Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Harris, Douglas C.

132 Left History 8.1 
Roy Vogt, Whose Property? The Deepening Conflict between Private Property 
and Democracy in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 
Published posthumously through the efforts of family and colleagues, Roy 
Vogt's 1997 manuscript, and now book, attempts to reclaim the idea of proper- 
ty and to put it to work for those whose interests have been excluded from the 
privileged protection accorded that which is deemed "property." 
Writing out of a tradition of political economy that seeks to understand 
economic phenomena in their social and political context, Vogt offers an attrac- 
tive social democratic vision of property as a socially constructed phenomenon. 
He is committed to the market and its productive possibilities, but also to an 
equitable (though not necessarily equal) distribution of Canada's wealth and 
resources. Such a distribution is best achieved, hc argues, in democratically 
accountable societies that recognize property rights not only in objects and 
land, but also in employment, education, and health care, and that expand prop- 
erty rights in ways that secure a healthy environment. 
Vogt begins with an analysis of the proper balance between state and pri- 
vate property, and between state and private enterprise. He defends the state's 
role both to provide services and to regulate private industry against what he 
sees as an incipient attack on government which emerged in the 1980s, led by 
the political right in the UK and the US. "Canadian history," argues Vogt, 
"attests to the fact that strong but not overly intrusive governments can com- 
bine with a vigorous private sector to produce a prosperous and relatively fair 
and free society," (63) and he seeks to maintain such a balance. 
In the book's second part, however, Vogt acknowledges that in important 
areas the Canadian record is wanting. In a chapter devoted to family law and 
the restrictions on women's property, he recognizes that important changes gov- 
erning the division of property on marriage breakdown are largely the product 
of the last thirty years. Similarly, the unresolved questions of Native title in 
some parts of the country and the continuing failure of governments to honour 
existing treaties with First Nations represents a significant challenge to 
Canadian conceptions of property and fairness. Vogt also devotes most of a 
chapter to the rights of Canadians, as citizens, to a healthy environment, some- 
thing for which the market as currently constructed pays insufficient attention. 
Vogt's principal contribution comes in Part 3 where he considers "new 
property," particularly as it relates to the workplace. The problem, he argues, is 
the separation of property and labour: "shareholders have the property rights 
without directly engaging in any of the corporation's work, while employees 
who are undertaking the work have virtually no property rights." (146) What 
has emerged, as a result, is a confrontational class struggle between unions and 
management, and "little real sharing of property rights." (150) Vogt suggests 
the answer lies in greater democracy in the workplace, and he chides govern- 
Left History 8.1 133 
ments, managers and union leaders for their inability to share property and 
hence power: "there is not strong or general commitment by Canadian govern- 
ment or firms, or for that matter by labour unions, to increased participation by 
workers in matters traditionally considered the prerogatives of managers." 
(167) 
In his final chapter, Vogt argues that property rights protection should 
attach to the new forms of property upon which Canadians depend. First among 
these is job security, but he also includes access to health care, education, and 
a minimum income, services that are largely funded out of general tax revenue 
by the various levels of government. 
This book is directed towards an interested and informed public rather than 
an academic audience, but even for its intended readership the analysis is thin. 
In each of his chapters, Vogt picks too sparingly from a vast secondary litera- 
ture. This is neither a comprehensive review, nor a study from one intimately 
familiar with a particular time and place and set of human relationships. The 
result is an account that is less focussed than it might be, and one that misses 
some basic issues involving property and democracy. 
