Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Luciano, Lynne

account “the susceptibilities of the young” (210).
Tubbs does see the possibility of a liberalism that is not detrimental to
children. Freedom does not depend on individual liberties that harm children. He
acknowledges a “value-pluralism movement within liberalism” that suggests a new
liberalism that considers personal freedom and individual rights important, while
allowing a restriction of adults’ rights to safeguard children. Legislators, not the
courts, should ensure that a balance between competing rights is effected.
Joselyn Morely
Carleton University
Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control
Politics in America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
In updating and revising her classic 1976 study of reproductive rights, Woman’s
Body, Woman’s Right, historian Linda Gordon provides an illuminating and timely
addition to our understanding of the intersection between gender equality and
reproductive control, which she designates “the single most important factor in
the material basis of women’s emancipation” of the past century (3). A social his-
tory of birth control and the quest for female sexual freedom, her book offers an
in-depth analysis of four distinct phases of the birth control movement: the nine-
teenth century campaign for ‘voluntary motherhood’, which paralleled the drive
for suffrage; early twentieth century links between birth control advocacy and rad-
ical movements, primarily socialism, that sought to ‘empower the powerless’—
poor people and women; the shift away from radicalism into mainstream liberal-
ism from the 1920s through the 1970s, especially through the family planning con-
cept promoted by the Planned Parenthood Federation, the only national birth con-
trol organization until abortion reform in the 1960s; and, finally, the post-1970s
politics of reproductive rights, with special attention to the role of the Christian
right. Gordon’s core argument is that reproductive control has always been cen-
tral to women’s status, and opposition to it a fundamental component of opposi-
tion to gender equality.
Gordon deftly weaves her narrative through the historical landscape of
nineteenth and twentieth century America, linking reproductive issues to the Great
Depression, two world wars, and to ideological influences like progressivism
(which was less concerned with feminism, Gordon suggests, than with elitism—
hence its association with the eugenics movement and its emphasis on selectivity
— producing babies “of great merit” rather than merely reducing overall birth
rates) (174). Such elitism survived the demise of the progressive movement and
continued to permeate birth control discourse and policy: in the 1940s and 1950s,
Planned Parenthood urged mothers to stay at home and concentrate on raising
smaller, “better” families with the help of contraceptives (276).
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Class and economic issues are crucial to Gordon’s analysis, whether in
regard to differences in availability and quality of contraceptives for “rich folk”
vis-à-vis the poor, or New Deal programs supporting birth control as a means of
“heading off the militancy of those at the economic bottom” (241). In the wake
of Roe v. Wade, the religious right appealed to its middle class supporters by equat-
ing abortion rights with liberal elites, while at the same time, Gordon points out
ironicall that African Americans who tended to be supportive of reproductive
rights were alienated by the movement’s overwhelmingly middle-class priorities
(much more than by the fact that it was largely white). Moving to a global per-
spective, she shows how the population control movement of the 1960s, tied to
neo-Malthusian and ecological concerns about worldwide overpopulation, shifted
the discourse on reproductive control away from feminist issues like sexual free-
dom and women’s rights toward an economic focus on the ability of birth control
to improve living standards and stability, especially in developing countries. U.S.-
sponsored population control programs, which were often tied to foreign aid (and
touted as crucial Cold War tools because of their potential to defuse Third World
“population powder kegs”) were widely regarded by developing nations as imperi-
alistic—a case of elitism raised to a global level (284).
Gordon has shifted from the position she took in her 1976 study, that
opposition to birth control was primarily a consequence of male oppression.
Rather, she suggests, the complexities of the issue require examination of
women’s motivations as well, bearing in mind the differences among women. She
points out that many pro-feminists who might be expected to view birth control
as a fundamental component of female liberation in fact opposed it—for exam-
ple, the suffrage movement, many of whose members argued that contraception
would destroy families and undermine marriage and motherhood, those “hard-
won protection[s] against the merciless selfishness of men” (161). And, while
socialists like Emma Goldman linked sexual freedom to the working class ideals of
her movement, other radicals decried birth control for deflecting attention from
the ‘real’ issue of class struggle while simultaneously denying the existence of sex-
ism within the working class (164).
In pressing her argument that every aspect of reproductive rights must
be viewed through a political prism, Gordon compellingly discusses the reproduc-
tive controversies of the latter part of the twentieth century. After the 1960s, she
observes, feminists shifted from promoting birth control as an element of person-
al freedom to setting it within a wider context of promoting overall social equali-
ty. More than a mere “selfish individual desire,” reproductive choice was credited
with being a positive social good, a redefinition that served to bring together a
broader coalition of supporters (297). This enlarged support would be needed in
the face of the emergent Right to Life movement, the product of an unprecedent-
ed merger between religion and politics that had not yet taken place when Gordon
wrote her earlier book on birth control. Initiated by a Catholic hierarchy alarmed
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by sexual liberation and increasing divorce rates, the movement became, by the end
of the century, one of the most powerful grassroots conservative movements of
the century. To the white born-again evangelical Protestants who overwhelming-
ly comprised its membership, abortion was not simply a moral issue: it was
deemed part of an overall liberal assault on traditional gender arrangements, espe-
cially women’s withdrawal from domesticity, and as a license for (female) sexual
excess—punishment for which would be specifically reserved for women, who
would be denied access to contraceptives and abortion.
Though clearly concerned about the potential of social conservatism to
undermine access to abortion and other reproductive freedoms—most notably
through an increasingly conservative Supreme Court—and noting that worldwide,
675,000 women still die annually from pregnancy-related causes and botched abor-
tions, Gordon concludes on an optimistic note. Gains include the establishment
of an enduring network of women’s health organisations with significant influence
upon mainstream medicine, and an international trend even in very traditional cul-
tures toward smaller families. Though the fight is far from over, the defense of
abortion rights has had the positive effect of revitalizing the feminist movement
and leading to a crucial recognition of the importance of sexual freedom for
women worldwide.
Lynne Luciano
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Frances Lee Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the
Soviet Masses (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007).
The focus of this detailed study is the programme of ‘sexual enlightenment’ in the
Soviet Union of the 1920s in which a part of the medical profession tried to
assume the leading role in solving the ‘sex question’ that had first emerged in the
later nineteenth century. The immediate context for the medical advice on health
and sexual behaviour was NEP (the New Economic Policy adopted in 1921),
denounced by many communists as a concession to forces hostile to the revolu-
tion which encouraged sexual promiscuity, taken by its opponents as proof of the
immorality and hedonism of capitalism. At the same time, the authorities were
concerned about the ‘sexual revolution’ which was proclaimed by young comrades
in particular but also by a fe w prominent communists, notably Alexandra
Kollontai who was widely condemned (and misunderstood) as a promoter of ‘free
love’. In addition, there were serious social problems after seven years of war, not
least the millions of abandoned children, as well as what the communists deemed
to be hangovers of pre-revolutionary moral disorder, such as widespread prostitu-
tion, drug-taking, and venereal disease.
Building a new order, it was held, required discipline (there was great
Left History 13.1 213
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Linda gordon, "The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America" (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007)

