Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Hinther, Rhonda L.

Review of "Labouring Feminisms and Feminist Working-Class 
History in North America and Beyond," 29 September-2 
October 2005, Munk Centre for International Studies at the 
University of Toronto. 
Rhonda L. Hinther 
What is labour history? What is feminist history? How do they intersect? 
What have these intersections meant historically? Historiographically? 
Through what means are scholars interrogating labour history, feminist history, 
labouring feminisms? These were some of the key issues confronted, chal- 
lenged, and addressed at the groundbreaking conference, "Labouring Feminism 
and Feminist Working-Class History in North America and Beyond" (or, 
"Labouring Feminisms," as it came to be called by many participants), held 29 
September-2 October 2005 at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the 
University of Toronto. 
As its title suggests, the conference brought together a diversity of scholars 
from Canada, the US, Australia, Germany, Mexico, and Britain. The consensus 
that emerged from the variety of papers, panellists, and presentations is that 
labouring feminism is a pluralistic concept, a "many splendoured thing." Panel 
sessions featured a variety of topics: "Labour, Race, Empire"; "Labouring and 
Consuming Bodies"; "Working Class Masculinities and Rethinking the 'Manly 
Man' in Labour History"; "Culture, Representation, and Politics on Display"; 
and "Trade Union Feminism-Its Presence and Its Absence," to name but a few. 
The variety of methodologies and sources scholars in attendance used and the 
diverse means through which they presented and diffused their findings was 
especially welcome to see. Varpu Lindstrom's Letters from Karelia, a film that 
explores the often tragic circumstances encountered by Finns who journeyed to 
Karelia in the 1930s in support of the Soviet experiment, was an engaging 
example of film as a means of disseminating research and exploring labour 
activism and its intergenerational consequences. 
One of the particular strengths of the conference was the way in which it 
welcomed and integrated the work of "new scholars" with that of more sea- 
soned academics. While academically rigorous, it nonetheless created a friend- 
ly and informal environment where connections between generations of schol- 
ars could be made. An asset to the often crowded conference was the lounge of 
the Munk Centre, an environment of easy approachability which was, as a 
result, the site of many post-panel or post-plenary "cross-generational" discus- 
sions. Scheduled free time and social events, like the Saturday night conference 
party and dance, also facilitated relaxed scholarly interaction, a feat at which 
many conferences can fail. 
11 1 
0 Left Histoq 
1 1.1 (Spring 2006) 
112 Hinther 
While the conference was a chance to explore what has and is being done 
in and with feminist labour history it was more importantly, perhaps, an oppor- 
tunity to highlight the need for more comparative (particularly transnational) 
approaches in the field. While the obvious links between many panel papers 
highlighted the value of this type of inquiry, the presentations at the plenary 
"Labour Feminism and Women's Activities: National, Transnational, and 
Comparative Perspectives" drove the issue home. Papers by Karen Hunt 
("Rethinking Communist, Socialist, and Other Radical Women in Britain and 
Europe"), Jennifer Guglielmo and Franca Iacovetta ("Historicizing 
Transnational Working-Class Immigrant Feminisms in the US and Canada"), 
and Wendy Goldman ("Lesson of Proletarian Feminism in Power and Defeat: 
The Soviet Union"), in particular, illustrated existing historical feminist paral- 
lels and the value of comparative international approaches for devising method- 
ologies and strategizing for change. 
Clearly, the time was ripe for this sort of conference. Sessions were often 
packed (to the point that an overflow room with closed-circuit television was 
necessary for plenary panels). The high attendance and diversity of participants 
suggests ongoing widespread cross-disciplinary interest in feminist labour his- 
tory. It was especially refreshing to see the array of scholarly activity that chal- 
lenged and expanded traditional boundaries of what constituted "labour," 
"work," "activism," and, perhaps most importantly, "feminism." This was evi- 
dent in the array of papers dealing with the labouring experiences and activism 
of Aboriginal women, women of colour, and women with disabilities who have, 
too often in the past, been situated outside or excluded from meaningful and 
inclusive feminist and labour discourse. Groundbreaking and insightful work 
was also evident in panels such as "The Body and Rethinking Working Class 
History"; "Whose Bodies? Whose Rights? Politics of Labour and the State"; 
and "Producing Sex" which interrogated the body and bodies-in prison, in 
morgues, on stage, and in uniform-as venues and symbols for exploitation, 
resistance, and activism. 
Because of the sheer variety of offerings, it was often an overwhelming task 
to try to choose which of the panels to attend. Organizers were right to limit 
parallel session papers to ten minutes, and session chairs should be commend- 
ed for the regularity with which the ten-minute rule was enforced. Additional 
time for questions would have been useful, however. Fewer panels in each par- 
allel session would have also been helpful. Too often it was difficult to choose 
which of the four panels to attend-there was simply too much to see in too 
short a time. Hopefully future versions-and there definitely should be future 
versions-f "Labouring Feminisms" will see one or two additional days added 
to the schedule to permit participants to hear more papers. 
Of course, these minor shortcomings did not affect the overall impact of 
"Labouring Feminisms." Participants routinely expressed much enthusiasm, 
Conference Report 113 
and many indicated that they could feel that they were a part of something big- 
a key development and turning point in worlung-class feminist historical stud- 
ies and activism. Overall, "Labouring Feminisms" was an exciting and engag- 
ing event and an important springboard for the expansion of transnational fem- 
inist labour history. 


Review of "Labouring Feminisms and Feminist Working-Class History in North America and Beyond," 29 September-2 October 2005, Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto

Muir, James

150 Reviews 
they utilized popular forms of performance, theatricality, and ironic parody, to 
make their messages "legible" and "visible" to a wider public (119). 
Throughout Popular Bohemia, the city of Paris is integral to this line of inquiry. 
Theatres, clubs, cafCs, cabarets, and the streets of the capital, all factor into 
Gluck's ideas about the performative nature of the bohemian, and famous sites 
such as the Salpetrike and the Trocadero Museum play critical roles in her fash- 
ioning of a public modernism. The city and its artists also figure prominently 
in her collection of illustrations from popular publications such as Les Fran~ais 
peints par eu-mgmes (1841), and famous caricatures by HonorC Daumier. 
These depict the many varieties of bohemian culture, and underscore Gluck's 
point about its pervasiveness at the commercial level. 
There may be some disagreement over Gluck's approach to popular culture 
and its public venues. She admits as much when she points to critics such as T. 
J. Clark, who contend that bohemian spaces such as cafks and cabarets, while 
popular and democratic on the surface, and open to a "heterogeneous audience" 
that blurred class divisions, were not truly able to erase the "economic inequal- 
ities, social injustice, or class oppression of modern society" (125). Gluck's 
reply is that bohemian cultural venues were never intended to fight this battle. 
Their goal, in her estimation, was to "transform perceptions" about the world in 
which people lived: "their hope was to transform modernity on the symbolic 
and experiential level, making it transparent, accessible, and emotionally 
expressive for ordinary people" (125-126). In linking various aspects of 
bohemian culture to this objective, not only through her discussion of artists 
from the romantic hero to the Primitive artist, but also through her re-evaluation 
of key figures such as Gautier, Baudelaire, and Gauguin, Gluck presents us with 
an alternative version of bohemia which "never subscribed to the myth of auton- 
omy" (187). In this way, Popular Bohemia is an important study that should 
encourage historians to envision a modernism that is rooted in a public and pop- 
ular experience, and will be of interest to those who continue to explore the 
intersections of art, culture, and society, as well as the historical conditions of 
modernity. 
Julie A. Johnson-Queen's University 
Victor Serge, What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression: A 
Guide for Activists (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2005). 
Introduction by Dalia Hashad. First printed as Les Coulisses d'une SGretd 
gbnirale. Ce que tout rdvolutionaire doit savoir de la repression (Paris: 
Librairie du Travail, 1926). 
How do we understand the role of the police and law in maintaining capitalism? 
As revolutionaries and radicals how do we watch for and evade the police before 
Left History 1 1.1 151 
the revolution? After the revolution of the working class what will become of 
the police and the law? Will we continue to repress dissent and criminality with 
a police force and law of our own? Historians have been interested by the first 
of these questions for years. Radicals and protestors have been rightly con- 
cerned by the second. The last two questions, however, about the future after 
some inevitable class revolution, have become much less popular for radical and 
left historians in the West and North, regardless of whether or not they are polit- 
ically active. True, in the conclusion of Whigs and Hunters, E .  P. Thompson 
ruminated on the rule of law as both a bourgeois legal idea and an important 
institution following the revolution. But, most historians today do not await or 
much-debate the content of a coming working class revolution. 
In the years following the Bolshevik revolution of late 1917, the Belgian- 
born Russian Victor Serge engaged with all of these questions. For Serge these 
were more than academic problems encountered in interpreting historical data 
or in theorizing about the future: they were essential to understanding what had 
hindered Russian and stopped other European revolutionaries in the first quar- 
ter of the twentieth century and for explaining the structure of the Soviet state 
after 1917. His investigations and answers, first published in Bulletin 
Communiste (Paris) in 1921 and expanded in 1926, have recently been reprint- 
ed in English as What Evev  Radical Should Know About State Repression with 
a new introduction by Dalia Hashad. 
The pamphlet is broken into four chapters: a long description of the anti- 
revolutionary activities of the Russian Okhrana; ruminations on the relationship 
between workers' organisations and the law in Russia and the West; advice 
about avoiding and dealing with state repression; and a comparison of pre and 
post revolutionary law, policing, repression, and state terror. The chapters are 
quite distinct in content and flavour, yet each on its own and together offer 
something of interest to the contemporary reader, even one who is not a 
RussianISoviet historian. 
The first and longest chapter discussing the Okhrana is an exciting exam- 
ple of history wrapped up in the politics of its time. Here, a European sympa- 
thiser and late joiner of the Bolshevik party takes his readers through the 
archives of the anti-revolutionary secret police. He exposes informers, 
describes reports on individuals and organisations, and dissects the role of the 
police in suppressing and provoking revolutionary parties in Russia and among 
their sympathisers in exile communities beyond. This section reads like the 
North American muckraking journalism of its era, except that it is based upon 
archival research and was written after the destruction of the Okhrana. The 
third chapter, "Simple Advice to Revolutionaries," is a distillation of the lessons 
he learned from his investigation into a series of aphorisms. Knowing what he 
now does of how secret police work, he instructs his European allies on what 
they must do to avoid being followed, to hide their plans, and to deal with police 
152 Reviews 
interrogation after the inevitable arrest. Some of this is interesting, but sections 
like the advice on how to avoid being followed are reminiscent of The Hardy 
Boys Detective Handbook. 
Among the recommendations he makes in the third chapter is this: after 
arrest "Don't reply to any question without having a defense counsel present 
and without previously consulting with him" (1 02-03). It is an interesting piece 
of advice, and one that speaks to the larger theoretical issues he describes in the 
second and fourth chapters. He asserts that for the worker in a capitalist coun- 
try, the law is "nothing but a purely material obstacle to his class" (86). Having 
said this, Serge recognises the importance of the legal form (Thompson's rule 
of law) as an imperfect but necessary protection from state authority. Hence the 
advice that one have legal counsel. These chapters are interesting as discussions 
of the law and police under capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. 
The stridency of Serge's class reading of the law is invigorating, and not with- 
out insight: "In conflicts between capital and labour, the army has often inter- 
vened against labour-never against capital" (86), or "In a word, respect for 
capitalist anarchy is the rule for the state. Whether you produce sell, resell, 
speculate without limit, with no concern for the general interest: it's all right" 
(126). But, it lacks the sophistication of his contemporary Pashukanis, let alone 
the flourishing of Marxist and radical legal studies and criminology since the 
1970s. His defences of state repression and terror under the dictatorship of the 
proletariat are less easy to accept today than they may have been in 1926. 
Dalia Hashad's introduction draws llnks between the Okhrana tactics Serge 
identifies and those of the US government today. In the months since she wrote 
these remarks, the revelations about state repression in the US (secret surveil- 
lance without warrants), the UK (the shooting of an innocent Brazilian worker 
as a suspected terrorist on the London Metro), and elsewhere allow us to draw 
such links even more clearly. But despite the parallels, is there much value in 
this book today? Like the best of revolutionary pamphlets it is an exciting, fast- 
paced read. For historians of the Russian Revolution and interwar socialism it 
is probably a useful primary document. For the radical today, however, there are 
equally intelligent and brief guides to state repression available that focus on 
current police forces. However revolutionary Victor Serge may have been him- 
self, this book no longer is. 
James Muir-<hang School of Continuing Education 
Ryerson University 


Victor Serge — What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression: A Guide for Activists

Lapsley, Joseph

Liberal Heterosexism: Masculinity, Male Heterosexuality, and the 1969 National Institute of Mental Health Task Force Report on Homosexuality

Koos, Cheryl A.