In his chapter on Aboriginal rights, for example, Vogt does not confront the 
difficult question of how to protect the property rights of minorities in a 
democracy. There are a number of ways to get at this question, but Vogt might 
have started with the basic observation that the democratically elected govern- 
ments of Canadian settler societies have minimized and in some cases ignored 
the property rights of First Nations. Natives, as a result, have turned to the 
courts, with some success, in their struggle to prod governments towards just 
settlements. In one short paragraph Vogt mentions the constitutional protection 
for Aboriginal and treaty rights, but he provides no analysis of the judicial 
interpretation and whether it offers an appropriate balance between competing 
interests. 
Native self-government raises other questions. How does one devolve 
effective self-government to First Nations while at the same time protecting the 
democratic and property rights of non-Natives living within a self-governing 
territory? Do the Nisga Treaty or the new Nunavut Territory (both of which 
Vogt mentions in passing) strike an appropriate balance? These are some of the 
questions that Vogt needed to address in a chapter on Aboriginal rights, in a 
book on property and democracy. 
Vogt is also prone to unsubstantiated generalization about Canadian pub- 
lic opinion, and much of his analysis does not take into account academic work 
of the last decade. This is particularly true of the chapters on family law and 
Aboriginal rights where his sources and analysis end in the late 1980s. 
More seriously, apart from a brief paragraph on page 45 Vogt does not dis- 
cuss the growing impact of international business and international govern- 
ment. He uses a few European and American examples of democracy in the 
134 Left History 8.1 
workplace, but otherwise his analysis does not stray beyond Canadian borders. 
The demands of increasingly mobile capital and the pressures on domestic gov- 
ernments, however, increasingly come from abroad, and Vogt's prescriptive 
analysis of property and democracy needs to address the phenomenon of glo- 
bilization, its dangers and its possibilities. 
Although Vogt suggests a potentially attractive vision of enhanced proper- 
ty rights, the analysis is too fleeting to satisfy the specialist, and not engaging 
enough to capture a larger imagination. This is too bad because Vogt's efforts 
to reclaim the idea of property and to put it to work for those whose claims have 
not been accorded such privileged protection is long overdue. 
Douglas C. Harris 
York University 
Michael Torigian, Every Factory a Fortress: The French Labor Movement in the 
Age of Ford and Hitler (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999). 
Following the 1936 electoral victory of the Popular Front coalition, the 
French Third Republic faced the biggest wave of labour unrest in its history, 
with over 1.8 million workers on strike during June of that year alone. Given 
the heady atmosphere extant in the wake of an historic left-wing triumph, one 
might think that Marceau Pivert, leader of the pro-revolutionary faction of 
the French Socialist Party, captured the spirit of the time when he entitled one 
of his newspaper editorials "Everything Is Possible." But in fact, the situation 
was far less straightforward. L1Humanit&, the organ of the French Communist 
Party (PCF), immediately countered that "Everything Is Not Possible." This 
encapsulated the new, "pragmatic" approach the party had adopted as a lead- 
ing architect of the Popular Front, in stark contrast to its hardline revolution- 
ary stance of only a few years earlier. Moreover, even Pivert's concrete 
demands were more limited than his rhetoric implied, concentrating upon 
wage increases and the election of workers' delegates.' 
Insofar as the working class was concerned, then, there was a sharp con- 
trast between the tremendous expectations aroused by the Popular Front, and 
the limited changes wrought by the government of the Socialist leader Leon 
Blum. To be sure, the Matignon Accords - hurriedly signed so as to end the 
strike wave - ushered in the 40-hour work week and significant wage increas- 
es for some. But by 1938, most historians of contemporary France agree, they 
had been undermined by continuing economic problems, a growing pressure 
to increase armaments output, a vigorous (an4 many would add, vindictive) 
employer counter-offensive, and bitter political conflict. 