Shor, Francis

cent sexuality grew, in part, from an unstable foundation of interracial dependen-
cy and proximity” (27). Southern society functioned according to strict rules gov-
erning race, class, and appropriate gender roles and mill girls and other young rural
transplants threatened this order by blurring the lines between child and woman,
poor white and poor black and spirited youth and modern decadence. Cahn does
note one important class distinction; where whites in the late 1920s were mostly
concerned with policing white working girls, blacks focused on middle class girls,
education, and uplift. Both races were concerned with sexual “delinquents” and
Cahn devotes a chapter each to black and white girls reformatories. Whites
seemed to police adolescent white sexuality out of a fear of “social disorder and
racial degeneracy,” while the uplift and reform efforts launched by black club-
women were meant to argue against natural racial inferiority, since a reformed girl
was proof that degeneracy was not a fixed condition (49, 70).
Cahn admits that her later chapters on rock n’ rollers, pickup girls, and
high school students focus on whites, though she argues that the specter of black
female sexuality is always present and is frequently invoked, either as a contrast
against white virtue or as a castigation against all too similar white sexual deviance.
But the conversation shifted over time from a focus on class distinctions to racial
interest. By the 1950s, teens of both races had “developed a more autonomous
and widely shared culture,” in which boys and girls mixed freely, and racial mixing
was a constant threat (308). With the social order thus challenged, white leaders—
and who exactly they are could be better defined—struggled to restrain and con-
strain female adolescent immorality. As the New South grew through its own dif-
ficult adolescence, Cahn argues, the teenaged girl came to represent the instability
of families, class distinctions, gender roles, and especially the systems of patriarchy
and white supre m a cy. It is a provo c at ive argument and Cahn adds gre at ly to our under-
standing of s exuality and adolescence during a pivotal period of S o u t h e rn history.
David Cline
Southern Oral History Program
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Peter Cole, Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-
Era Philadelphia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
Concluding his superb study of the largest African-American local in the
Industrial Workers of the World, Peter Cole underscores the main theme of the
book: “Local 8 demonstrates what can be accomplished when workers overcome
racial and ethnic differences…(even in the face of) the myriad, powerful forces
that can defeat such efforts” (176). In order to probe the conundrum of how
Local 8 sustained itself for over a decade (from 1913 to 1922) as a bulwark of
IWW unionism in the face of powerful racial divisions and massive political
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repression, Cole incorporates the important case studies of Eric Arnesen and
Bruce Nelson on racially mixed dockworkers, local histories of Philadelphia dur-
ing the Progressive Era, primary and secondary works on African-American his-
tory, and national and international examinations of the Wobblies and syndicalism
during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Acknowledging that his
focus is the “institutional history of Local 8” (6), Cole, nonetheless, provides
exceptional insights into the job, class, gender and racial/ethnic identities of those
workers who laboured on the docks and inside the ships in the busy port of
Philadelphia during this period.
In addition to exploring the interracial dynamics of Local 8, Wobblies on
the Waterfront does not shy away from one of the most persistent paradoxes asso-
ciated with the IWW, that is, in Cole’s words, “how to form a strong, well organ-
ized union fighting for important albeit not revolutionary gains…while striving to
overthrow the economic system” (4). Developing a pragmatic approach to job
control and facilitating a radical sense of solidarity and oppositional politics makes
Cole’s book a fascinating and significant addition to not only histories of the IWW
but also studies of working class social and labour movements. The story told in
this excellent study is further complicated by other issues he highlights related to
the role of local control and leadership. That leadership, exercised by the
Philadelphia-based African-American Ben Fletcher and national IWW organizer
George Speed among others, confronted constant challenges from the persistent
racial animosities stoked by job competition and the on-going harassment by the
racially segregated AFL unions, often in collusion with employers seeking to snuff
out the militancy of Local 8.
In examining the growth and eventual collapse of Local 8, Cole renders
