Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Mirra, Carl

Radical Historians and the Liberal Establishment: Staughton Lynd's Life with History

Vacante, Jeffery

Liberal Nationalism and the Challenge of Masculinity Studies in Quebec

Bell, Amy

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 
148 Reviews 
raided on 25 August 1934. Retaining his composure, he approached the 
Divisional Detective Inspector in charge and said, "I don't mind the beastly 
raid, but I would like to know if you could let me have one of your nice boys 
to come home with me. I really am rather good" (12). 
Cyril's experiences demonstrate how mid-century London could be a place 
of affirmation and liberation, a "productive space and place that generates and 
stabilizes a new form of selfhood and way of life" (3). Yet paradoxically, 
Cyril's story itself survives because the state sought to suppress certain forms 
of sexuality and sociability between men. 
Plainclothes police had the Caravan under surveillance for several weeks, 
and after the raid Cyril was arrested, taken to the Bow Street Police station 
where his cheeks were rubbed with blotting paper for evidence of make-up. He 
was imprisoned and brought to trial at the Central Criminal Court for aiding and 
abetting in keeping a disorderly house while the police searched his flat and 
confiscated a pencil sketch of a naked man, a photograph of a penis, and his let- 
ters to friends and lovers. His name, nickname, address, and a letter to his lover 
Morris were mentioned in the Times, The News of the World, and The Illustrated 
Police News. Thus the very survival of the records indicate the tensions inher- 
ent in queer urban life; the failure of queer men to evade the law and public hos- 
tility, and London as the site of a vibrant, extensive, and diverse queer urban 
culture. 
Houlbrook succeeds in doing more than simply 'uncovering' a hidden set 
of sources that reveal historical parallels to contemporary queer culture. As he 
is careful to point out, Cyril's London is not the London of the present, and 
Cyril's definitions of 'queer' and 'normal' in his letters are very different from 
contemporary ones. When Cyril was at the Caravan he wore makeup, was 
referred to and referred to himself as the Countess and with the pronoun 'she, 
and had a series of passionate affairs with men. Cyril was also married, had a 
two-year old daughter, and "still like[d] girls occasionally" (6). While he locat- 
ed his queerness in his public effeminate persona, others, mainly middle and 
upper class men, defined themselves as queer only in their choice of a sexual 
partner. Definitions of normal also varied. To a modem observer, the most 
enigmatic figures in the queer urban culture of mid-twentieth century London 
were the working class men, known as 'trade,' who engaged in gay sex on 
ongoing emotional relationships with other men, who were not considered, by 
themselves or others, anything other than normal. As Houlbrook writes, "The 
most remarkable thing about queer urban culture is that it was, to a large extent, 
composed of and created by men who never thought themselves queer" (7). 
Despite the numerous fascinating individuals that Houlbrook brings to life 
in his work, the most important character that emerges in the book is the city of 
London itself. London, the city in which the modem police force had first 
emerged in the early nineteenth century, was also the site of strict surveillance 
Left History 11.2 149 
and enforcement of the sexual offences laws, detailed in Part One. As 
Houlbrook describes in Part Two, London also provided the freedom, anonymi- 
ty, and convivial public and private spaces in which men met and loved. It was 
in these spaces, Houlbrook argues in Part Three, that the fluctuating identities 
of queer and normal, of trade and queens were explored, defined, dissolved, and 
reformed. And finally in Part Four, London is revealed as the site of the shift- 
ing bureaucratic and legal reactions to queer urban culture that would culminate 
in the 1967 Sexual Offences Law which privileged a new privatized form of 
male homosexuality, even as it sought to exclude the public expressions of sex- 
uality that had formed the basis of so much queer urban culture. The city of 
London was not just the backdrop for these individual and historical events, but 
profoundly influenced male sexual practices and identities, and they in turn 
helped to shape the physical and cultural forms of modem urban life. 
Matt Houlbrook's book is a landmark in queer history, much as George 
Chauncey's Gay New York was ten years ago. Although occasionally marred by 
impenetrable prose, Houlbrook's work provides a detailed map of the complex 
spaces and patterns of class, sex, gender, and identity that constituted queer 
urban culture in London between 19 18 and 1957. 
Amy Bell-Huron University College 
Brad Beaven, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 1850- 
1945 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005). 
This is an ambitious book. Some of the material discussed here may seem old 
hat to historians familiar with the huge body of literature on working-class pop- 
ular culture in Britain in the century before the end of World War Two, but Brad 
Beaven has undertaken to work back through much of that writing to extract 
some key debates and, by adding new evidence or re-examining older findings, 
to challenge some facile or overly simplistic perspectives. His re-interpretation 
is thoughtful and compelling. 
Beaven is interested in one central question: how did working-class men 
respond to the 'civilizing' projects directed at them by a dominant order intent 
on turning them into acceptable material for 'citizenship?' He notes that the 
greatest anxieties that began to emerge in bourgeois circles by the second half 
of the nineteenth century were about what men got up to in their 'free time' after 
work. Consequently, a series of cultural projects in 'rational leisure' were 
launched to tame and shape them into self-disciplined, responsible actors capa- 
ble of participating appropriately in public life. There was particular concern 
about the destructive impact of commercial pleasures that more and more work- 
ing men bought into over the century, and that, according to critical commenta- 
tors, were turning them into dull, passive, poorly motivated creatures. As a 


Matt Houlbrook — Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis; 1918-1957