Roy Vogt — Whose Property? The Deepening Conflict Between Private Property and Democracy in Canada

Palmer, Bryan D.

142 Left History 8.1 
Antliff's anarchist modernists are worth remembering, worth preserving as 
a cultural legacy, for the ways they resisted Wilson's voice, for the alter- 
natives they proffered, alternatives like Robert Henri's declaration that his 
"love of mankind" was "individual, not national." One important service 
Antliff's book does for us at the turn of the twenty-first century is pre- 
cisely to preserve these alternative voices and visions. 
Michael Thurston 
Smith College 
David McNally, Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor, and 
Liberation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 
This is a fashionable book with an untrendy message. Language and the 
body are perhaps the most captivating of subjects in the current theoreti- 
cal moment. But McNally's purpose is a dissident one. He reminds us that 
for all the talk of bodies in what he considers, loosely, postmodern writing 
(which he labels as post-structuralist and deconstructive), the sensuous, 
material, productive body is an illusive non-presence: "linguistic idealism 
involves the subsumption of concrete bodies and relations - bodies, 
objects, social practices - under a set of conceptual abstractions." (3) It is 
not McNally's purpose to understate the importance of language, which he 
respects as the site of significant meaning. Rather, like other historical 
materialists who have challenged "the linguistic turn," he aims to reinvest 
language with materiality by connecting what is severed by collapsing 
substance into "text," an intellectual exercise that carries the interpretive 
and political cost of obscuring, even denying, the many "things" we seem- 
ingly, according to bourgeois ideology, cannot change, among them bod- 
ies. 
Readers expecting an accounting of bodies at labour, in class struggle, 
resisting oppression, or engaged with historical movements, relations of 
love and sexuality, straddling biological need and the political uncon- 
scious, will not find it here. There is no social history of experience to be 
found in McNally's pages. Instead, what he develops is a rigorous theoret- 
ical accounting of the ways in which the materialist edifice, from Darwin 
through Marx to Walter Benjamin, reawakens an appreciation of the body's 
central place in human development, where both language and the struggle 
for liberation have parallel histories. McNally is particularly illuminating, 
albeit in ways that are relentlessly oppositional, with respect to Nietzsche's 
influence, encapsulated in the entirely bourgeois conception of an ideal- 
Left History 8.1 143 
ized, metaphysical "will to power," which he counterposes to Darwin's his- 
toricized and materializing accent on cooperation in the evolution of 
species. Study of the survival and adaptation of bodies provided something 
of a mid-Victorian laboratory for dismantling the ideological weight of 
feudal superstition and religious cant that hung like a millstone around the 
neck of rational, analytic thought well into the twentieth century. He 
moves from this invaluable introductory premise through discussions of 
linguistic theory's suppression of the body from Saussure to Derrida and, 
after pausing in a chapter much indebted to the anthropological tradition 
to decipher the language-labour relation and overcome the tendency to 
dualism inherent in non-materialist theories of language, moves into dis- 
cussions of the significance of Voloshinov, Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin. 
No short review can adequately convey either the nuances or contri- 
butions of McNally's marshalling of what he intends to be a "dialectics of 
awakening," by which the body and its languages are reconciled in an 
awareness of the struggle for liberations that free men and women from the 
tyrannies of capitalist exploitation and the plethora of neuroses that sur- 
round and suffocate libidinal bodies always standing, not in an original sin, 
but on the hard, primitive ground of that most powerful of alienations, the 
extraction of surplus upon which so much of "civilized" modernity and 
postmodernity rests. The book should be read carefully and generously by 
all those who take "postmodernism," "materialism," and social transfor- 
mation seriously. 
McNally himself could be more generous to those with whom he is 
aligned. Oddly absent from his wide reading and impressive citations are 
some key texts by contemporary Marxists whose concerns, if not directly 
related to those of this book, certainly offer as much in the way of con- 
gruent commentary as any number of non-Marxist works commonly refer- 
enced. There may be a message, buried in a footnote where McNally 
defines "his" tradition of "classical Marxism." He mentions Marx and 
Engels, of course, and then Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci, whose 
presence he does not qualify chronologically. "The early years of the 
Bolshevik Revolution" are alluded to as a generic good, but Lenin and 
Trotsky are not named. The language of sectarianism, it seems, emanates 
from quarters other than the ultraleft "body politic." 
Bryan D. Palmer 
Canadian Studies, Trent University 


David McNally — Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor, and Liberation