a critical and valuable investigation of how the IWW was able to capitalize on
working class mobilizations and strikes, especially of dockworkers in the US (and
in other places such as New Zealand and Australia). From the successful organ-
izing effort in 1913 to the 1922 lockout and demise of the IWW on the
Philadelphia waterfront, the book charts how the union contended with the arrival
of ever new unskilled immigrants, whether from Eastern Europe or increasingly
from the West Indies and the South, as immigration from Europe was curtailed
during WWI. In particular, Cole notes the disruptive addition of Southern blacks
whose regional background often “further complicated the union’s efforts” (98).
E s p e c i a l ly during WWI and its immediate afterm at h , racial tensions only ex a c e r b ated the
d i fficulties of ke eping up class and revo l u t i o n a ry solidarity. The book is part i c u l a rly reve a l-
ing in laying bare how the themes of “ a n t i - G e rm a n / i m m i grant hy s t e r i a , a n t i - B o l s h ev i s m ,
and the open shop” (103) became critical we apons utilized by the gove rnment and employ-
e rs to ch a l l e n ge and eve n t u a l ly destroy Local 8’s control of the Philadelphia wat e r f ro n t .
In light of the incisive and subtle reading that Cole provides of the interra c i a l
unionism of Local 8, it is unfo rt u n ate that he continues the established tra d i t i o n , d at-
ing back to the seminal wo rk of D u b o f s ky ’s We Shall Be All, o f m i s re a ding the IWW’s
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resistance to WWI and, in particular, the draft. Without belabouring all of the
egregious errors of such a misreading, it is important to note that Cole relies, as
does Dubofsky and so many other studies of the IWW, on what those Wobblies
and their supporters said during the 1918 trials for treason about their wartime
records, especially on the draft. One example of this is the claim that “fully 100%
of Local 8’s members registered for the draft” (82). The only empirical evidence
for this comes from the testimony of Local 8 and national IWW organizers Walter
Nef and E.F. Doree, both of whom were under duress because of the govern-
ment’s indictment on treason. Given the documented evidence of Wobbly resist-
ance to the draft from Irish miners in Butte to Finnish and Austrian miners on the
Iron Range to whole locals, such as that in Rockford, Illinois, marching against reg-
is t rat i o n , it seems re a s o n able to suggest that the re c o rd of Local 8’s part i c i p ation with the
d raft and its anti-war activities is more mixed and more contentious than Cole pro p o s e s.
While Cole is not oblivious to the contradictory nature of Local 8’s polit-
ical activities during WWI, his use of the highly contested term “patriotism” is def-
initely suspect in its less than tentative application to the black rank-and-file of
Local 8. Given the illuminating insights into the dominant African-American role
in Local 8, Cole seems to falter in the exploration of contradictory tendencies
among those African-Americans during WWI. Certainly, the influence of W.E.B.
DuBois in urging blacks to get behind the war effort is noted by Cole. On the
other hand, he completely overlooks those voices challenging Du Bois on this
question within the black activist community, whether from William Monroe
Trotter or A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, editors of the militant and
IWW supporting journal, The Messenger. In fact, a November 1917 editorial in The
Messenger made very explicit their opposition to war-manufactured national chau-
vinism: “Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has.” Thus, although there were
obviously black dockworkers in Local 8 who followed Du Bois’s lead and joined
the Army, there were countless others for whom wartime patriotism was just
another “shuck and jive” of a white supremacist political order.
On the other hand, in navigating many of the extant contradictions on
Philadelphia’s waterfront and in Local 8’s Herculean pains to foster racial and class
solidarity while under constant economic, social, and political pressures, especially
in the dire circumstances of the 1920’s, Wobblies on the Waterfront manages to tell a
very inclusive and important story of interracial unionism. As a probing render-
ing of the intersection of IWW revolutionary objectives with the grinding realities
of defensive unionism, Cole’s book is essential reading not only for understanding
working class self-activity during the first two decades of the twentieth century but
also for recognizing the on-going difficulties of generating and sustaining a social
and labour movement for a diverse and often divisive working class.
Francis Shor
Wayne State University
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Peter Cole, "Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia" (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007)

Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona

Masculinity, Modernism, and the Ambivalence of Nature: Sexual Inversion as Queer Ecology in "The Well of Loneliness"

W. Ogilvie, Brian

that ecology was supposed to have precedence in policy decisions. First, there was
the questionable transfer of the Parks Branch to the new Department of Canadian
Heritage. Then, budgetary constraints devastated employee morale. (Here, inter-
views with former parks personnel would have been instructive.)  Sadly, as Kopas
notes, reorganization  reached the point where superintendents and other supervi-
sory personnel were not dedicated to one particular park and moved around like
migratory animals. In retrospect, it appears that I was lucky to have worked at
Parks Canada when I did.
Bill Waiser
University of Saskatchewan
Londa Sch i eb i n ge r, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic
W o r l d ( C a m b r i d ge, M A : H a rva rd Unive rsity Pre s s, 2 0 0 4 ) .
From the title and cover of Londa Schiebinger’s engaging, provocative book, one
would never guess that it was about abortion. Not that the title is misleading.
Schiebinger provides a fascinating and well researched account of European and
Creole botanical explorers in the western hemisphere, their interactions with
indigenous experts, and the “linguistic imperialism” of Carl Linnaeus and his fol-
lowers who imposed European names—often the names of prominent European
botanists or patrons—on American, African, and Asian plants. But her story cen-
ters on a plant, commonly known as the pride-of-Barbados, also called the peacock
flower (Poinciana pulcherrima L. or Caesalpinia pulcherrima ([L] Sw), the slaves and
Indians who used it and other plants as abortifacients, and the reasons why knowl-
edge of its abortifacient properties did not become part of European medical
botany.
Medicinal plants were big business in the eighteenth century, and a wide
range of travelers sought them out. With the anachronism “bioprospecting”
Schiebinger underscores the parallels between their efforts and modern pharma-
ceutical companies’ attempts to find new drugs by exploiting indigenous knowl-
edge. But no Rio Convention protected indigenous peoples’ rights to their botan-
ical products and lore in the eighteenth century; if some “biopirates” like Nicolas-
Joseph Thiery de Menonville thought that natives should be compensated for the
plants and knowledge he took from them—unless they were subjects of the
enemy Spanish—few shared his scruples. Schiebinger introduces readers to a wide
range of bioprospectors. She includes heroic “voyager botanists” such as Hans
Sloane and Maria Sibylla Merian, on whom earlier historians tended to focus, but
she introduces us to “type specimens” of others: mercenary biopirates, Creole
naturalists, and traveling botanical assistants, like Jeanne Baret, the assistant and
(probably) lover of Philibert Commerson, physician on Bougainville’s circumnav-
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igation of the globe. Armchair botanists in Europe collected and organized the
plants and knowledge that these prospectors sent across the Atlantic.
In the Americas and in Europe, physicians tested these new drugs.
Eighteenth-century medical theory held that the effects of a drug varied accord-
ing to the patient’s age, sex, weight, and ‘complexion’, or balance of humors.
Physicians and medical students tested drugs on animals, criminals, orphans, and,
if early trials were encouraging, on themselves; the healthy, trained (male) medical
body was well suited, they thought, to identify the effects of a drug and distinguish
them from those of illness. They could not auto-experiment with drugs that dealt
with female maladies. But they did conduct a number of experiments on emme-
nagogues (menstrual regulators) and shared data widely.
By contrast, they gave little attention to abortifacients. Of course, as
Schiebinger argues, the line between an emmenagogue and an abortifacient might
be a matter of dosage. And physicians were expected to be able to induce abor-
tions when necessary to save a woman’s life, though some preferred ‘the hand’ to
drugs. Savin, pennyroyal, and other indigenous European abortifacient plants
were well known. But it is striking how, in a period when colonial explorers greed-
i ly sought indigenous medicinal know l e d ge and substances, the pride-of-
Barbados’s abortifacient properties did not become part of the European pharma-
copoeia. Schiebinger frames her exploration of this question as a contribution to
“agnotology,” the study of “culturally induced ignorances” (3).
Europeans certainly knew the plant itself. A native of the Americas, it
had been introduced to Africa, Asia, and European gardens by early European
travelers. They occasionally used it for other medicinal purposes. And they could
certainly have learned of its use as an abortifacient. In 1705, Merian described
how pregnant slaves used the plant’s seeds to induce abortion, thus sparing their
children from being born slaves and suffering the cruelties to which they had
themselves been subjected. Hans Sloane, too, reported with disapproval the use
of the pride-of-Barbados as an abortifacient. Much knowledge of abortifacients
remained within the slave community; male physicians rarely attended slave
women’s birthings, and slaves would have been chary of sharing such knowledge,
which offered them a covert form of resistance. But the abortifacient properties
of the pride-of-Barbados were in print. Why, then, did European physicians
remain largely ignorant of them?
Here we reach the most interesting, but also most speculative, part of
Schiebinger’s account. The causes of culturally induced ignorance must be
approached indirectly. Schiebinger identifies two main causes. In Europe, in the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, physicians and state authorities increas-
ingly restricted women’s control over reproduction. Instead of testing and
improving native European abortifacients, physicians came to consider them
either dangerous or ineffectual. And while early modern law and custom had
made women the judge of when they were pregnant (when the fetus “quickened”),
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allowing them to use emmenagogues or abortifacients before that point without
legal repercussions, from the 1790s on states eliminated the distinction between
abortion before and after quickening while outlawing abortifacient drugs. In this
climate, there was little interest in exotic abortifacients. The second cause, though,
involves the colonial enterprise itself. Administrators and bioprospectors, almost
all men, were pronatalist. They had no interest in drugs that might reduce fertili-
ty; on the contrary, they were deeply concerned about the failure of colonial pop-
ulations, especially slave populations, to reproduce themselves. They had little
incentive to study abortifacients or to transmit knowledge of them to a European
medical community that, in any case, had little interest in such knowledge.
I find this account convincing, if necessarily drawn with a broad brush.
Schiebinger notes one instance in which knowledge of an exotic abortifacient was
deliberately suppressed; in most cases it did not need to be. No grand conspiracy
was needed to keep such knowledge away from European women. Social struc-
tures that embodied masculine, pronatalist interests generated the indifference that
produced ignorance. But not complete ignorance. In the pages of Sloane and
Merian—and today, in indigenous communities throughout the Caribbean—
knowledge of herbal abortifacients has been preserved. Schiebinger ends with a
lament for knowledge that might have been lost forever due to “state politics that
enmesh innocent plants in their web” (241). But her tale admits a more optimistic
reading. In the case of the pride-of-Barbados, that knowledge was not lost, mere-
ly neglected by European medicine. Today, ethnobotanists and bioprospectors are
eagerly seeking out new drugs in indigenous communities and in the pages of old
herbals. In the twenty-first century, whether such knowledge will be preserved or
lost—and if preserved, whether its indigenous possessors will be compensated—
seems less a question of state politics than of global capital: that is, whether phar-
maceutical companies can find or create a market. Then and now, bioprospectors
follow the money.
Brian W. Ogilvie
University of Massachusetts Amherst
L aw rence M. L i p i n , Work ers and the Wild: Conser vatio n, Co ns ume rism, and
Labor in Ore gon, 1910-1930 ( U r b a n a , I L : U n ive rsity of Illinois Pre s s, 2 0 0 7 ) .
To some extent, while environmental historians struggle to connect the history of
human relations with non-human nature to the history of social conflict, labour
historians tend to overlook the role of non-human nature in reshaping social con-
flict. Two years ago, Liza Piper’s short essay in Left History outlined some of the
intersections and obstacles between left history and environmental history, seek-
ing to highlight the possibilities for considerable overlap (11.1 2006: 41-46).
Lawrence M. Lipin’s study of the relationship between organized labour and early
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Londa Schiebinger, "Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)