Blow, Christopher

Left History 1 1.1 155 
Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher, The Voice of Southern 
Labour: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929-1934 (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 
Textile workers in the Southern states formed one of the strongest labour move- 
ments in American history in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Strikes in 
Elizabethton, Tennessee and Gastonia and Marion, North Carolina gathered 
momentum between 1929 and 1934, with the movement reaching its pinnacle 
at the Labour Day strike of 1934, when 400 000 textile workers in several states 
simultaneously walked off the job. Their demands were clear: more humane 
working conditions and better pay. In the Voice of Southern Labor: Radio, 
Music and Textlile Strikes 1929-1934, Vincent J Roscigno and William F. 
Danaher suggests that Southern bluegrass music detailed the grievances of tex- 
tile workers and that the broadcast of that music during the advent of radio acted 
as a cohesive force for the movement. 
The authors tell us that in this era, textile mills of the American South 
employed entire families, many of them migrants from failing cottage farms, 
their livelihoods victims of the boll weevil. With the survival of their families 
foremost in their minds, workers offered their labour to mill managers in 
exchange for the rental of a house in the mill village and a wage of 20 to 25 
cents an hour, one third of that earned by mill workers in the North. Children 
as young as eight or nine worked in the mills alongside their mothers and 
fathers. Heat, noise, and cotton dust made twelve-hour days unbearable. The 
inhalation of fibre, the proximity to hazardous machines, and the ever-increas- 
ing demands by management to quicken the pace of production made life on the 
floor of the textile mill ever dangerous. 
When work finished, some mill workers turned to their traditional instru- 
ments-banjos, mandolins, fiddles, guitars, and bass fiddles-to entertain 
themselves and their co-workers. Many other touring musicians came to the 
mill villages to perform shows for textile workers, the audience always raven- 
ous for good music and good times after long shifts. In the lyrics of many of 
the songs performed, the brutish world of the textile mill was exposed and 
detailed. 
Roscigno and Danaher assert that the distribution of these songs through 
fledgling radio broadcasting outfits helped forge class-consciousness among 
mill workers that spread across county and state lines. Radio during this peri- 
od was not yet managed by oligarchical ownership structures and control of 
content was more socially diffuse. As a result, many broadcasters, supportive 
of the plight of the textile worker, or alternatively, broadcasters merely eager for 
a mass audience, played popular songs that were key to the labour movement. 
Between radio programs of bluegrass music, listeners could not have 
missed the fireside chats of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt 
156 Reviews 
was offering Americans marginalized by the Depression a New Deal, and he 
directly addressed Southern mill workers and their labour movement. With the 
ainvaves full of messages assuring them that their grievances were just and their 
movement popular, textile workers felt increasingly empowered to demand bet- 
ter working conditions. 
Management, with the support of local police, eventually crushed the 
movement. Tangible legislation favouring the textile workers was not forthcom- 
ing from the Roosevelt government, nor was protection from the violent state- 
sponsored repression of the strikes. The movement lost its cohesiveness under 
these physical, political, and economic pressures; the murder of singer-song- 
writer Ella May Wiggins by local police perhaps best symbolized the vulnera- 
bility of the workers and their certain defeat. By the end of 1934, communities 
of mill workers were dividing on the issue of unionization. 
By employing the archives of the Southern Oral History Program installed 
at the Southern Folk Life Collection at the University of North Carolina, 
Roscigno and Danaher add impressive detail to a spectacular history of 
Southern textile workers conducted by Jacqueline Hall et al. entitled, Like a 
Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton World (1987). Whereas Like a 
Family, a founding work of the archive, provides a broad survey of the cultural 
landscape of the textile worker including the physical environment of mill work, 
the negotiation of worker grievances, and the role of leisure in a mill town, 
Roscigno and Danaher focus exclusively on how the transmission of music 
through radio and performances affected the rise of class consciousness in the 
Southern textile industry. Through this far narrower lens, the faces of those mill 
workers who joyfilly played their banjos, mandolins, and fiddles after gruelling 
hours in textile mills become evermore clear, their inspirational role in the for- 
mation of a grassroots search for justice more evident. 
The authors tend to ignore the role that ethnicity doubtless played in the 
formation of the labour movement of Southern textile workers. They demon- 
strate that migrants from the Appalachian Mountains composed a substantial 
portion of the work force at the textile mills and that musicians originating from 
the Appalachians contributed to the music-filled gatherings outside of the mill 
towns. The technical roots of Appalachian string music, in terms of instnunen- 
tation, harmonic resolves, and melodic construction, had crossed generations 
and the Atlantic Ocean to reach the mountains of Appalachia. Fiddles and man- 
dolins, like jars of good whiskey, had already accompanied Celts through longer 
and more trying migrations. Ethnic unity, gaining voice in this ancient music, 
was unifying textile workers as common grievances in the workplace were 
accumulating among them. Put differently, hillbilly music was nursing both an 
ethnic and a class-consciousness. 
By contrast, ethnically diverse workers at the meatpacking plants of 
Chicago in a comparable era, could not rely on a common cultural heritage to 
Left History 1 1.1 157 
unify them in their attempts to resolve workplace grievances. In Rick Halpern 
and Roger Horowitz's analysis of the labour movements of workers of the Swift 
& Armour meat-packing houses in Chicago, the authors discuss how an ethni- 
cally mixed shop floor, composed of Irish, Polish, and Afiican American work- 
ers problematised the unification of oppositional culture in the work force. 
Roscigno and Danaher's work is an excellent addition to studies on the rela- 
tionship of music and performance culture to the generation of oppositional cul- 
ture in historical settings. Eugene Genovese's 1972 landmark Roll, Jordon Roll: 
The World The Slaves Made opened the door for professional historians to con- 
duct thorough studies of harmony, rhythm, and lyric and its effect on political 
movements. But there are still major gaps in the historiography of the role of 
music in American radical movements that have yet to be filled. For example, 
studies could be done on the effect of hard rock music during autoworkers' 
strikes in Detroit or the effect of soul music on Black Power movements in 
Watts. Hopefully, The Voice of Southern Labour: Radio, Music and Textile 
Strikes, will stimulate growth in this essential field of historical inquiry. 
Christopher Blow-4iles Street Media 