McGuire, John Thomas

166 Left History 8.1 
to those interested in advertising history is a chapter comparing advertising in 
small town and large city newspapers to explore the changing relationship 
between suppliers of consumer goods and their rural customers. Blanke analyzes 
over four thousand ads from selected newspapers to map the types of businesses 
which used newspapers to advertise as well as the possible consumers they hoped 
to reach. 
More broadly, Blanke's work touches on a number of larger themes in 
American culture and demolishes old stereotypes about farmers as insular, back- 
ward-looking and reactionary. Midwestern farmers had a strong belief in com- 
munity, but they were canny capitalists, not romantic yeomen farmers. Blanke 
demonstrates that in many ways Midwestern farmers grappled with the problems 
of "modem" consumerism years, if not decades, earlier than scholars of either 
urban shoppers or Populists have indicated. His work complicates the model of 
cultural diffusion in which ideas move swiftly from city to countryside, and right- 
ly suggests that attention must be paid to regional variations in American con- 
sumer behaviour. 
Sarah Elvins 
University of Manitoba 
I Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of 
Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1940 (New York, 
1983), xi. 
Kathleen Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and 
Subversion During World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 
In director William Wellman's classic western, The Ox-Bow Incident (1942), a 
posse, enraged over the reported murder of a local rancher, seizes and hangs three 
cowboys without benefit of a trial. Satisfied with their "justice," the returning 
posse encounters the local sheriff, who brusquely informs them that the rancher 
remains alive, if seriously wounded, and that he has captured the persons respon- 
sible for the shooting. Slinking away to the town saloon, the shame-faced posse 
members listen to the character played by Henry Fonda read from a letter scrib- 
bled hastily by one of the mob's victims.' 
While the film, made in the midst of World War 11, does not discuss the issue 
of dissent during wartime, it does touch upon the all-too-ready capacity of a 
majority to tread upon minority rights. The question of whether a democracy can 
fight in a major war without stifling the right of dissent has been controversial in 
Left History 8.1 167 
United States history. Free speech often becomes restricted during wartime, as evi- 
denced by the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts by a hysterical Federalist 
Congress in 1798 and Abraham Lincoln's abrupt suspension of the writ of habeas 
corpus during the Civil War. 
First Amendment rights suffered their sharpest blow, however, during the U.S. 
involvement in World War I. Committed to making the world "safe for democra- 
cy," Woodrow Wilson's administration perceived criticism of American involve- 
ment as a dire threat to its utopian goals. Federal government officials thus prose- 
cuted and even deported hundreds of socialists and pacifists who simply exercised 
their rights of free speech and assembly.2 Even civil libertarians such as U.S. 
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes sometimes defended the govern- 
mental right of suppression. Among the dire results of this governmental overre- 
action was the rise of young bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover, whose zealous pursuits 
of "anti-Americans" foreshadowed his later efforts as head of the FBI. 
Scholars Paul L. Murphy and Richard Pollenberg have conducted the most 
searching examinations of this shameful time in U.S. history. Examining the era 
from a legal perspective, Murphy argued that the federal government's suppression 
of dissent resulted from the myopic vision of Progressivism. Having "perfected 
U.S. society through pre-war reforms, progressives such as Wilson saw criticism 
of the war effort as a direct assault upon their defense of democracy overseas. 
Pollenberg, in contrast, concentrated on what he perceived the clash of cultures in 
the 1919 Abrams Supreme Court case. The critical viewpoints of socialists and 
other dissenters collided, according to Pollenberg, with those of a nativist elite 
intent on preserving traditional values.' 
Now Kathleen Kennedy, assistant professor of history and director of 
Women's Studies at Western Washington University, has contributed to the histo- 
riographical discussion. Her book is a useful, although limited, examination of 
how gender influenced the U.S. government's prosecution of women charged 
under the Wartime Emergency Laws from 19 17 through 19 19. 
Kennedy's introduction makes it clear that although she finds Murphy and 
Pollenberg essential, gender has been ignored as a factor in examining the civil lib- 
erties situation during World War I. "I argue," she continues, "that issues of gen- 
der appropriate behavior appeared regularly in women's confrontations with legal 
authorities" (xv). Kennedy is certainly correct that scholars have not used gender 
as an analytical tool; Murphy and Pollenberg never considered how governmental 
authorities used standards of maternity as a prosecutorial tool. But her argument 
is one that is only partially confirmed in her examination of three women con- 
victed during the war: Kate Richards O'Hare, Emma Goldrnan, and Rose Pastor 
Stokes. 
O'Hare's case provides the strongest support for Kennedy's argument, as 
Kennedy admits: "[olf all the federal wartime cases, [this case] most explicitly 
168 Left History 8.1 
raised questions about the meaning of motherhood and its role in constructing 
women's political identities" (38). For example, O'Hare and her defenders capi- 