152 Reviews 
based responses to projects to reform working men contributed to the construc- 
tion of working-class masculinities, or what they meant for the younger wage- 
earning women who were also visible in public spaces and popular pastimes. In 
part, this reflects an avoidance of sexuality as a point of cultural confrontation. 
There is now a growing body of historical scholarship and theoretical literature 
on masculinities that could have helped here. 
I am nonetheless glad that Beaven wrote this book and like the general 
thrust of his argument. He is challenging us to rethink now deeply ingrained 
assumptions about working-class cultures, and he makes a convincing case. 
That makes this book well worth reading. It is, however, a shame that at $84.95 
(Canadian) it is beyond the reach of most people (and libraries). 
Craig Heron-York University 
Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood 
(Balitimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 
Chnstopher Forth's much needed book is a stellar example of a gendered his- 
tory of politics as well as a political history of gender, sexuality, and the body. 
Following in the footsteps of such ground-breakers as Edward Berenson and 
Robert Nye, Forth adds a significant contribution to not only masculinity stud- 
ies, but also a major corrective to political histories of one of the most pivotal 
events in modem French history: the Dreyfus Affair. Like his fellow Dreyfus- 
era historians Venita Datta and John Cerullo, Christopher Forth sees the 
Dreyfus Affair in a much larger cultural context; the event became a prism 
through which the anxieties of modernity were reflected and refracted through- 
out French society and culture. While one can argue that the 'crisis of mas- 
culinity' began earlier than the 1890s, Forth convincingly shows that cultural 
concern about the manliness and its expression through the male body-both its 
physical appearance and actions- became a mainstay of the debate launched 
by the Affair. 
One of the impressive features of the book is that its central event is both 
everywhere and nowhere; we get fleeting descriptions of what happened to 
Captain Alfred Dreyfus and some inklings of the ensuing uffaire, but the story 
that concerns Forth is that which played out in the cultural arena. According to 
him, the polemical debate that ensued between the republican Dreyfusard camp 
and the ultra-nationalist 'antis' revolved around three interrelated areas of con- 
cern: modernity, medicine, and manhood (8). The resulting discourse about 
manhood became wrapped up in existing anxieties about the cultural and social 
dislocation brought on by modernity and a growing concern with the body due 
to the advent of modem medicine. In a debate that became increasingly vitri- 
olic and laced with overt and covert anti-Semitism, attacks on the opposition's 
Left History 11.2 153 
masculinity were de rigueur; Dreyfus's non-Jewish supporters increasingly dis- 
tanced themselves from both Jews, whom the nationalistlanti-Semitic right cast 
as effeminate, flabby, and weak, and women (by 'nature' holding these same 
qualities) who were active in the movement such as the journalist Severine. By 
association with these two groups, in other words, non-Jewish republican men 
were being tarred by the same cultural brush and attempted to assert their posi- 
tion by deserting their allies. By embracing the new "culture of force" that 
found its way across the Atlantic and the English Channel, Dreyfusards, both 
Jewish and gentile, as well as the reactionary anti-Dreyhsards, attempted to 
out-do each other in their attempts to defend and assert their masculinity while 
branding their foes as figurative women. As a result, Forth argues, both creat- 
ed a climate that contributed to the rise of European fascism with its fetishism 
of the supposedly hallmark manly values of virility, duty, honour, courage, 
struggle, and sacrifice. 
To get at what he rightly calls "the body politics of the Dreyfus Affair," 
Forth inventively looks at the masculine imaginary and various factors feeding 
into the creation of such by those on the right and left. Using newspaper arti- 
cles and satirical cartoons from both sides of the debate, Forth effectively mines 
media coverage for the way in which masculinity became a defining issue in 
determining the merits of each side's intellectual arguments. The right's demo- 
nization of the intellectuals who were Dreyfus's most stalwart defenders and 
successful conflation of them with Jews and women drove the Dreyfusards to 
defend themselves by actively trying to redefine themselves as the true men. It 
also led the pro-Dreyfus forces to embrace the new culture of physicality and 
force. Captivating chapters that examine this area include ones on Zola's body 
and its cultural import as well as a more general examination of the culture of 
force that dominated the decade before the war. While Forth hints strongly at 
the transatlantic influence of Theodore Roosevelt and an Anglo-Saxon mascu- 
line culture on French writers and intellectuals, it seems that much more could 
be done with growing scholarship on masculinity in the American and British 
contexts to support these relationships. 
Forth is right to guard against making ipso facto links between the anti- 
Dreyfusards' success in feminizing the intellectual left through advocacy of a 
culture of force and fascist formulations of masculinity that would prove 
remarkably similar in the early twentieth century. Forth convincingly shows 
that the left countered by trying to brand the right (and later fascists) as effem- 
inate by using counter strategies, thus also contributing albeit inadvertently to a 
decidedly illiberal view of masculine nature. While this is true, it is important 
to ask where these accusations stick most readily and who gains the most by 
employing them. Here, undoubtedly, the right and far right won the cultural 
contest during the Dreyfus Affair, in its pre-Great War aftermath, and then dur- 
ing the interwar period with the ascendancy of fascism. Even today, one can 
154 Reviews 
even argue that such accusations of effeminacy have much more power and are 
more politically wounding when hurled by the right at the left; the lefdcenter- 
left's attempts to the do same are and were meet with ridicule. This pattern is 
easily discernable in multiple national contexts, particularly in Europe and the 
United States. As Forth's book insightfully shows us, the crisis of modernity 
and its ineluctable ties to the ongoing 'crisis of masculinity' may have had their 
genesis in the late nineteenth century but possess amazing staying power in the 
early twenty-first century. 
Cheryl A. Koos--California State University, Los Angeles 
Rachel Devlin, Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and 
Postwar American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 
Press, 2005). 
American culture after World War 11 was greatly affected by two phenomena: 
the growing popularity of psychology and psychoanalysis, as well as the emer- 
gence of teenagers as a distinct group or subculture. Rachel Devlin's book, 
Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American 
Culture, examines how these two phenomena intersected in the 1940s and 
1950s with particular emphasis on how the father-daughter dynamic was envi- 
sioned by psycho-analysts, novelists, playwrights, advertisers, and the legal 
community. 
Devlin begins by discussing how one prominent psychoanalyst, Helene 
Deutsch, re-imagined the debate concerning the development of adolescent 
girls in the 40s and 50s. Whereas the development of teenage boys was always 
defined as a quest for independence from most forms of parental authority, 
Deutsch argued that the developmental arc of teenage girls was intimately tied 
to a strengthening relationship with their fathers. Adolescent girls were expect- 
ed to remove themselves from their mothers in order to properly make the tran- 
sition from dependent child to independent adult, but they were also expected 
to rediscover their father and embark upon a relationship that frequently took 
on erotic overtones, ranging from abstract father-daughter fantasies to incestu- 
ous acts. As unseemly as all this sounds, Deutsch and her followers, most 
notably Phyllis Greenacre and Peter Blos, concluded that adolescent girls who 
were denied a healthy paternal relationship were more likely to encounter prob- 
lems on the road to adulthood. 
In chapter two Devlin examines the public debate over perhaps the most 
talked about adolescent developmental problem of all: juvenile delinquency. 
Devlin points out that Deutsch and company saw the denial of the Oedipal rela- 
tionship as a contributing factor in the rise of criminal behaviour among teenage 
girls during the postwar years. As in previous eras, female delinquency during 


Christopher E. Forth — The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood

Johnson, Julie A.