Vincent J. Roscigno and William F. Danaher — The Voice of Southern Labour: Radio, Music, and Textile Strikes, 1929-1934

McManus, Sheila

Left History 11.2 161 
and often sharply opposed political cultures, ranging from the Catholic right to 
the Socialist left, were asked to set aside their differences for the sake of patri- 
otic unity. The President's agreement to meet with Claire can be regarded as 
part of his ongoing efforts to preserve that union. But the secular republican 
state's tolerance soon reached its limits, and it began to crack down on the cam- 
paigns. In 191 7, for example, the Archbishop of Tours was charged for display- 
ing a tricolour flag carrying the Sacred Heart. 
But while Jonas's study displays the limits of the wartime reconciliation 
between Catholics and the Third Republic, he also makes clear that there were 
points of contact between the secularist republican elite and elements of the 
church hierarchy. Certainly that proved to be the case with Claire herself. After 
the war both anticlerical medical doctors and clergymen concerned about the 
church's being discredited by a fraud, dismissed Claire's troublesome visions as 
the likely product of hysteria. This diagnosis facilitated her sequest~ation in a 
religious community after the condemnation from the Vatican, which was not 
lifted until 1964. Claire died in 1972 in relative obscurity. 
The Tragic Tale of Claire Ferchaud complicates and thus enriches our 
understanding of France during the First World War. There are points in the 
book where Claire herself disappears from view, and Jonas could develop com- 
parisons between her and other Catholic visionaries in a bit more detail than he 
does. But he has located fascinating material and mined it to great effect; in 
addition to the themes highlighted in this review he makes perceptive remarks 
about religious imagery and spectacles, and writes in an engaging, accessible 
style. This thought-provoking book deserves a wide readership; it could be 
used with profit in courses dealing with modern France or the cultural history 
of the Great War. 
Sean Kennedy-University of New Brunswick 
Miriam G. Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and 
National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 
University of California Press, 2005). 
Back in November 2004, the New York Ernes published an article by Benedict 
Carey entitled "Long After Kinsey, Only the Brave Study Sex." In it Carey 
noted that in George W. Bush's America, scientists who want to ask questions 
about human sexuality risk losing their funding if they ask those questions too 
openly. The parallels with Cold War America when zoologist Alfred Kinsey 
and his team were conducting their research are obvious. Thankfully historians 
of American sexuality are subjected to less scrutiny than researchers of sexual- 
ity itself (perhaps due to the relative lack of funding), and the field continues to 
flourish even when the subject itself is the controversial Kinsey Reports. 
162 Reviews 
Miriam Reumann's American Sexual Character: Sex, Gendel; and National 
Identity in the Kinsey Reports is an excellent addition to the fascinating history 
of sex and sexuality in the United States after World War 11. The book places 
the two Kinsey Reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual 
Behavior in the Human Female (1953), in their historical context and traces 
their effects instead of treating them as isolated cultural phenomena, which is 
how they can often appear in hindsight. The strength of Reumann's work is that 
it provides a close-up of the milieu of the Reports, the conversations about sex 
that had already started before the Reports were published, and the ways those 
conversations were changed permanently by the Reports. 
As she notes in her introduction, the key to her analysis is the concept of 
"American sexual character," that is, "the mutual construction of postwar ideas 
about national identity, sexual, life, and personal and community standards of 
behaviour and ideology . . .." (3). These ideas are usually working together at 
any given time to produce what a society thinks is 'normal,' but they came 
together in particularly intense (if sometimes contradictory) ways in Cold War 
America. 
The combinations and contradictions are explored in five core chapters. 
The first unpacks the book's short title by analyzing the many obvious and sub- 
tle connections drawn between sexuality and 'national character' in the United 
States after WWII. The next two chapters focus on the Reports and their effects 
on discussions of male and female sexuality and gender. When the Reports' 
deliberately-dry statistics revealed that American men and women seemed to be 
doing a lot of things they were not supposed to be doing, particularly same-sex 
and extramarital activities, many deeply-rooted cultural narratives had to be re- 
worked or reinforced. The fourth chapter examines one of the narratives that 
became the subject of the most intense scrutiny and hand-wringing, that of the 
heterosexual marriage and the meanings of marital sexuality. Then, as now, 
marriage was laden with enormous social, political, and national importance, 
and even in the midst of rapidly rising post-war marriage rates the Reports 
seemed to suggest that there was something seriously wrong with the institu- 
tion. 
The final chapter examines the ultimate source of Cold War paranoia: 
homosexuality. Some of the most shocking evidence Kinsey presented was the 
sheer volume of same-sex behaviour American men and women were engaging 
in, simultaneously giving authorities more reasons to crack down on gays and 
lesbians in the name of national security, and giving gays and lesbians proof 
that they were not alone and were a lot more 'normal' than they had been led to 
believe. Kinsey's most lasting pop-culture effect may well be the large number 
of 'Kinsey 6' t-shirts in evidence at any large urban Pride Day, referring to the 
6-point scale he developed to highlight that human sexuality is much more fluid 
and complex than the standard hetero-homo binary. The thousands of pages of 
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 


Miriam G. Reumann — American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports

Bredenkamp, Susannah

Gesturing Towards Definition: Passing Thoughts on Lack and the Phallus

Burnett, Kristin

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- 
Left History 11.2 175 
tors argue, "in a post 11 September 2001 world, it is very important to acknowl- 
edge how concepts of nation and citizenship are racialized" (8). 
Looking at the stories of first, second, and third generation immigrants, the 
authors try to unpack how gender, race, ethnicity, and class shaped the identi- 
ties of minority women within the Canadian landscape. The essays look at how 
women, operating within their own context and according to priorities estab- 
lished by their own ethnic or racial groups, maintained cultural connections 
within families, communities, and 'their' people outside of Canada (9). For 
example, Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill examines rates of intermarriage among 
Armenians and the efforts that were made within mixed-families and commu- 
nities to retain and transmit language and traditions to their children, and Midge 
Ayukawa's piece focuses on the important roles Japanese mothers played in 
maintaining pride and self-respect among Japanese children in the face of overt 
racism. In a society in which white Anglo-European identities were privileged, 
it is important to appreciate how minority groups maintained and encouraged 
their own cultural distinctiveness. 
Questions of nation and citizenship are also central to this collection. In 
their interactions with the state, minority women faced serious obstacles. 
Immigrant women were not considered to be ideal 'citizens,' and did not 
receive the same privileges of citizenship allocated to most Anglo-European 
Canadians. These women were subject to greater scrutiny and regulation by the 
state. Franca Iacovetta and Valerie Korinek's essay shows how efforts by the 
government after World War I1 to introduce Euro-North American concepts of 
a healthy 'balanced diet' were also about cultural dynamics and power. Food 
served as an important signifier of difference, and health campaigns run by the 
state created normative definitions of behaviour that excluded large segments 
of the population (190). 
Other articles in this volume show how some women came to the attention 
of the state under less than ideal circumstances. Barrington Walker and Lisa 
Mar use court records that ensued from incidents of domestic violence in an 
attempt to make African Canadian and Chinese women visible. Both Walker 
and Mar found that as members of a visible minority these women faced a 'dou- 
ble bind.' Walker's examination reveals that although the bodies of Black 
women became visible through court records, these women remained invisible 
as subjects (1  1). Similarly, Mar's work shows that the interests of individual 
Chinese women were often obscured or ignored by the male members of the 
Chinese community, as was the case with Lin Tee. The claims that the Chinese 
community put forth in the defence of Mr. Lee emphasized Anglo-European 
gender ideals of the Christian family and male patriarchy to the detriment of Lin 
Tee. In the face of racism immigrant, ethnic, and racialized communities often 
had to forgo the rights and personal interests of individual members, particular- 
ly women, in order to 'fit in.' Given the multiple and varying categories of race, 
176 Reviews 
ethnicity, and class that women occupied, it is important to acknowledge how 
such diversity produced very different boundaries within which women were 
forced to operate. 
This volume offers a much more complex picture of the lives of immigrant, 
ethnic, and racialized women. More importantly, especially after 911 1, this col- 
lection documents the impermanence of national boundaries, and by recogniz- 
ing multiple and shifting identities and loyalties, the authors have raised impor- 
tant questions about citizenship and definitions of nationhood. The activities of 
the state are informed by who and what it means to be a 'Canadian' and the 
authors of this collection have attempted to unpack such categories as unnatu- 
ral, socially constructed, and subject to revision. 
Sisters or Strangers? is written as a response to an earlier work on the his- 
tory of immigrant and ethnic women in Canada entitled Looking into My 
Sister b Eyes: An Exploration in Women 5 History. A groundbreaking work, 
Looking into My Sisterb Eyes, was a collection of articles published in 1986 
that used the concept of 'sisters' or 'sisterhood' as an organizing framework. 
This 1986 work emphasized the connections between women despite diverse 
backgrounds, and tried to locate a 'middle' or 'common' ground that all women 
occupied based on a shared experience of 'sisterhood.' In contrast, Sisters or 
Strangers seeks to complicate the framework of 'sisterhood,' "recognizing that 
the historical experience is so often characterized by dichotomies" (6). Instead 
of trying to trace the similarities that exist between women, the authors of this 
collection have sought to excavate the multiplicities of women's experiences. 
Epp, Iacovetta, and Swyripa recognize and assert that women can simultane- 
ously be oppressed and oppressive, that agency and victimization are not mutu- 
ally exclusive, and that common ground can CO-exist quite comfortably along- 
side alienation and marginalization. These authors argue that questions of dif- 
ference and diversity are an essential component of understanding the lives of 
women in Canada. 
Kristin Burnett-University of Alberta 
Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-vaccination Movement in 
England, 1853-1907 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). 
The received image of the nineteenth century anti-vaccinationist as an ignorant, 
anti-modern extremist tilting against the incontrovertible evidence of the bene- 
fits of vaccination has started to dissolve in recent years. While the movement 
did attract more than its share of cranks and eccentrics, more recent scholarship 
has tended less towards ridicule than to rehabilitation, rendering anti-vaccina- 
tionism as a genuine expression of a sometimes radical proletarian culture and 
its proponents working-class heroes defending themselves against the depreda- 


Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, eds. — Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History