talized on the fact that the fiery Socialist possessed a large family and acted as a 
"happy wife and mother" (24). Kennedy skillfully interweaves direct quotations 
from contemporary sources and her own analysis to provide a convincing por- 
trayal of O'Hare using her maternal instincts to contradict the federal govern- 
ment's accusations of disloyalty. 
Kennedy's argument falters in part, however, when she turns her gender-cen- 
tered analysis to Goldman and Stokes. While female protestors undoubtedly con- 
fronted a patriarchal system intent on defending the war effort, the complexity of 
historical causes must also be taken into account. The women in Kennedy's case 
analyses did not come from "non-white7' backgrounds, so race does not enter into 
the equation. But issues of class and ethnicity become paramount in discussing 
Emma Goldman. It is hard to imagine such a strident socialist using terms such as 
"family" and "children" in her defense against government persecution. 
Goldman's radicalism came from more than maternal instincts, if any - it arose 
from her Marxist beliefs. In addition, Goldman's Eastern European Jewish back- 
ground provided ready ammunition for governmental authorities claiming that 
Goldman represented "anti-Americanism.'' As one historian quoted by Kennedy 
comments, "[J. Edgar] Hoover had identified the source of evil as those who were 
different in appearance, culture, and belief - groups who were alienated from the 
old truths and pieties of nostalgic America."4 Thus class and ethnicity doomed 
Goldman to governmental prosecution and eventually deportation from the United 
States. Sullivan's gender-centered argument for Goldman's prosecution convinces 
most when she examines the deportation of Goldman and her companion, 
Alexander Berkrnan, in 19 19. By using Goldman's previous marriage to argue that 
she could not be a U.S. citizen, J. Edgar Hoover and his allies used gender as a tool 
to erase Goldman as an influence in civil discourse. Rose Pastor Stokes's case 
presents a similar dilemma. A Polish emigrant, Stokes based her opposition to the 
war on grounds of free speech and her ingrained socialist beliefs. As Kennedy her- 
self points out, "Stokes did not link this odyssey to gender" (67). 
Kennedy's analysis stands on firmer ground when she discusses alleged sub- 
version in the context of politics and professionalism in Chapters 5 and 6 of her 
book. The use of one's sexual history to prove "anti-Americanism" is effectively 
portrayed in the case of Agnes Smedley. When Smedley refused to cooperate with 
federal authorities against her fellow protestors, authorities reportedly threatened 
to use her sexual relationships with Indian nationals as a way of destroying her 
credibility (86). Although Kennedy does not pursue this matter further, a depress- 
ing parallel between this threat and the later alleged connections between sexual 
"perversion" and anti-Americanism during the Cold War era forms in the mind of 
the informed reader. 
Left History 8.1 169 
The most interesting case in Kennedy's book is Mane Equi's. A medical doc- 
tor and unrepentant lesbian who performed abortions and supported birth control, 
Equi became an all-too-ready target for governmental prosecution when she 
allegedly called U.S. soldiers "dirty, contemptible scum" in a June, 1918, speech 
(97). Equi's case starkly demonstrates what happens to social dissenters who pur- 
sue their beliefs aggressively during wartime. Simmering resentments surface in 
the form of accusations of "anti-Americanism," with authorities throttling unpop- 
ular opinions. 
Kennedy also successfully portrays the use of "patriotic motherhood" by gov- 
ernmental authorities against women defendants. Quotations from primary 
sources skillfully show the extent federal prosecutors used the ideal of a woman 
patriotically allowing her sons to fight in European trenches to condemn their 
opponents. "This is a nation of free speech," one prosecutor melodramatically 
intoned at O'Hare's trial, "but this is a time of sacrifice, when mothers are sacri- 
ficing their sons, when all men and women who are not at heart traitors are sacri- 
ficing their time and hard-earned money for defense of the flag" (22). As Kennedy 
perceptively notes of this tirade, "Without mothers who were willing to sacrifice 
their sons for the state the nation could not wage war" (22). Thus anti-war oppo- 
sition from women seemingly endangered the nation's fighting efforts, no matter 
how minor. 
Kennedy's writing style remains clear and crisp throughout the book. Her 
command of primary sources, particularly the papers of her agents, impresses. 
Despite some flaws, Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens stands as an impor- 
tant contribution to the historiography about the U.S. Left and civil liberties repres- 
sion during World War I. 
John Thomas McGuire 
State University of New York, Oneonta 
1 This book review was written just two days before the terrorist attacks on the 
World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon' in Washington, D.C. 
Although I have not made changes to reflect these recent incidents, I believe that 
the discussion here has become even more pressing in a time of war. 
2 An excellent description of this process can be found in Frances Early, A World 
Wthout War: How US. Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I (Syracuse, 
1997). 
3 See Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United 
States (New York, 1979) and Richard Pollenberg, Fighting Faiths: The Abrams 
Case, The Supreme Court, and Free Speech (New York, 1987). 
Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J Edgar Hoover (New York, 
1987), 8 1-9 1, quoted in Kennedy, 40. 