172 Reviews 
maris, mais aussi, voire davantage, en tant que peres, responsables du bien-&tre 
et de 1'Cducation de leur progeniture. 
Au total, les questions abordkes par ces deux ouvrages sont nombreuses. 
En inscrivant resolument les identites genrees dans leur contexte economique, 
social, culture1 et religieux, Negotiating Identities et Household Politics illus- 
trent de brillante maniere le caractere construit des normes sexuees et les 
diverses modulations qu'elles prennent dans l'espace et le temps. Ces travaux 
dkmontrent aussi avec brio le renouvellement des perspectives qu'apporte h 
l'histoire sociale une rkflexion sur les genres. 
Chstine Hudon-Universite de Sherbrooke 
Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 2004). 
Historians of France's revolutionary period have held fast to the view that the 
tumultuous events of 1789 ushered in a decade that effectively removed women 
from the public sphere and placed them firmly within the home. Following the 
work of Joan Landes, many have argued that the development of France's 
republic in the late eighteenth century, which was based on the fraternity of 
male citizens and duty to the nation, reinforced the domestic and private role of 
women, a role that was eventually entrenched in French law by Napoleon's 
Civil Code in 1804. Indeed, although some historians of the period, such as 
Carla Hesse, have explored the ways in which women often circumvented these 
developments and succeeded in addressing questions of political empower- 
ment, cultural representation, and agency, the belief that the legacy of the 
Revolution was responsible for the stymied growth of public womanhood well 
into the nineteenth century has continued to resonate within the fields of French 
cultural and gender history. 
In The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France, Suzanne Desan makes 
important revisions to this argument by contending that women in households 
of the 1790s were not part of a "new domesticity," but in fact, frequently 
engaged with republican ideology, new laws, and increased access to the state, 
in order "...to challenge their former positions of domestic inferiority" (11). 
Specifically, Desan argues that the revolution recast the ways in which French 
women and men experienced family life, by providing them with a new lan- 
guage of equality and liberty that they used to demand relationships based on 
affection, companionship, and egalitarianism (2). She also discusses radical 
family reforms passed in the Assembly during the 1790s, fiom the definition of 
marriage as a "civil contract" and the legalization of divorce, to the reduction 
of paternal rights over the marriage of children, and increased equality in inher- 
itance laws (49). In this way, Desan contends that the family became the "cru- 
Left History 11.2 173 
cial matrix . . . that linked each individual to the new nation-state," and was the 
key arena for applying the most fundamental goals of the revolution (7). 
However, forging the new republican family was not left only to the 
deputies and politicians. Desan argues that families themselves also played a 
key role in shaping the "new social and political order" of revolutionary France 
(3-4). They achieved this, in large part, through family courts of arbitration, the 
tribunawc de famille, which were established locally and on a temporary basis 
to hear and adjudicate family disputes. This new system, according to Desan, 
made family law and justice "malleable, relatively affordable, and close to 
home," and encouraged average citizens to take advantage of the laws (5-6). It 
gave hope to women in abusive relationships, to cuckolded men, and to those 
who had been disinherited by their relations. This revolutionary emphasis on 
family reform gave women, in particular, an active and vocal way of participat- 
ing in matters of the state. Far from being relegated to the domestic sphere, 
Desan convincingly demonstrates how, through their petitions and court 
appeals, women were instrumental in shaping a new vision of the family, one 
based on "equality and mutual esteem between the sexes," and which, in turn, 
was fundamental in transforming gender relations in the late-eighteenth centu- 
ry (172). 
At the heart of this transformation, according to Desan, was the importance 
of marriage, which she argues became a political issue at a time when the rev- 
olutionary government, "strove to unite the civil and natural man in service of 
the new nation and to draw on the distinct, but socially useful qualities of each 
citizen, female or male" (50). She is particularly convincing in demonstrating 
that good republican marriages were expected to be "rooted in conviviality, 
individual liberty, and personal happiness," and that husbands and wives were 
equally integral to a successful union (138). The nature of republican masculin- 
ity was imagined not as a commanding, patriarchal force that headed the fami- 
ly, but was meant to embody an "energetic, unflinching dedication to the nation 
and [a] humane sensibilite! both inside and outside the household" (91). 
Likewise, women were not simply Rousseauian mothers, but were called to 
help "regenerate" their husbands to the cause of the revolution and to help them 
cultivate their republican qualities (69). Thus, Desan shows that the revolution- 
ary ethos of liberty and equality was applied to, but also effected by, the most 
intimate of relationships in the French republic, and in the process, redefined 
gender relations as well as the nature of masculinity and femininity. 
In The Family on Trial, Desan uses a compelling combination of social and 
cultural history, and is particularly persuasive in demonstrating the ways in 
which the refashioning of the revolutionary family was accomplished not just 
at the level of political legislation, cultural discourse, or lived experience, but 
at the intersection of all of these elements. As a result, her source base is par- 
ticularly impressive, and gives her the latitude to take the pulse of the nation, 
174 Reviews 
but also to conduct a detailed analysis of the Calvados region, and examine the 
intricacies of one localized area. Desan carefully and thoroughly excavates 
court cases, legislation and political debates, ttat civil records, and a host of 
other sources, which bring the spirit and practice of the family reforms to life. 
She is also adept at re-creating the details of particular family crises and dilem- 
mas, which as Desan notes, gives the historian a unique opportunity to "peer 
into households and assess the contours of this revolution within the home" (6). 
In addition to marriage reform, Desan devotes chapters to the implications of 
the divorce law of 1792, the changes made to inheritances, and the debates over 
determining paternity and legitimacy. All of these issues are impressively 
woven together within a rich historiographical context to demonstrate the ways 
in which the family was indeed an important testing ground for the high ideals 
of the revolution, and at the same time, was crucial to the forging of the revo- 
lutionary state. Family reform was also transformative in the lives of average 
French citizens, and Desan is at her best when she tells the stories of the men 
and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, who could now claim 
the lofty goals of the new republic for themselves and apply them to their own 
lives. In this way, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France is a tremen- 
dous achievement, one that demonstrates the potential of cultural histories that 
foreground social practice, and will be of importance not only to historians of 
the period, but to those who deal with cultural constructions of gender, and the 
interactions between politics and lived experience. 
Julie A. Johnson--Queen's University 
Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, eds., Sisters or 
Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History 
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 
Sisters or Strangers? is a collection of articles investigating how women's 
experiences in Canada were shaped by their immigrant, ethnic, and racialized 
identities. Spanning close to two hundred years of history, this volume begins 
by looking at the creation of white settler communities in North America and 
concludes with a discussion of how women not only dealt with the process of 
immigration, but how they remembered the reception they faced as non-Anglo 
Canadians in post-war Canada. In between, the collection tries to excavate the 
lives of women by dealing with a number of important issues fiom nation build- 
ing, interactions with the state and public institutions, the representation of 
women as symbols, family relations and the transmission of culture, to an 
examination of experience and memory. The editors select works and themes 
that highlight not only the diversity of women's experiences, but also the 
impact of national allegiances and borders on the lives of women. As the edi- 


Suzanne Desan — The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France

Lindquist, Malinda Alaine

"The world will always want men": Anna Julia Cooper, Womanly Black Manhood, and "Predominant Man-Influence"