Dooley, Chris

176 Reviews 
ethnicity, and class that women occupied, it is important to acknowledge how 
such diversity produced very different boundaries within which women were 
forced to operate. 
This volume offers a much more complex picture of the lives of immigrant, 
ethnic, and racialized women. More importantly, especially after 911 1, this col- 
lection documents the impermanence of national boundaries, and by recogniz- 
ing multiple and shifting identities and loyalties, the authors have raised impor- 
tant questions about citizenship and definitions of nationhood. The activities of 
the state are informed by who and what it means to be a 'Canadian' and the 
authors of this collection have attempted to unpack such categories as unnatu- 
ral, socially constructed, and subject to revision. 
Sisters or Strangers? is written as a response to an earlier work on the his- 
tory of immigrant and ethnic women in Canada entitled Looking into My 
Sister b Eyes: An Exploration in Women 5 History. A groundbreaking work, 
Looking into My Sisterb Eyes, was a collection of articles published in 1986 
that used the concept of 'sisters' or 'sisterhood' as an organizing framework. 
This 1986 work emphasized the connections between women despite diverse 
backgrounds, and tried to locate a 'middle' or 'common' ground that all women 
occupied based on a shared experience of 'sisterhood.' In contrast, Sisters or 
Strangers seeks to complicate the framework of 'sisterhood,' "recognizing that 
the historical experience is so often characterized by dichotomies" (6). Instead 
of trying to trace the similarities that exist between women, the authors of this 
collection have sought to excavate the multiplicities of women's experiences. 
Epp, Iacovetta, and Swyripa recognize and assert that women can simultane- 
ously be oppressed and oppressive, that agency and victimization are not mutu- 
ally exclusive, and that common ground can CO-exist quite comfortably along- 
side alienation and marginalization. These authors argue that questions of dif- 
ference and diversity are an essential component of understanding the lives of 
women in Canada. 
Kristin Burnett-University of Alberta 
Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-vaccination Movement in 
England, 1853-1907 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). 
The received image of the nineteenth century anti-vaccinationist as an ignorant, 
anti-modern extremist tilting against the incontrovertible evidence of the bene- 
fits of vaccination has started to dissolve in recent years. While the movement 
did attract more than its share of cranks and eccentrics, more recent scholarship 
has tended less towards ridicule than to rehabilitation, rendering anti-vaccina- 
tionism as a genuine expression of a sometimes radical proletarian culture and 
its proponents working-class heroes defending themselves against the depreda- 
Left History 11.2 177 
tions of the state. Nadja Durbach's Bodily Matters is the first scholarly mono- 
graph on Great Britain to fall within this latter tendency, and while occasional- 
ly frustrating, it should be welcomed by students of health, gender, and citizen- 
ship. 
Eschewing the local studies approach that dominates British health history, 
Durbach approaches her subjects through their cultural production, seeking to 
render intelligible the discourses embedded in pamphlets, periodicals, and other 
anti-vaccinationist ephemera. This demands that she transcend the hyperbole 
characteristic of anti-vaccinationist writing, and also that she confront the het- 
erogeneity of beliefs and the fragmented nature of the movement. To do so, she 
deploys the body; for Durbach, bodies are the sites where the discursive and the 
material meet. Bodies were, after all, objects both of the lancet and of the rav- 
ages of smallpox, and it is the different bodily experience of vaccination that 
cleaves the working-class anti-vaccinationists from their middle-class allies. 
The thrust of this argument is that while middle-class anti-vaccinationists 
were able to forge cross-class links through their appeals to popular constitu- 
tionalism, most were ultimately animated by libertarian concerns about the 
reach of the state. For middle-class activists-who were not liable to be target- 
ed by the Poor Law authorities for compulsory vaccination-anti-vaccination- 
ism tended to be about abstract questions of politics, whereas for the workers, 
artisans and petty bourgeois that constituted the greatest part of the movement, 
it was about very material questions of bodily autonomy. Arguing that public 
vaccination literally inscribed class identity onto real bodies, Durbach analyses 
the rhetorical strategies that workers used to claim property in their own bod- 
ies. She observes, for example, that workers used discourses of citizenship to 
contest the pathologization of their bodies, re-casting them not as a danger to 
the state, but as vulnerable to violation and contamination by an over-reaching 
state and its agents. Moreover, by situating compulsory vaccination within a 
spectrum of other bodily intrusions that asymmetrically affected the lower 
orders-for example the dissection of paupers' bodies authorized by the 1832 
Anatomy Act-she renders comprehensible popular outrage at what she calls 
the 'parliamentary lancet. ' 
The strongest sections of the book treat the gendered discourses of anti-vac- 
cinationism, which had different ramifications for men and women and mani- 
fested in rhetorical strategies that appealed to Victorian ideals of masculinity 
and femininity. In appeals to the working class man, the rhetoric of anti-vacci- 
nationism deployed the language of free thought, liberal individualism, and 
political rights. Anti-vaccinationist rhetoric, for example, suggested that the 
franchise was only one component in a wider struggle for citizenship, meaning- 
less unless a man had sovereignty over his own body and family. Moreover, 
such rhetoric invoked the idea that the projection of an appropriate masculinity 
was predicated on a man's ability to remain independent of the state. Public 