L. Manore, Jean

John Sandlos, Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation
in the Northwest Territories ( Va n c o u ve r: U n ive rsity of British Columbia Pre s s,
2 0 0 8 ) .
Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth
Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007).
As can be discerned from the titles of their books, both Sandlos and Loo exam-
ine the historical developments of wildlife conservation in Canada. Sandlos focus-
es on the relationship between federal wildlife policy and officials and subsistence
hunters, most notably the First Nations, in northern Canada; whereas Loo focus-
es on individuals and institutions, both government and non-, who contributed to
Canadians’ understanding of how best to manage wildlife for human use and con-
sumption. Both books seek to demonstrate the varied and at times conflictual his-
tory of conservation that arose out of differing ideas of the human/nature rela-
tionship and the differing needs of wildlife by those who had an interest in it, gov-
ernment officials, sports-hunters, subsistence and rural hunters, and recreationists.
As a result, both books demonstrate an immense interest in conservation by a wide
variety of constituents, thereby belying the predominate myth, as espoused, for
example, by Janet Foster, that conservation in Canada was the result of the efforts
of dedicated and talented, but very few, civil servants.
Themes common to both books include: the exercise of state power to
the disadvantage of local hunters, the commercialization of game, the ethical and
societal values that humans gain from a relationship with wildlife and the role of
science versus other forms of knowledge in managing wildlife populations. Yet
despite their common themes, the organization of the books is very different.
While both books provide an introductory overview of the history of wildlife con-
servation, Sandlos remains focused on government wildlife policy whereas Loo
delves more into cultural theory and the social significance of wildlife to Canadian
society. From there, the books diverge even further. Sandlos focuses on big game,
organizing his chapters so that first the bison, then the muskox, and finally the
caribou are the featured topics. Loo looks at constituents within Canadian socie-
ty who influenced Canadians’ ideas of wildlife such as First Nations, Jack Miner,
Percy Taverner, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Farley Mowat.
When examining the themes of state power and commercialization,
Sandlos argues that conservation policy represents the exercise of federal state
power over local subsistence hunters, especially Aboriginal hunters. Conservation
is the means whereby First Nations are brought within the framework of federal
legislation and hence Canadian society; it is the means whereby First Nations will
be assimilated and more importantly, whereby they will be ‘civilized’. Sandlos
argues that despite the official rhetoric of the state exercising its power to stop the
“wanton slaughter” of big game by Aboriginal hunters, conservation policies were
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really reflective of an antipathy to local Native knowledge and management (237-
238). Additionally, the federal government viewed game species, such as bison,
muskox, and caribou as potential domesticates and believed that if these animals
could be herded onto ranches, then First Nations could become ranchers and
farmers and therefore adopt civilized occupations. Conservation of big game
species was therefore not about preserving or protecting animals but about man-
aging them for production. Conservation was the tool not for sustaining First
Nations’ local economy but for bringing them into the industrial economy.
For Loo, state conservation policies were only one of a myriad number
of ways in which wildlife was preserved and protected. She agrees with Sandlos
on the effect of federal policies on First Nations but demonstrates that some
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people who became guides were able to create a
niche for themselves within the commercialization of wildlife that, in some cases,
made them prosperous, but also earned them respect for their skills and knowl-
edge. Additionally, she also examines state employees who resisted the reduction
of wildlife to units of production. Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) employees
for example recognized the importance of habitat preservation to conserving
wildlife, and as a result took a more holistic and less utilitarian view of the natural
world. Other advocates such as Farley Mowat and Bill Mason, who were hired
temporarily by the Parks Branch and CWS respectively, took the idea of conserva-
tion even further. To them, it was of paramount importance to regard all wildlife
as valuable and worthy in and of itself. To champion their position, Mowat and
Mason ‘rehabilitated’ the wolf through books and movies; they transformed it
from a savage, ruthless, beast fit only for slaughter to a noble, co-operative animal
that rendered valuable service to the natural world by killing the weak and infirm
of a species and doing so only when necessary.
When examining the theme of ethics and values, Sandlos views conser-
vation as a paternalistic, colonialist agent. It is imbued with the values of commer-
cialism; wildlife was not to be preserved, that is left alone, free from human inter-
ference, but rather it was an economic resource which would enable the northern
landscape and its peoples to become useful to Canada. Conservation was also
imbued with the values espoused by science. Rational management practices
would displace local, ‘serendipitous’ knowledge and ranching, herding and slaugh-
ter-houses would replace seasonal hunting and trapping activities. First Nations
and other local hunters resisted these values and their results but had only limited
success. Treaty rights of First Nations were constantly challenged by conservation
policies and wilderness preserves were carved out of Native hunting and trapping
territories. Sandlos refers to these preserves as “prisons” for wildlife and details
how the First Nations were reluctantly accorded “visiting rights” (77). Thus
Sandlos focuses on the clash of views about wildlife between federal officials and
local First Nations.
In contrast, Loo elaborates on the clashes that existed not only between
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Left History 13_1 (final)  9/24/08  9:49 AM  Page 168