Onishi, Yuichiro

Book Reviews 
Steve Estes, I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement 
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 
Among historians of the civil rights movement, how one narrates a story does 
matter, and Steve Estes is certainly aware of methodological concerns within 
existing scholarship. For Estes, absent in current literature is attention to the 
role of manhood, especially how it informed the politics of race in the civil 
rights movement. I Am a Man! takes up this question to chronicle the interplay 
of race and manhood in the struggle for Black freedom and white opposition to 
civil rights from the years surrounding World War I1 to the early 1970s. The 
central argument of this book is that the interconnectedness of Black men's 
struggle for manhood and citizenship challenged and redefined racial and gen- 
der identities on both sides of the colour line, ultimately transforming the 
course of events in US history. In a broad sweeping narrative, Estes offers some 
insights into the gender dynamics within the civil rights movement. However, 
he never fully recasts the story in a way that pushes the field to a new direction. 
The book covers numerous familiar events and developments in the civil 
rights movement to explore the shaping power of race and manhood, as well as 
the limitations and possibilities of Black manhood. His analysis of the Black 
experience during the World War I1 period, for instance, shows just how the 
Black Americans' struggle for manhood and white Americans' determination to 
make Blacks less than men were inseparable and at the centre of the debate over 
citizenship. The irony was that for whites the war heightened the diEculty of 
denying manhood to Black men since they performed the manly responsibility 
of citizen soldiers, albeit within segregated units. Estes also explores the 
activism of the Citizens' Councils in the South to explain how the struggle over 
citizenship ensued around the question of manhood throughout the 1950s. 
Whites continuously reproduced the image of Black men as an immediate dan- 
ger to white women and the southern way of life to deny Black manhood and 
full citizenship to Black people. Interestingly, the interaction between race and 
manhood figured in the Citizens' Councils' criticisms of moderate southern 
whites as well: these men were characterized as 'women' unfit to defend south- 
ern white honour (48). The demonization and feminization of supposed threats 
shaped southern white men's resistance to integration. 
IAm a Man! also turns to the analysis of the function of Black manhood as 
a social force. Central to Estes's analysis is that the nexus of race and manhood 
produced an impetus for political transformation and solidarity within the Black 
freedom movements. For instance, the Black participants of the Mississippi 
freedom movement, as well as white male and female volunteers, helped create 
what he calls the "militant new models of manhood that "avoided many of the 
145 
0 Left Histov 
1 1.2 (Fall 2006) 
146 Reviews 
traditional trappings of manhood that rested on power and domination" (62). 
This model of manhood transformed the gender identities of men and women 
across the colour line, as they navigated the volatile politics of race and sex and 
struggled with the presence of male chauvinism within the movement's culture. 
Estes also explores how the militant models of Black manhood enabled the 
space of Black resistance to become productive for a nationalist politics. Both 
Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, for instance, embraced traditional gender 
roles to restore patriarchy and reclaim Black manhood as a basis of the Nation 
of Islam's struggle for racial solidarity and separation. The Black Panther Party 
for Self-Defense also operated with the militant model of manhood informed by 
heterosexual and patriarchal values. At times, such a politics narrowed the 
scope of their localized projects of self-determination and community control; 
some openly displayed their repulsion toward homosexuality and denigrated 
femininity as a hindrance to Black liberation. The Panthers, however, per- 
formed militant masculinity through Survival Programs, such as free breakfast 
programs, free health care clinics, and free transportation services for prisoners' 
families. 
Although the militant model of Black manhood functioned in contradicto- 
ry ways, Estes contends that it also produced "new possibilities for working- 
class black men, black youth, and others to define their own identities" (132). 
Such was the case during the Memphis sanitation workers' strike. What is most 
notable in his analysis is the role of the Black youth group called the Invaders. 
Convinced that the non-violent revolution led by Dr. King lacked necessary 
virility to materialize Black freedom, young Black men called for the Black rev- 
olution. They saw a willingness to fight the white power structure as an ulti- 
mate proof of manhood and the only path toward human liberation. The 
dynamics of race and gender opened up a political space through which the 
young and old, as well as the middle-class and poor within the Memphis Black 
community debated what it meant to be men and citizens. 
However, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black manhood had come to 
be placed on trial as representative of urban problems. The strong influence of 
Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action 
(1965) in American political culture reveals another side of the connection 
between race and manhood in the civil rights movement. In the wake of work- 
ing-class Black people's revolt against institutional violence and structural 
inequality in cities across the United States, policymakers and social scientists 
began developing strategies to solve what they defined as the crisis of urban 
Black America. According to these critics, if Black men assumed their proper 
role as patriarchs, the problems in inner-city Black communities, such as pover- 
ty, joblessness among Black men, welfare dependency among Black women, 
and the high rate of illegitimate births, would be mitigated. Estes's analysis 
demonstrates that the Moynihan report did cement the ideological foundation of 
Left History 11.2 147 
white backlash that led to cutbacks in federal funding for social welfare pro- 
grams, health care, and education during the ReaganlBush era. 
Estes carries his analysis to the Million Man March, the Promise Keepers, 
and one of the most important cultural and artistic developments within the 
Black community, Hip Hop, to show the shaping power and limitations of 
Black manhood in contemporary society. However ambitious this book is, IAm 
a Man! fails to explain the gender dynamics in times of racial crisis and trans- 
formation. Missing from his analysis is a conceptual framework. Nowhere 
does one find a rigorous theoretical and methodological treatment of gender, 
especially as it relates to the question of power. Estes never theorizes gender 
as a process that is not only flexible and historically contingent but also capa- 
ble of producing possibilities for a new politics and cultural formation within 
the Black freedom struggle. He also does not clarify gender as a relational cat- 
egory, although his analysis throughout reveals not only how men and women 
on both sides of the colour line related to each other but also how the gender 
identities of Black men and women were defined across class and generational 
differences within Black communities. 
These theoretical and methodological concerns do matter since this book's 
objective is ostensibly to recast the familiar story of the struggle for Black free- 
dom in a new way. Instead, Estes seems to be more concerned with establish- 
ing the movement's narrative in a seamless fashion in order to show how the 
interplay of race and manhood shaped the course of historical and political 
developments during the civil rights movement era. To this end, he relies on 
the traditional chronology of the civil rights movement, making sure that the 
transition from one chapter to another follows this timeline. The result, how- 
ever, is that the manner in which the story is told is contrived and ultimately 
underplays the complexities of gender identity formations. If Estes had shown 
theoretical persistence and established methodological orientations, the book 
would not read like a typical textbook full of the familiar events, images, and 
dramas. 
Yuichiro Onishi-Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City 
University of New York 
Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual 
Metropolis; 1918-1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 
Matt Houlbrook begins his history of male homosexual life in mid-century 
London with the story of Cyril. Cyril moved to London in 1932 and quickly 
found his way around town, frequenting clubs like the Caravan, in a basement 
of Endell Street, where he made friends and embarked on a series of sexual 
affairs. Known as 'The Countess,' he was dancing in the Caravan when it was 