178 Reviews 
vaccination, administered by the Poor Law Guardians and inextricably bound 
to the systems of Poor Law relief, was constituted within paternalist rhetoric as 
a basic threat to the citizen-self. By contrast, maternalist rhetoric turned on an 
essentialist discourse that was decidedly emotional and instinctual, calling on 
women to refuse to let the state and its agent-the male physician-interpose 
itself in the relationship between mother and child. 
Such rhetoric also blurred the easy divisions between male and female, pub- 
lic and private, and Durbach's analysis usefully reveals the imbrication of class 
and gender. In charging mothers to defend their children, anti-vaccinationists 
rendered the private political. Similarly, in linking resistance to the state to the 
act of mothering, they appealed to working-class ideals of motherhood predi- 
cated not just on sentiment, but also on a mother's duty to work for her chil- 
dren. And the movement also appealed to domestic forms of manhood; con- 
scious of the deployment of tropes of a male working-class brutishness by the 
other side, anti-vaccinationists evolved a counter-discourse of nurturing father- 
hood, one which at once humanized the working man and provided him with a 
legitimate avenue for the expression of sentiment. 
Durbach's project is to rescue anti-vaccinationists from the condescension 
of posterity, a task she undertakes with obvious sympathy and passion. This is 
to be commended, especially in a series that celebrates politically engaged 
scholarship, but there are times when her partisanship draws her into the rhetor- 
ical strategies of her subjects. While she provides the reader with lengthy pas- 
sages in which the horrors, real and imagined, of vaccination are described in 
morbid detail, no similar treatment is accorded to the ravages of smallpox itself 
or the terror created by epidemic disease. While the rather gothic renderings of 
the arm-to-arm vaccination do much to help the reader appreciate the anxiety 
and revulsion that the procedure produced in its object, Durbach's asymmetri- 
cal treatment sometimes leaves her appearing credulous. Moreover, this 
approach elides the complexity of the state, which is rendered faceless and 
hegemonic, medical science its handmaiden. Indeed, in the opening paragraphs 
of the book, she recounts an 1876 episode in which seven Poor Law Guardians 
from Yorkshire, imprisoned for their refusal to enforce the Vaccination Act, 
were liberated by a mob and were subsequently tried and dismissed on the 
strength of a promise to refrain from actively obstructing vaccination. This, 
together with the ultimate triumph of anti-vaccinationism that Durbach reveals, 
suggests a state that is fractured and weak rather than monolithic and hegemon- 
ic. 
While the cultural approach serves her well-her chapter on the Victorian 
gothic is the book's most innovative-Durbach would have done well to pay 
more attention to the political economy of anti-vaccination. While she nods 
briefly near the end of the book to scholars like Anne Hardy, who has argued 
that the reason that the government acceded to the anti-vaccinationists was 
Left History 11.2 
because it was, by the end of the century, less invested in compulsory vaccina- 
tion, this deserves more direct treatment. Similarly, Durbach's reliance on anti- 
vaccinationist ephemera sometimes elides both the local and the historical, and 
there is sometimes insufficient sense of place or change over time. Moreover, 
some attention needs to be paid to how deeply invested rank-and-file anti-vac- 
cinationists were in the movement. For example, if anti-vaccinationists were 
animated by a rational fear of infection and disease, did this rational calculus 
change when the relative risks from the disease rose? 
In the closing pages, Durbach places the conscience clause in the 1907 
Vaccination Act within a teleological narrative that stretches all the way to the 
establishment of the National Health Service, which she reads as an ultimate 
repudiation of coercive Poor Law policies. While it is indisputable that the anti- 
vaccination movement offers a useful window on popular conceptions of citi- 
zenship, Durbach's assertions that it should occupy such a place of primacy 
need to be substantiated, something which her sources cannot allow. Instead of 
placing the anti-vaccinationists at the centre of the grand radical narrative of the 
latter nineteenth century, Durbach might instead have explored the ways in 
which the conscience clause fragmented the movement, disclosing the range of 
perspectives, approaches and philosophies that girded an apparently unitary 
movement culture. For an engaged historian like Durbach, such an approach 
might have done greater justice to those whose subjectivities she seeks to recu- 
perate. 
Chris Dooley-Institute for the Humanities, University of Manitoba 
Pablo Emilio PCrez-Mallaina, Spain's Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the 
Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century, translated by Carla Rahn Phillips, 
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 
It is not common to have a work of Spanish history translated into English, 
while the opposite is the norm. This is not the product of collusion but rather 
of the more pedestrian combination of the lack of international perspective 
among many Spanish historians and the outright ignorance and disdain for them 
on the part of their English-speaking counterparts. It is, in sum, a tale of two 
parochial approaches to culture, of two almost mutually isolated worlds in the 
age of globalisation. Here we have a notable exception. Pablo E. PCrez- 
Mallaina's work, enhanced by an excellent translation by Professor Carla Rahn 
Philips (Minneapolis) and the product of a gamble by Johns Hopkins University 
Press, is a good step which reveals the high quality of work done in many 
departments of History in Spain. Let us hope that the exception becomes the 
norm one day. 
When reading Perez-Mallaina's overwhelming account of the crews that 


