home ownership in Evanston, Illinois, a railroad suburb of Chicago, illustrates that there was a greater variety in suburban housing markets before WWII than historians have recognized. Housing discrimination was a fact of life in early, affluent suburbs, such as Evanston, by the mid-1910s, yet housing markets in these suburbs often accommodated black population growth and comparatively high rates of black home ownership, albeit within the limits of segregation. In Evanston, members of the local real estate establishment played key roles in the process-building, selling, and even financing housing for African Americans. Black suburbanites, for their part, made exceptional efforts to become home owners, in some cases even building their own homes (owner-building). In Evanston and other suburbs where patterns of local race relations were built on a foundation of domestic service, white paternalism combined with the aspirations of black southerners to shape housing markets that supported black home ownership and accommodated black community building in otherwise affluent and white suburbs.