Steve Estes — I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement

Torrie, Julia

Left History 1 1.2 163 
other kinds of statistical data in the Reports were (and are) often overshadowed 
by Kinsey's data on homosexual behaviour and desires because of the connec- 
tions that were drawn to national character and security. 
American Sexual Character draws on an impressive amount of research. It 
uses a wide range of published, mass-market sources from the 1940s-60s, from 
handbooks to women's magazines, in addition to the massive Reports them- 
selves. Non-specialist readers will particularly enjoy Reumann's use of the 
1954 A Cartoon Guide to the Kinsey Report, which is itself a fascinating way 
to assess how the Reports' contents were being interpreted by mainstream 
American popular culture. Unfortunately her primary sources (other than the 
Kinsey Institute's collections) are not listed separately from the secondary 
material, making it more difficult to appreciate the number and variety of 
sources used in the book. 
Other critiques that can be made of the book are few and minor. The work 
is a bit repetitive at times, but that can be said of most first monographs based 
on dissertations. The title is misleading in that large sections of the book do not 
mention Kinsey at all, and at times the connection to the Kinsey Reports seems 
tenuous. A more accurate (albeit less-marketable) subtitle would have been 
"Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Era of Kinsey." One notable and 
questionable omission is that Reumann assumes the reader already knows the 
story of how Kinsey, a zoologist whose previous obsession was wasps, came to 
lead the most famous study of human sexuality to-date, as well as the contro- 
versies around his methodology and research subjects. It is clear that Reumann 
wanted to avoid the polarizing debates that have characterized biographical 
studies of Kinsey, and maintain a wider view that puts the Reports in context, 
but a few brief paragraphs would have gone a long way to making this book 
more accessible for a non-specialist. Nonetheless, this book gives the Kinsey 
Reports their due by putting them in their proper place in the history of Cold 
War sexuality, and is a welcome addition to the historiography. 
Sheila McManus-University of Lethbridge 
Harlan Greene. The German OfJicer 'S Boy (Madison, Wisconsin: Terrace 
Books, 2005). 
The murder of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan is a 
dramatic, yet seemingly inexplicable, historical event that has given rise to sig- 
nificant speculation. Vom Rath was a relatively low-level member of the 
German embassy staff in Paris. In ordinary times, his death might have become 
a minor diplomatic incident, but little more. The murder took place in 1938, 
however, by a young Jew. The Nazis caught hold of the issue, whipped up a 
propaganda frenzy around it, and subsequently used it as the excuse for 
164 Reviews 
Kristallnacht, the pogrom known as the Night of Broken Glass. The evidence 
suggests that Kristallnacht would have happened anyway, but vorn Rath's mur- 
der gave the Nazi leadership a specific reason to attack Germany's Jews. 
Since the regime used vorn Rath's murder as a justification for anti-Semitic 
violence, it seems important to know how and why it happened. Was it a pre- 
meditated act, an individual's outcry against German injustice? Grynszpan's 
family were Polish Jews who had just been expelled from Germany, and per- 
haps this motivated the 17-year-old's violent action against a German official. 
Vom Rath's murderer left no very clear explanation of his act, however, so it is 
impossible to be sure. The killing was an isolated incident, a murder like many 
others, for which the motivations remain unclear. 
Harlan Greene has filled this historical void with fiction in The German 
OfJicer 5 Boy. Greene's account brings to life the circumstances surrounding 
vorn Rath's murder, and in the process, argues that the killing was a partly acci- 
dental crime of passion. According to Greene, Grynszpan was at the end of his 
tether after months spent living illegally in France. Hearing about his family's 
expulsion, he came to the German embassy intending to use a gun to force the 
Ambassador to assist his relatives. If this failed, he planned to kill himself to 
make a public statement. Instead of seeing the Ambassador, however, he was 
shown into the office of vorn Rath, whom he already knew well, for he and the 
German had been involved in a homosexual relationship. In a moment of pas- 
sion, Grynszpan turned his gun on himself, but dropped it and shot vorn Rath 
who later died in hospital. 
The book's jacket tells us that Greene is the son of Holocaust survivors, 
and an author of both fiction and non-fiction books mainly dealing with the his- 
tory of Charleston and other parts of South Carolina. He bases his argument 
about Grynszpan on the few surviving statements in which Grynszpan 
explained his actions. In confessions written in prison in 1942, Grynszpan said 
that he had been involved in a same-sex relationship with vorn Rath, and that 
this had led to the killing. 
For the most part, historians have downplayed Grynszpan's statements, 
viewing them as part of a clever plan devised by the murderer's lawyers to keep 
young Grynszpan alive. Once they had turned vorn Rath into a martyr, the 
Nazis could ill afford to have his memory associated with homosexuality. 
Rather than risk information about the relationship coming out in a public trial, 
therefore, the affair was hushed up and Grynszpan stayed alive in prison. 
Greene has taken Grynszpan's explanation at face value, and woven a plot 
around it that follows the young man from Germany to France, into the Parisian 
demimonde, and then into the arms of vorn Rath. Perhaps Grynszpan initially 
hoped to use the diplomat to regularize his own situation in France, or help his 
family stay in Germany, but Greene believes that the two men fell in love. 
The hypothesis that Grynszpan and vorn Rath had a relationship is worth 
Left History 11.2 165 
exploring. Perhaps the strongest piece of evidence Greene uses is Goebbels' 
comment in his diary, on 5 April 1942, that while Grynszpan had initially 
claimed he did not know vorn Rath, "Now he's changed his story and there's 
surfaced bits of evidence to support the possibility of relations between 
Grynszpan and vorn Rath" (202). Unfortunately, Greene cites this incorrectly, 
writing that it dates from 24 March 1942. His translation of the diary (given 
above) is also rather liberal. The original reads "Nun existiert irgendein 
anonymer Brief irgendeines jiidischen Emigranten, der die Wahrscheinlichkeit 
eines homosexuellen Verkehrs zwischen Griinspan und vorn Rath offenlaflt." 
(See the entry for 5 April 1942 in Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebiicher, Elke 
Frohlich, ed., Teil 11: Diktate 1941-1945, Vol4: April-June 1942, 51-52.) Other 
authors, notably Gerald Schwab, mention additional sources that confirm 
Grynszpan intended to use such a relationship as part of his defence. For exam- 
ple, Chapter nineteen of Gerald Schwab's, The Day the Holocaust Began: the 
Odyssey of Herschel Giynszpan focuses on how Grynszpan's expected defence 
influenced the Nazis' decision to postpone his trial. 
The problem, however, is that even if it is clear Grynszpan intended to 
mention a relationship with vorn Rath at his trial, that does not mean the rela- 
tionship actually existed. The evidence to which Goebbels referred has yet to 
surface, and even if it did, it would likely be inconclusive. It is certainly pos- 
sible that Grynszpan was telling the truth, but it is equally possible that he was 
not. 
In such a situation, perhaps the best recourse is to write a work of fiction, 
as Greene has done. Greene's work is a vivid historical novel, and the author 
includes a short afterword that outlines where the borders of history and his fic- 
tion lie. A historian could wish for greater detail here, but in comparison, Andy 
Marino's Herschel: The Boy Who Started World War I1 is an equally specula- 
tive account of the same murder that makes greater claims to legitimacy as non- 
fiction. Greene's work gives a good sense of the frustrations of someone living 
in Grynszpan's situation, as an illegal young Jewish immigrant in 1938 Paris. 
It allows one to imagine how a relationship between such a person and diplo- 
mat vorn Rath could have developed, and what it might have been like. 
The book is an interesting experiment, though its value to the historian is 
difficult to judge. The suggestion that vorn Rath and Grynszpan were lovers is 
certainly plausible, but due to lack of evidence, the book must remain fictional. 
Whether or not one chooses to use such a book in teaching, for instance, 
depends more than anything else on one's own comfort with historical fiction 
as a genre. Greene's work might make a valuable addition to a course on his- 
torical methods, where it could be read and discussed alongside more factual 
accounts of vorn Rath's murder and its aftermath. It could not, however, 
replace an analytical work about homosexuality and Nazism, or anti-Semitism 
in the Third Reich. The 1999 film Aimee und Jaguar, directed by Max 
166 Reviews 
Farberbock, might do as good a job, or better, of raising similar themes in an 
approachable, semi-fictional way. 
In the end, it matters little whether Grynszpan was gay or not, just as it mat- 
ters little that he was the particular man who shot vom Rath. The diplomat's 
death may have been a tragedy, but its importance lies not in the details, but in 
what happened afterward. The murder was just the excuse for Kristal2nacht, 
not the cause, and the question of Grynszpan's sexuality mattered little to that 
event, if at all. 
Julia Torri-St. Thomas University 
Dagmar Herzog. Sex afer Fascism: Memory and Moraliw in Twentieth- 
Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 
Dagmar Herzog's Sex after Fascism is a detailed re-evaluation of the history 
and memory of sexuality in Germany since the Third Reich. Herzog categori- 
cally rejects the idea of Nazism as anti-sex. She argues that Nazi sexuality was 
marked by simultaneous "incitement and disavowal" (27). Specifically, while 
the Nazis rejected a supposedly libertine Weimar sexuality and harshly con- 
trolled the sexuality of those considered racially unfit, they also emphasised 
sexual emancipation and pleasure for those considered racially fit, encouraging 
condom use, women's sexual freedom, and pre and extra-marital sex. 
Before the Sexual Revolution, Nazism was remembered in West Germany 
as sexually inciting, and this sexual liberalism was linked causally to Nazi 
genocide. With the post-war Christianisation of German politics, sexual con- 
servatism came to dominate the West as a postfascist way of renouncing link- 
age to, complicity with, and pleasure under the former Nazi regime, for the peo- 
ple, the new state, and the churches. Yet the Bundesrepublik Deutschland 
(BRD) exhibited continuities with the Third Reich, including a eugenic, 
volkisch, and socially-if not politically-anti-Semitic worldview, and the con- 
tinued criminalisation of abortion, pornography, and homosexuality (the latter 
two under the guise of protecting youth). Yet because most West Germans liked 
the sexual liberality they gained during Weimar to the Third Reich, conserva- 
tive theory and liberal practice did not line up, with pre- and extra-marital sex, 
pregnancies, and abortion remaining common. 
West Germany's Sexual Revolution depended on four main elements: the 
New Left; the 'sex wave' (i.e. the commercialisation of sex and the spread of a 
sexual consumer culture including pornography and sexualised advertising); 
the government's willingness to liberalise its policies vis a vis abortion, pornog- 
raphy, and homosexuality; and the advent of the pill. Arguing that the person- 
al is political, the small but ever important New Left viewed sexual politics as 
inseparable from other politics, leading to their idea that the defeat of sexual 