Nadja Durbach — Bodily Matters: The Anti-vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907

Cazorla-Sanchez, Antonio

Left History 11.2 
because it was, by the end of the century, less invested in compulsory vaccina- 
tion, this deserves more direct treatment. Similarly, Durbach's reliance on anti- 
vaccinationist ephemera sometimes elides both the local and the historical, and 
there is sometimes insufficient sense of place or change over time. Moreover, 
some attention needs to be paid to how deeply invested rank-and-file anti-vac- 
cinationists were in the movement. For example, if anti-vaccinationists were 
animated by a rational fear of infection and disease, did this rational calculus 
change when the relative risks from the disease rose? 
In the closing pages, Durbach places the conscience clause in the 1907 
Vaccination Act within a teleological narrative that stretches all the way to the 
establishment of the National Health Service, which she reads as an ultimate 
repudiation of coercive Poor Law policies. While it is indisputable that the anti- 
vaccination movement offers a useful window on popular conceptions of citi- 
zenship, Durbach's assertions that it should occupy such a place of primacy 
need to be substantiated, something which her sources cannot allow. Instead of 
placing the anti-vaccinationists at the centre of the grand radical narrative of the 
latter nineteenth century, Durbach might instead have explored the ways in 
which the conscience clause fragmented the movement, disclosing the range of 
perspectives, approaches and philosophies that girded an apparently unitary 
movement culture. For an engaged historian like Durbach, such an approach 
might have done greater justice to those whose subjectivities she seeks to recu- 
perate. 
Chris Dooley-Institute for the Humanities, University of Manitoba 
Pablo Emilio PCrez-Mallaina, Spain's Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the 
Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century, translated by Carla Rahn Phillips, 
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 
It is not common to have a work of Spanish history translated into English, 
while the opposite is the norm. This is not the product of collusion but rather 
of the more pedestrian combination of the lack of international perspective 
among many Spanish historians and the outright ignorance and disdain for them 
on the part of their English-speaking counterparts. It is, in sum, a tale of two 
parochial approaches to culture, of two almost mutually isolated worlds in the 
age of globalisation. Here we have a notable exception. Pablo E. PCrez- 
Mallaina's work, enhanced by an excellent translation by Professor Carla Rahn 
Philips (Minneapolis) and the product of a gamble by Johns Hopkins University 
Press, is a good step which reveals the high quality of work done in many 
departments of History in Spain. Let us hope that the exception becomes the 
norm one day. 
When reading Perez-Mallaina's overwhelming account of the crews that 
180 Reviews 
sailed between Spain and its colonies, the comment that comes to mind is: what 
a hard, short life it was! Behind the glory--or criminal misery, depending of 
one's perspective--of empire and 'discovery,' of gold, destruction, religion, 
genocide, military feats, etc., lay the experiences of mostly ordinary people. 
They were just simple sailors, men with no history or family annals. Even in 
these days of political correctness, there is a mesmerizing story to be told about 
this particular group of white European males. In this sense, Spain S Men of the 
Seas shows a refreshing concern for ordinary people, and tries, if not always 
with success (mostly due to the paucity of sources), to tell us their story. 
These men, more often than not, could not read and could write even less 
frequently. Even the pilots who mastered their little boats were normally illit- 
erate. Accordingly, the records of their lives come mostly from the endless 
bureaucratic documentation of the Archive of the Indies in Seville. These 
records were kept to document trade, licenses, disputes, organizational matters 
and, in sum, to ensure that some of the money made in the colonies ended up 
in the royal chest. It requires time and skill to extract life from all this mass of 
paperwork. And here PCrez-Mallaina's mastery of the records pays off. By 
focusing on the 16" century, the author concentrates on a period before capital- 
ism turned men who used to see themselves mostly as free companions, or part- 
ners (although very unequal ones) in both risks and profits into simple employ- 
ees and proletarians. The 16" century was in this sense an open period, during 
which modernity-including not only capitalism and its values but also the 
future hegemony of Northern Europe and its impact on our interpretation of the 
past-had not yet emerged triumphant. 
The author has managed to present an awesome portrait of Seville where 
most legal trips started and theoretically ended, (smuggling, corruption, and 
deceit being widespread), and particularly of the seamen's neighbourhoods on 
the Guadalquivir River banks. He also shows how the skills acquired by north- 
ern pilots, many of them Basques, were transferred to the Atlantic experience. 
More important is the chapter on the economic opportunities for poor people 
and the risks they took in pursuit of them in a period when there were very few 
prospects. For sea life was hard, often brutally short and its benefits far from 
certain. At least, these poor men were usually allowed to carry their own mer- 
chandise to sell in the Indies, and thereby make a profit far superior to what they 
would earn elsewhere . . . if they did not die. A dead man's meagre possessions 
would be auctioned among his peers and the proceedings given to his survivors 
back in Seville, but if cheated often in life, he would be again cheated in death 
for his slim salary would be lost for not fulfilling his contract. A man could die 
of many things: accidents at sea, (less frequently) fights, and tropical diseases 
that ravaged entire crews and fleets. The chances of survival were further 
diminished by the appalling living and hygienic conditions on board and the 
poor diet. Sexual encounters were predictably homosexual and being caught in 
Left History 11.2 181 
such an act carried deadly punishment. Nor were other forms of entertainment 
any safer; games, for example, often involved money and fights. Even the last 
moments of the trip, when home was nearly in sight, were dangerous, as the 
mouth of the Guadalquivir River, the gate to Seville from the Atlantic, was 
notoriously treacherous and boats suffered frequent, deadly wrecks on its sand 
banks. 
There were compounded risks to being a man of the sea, products of the 
contemporary social structure and its workings. Quite often, the skills and pro- 
fessionalism of crews, shipmasters and pilots, learnt mostly by experience 
rather than by scientific education, was undermined by the sheer incompetence 
and corruption of the admirals responsible for the expeditions. These were 
royal appointees selected not for their skills at sea or organizing fleets but 
because of their proximity to the crown. Indeed, one of the more attractive fea- 
tures of this book is how it shows the social stratification of the fleets and the 
very different treatments and rights (or rather privileges) that its members 
enjoyed. Discipline and punishment were harder at the bottom of the ladder 
while captains, admirals, and their retinues reaped, often with legal impunity, 
the biggest share of legal and illegal profits. Dissent and protest were harshly 
punished. For the poor seaman, the only possible escape was desertion, for he 
had, in sum, a hard life and his hopes were limited. 
Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez-Trent University 


Pablo Emilio Perez-Mallaina — Spain's Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century, translated by Carla Rahn Phillips