Kathleen Kennedy — Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion During World War I

Akurang-Parry, Kwabena O.

Rethinking the "Slaves of Salaga": Post-Proclamation Slavery in the Gold Coast (Colonial Southern Ghana), 1874-1899

Eley, Geoff

Bryan D. Palmer — Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression

Jaffe, James

Left History 8.1 147 
children and motherhood is a means of achieving a fully formed female identi- 
ty, but at the same time we all know the lengths to which women have gone now 
and in the past in order not to have children. 
This tension between the requirement of the species to reproduce itself, 
society's valourisation of motherhood, individual desires and the real difficul- 
ties, even dangers, attendant on motherhood are the real subject of Lisle's book. 
However, they remain as threads that are never fully gathered together. This is 
partly to do with the structure of a book that is part advocacy, part sociology 
and part personal narrative. Lisle is herself "without child" and the story of why 
this is so unfolds gradually and sometimes intrusively. I am not suggesting that 
the author should have refrained from personal reminiscence and reflection. 
This material adds to the book's authenticity, but could have been communi- 
cated with greater force and clarity if restricted to a single chapter. 
Another weakness of the book is its failure to provide a full discussion of 
the kinds of alternative forms of mothering that are open to women. On page 
108 Lisle observes that not only is it now possible for a child to have two bio- 
logical mothers, but also a whole range of psychological ones as well, includ- 
ing adoptive mother, foster mother, godmother, lesbian CO-mother and so on. 
The fit between biological mother and the social category of mother is extreme- 
ly rigid in Euro-American societies, especially when compared to the kinship 
system of many others societies. Lisle suggests that this could change and that 
new family formations open up quite different possibilities for childless women 
than might have been present in the past, but this interesting area warrants 
much more attention than it receives here. 
Sandra Bell 
University of Durham 
John H.M. Laslett, Colliers Across the Sea: A Comparative Study of Class 
Formation in Scotland and the American Midwest, 1830-1924 (Urbana: 
University of Illinois Press, 2000). 
The past twenty years have had an obvious chastening effect upon historians of 
the labour movement, and nowhere has this been more apparent than in Britain. 
There was a time when British coal miners were both lionized and envied for 
their self-evident solidarity, their determination to struggle even in the face of 
tremendous hardships, their organizational skills, and their vision of a society 
in which nationalized industry superceded private ownership and capitalist 
competition. They not only seemed to epitomize the labor movement generally 
but their initial particularist agenda was eventually writ large as the national 
148 Left History 8.1 
social program of post-war Britain. At the same time, in the United States, 
while the ultimate trajectory of miners' unionism differed significantly from 
that in Britain, many of those same qualities were also readily apparent among 
American miners. This was so much so that as early as the mid- 1950s industri- 
al sociologists already had hypothesized that such forms of solidarity and 
activism were a common feature of miners internationally. In one especially 
influential proposition, these special characteristics were thought to be a func- 
tion both of the degree to which mining villages were isolated from other cen- 
ters of population and the extent to which miners lived in relatively homoge- 
neous communities. Miners thus became famously categorized in the academ- 
ic literature as an "isolated mass," an obvious albeit formidable aberration of 
modem urban and industrial society. 
In Britain, however, this forbidding reputation was first threatened by the 
election of Mrs. Thatcher in 1979 and then shattered by her government's sub- 
sequent victory over them in 1984-5. Over the course of the next decade or so, 
several historians sought to pick up the pieces and in doing so began to build a 
decidedly different portrait of the nature of miners' unionism and their politi- 
cal activism. Rather than emphasize the essentialism of miners' solidarity, there 
evolved a new concern with its contingencies and fragility; rather than seeking 
to explicate the miners' unusual "strike-proneness," more recent work has sug- 
gested that miners' strikes were both highly localized and rather transient 
events; rather than stress the isolation and homogeneity of the miners' commu- 
nities, there is now new interest in the extent of these communities' external 
contacts and in the scope of their social heterogeneity; and rather than seeking 
to illustrate "the forward march of labour," recent miners' historians have come 
to see in this perspective an invented tradition that, in the words of one group 
of sympathetic writers, was comprised of "selective myths [with] significant 
absences and limiting closures." 
John H.M. Laslett's new book therefore comes at a time when historians, 
especially those on the other side of the Atlantic, are engaged in a significant 
reevaluation of many of the verities of their profession. From that perspective, 
the importance of this book lay foremost in placing the history of miners' 
unionism and political activism in a comparative historical perspective, for 
Laslett seeks to trace and account for the similarities and differences in the fate 
of the miners and their unions in both Britain and the United States. Laslett 