Harlan Greene — The German Officer's Boy

Shklanka, Peter

Democracy in North America: l b o  Views of Mexico 
Peter Shklanka 
The Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers 
Matthew C. Gutman, The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in 
Contemporary Mexico (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California 
Press, 2002). 
Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Opening Mexico: The Making of a 
Democracy (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2004). 
The defeat of the Partido Institutional Revolucionario (PRI) in the Mexican 
presidential elections of 2000 is commonly viewed as Mexico's democratic 
breakthrough. The PR1 (and its predecessors) held power in Mexico longer than 
any other self-described socialist or communist government in the twentieth 
century and its defeat in 2000 was an event of enormous national significance. 
But the depth and health of Mexican democracy is a source of continuing debate 
leading up to the presidential contest in July of this year, the first since that his- 
toric victory. The election of Vincente Fox and his center-right Partido Accidn 
Nacional (PAN) party was a victory for electoral choice in Mexico, but in ret- 
rospect, it did not deliver the significant structural changes, reforms, and eco- 
nomic benefits that had long been hoped for by so many. The economic circurn- 
stances of the average Mexican have not substantially changed since 2000. 
Economic development and growth in the north under NAFTA has been 
matched with a continuing decline in Mexico's rural and agricultural base, 
resulting in increasing economic inequality, particularly for Mexico's large rural 
farming class and indigenous populations (See for example: NAFTA Promise 
& Reality: Lessons from Mexico for the Hemisphere, Demetrios 
Papademetriou, et al., Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 
2003; "Baja Pobreza Rural Pero Crece Desigualdad: BM," La Jornada, 25 
August, 2005). Corruption remains endemic, independent journalism and trade 
unionism are still risky, often dangerous occupations, and military, law enforce- 
ment, political and judicial institutions continue to operate under the influence 
of organized crime and old-style graft. There is no shortage of wealth in 
Mexico, always a strong contender among Forbes' list of nations with the most 
billionaires; nevertheless, a stark and historically entrenched state of economic 
inequality remains firmly in place, despite signs of increased civil and political 
freedom. The two books examined here serve as useful primers from two very 
different perspectives for those interested in following this year's presidential 
campaign, a campaign which has already found a place in Mexican political his- 
117 
0 Left Histoly 
1 1.1 (Spring 2006) 
118 Shklanka 
tory for its drama, intrigue and unexpected developments. The Romance of 
Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico by Matthew C. 
Gutman is an "ethnography" aimed at the subject of Mexican democracy on a 
local level. Gutman is a professor of Social Sciences and International Affairs 
at Brown University. His intent is to write an "ethnographic study of popular 
politics and official subjugation" in a colonia popular (or working-class sub- 
urb) in the northwestern area of Mexico City called Santo Domingo (Gutman, 
1). He examines the politics of everyday life on a local or microcosmic level, 
identifying attitudes and behaviours in his neighbourhood and placing them in 
the context of broader historical and social changes over a period up to and 
immediately following the election of Vincente Fox. 
Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, the authors of Opening Mexico: The 
Making ofDemocracy, draw on material from two decades as reporters on Latin 
America for the New York Times and nearly ten years as residents of Mexico 
City. Theirs is an account of the recent emergence of democratic institutions in 
Mexico, primarily on the state and federal levels. Their approach and subject 
matter is journalistic: they use local stories and anecdotes to illustrate larger 
historical events as they unfold. They have impressive access to Mexico's polit- 
ical and institutional elites and are able to provide intimate descriptions of the 
coloufil and often nefarious characters running the country. In their view, 
Mexico has, over the last 30 years, undergone nothing short of a democratic rev- 
olution (Preston and Dillon, xii). 
The colonia or barrio that forms the locus of The Romance of Democracy 
was originally populated by squatters in the early 1970s as part of that city's 
notorious and continuing population explosion (Gutman, 2). Over time, it has 
become a settled, lower middle-class neighborhood of narrow tree-lined streets, 
modest one and two-story houses, apartment blocks and small family stores. 
The area has a friendly, bustling feel but it occupies a precarious position on the 
border between Mexico's haves and have-nots. Gutman has lived in Santo 
Domingo for stints of some length since the early 1990s, long enough that he 
has witnessed the Zapatista rebellion, the peso collapse of 1995, NAFTA and 
the demise of the PR1 presidential succession through the eyes of this neigh- 
bourhood's citizens. One of his main aims is to document those reactions 
through the words and actions of his neighbours. 
Gutman's acknowledged precursor is the American ethnographer Oscar 
Lewis, whose studies of peasant, working-class and underclass communities in 
Mexico during the 1950s and 1960s achieved much popularity and notoriety. 
Gutman picks up on Lewis's project and methodology and seeks to address a 
specific question that arose from Lewis's work, namely, whether his subjects are 
active agents in opposing their marginalization and subjugation (Gutman, 50). 
In addressing this question, Gutman comes up with the idea of "compliant defi- 
ance," his characterization of how the "agency" relationship between the state 
Two Views of Mexico 119 
and the people of Santo Domingo manifests itself on a personal and political 
level (Gutman, 6). 
The theoretical framework used by Gutman to approach his subject matter, 
including the idea of "compliant defiance" itself, distracts from an otherwise 
interesting and frequently entertaining account. For example, Gutman exam- 
ines various strands of thought around the contested idea of democracy but 
never arrives at a working definition or postulation (Gutman, xxviii). In turn, 
he overlooks any extended examination of attitudes towards a number of insti- 
tutional elements in Mexican civic life: local and state government, the judici- 
ary, the media, labour unions, and so on. Instead, he favours an emphasis on 
what might be called Mexican gender politics--changes in traditional values, 
the division of labour in the home, machismo-matters of interest and impor- 
tance but not ones the author always ties convincingly to his theme of "democ- 
racy" (Gutman, 32-38). 
Gutman is nevertheless a sensitive observer of life in the colonia. The most 
satisfying parts of Gutman's book are passages where he lets his subjects tell 
their stories, the unabridged "Oscar Lewis" moments. One character appearing 
throughout the book is a hard-dnnking garage mechanic named Gabi. Gabi 
embodies "compliant defiance." His particular take on politics is a purposeful 
non-participation in the electoral process: he is informed, interested, and opin- 
ionated, but does not vote. Like many Mexicans, and certainly the vast major- 
ity examined in this book, Gabi views all politicians and political parties as cor- 
rupt. Discussions around Gabi's political abstinence form the backdrop to some 
revealing roadside discussions where we meet advocates of the competing polit- 
ical parties (Gutman, 168). 
Gutman's book also presents some useful historical background to the cur- 
rent political and economic climate in Mexico and the attitudes of his subjects. 
Typically, he will recount a conversation with one of his neighbours about, say, 
the zapatista movement, and then provide some theoretical and historical con- 
text to illuminate the attitudes and opinions presented (Gutman, 144-157). In 
reading the book, one develops a sense of the variety of attitudes in the colonia, 
although it is a reflection of the pace of change in Mexican politics that at the 