Heathorn, Stephen

142 Reviews 
[52]). But there is plenty of political and intellectual insight and challenge here 
for non-historians, and the broad synthetic canvas simply whets the appetite for 
the more substantive volumes. Rebels is an astonishing book by any measure, 
and should be read for both its take on the left and for the way it re-thinks ossi- 
fied categories in Canadian history. 
Steve Penfold-University of Toronto 
Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (New York: 
Columbia University Press, 2004). 
In his extended essay, An End to Poverty? Gareth Stedman Jones provides a 
novel account of the origins of social democracy and its prescriptions for deal- 
ing with poverty. Rather than tracing the evolution of the nineteenth and twen- 
tieth century welfare state and the ideas that sustained it, Stedman Jones depicts 
Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Condorcet as the intellectual progenitors of 
modern social democracy. Responding to the American and French 
Revolutions, Paine and Condorcet sought to apply enlightenment ideas about 
education and actuarial probability to the problem of mendacity through univer- 
sal education and social insurance schemes. They reasoned that such contribu- 
tory social programs would help develop a republican social citizenship; that 
the social, political, commercial, and moral were all interconnected and the pos- 
sibility of eliminating chronic economic deprivation could be accomplished 
within the parameters of civic life. Drawing on the initially optimistic response 
of liberals to the American and French Revolutions, Paine and Condorcet 
offered a reading of Adam Smith that allowed them to combine his embrace of 
commercial society with an egalitarian project of democratic community build- 
ing. 
The fierce monarchial and anti-republican reaction to the revolution in the 
1790s, and the conservative nationalism and evangelicalism that followed, how- 
ever, buried these moderate republican proposals by appropriating and re-inter- 
preting Smith in entirely different directions. Indeed, in a sense this book is all 
about how rival authors fought over the legacy of Smith's ideas. Paine and 
Condorcet are Stedman Jones's heroes because they recognized that Smith's 
economic analysis was entirely compatible with liberal, moderately egalitarian 
republican politics. Malthus is one of the chief villains because of the way in 
which he redirected later political economists away from such social democrat- 
ic ideas with his heterodox Christian views about the origins of poverty. 
Further, Stedman Jones sees early political economists, like Jean-Baptiste 
Say, splitting the social and political realm, and pushing political economy to 
concern itself with economic freedom and markets rather than with democratic 
Left History 1 1.1 143 
culture. As a result of the efforts of Malthus and Say, amongst others in the 
early nineteenth century, poverty came to be depicted either as an issue of per- 
sonal behaviour and morality, or as a purely economic problem. And conse- 
quently, the alleviation or elimination of poverty ceased to be part of a demo- 
cratic project of creating citizens. Meanwhile, the later development of social- 
ism divided society into opposing camps of workers and capitalists, occluding 
the significance of commercial society for civic life that had been recognized 
earlier by Paine and Condorcet. Thus, instead of the heroic rise of the working 
class and of Labour representatives pushing for economic amelioration in 
response to the development of industrial capitalism, Stedman Jones posits 
socialism and laissez-faire political economy as polar extremes carving up the 
liberal-republican vision of social democracy first formulated by Paine and 
Condorcet. 
Clearly, Stedman Jones makes this argument as a plea for a return to social- 
democratic politics today: a politics that ought to draw on the initial republican 
project by combining commercial society with social equality and inclusive cit- 
izenship. Indeed, Stedman Jones is entirely upfront in his motives, stating in the 
first few pages that he aims "to make visible some of the threads by which the 
past is connected with the present" in order to disabuse those who have recent- 
ly tried to "remove any residue of an old-fashioned collectivism" by embracing 
the libertarianism of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1-2). While this 
desire to liberate Smith's ideas from the ahistorical appropriation of neo-liber- 
als does not undercut Stedman Jones's book as a significant and original piece 
of historical scholarship, An End to Poverty? is perhaps too heavy on argument 
and too light on evidentiary explication to satisfy academic specialists. 
But perhaps the most interesting light in which to consider this book is how 
it caps Stedman Jones's intellectual odyssey from the new social historian of 
Outcast London (1971), through the modest linguistic turn of Languages of 
Class (1983), to the textual analysis of the traditional intellectual historian. For 
although this book is clearly not intended as a theoretical or methodological 
intervention, and despite the social-democratic sympathies and sophisticated 
critical analysis evident within it, An End to Poverty? projects ideas as derived 
primarily from the political realm, largely autonomous from socio-economic 
developments. Like in his work on Chartism, Stedman Jones sees the political 
revolution of the late-eighteenth century Atlantic world, and the hysterical reac- 
tions to its republican radicalism that followed, as ultimately more significant in 
shaping the ideas of the modern world than the socio-economic revolution 
caused by the development of late-eighteenth century factory towns. Stedman 
Jones is too good an historian to put the division in such stark, crude terms, and 
indeed, he would no doubt resist such a characterization. But it cannot be 
denied that this is a work that focuses almost entirely on the interplay of texts, 
not on the place of ideas within society or culture. I was left wondering if the 
144 Reviews 
evolution of textual interpretations fully explains the social and political impact 
of political economy? Did not the changing material world at least influence 
later generations of radicals and social democrats to produce new ideas that 
seemed to fit the conditions of their own time? More than once while reading 
this book, Stedman Jones's method (though not conclusions) reminded me of 
Gertrude Hirnrnelfarb's two volume intellectual history of ideas about poverty, 
Tke Idea of Poverty (1985) and Poverty and Compassion (1991). Fifteen years 
ago, amidst the fury of the debates about the linguistic turn, such a comparison 
would have seemed shocking. In this instance, it is not the method that distin- 
guishes the scholarship of Stedman Jones and of Himmelfarb, only their politi- 
cal commitments. 
Stephen Heathorn-McMaster University 
David Rogers and John McLeod, eds., The Revision of Englishness 
(Manchester and New York:  anc chest er University Press, 2004). 
This collection of articles operates on two levels. It sets out to analyse the reac- 
tion of various English writers, poets, and film makers to both the influx of 
immigrants from across the former empire that began in the postwar era and to 
the shifting definition of Englishness associated with that rapid demographic 
transformation. Given that Rogers and McLeod invited the contributors to 
"reflect self-consciously upon their relationship with Englishness as a part of 
their critical endeavours" (10), the articles also document the reaction of mod- 
ern scholars to the question of what it meant to be English during the same peri- 
od. 
Focused on the issue of Englishness and how that identity has been chal- 
lenged and changed since the effective collapse of Britain as an imperial power 
in the years after 1945, The Revision of Englishness is more cohesive than most 
collections of conference papers. Almost all of the essays have something 
thought-provoking to say about the lived experience of Englishness, whether 
portrayed through novels like Adam Thorpe's Still, Hanif Kureishi's The Black 
Album, and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses; through the poetry of Philip 
Larkin, Ted Hughes, and GeofTrey Hill; through films like Bhaji of the Beach; 
or through the lives of the contributors themselves. In the last case, however, 
The Revision of Englishness sometimes seems to teeter dangerously on the 
brink of self-indulgence. Some of the self-conscious reflections invited by 
Rogers and McLeod convey the sense of being part of a captive audience at an 
academic conference perfectly, but that is probably not what the editors had in 
mind. For instance, Alan Sinfield's autobiographical admission that "I was in 
love with Derek, and wanted to have sex with him in some partly comprehend- 


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