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ABSTRACTS
| Max Paul Friedman, "Beyond 'Voting with Their Feet': Toward a Conceptual History of 'America' in European Migrant Sending Communities, 1860s to 1914"
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The notion that most European immigrants "voted with their feet" by fleeing oppression for the political and religious freedom of the United States endures despite the contrary findings of years of migration research. This article calls the cliché into question in two ways. First, it presents some of the main findings of immigration scholarship that emphasize the role of labor and land, rather than freedom, as the principal factors drawing migrants from Europe. Second, the article applies methodologies from Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts) to interpret linguistic and folkloric sources from across Europe, discovering very different perceptions of America among ordinary nineteenth-century migrant sending communities. While some images were positive, others ranged from metaphorical associations of America with sleep, loss, and imprisonment, to satires of the myth of unlimited abundance, and resentment of the transformation U. S. society produced in many of the emigrants who went there. Rather than celebrating American exceptionalist credos by repeating platitudes about mass popular enthusiasm for American freedoms, this article calls for a more nuanced and deeper appreciation of the wide range of symbolic meanings America held in the minds of people who often left few written records of their views.
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| Craig M. Loftin, "Unacceptable Mannerisms: Gender Anxieties, Homosexual Activism, and Swish in the United States, 1945–1965"
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| This article analyzes gender anxieties in the post-World War II McCarthy-era gay rights movement known as the "homophile movement" in the United States. Using survey data gathered by these pioneering gay rights organizations as well as letters written to ONE magazine (the first gay magazine in the U.S., 1953–1967), "Unacceptable Mannerisms" demonstrates that homophile movement leaders worried about the negative social impact of stereotypical iconic representations of effeminate male homosexuals while rank-and-file homophiles worried about specific threats to their livelihoods caused by the visibility of effeminate male homosexuals. The homophile movement thus boldly challenged prevailing conceptualizations about sexuality during the 1950s yet simultaneously reinforced the hegemonic masculinity characteristic of broader postwar American gender patterns. |
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Homophile anxieties regarding "swishy" behavior underscore a paradox about homosexual visibility in the 1950s. The homophile movement sought to create a positive collective homosexual image modeled on an idealized middle-class white-collar worker. At the same time, the movement discouraged individual visible markers of homosexual identity such as effeminacy. This paradox is partly explained by the increasingly middle-class character of gay identity after World War II; this trend reflects a broader shift toward middle-class identity in American society during these years.
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| Angus McLaren, "Smoke and Mirrors: Willy Clarkson and the Role of Disguises in Inter-War England"
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Questions of identity and disguise long fascinated English culture. A society made anxious by shifting class, gender, and racial relationships was naturally preoccupied by dress and role playing, by visual codes and clues. The investigation of the life of Willy Clarkson—the man who probably knew more about costumes and disguises than any other individual in the early twentieth century—allows us to understand why the public was at specific times particularly sensitive to the employment of certain disguises, and so provides us with a new view of the cultural preoccupations of the inter-war years. The purpose of the essay is not simply to tease out the reasons why one man led a double life, but to reveal how such disparate deviances as homosexuality, Jewishness, and criminality could be linked in the public mind and why a society, which in principle praised candor and condemned subterfuges, in practice fostered a culture of duplicity.
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| Rineke van Daalen, "Paid Mothering in the Public Domain: Dutch Dinner Ladies and Their Difficulties". . . |
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