time of this review, some of the political references are dated. The book pre- 
dates, for example, the entrance onto the national political stage of Andris 
Manuel Lopez Obrador, a charismatic, leftist-populist former Mexico City 
mayor who currently holds a significant lead in the polls leading up to this 
year's elections. Regarding other recent developments, Gabi would probably 
find comfort in the zapatistas' unusual decision to run a national political cam- 
paign without actually proferring candidates or seeking office. One wonders if 
Gutman would view this latest maneuver by subcommandante Marcos as the 
ultimate act of "compliant defiance." 
Preston and Dillon begin their account in Opening Democracy with a short 
120 Shklanka 
overview of Mexican history and politics up to the 1960s and in particular, the 
rise and influence of the PIU in every aspect of Mexican civic life. They argue 
that political culture under the PRI was unique in Latin America. While 
Mexican presidents of the post-revolutionary period have essentially been 
despots or quasi-monarchs, the ability of Mexico's rulers to maintain a peace- 
ful succession of power and co-opt both the military and organized labour has 
set Mexico apart from the pattern of brutal and unstable military regimes which 
have dominated most of Latin America over the same period (Preston and 
Dillon, 407). 
If Mexico's successive PR1 presidents do not easily bear comparison with 
the Somozas and the Pinochets, the PR1 nevertheless operated for the most part 
like a large and well-diversified organized-crime syndicate. Terror and intimi- 
dation, if not ever-present, were certainly put to use at critical moments. The 
repressive face of the PRI was revealed to the world on 2 October, 1968 when 
a group of protesters, many of them students from Mexico's largest university, 
gathered in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City to engage in a peaceful 
demonstration. Demonstrators that day were herded into a square and fired 
upon by government troops. When the shooting subsided, an estimated 200 to 
400 demonstrators had been killed. The Tlatelolco massacre left little lasting 
impression on the world media, but the effect of this event on domestic popular 
opinion was profound. According to Preston and Dillon, Tlatelolco was the 
formative and defining moment for a new generation of journalists, activists, 
writers, and intellectuals who would lead popular reform movements over sub- 
sequent decades (Preston and Dillon, 84). 
Two subsequent disasters provided further impetus to Mexico's democratic 
revolution, one man-made and one natural. The economic fortunes of the 
Mexican economy have long been tied to the volatile price of oil and in the early 
1980s, during the term of President Jose Lopez Portillo, a crash in the price of 
crude sent shock waves through the Mexican economy, already saddled with an 
unsustainable debt. In an effort to shore up a peso in free-fall, the Portillo gov- 
ernment forced citizens to convert their savings in popular dollar accounts to 
pesos, and in the process, a generation of middle-class Mexicans saw their nest- 
eggs obliterated (Preston and Dillon, 96). Just as Mexicans were picking them- 
selves up from the Portillo financial crisis a devastating earthquake hit Mexico 
City, which killed and rendered homeless tens of thousands of people. The 
PM's incompetence and neglect in dealing with this disaster brought average 
Mexicans into open defiance of the authorities. The earthquake gave rise to a 
new period of truth-telling in the media, a media long compromised or con- 
trolled by the PRI (Preston and Dillon, 113). 
Popular opposition to the PR1 had reached the point of possible victory for 
the left-wing PRD party in the presidential race of 1988, but PRI candidate 
Carlos Salinas effectively stole the election through one of the more brazen 
Two Views of Mexico 121 
examples of electoral manipulation in modern memory (Preston and Dillon, 
159- 169). The electoral theft which brought Salinas to office nevertheless 
marked a new era of popular dissent. Opposition politicians, the press and ordi- 
nary citizens spoke freely about the outrages of the election and demonstrated 
in massive numbers. One of the more striking photographs in the book is that 
of newly elected PAN representative Vincente Fox, standing in the Chamber of 
Deputies with ballots stuck to each side of his head in a crude imitation of 
Salinas' large ears, openly parodying the president "elect" (Preston and Dillon, 
178). Perestroika had arrived. 
The "Carlos Salinas Show," as the authors call it, was suddenly interrupted 
on New Year's Day, 1994, when the Zapatista Liberation Army (EZLN) took 
control of several towns in Chiapas. The zapatistas denounced NAFTA and 
called for a nation-wide armed uprising against the government. Preston and 
Dillon suggest that while the rebellion was a dramatic and attention-grabbing 
event, the movement was never a sustainable or particularly well-organized mil- 
itary threat. The authors are probably correct in their suggestion that as a polit- 
ical force, the zapatistas are a marginal feature on the national political stage 
(Preston and Dillon, 455, 460). Certainly, the urgent promises of change that 
followed in the wake of the rebellion are now scarcely remembered in the cap- 
ital. 
If the Mexico City earthquake was the beginning of a seismic shift in 
Mexican civil society, and the zapatistas a significant but isolated aftershock, 
Preston and Dillon suggest that the 1994 peso crisis was the event which 
destroyed the PR1 regime (Preston and Dillon, 248). This most recent of 
Mexico's currency meltdowns and the new and ignominious role of Wall Street 
debt-speculators in triggering it is a subject worthy of detailed examination and 
receives fairly superficial treatment here. The political fallout from the crisis 
ensured that Salinas' successor Ernesto Zedillo would be the last in an unbro- 
ken line of PR1 presidents. 
The two books examined here present different views of Mexican democ- 
racy and in many respects lead the reader to draw divergent conclusions. 
Preston and Dillon's version of Mexican democratic development is a fascinat- 
ing and compelling read which suggests that fundamental and lasting democ- 
ractic reform has taken hold. They also provide some insightful background on 
some of the key players in this year's election, including the shadowy past of 
PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo (Preston and Dillon, 265). Gutman avoids 
drawing any firm conclusions or making any clear prognostications, however, 
one's sense is that he, like his subjects, is skeptical about the prospect of signif- 
icant change in Mexican politics. Gutman's account would suggest that the idea 
of electoral reform bringing about change is a romantic notion of minimal prac- 
tical benefit, and that the real territory of political struggle is in the home and 
neighborhood; hopefully, subtle changes over time at the grassroots level will 
slowly filter up to the oligarchs running the country. 
If economic development is seen as a key payoff of democratic reform, 
then most Mexicans have good reason for continued skepticism. But the elec- 
tion of Fox was not the final chapter in the history of Mexico's emergence as a 
functioning democracy. State elections such as those recently held in Oaxaca 
continue to raise serious concerns about corruption and political repression. 
Recent attempts by the PR1 and PAN to have Lopez Obrador excluded from the 
upcoming federal elections had all the hallmarks of a Salinas-style plot. 
Mexicans are now marching in the streets in huge numbers and with regularity, 
protesting a presidency that has achieved little more than its own survival and 
attacking continuing abuses by the old guard at the state and local levels. 
Vigorous public debate and popular involvement in the political process is com- 
pelling evidence that ordinary Mexicans are seizing the opportunity to shape the 
destiny of their country as never before. It would be foolish to make any strong 
predictions about the future of Mexican democracy but one can say with some 
confidence that this year's election promises to be unlike any other in Mexican 
history. 


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