the government and First Nations, but between ‘folk biologists’ and scientists,
n ational and local intere s t s, p r ivate enterprise and public re s p o n s i b i l i t y.
Specifically, she explores the ideas and suggestions about how to manage wildlife
that came from non-government sources and in so doing demonstrates culture’s
importance to approaches to nature. The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), for
example, became an exponent of conservation as a means of protecting its com-
merce in furs. During the early twentieth century, beaver stocks were so severely
depleted in northern Quebec, that James Watt, an HBC employee, took it upon
himself to encourage the Cree not to trap beaver but rather leave them alone and
report back to Watt whenever they came across an active beaver house. In this
example, conservation is a management tool of business and serves as the means
of maintaining product supply. Jack Miner was another conservationist who orig-
inally made his living, out of sheer necessity, by trapping, hunting and then guid-
ing. He later became concerned about the decline of migratory birds and endeav-
oured, through his individual efforts, to provide sanctuary for Canada Geese. For
this, he was dubbed ‘Father Goose’, and more significantly the father of conser-
vation in Canada. Miner’s approach to conservation arose out of his rural back-
ground and his religious convictions. Miner believed that ‘Man’ held dominion
over the earth and as a result had the responsibility to manage its resources, includ-
ing wildlife. He believed that wildlife existed for man’s benefit and should there-
fore be exploited as such. Miner was also what might be called a ‘folk biologist’.
His approach to conservation was not based on science but rather on personal
experiences and beliefs. As a result, Miner believed that Canada Geese were ‘good
species’ because they were a source of food for humans and because they seemed
to exhibit noble traits such as loyalty to family and bravery in the face of danger.
Hawks were ‘bad species’ because they were not loyal nor useful. As result, in
terms of conservation, geese should be protected, hawks should be exterminated
(74-78).
This point about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ species also highlights another
approach to conservation discussed by Loo, one that brought local and national
interests into conflict by the second half of the twentieth century. As scientific
views broadened to consider wildlife within an ecological context, debates over
bounties for nuisance animals such as wolves and coyotes increased. Whereas fed-
eral biologists and others could recognize the importance of these animals to the
natural order, rural farmers and ranchers continued to be threatened by these ani-
mals’ predations on their sheep, chickens and other stock. These local interests
therefore continued to propose the necessity of destroying these animals and
advocated the continued use of a bounty to encourage that end. Biologists, ecol-
ogists and naturalists, whether employed by the state or not, cared little for local
concerns and instead advocated for the end of the bounty. For Sandlos, the debate
over good and bad usually involved discussions of hunting practices. Good
hunters were sport-hunters, who gave game a fair chance to escape, who did not
Left History 13.1 169
Left History 13_1 (final)  9/24/08  9:49 AM  Page 169
shoot an animal until they were sure to get off a good shot, and who did not hunt
to ‘fill their pots’. This meant therefore that bad hunters were the opposite and
their characteristics were usually ascribed to First Nations and other subsistence
hunters.
Finally, both authors devote some time to discussing wild places and how
they came to be preserved. Sandlos discusses the creation of Wood Buffalo
National Park and its use as an abattoir for surplus and diseased buffalo, and Loo
examines the individual efforts of Tommy Walker and Andy Russell to set aside
areas within the Rocky Mountains. These men believed that living in ‘pristine’
areas allowed people to live ethically, that is, in unity with the natural order. For
those interested in the history of conservation, wildlife management, First
Nations, state power and individual agency, Sandlos and Loo offer insightful analy-
ses within provocative narrative frameworks. As a result, both books make a sig-
nificant contribution to the literature on conservation in Canada and both books
are enjoyable to read.
Jean L. Manore
Bishop’s University
Jamie Benidickson, The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of
Sewag e (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007).
It is difficult to imagine this book being published twenty or 30 years ago. In the
1970s and 1980s neither the secondary literature, which it expertly summarizes and
interprets, nor the world waste and water crisis by which it is ideologically and con-
ceptually underwritten, had come fully and visibly into being. Benidickson’s book
is described as a social and legal history. But it is more than that. An excellent
interim overview of the historiography of water and waste, The Culture of Flushing
draws on a wide range of specialist publications. Information from this body of
literature is intermixed with findings based on original research into Canadian,
American, British and, on a more limited scale, European sources. The somewhat
recondite term “flushing” may reduce potential readership. Firmly and authenti-
cally rooted in nineteenth—and much earlier—discourses and experience, it will
fail to resonate with those struggling against pollution problems in twenty-first-
century Lagos or Rio and near-critical drought conditions in the mightily affluent
south-eastern United States. Something along the lines of ‘water and waste, then
and now’ might have made better marketing sense.
Over the last two decades historians concerned with the origins and
development of large-scale water supply, sewage disposal and treatment systems
have intensively explored what Joel Tarr has classically described as the search for
an “ultimate sink”. Throughout the nineteenth and on into the twentieth century
rapidly expanding urban communities in Europe and the United States urgently—
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John Sandlos, "Hunters and Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories" (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008) and Tina Loo, "States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century" (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007)

Egan, Michael

of the “inverted quarantine” response to the environmental crisis holds the mir-
ror up to the face of consumer society so that it may, as Beck suggests, encounter
in its own image “the hazards that confront it.” Whether Szasz’s intervention aids
society in overcoming the ‘reigning paralysis’ (or as he refers to it in chapter seven,
“political anesthesia”) remains unclear.
Arn Keeling
Memorial University of Newfoundland
William F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues & Petroleum: How Humans Took
Control of Climate (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Climate is unstable: for the past 900,000 years, based on varying orbital parame-
ters, the earth has fluctuated between glacial and inter-glacial cycles. These truths
have served as the foundation of much current debate over the human role in
global climate change. If the climate fluctuates on its own can we really attribute
recent global warming to human activities?  The growing consensus within the sci-
entific community—and, it seems, in public and political circles as well—is that
human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the
Industrial Revolution have indeed contributed to the warming of the planet, which
has resulted in the dramatic collapse of major Antarctic ice shelves, more potent
storms, and rising water levels. The proliferation of greenhouse gases, the argu-
ment goes, is the product of the increasing human dependence upon fossil fuels—
and predominantly coal and oil—which began in earnest in the western world in
the eighteenth century. The modern production and consumption of energy has
yielded the climate crisis. But here’s a riddle: if the earth’s climate is supposed to
be unstable, then why has the Holocene’s climate remained strikingly stable for the
last 10,000 years?  
This is the puzzle that William F. Ruddiman confronts in Plows, Plagues,
and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Ruddiman, an earth scientist
and Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, argues that the last 10,000
years marks a break from the standard pattern. While this argument might seem
to let humans off the hook for climate change, Ruddiman points to the rise of
agriculture as the point at which more greenhouse gases entered the atmosphere
and temperatures began to steady themselves. Drawing on his earlier work on the
‘early anthropogenic hypothesis,’ Ruddiman links global warming trends and cli-
mate stability to a much earlier period of human environmental activity. As early
humans transformed from hunter-gatherers to agricultural societies, sedentary liv-
ing and farming practices yielded a larger population and required the clearing of
more lands. Deforestation precipitated increases in carbon dioxide accumulation
and the rise of animal husbandry, combined with the creation of artificial wetlands
to grow rice, produced greater quantities of methane. Ruddiman carefully tracks
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Left History 13_1 (final)  9/24/08  9:49 AM  Page 179
these records and suggests that there are chronological similarities between this
human transition and the rise of greenhouse gases at a time when existing climat-
ic patterns should have been dictating decreases and cooling temperatures. In
effect, Ruddiman contends that the earth was due for another ice age some five
thousand years ago, but human activities continue to delay its arrival. Moreover,
he notes that subsequent drops in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmos-
phere can be linked to concomitant decline in human population as a result of dis-
ease (in fourteenth century Europe and a couple of centuries later in the Americas
after European contact).
The book is instructive and refreshingly non-technical in its prose. It also
offers insight to historians as to how they might think about scientific and envi-
ronmental processes in the longue durée and draw on these materials to write histo-
ry. Ruddiman’s overriding argument is somewhat speculative, but the correlation
between human agricultural practices and greenhouse gas emissions is striking and
worthy of some consideration, particularly in their very accessible presentation in
graphs and tables throughout this book. This is hardly the last word on human
influences on climate, but it does complicate historical interpretations that indict
the Industrial Revolution as the pivotal turning point in the rise of the current
environmental crisis. Ruddiman also challenges his readers to be conscious of the
role of human-ecological interactions in our histories. This is important: the take-
away message is that not only are humans capable of changing the earth’s climate,
but also that we have been doing so for millennia. Given our contemporary indus-
trial capacity, it raises some serious questions and concerns over the fragility of the
physical environment and our relationship with it.
Michael Egan
McMaster University
Kathryn Hochstetler and Margaret Keck, Greening Brazil: Environmental
Activism in State and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
Until the early 1980s the ‘left’ was largely ‘red’ but not ‘green’ in its concerns and
politics—essentially ignoring the nature-society/development relation. However,
United Nations Conferences in 1972 and 1992 placed the environment at the cen-
tre of agenda at the level of both theory and practice. These conferences stimu-
lated a global environmental movement and several rounds of environmental leg-
islation by governments across the world in the search for a more sustainable form
of national development. And, it would seem, the resulting environmental move-
ment also stimulated greater environmental awareness on the left, leading to the
formulation of various forms of left-critical analysis and political activism—eco-
Marxism, political ecology, eco-feminism, etc. In retrospect it is possible to divide
the environmental left into two categories: a dominant stream oriented towards
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William F. Ruddiman, "Plows, Plagues & Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate" (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)

EDITORIAL NOTE
The production of this issue was delayed by a long and difficult strike by the
graduate students and contract faculty at the journal’s host institution, York
University. This strike, which closely affected everyone involved with the pro-
duction of Left History, raised hard and divisive questions about the politics that
surround academic life and labour, as well as the relationship between the uni-
versity, the state, and the broader community. The relevance of publications
like Left History, with its reputation for solid progressive scholarship and
debate, became increasingly apparent in the midst of this conflict.  While the
editors make no apologies for standing in solidarity with the striking CUPE
3903 members, we appreciate the patience of our contributors and subscribers
for any delays in the publication of this issue.
On that note, we would like to salute three of our editors who have recently
handed over the reins of Left History.  Ian Mosby, Jason Ellis, and Stephen
Brooke have each devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to the journal
over the past several years.  Much of the credit for Left History’s continued sta-
tus as a forum for dynamic academic debate is owed to their hard work and ded-
ication.  Their efforts are warmly appreciated by readers and contributors alike.
Left History 13_2FinalTextQuark  3/20/09  1:44 PM  Page 8


Editorial Note

Cassano, Graham

"Hunkies," "Gasbags," & "Reds": The Construction and Deconstruction of Hegemonic Masculinity in Black Fury (1935) and Riff Raff (1936)

Austin, Curtis

Roz Payne (Editor), What We Want, What We Believe: The Black Panther
Party Library DVD (Oakland: AK Press, 2006).
What We Want: We Believe: The Black Panther Party Library is a ground breaking col-
lection of film footage, videographies of the top BPP leaders and video oral his-
tories of the members of the News Reel who worked to publicize and support the
work of the Black Panther Party, movement organizations and individuals in gen-
eral. This collection of four DVDs is unsurpassed in its breadth and knowledge
of those most closely associated with the inner workings, growth, development,
and decline of the BPP. It is a welcome addition to the rapidly growing research
on civil rights and black power now being conducted by scholars throughout the
US and around the globe. Roz Payne’s thoroughly researched and well-edited
video collection is one that will be indispensable to those seeking to understand
the phenomenon J. Edgar Hoover chose to dub the “greatest threat to the inter-
nal security of the United States.”
Included in this collection are well-known short documentary films like
Off the Pig!, May Day and Repression. These short films, often less than twenty min-
utes in length, cover the early history of Black Panther Party and the major events
that brought it headlines in the late sixties and early seventies. One sees footage
where an imprisoned Huey Newton speaks candidly about why there was a need
for the BPP. Viewers witness party co-founder Bobby Seale read Executive
Mandate number one on the steps of the Sacramento Capital where he called for
blacks nationwide to take note of the “racist California legislature” that was
preparing to pass a law to “disarm” blacks and take away their second amendment
rights to bear arms. This spectacle swelled the group’s numbers from thirty to
nearly 4,000 in a few months time. Minister of Information and infamous author
Eldridge Cleaver chimes in with a few choice four-letter words and explains why
it is important to blacks and their white, brown, red, and yellow allies to make the
police feel the same fear that blacks had grown to know over the centuries. While
all of this is classic footage that makes for excellent teaching tools, the newsreel
team made it clear that their task was not only to document and preserve the his-
tory of this radical organization but also to use their films to educate “the people”
and to recruit new members into party. In other words, they were scholar activists
long before the term became popular in the late twentieth century.
Newsreel’s role in the life of the BPP is the part of the collection that
makes it so unique. The stories that the newsreel film team and the lawyers who
fought for and supported the party through uncounted legal battles tell are at the
same time heartbreaking and courageous. The members of the newsreel family
from New York to California lay bare their hearts in an attempt to tell their indi-
vidual stories of how they came to know, love, work with, and finally to leave the
BPP and carry on with the rest of their lives. Movement lawyers follow suit with
stories of intrigue, betrayal, innovative and new defenses, and plain old good luck.
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Bob Blume, Bob Boyle, and Jesse Burman paint a picture of this radical organiza-
tion that most have never seen.
Never before seen video interviews with Panther Field Marshal Don Cox
in his home in France round out the collection. Living in exile for the better part
of forty years has left this movement stalwart worn but not defeated and certain-
ly not bitter. His exposition on the Panther’s foibles, defeats, and victories provide
a fresh inside view of the party that one rarely sees from those on this side of the
pond. His counterpart, FBI special agent William A. Cohendet is juxtaposed with
Panther leaders to show how the powers that be saw the Panthers, and more
importantly, how they saw themselves and their roles as keepers of the status quo.
Despite hard hitting questions and candid comments from Roz Payne who inter-
viewed Agent “WAC,” one still comes away feeling that there had to have been
more to the overkill in strategy and tactics the FBI used to destroy the BPP.
Nevertheless, the collection is useful because it allows the viewer to make up his
or her own mind about the Panthers, the movement, and the work of local, state,
and federal government agencies that participated in this dance of death and d o o m
with this radical gro u p. This in itself would have been sufficient to carry us into the
n ext millennium, but Payne had the fo resight to re a l i ze that no collection of this caliber
could have been fully complete without a photo ga l l e ry that carried the viewer thro u g h
the short life of an orga n i z ation whose lega cy continues to be manifested in free bre a k-
fast progra m s, access to healthcare for the poor, and ch a rter schools that do mu ch bet-
ter jobs at educating the young than do most of the nat i o n’s public sch o o l s.
Scholars, students, and lay people will find something of value in this col-
lection. Community people who were “there” will be taken on an unforgettable
trip down memory lane and would-be revolutionaries and future activists can learn
a lot from those who have already been there and done that. They might start by
watching the amazing footage of the first ever conference (at Wheelock College in
Boston) held solely on the subject of the Black Panther Party. They might get
even more clarity by analyzing the footage from the BPP’s 35th Reunion, which
took place in Washington, DC and marked the first time in thirty years that East
Coast and West Coast Panthers sat down as a group to discuss the legacy of the
party and what went wrong along the way. What We Want What We Believe is going
to be used for years by high school teachers and college professors who want to
share with their students the tragic but grand story of radical change in the 1960s.
For this reason, this collection is recommended for all who seek to know why the
United States is the way it is in terms of race relations and social stratification.
They will find in it the answers they seek to know about America’s tragic past.
More importantly, they will be forced to ask those questions that most of us are
afraid to ask: Where do we go from here?  And what do we do after we get there?
Curtis Austin
University of Southern Mississippi
Left History 13.2 191
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Not a member yet

Linda gordon, "The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America" (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007)

Peter Cole, "Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia" (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007)

Masculinity, Modernism, and the Ambivalence of Nature: Sexual Inversion as Queer Ecology in "The Well of Loneliness"

Londa Schiebinger, "Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)

William F. Ruddiman, "Plows, Plagues & Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate" (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)

Editorial Note

"Hunkies," "Gasbags," & "Reds": The Construction and Deconstruction of Hegemonic Masculinity in Black Fury (1935) and Riff Raff (1936)

Roz Payne (Editor), "What We Want, What We Believe: The Black Panther Perty Library DVD" (Oakland: AK Press, 2006)

Remembering the Struggle for the Environment: Hamilton's Lax Lands/Bayfront Park, 1950s-2008

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