therefore has selected to study a half dozen mining communities in both 
Scotland and Illinois, communities whose histories were often surprisingly 
intertwined at the same time that they ultimately developed in quite different 
directions. 
These mining communities on either side of the Atlantic, Laslett suggests, 
developed in roughly the same manner and at approximately the same time. 
Both in Scotland and in Illinois, relatively small units of ownership and tradi- 
Left History 8.1 149 
tional methods of coal extraction yielded to larger-scale and partially mecha- 
nized production. The social and economic effects of such a transition were 
also remarkably similar. In Laslett's terms, the skilled "artisan-collier" gave 
way to the "semi-proletarianized" underground labourer as the ideology of 
industrial relations shifted from a sense of the shared stewardship over indus- 
try at mid-century to the recognition of class conflict and exploitation by the 
century's end. Moreover, Laslett further identifies comparable developments 
within the British and American trade union movements as their increasing pro- 
fessionalization and bureaucratization spawned rank-and-file movements that 
by 1900 often exhibited similar syndicalist characteristics. 
Notwithstanding such similar processes of class formation the miners' 
movements in Illinois and Scotland did not yield similar political results. In 
Britain, the Scottish miners eventually came to support the Labour Party 
through which, Laslett argues, it could best promote its collectivist objectives. 
In the U.S., however, support for socialism in the midwest coalfields although 
initially substantial ultimately waned, especially in the years after World War I. 
It was once common, of course, to explain these decidedly different trajectories 
as an example of American "exceptionalism," the historical effects of a nation 
rooted in a different political tradition and burdened with a different historical 
legacy than its European counterparts. However, Laslett convincingly rejects 
this "exceptionalist" thesis by illuminating the common political objectives that 
continued to be expressed by miners on both sides of the Atlantic throughout 
this period. Instead, the differing fortunes of the miners in the U.S. and Britain 
can be better explained by contingent political developments. Laslett argues 
that a variety of structural differences contributed to significantly different his- 
torical results, among them the distinct nature of the franchise in Britain and 
the U.S., the differing forms and practices of each country's two-party systems, 
and the differing policies followed by the respective miners' unions. Ultimately, 
however, the political impact of the First World War had a decisive effect. In 
Britain, the creation of David Lloyd George's coalition government during the 
wartime crisis of 1916 not only split the ruling Liberal Party but also further 
legitimated its Labour allies by inviting them to share power. In the U.S., on the 
other hand, the center held at the same time that the Socialist Party's opposition 
to the war became a significant factor in the demise of a collectivist party there. 
Such an interesting and thoughtful analysis merits the attention of a wide 
range of social and political historians but it perhaps could have been even fur- 
ther improved by a direct engagement with some of the more recent historical 
writing on class and party, particularly those emanating from the U.K. Thus it 
would seem relevant here to discuss the work of Gareth Stedman Jones and his 
progeny whose linguistic postmodernism has led them to jettison the impor- 
tance of class altogether and assert the autonomy of the political. Similarly, 
recent work on the electoral sociology of early twentieth-century Britain, such 
150 Left History 8.1 
as Duncan Tanner's important book, merit further attention. Some engagement 
with important post-Thatcher era works on miners, their unions and politics in 
Britain is also lacking, although this book admittedly appeared just prior to the 
publication of Alan Campbell's second volume on the history of the Scottish 
miners. Finally, especially considering the rightwards turn of contemporary 
Labour politics, an evaluation of recent work on the persistence of late nine- 
teenth and early twentieth-century "popular radicalism," the term coined by 
Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid to indicate the shared ideological heritage of 
both Liberals and Labour, would also seem to be in order. 
Such reservations aside, Professor Laslett has written a unique book. Few 
historians are willing to tackle the logistical and historiographic morass of sys- 
tematic comparative history and even fewer are able to directly confront major 
interpretive puzzles. This book succeeds on both counts. 
James Jaffe 
University of Wisconsin at Whitewater 
Pamela Pilbeam, French Socialists Before Marx: Workers, Women and the 
Social Question in France (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University 
Press, 2000). 
Pamela Pilbeam asks "was Cabet the Barbara Cartland of the 1840s?" In 
other words, did his book, Voyage en Icarie, merely offer artisan readers 
"a dream world in which to escape"? 
This provocative question, in addition to numerous allusions to contem- 
porary figures such as Jospin and Blair, discloses the author's interest in 
showing how early French nineteenth century socialism is relevant to our 
times. 
This is a very difficult undertaking, in view of the great changes in 
the meaning of socialism over time. Pilbeam is aware of this, of course, 
and in a brilliant introduction she presents a review of how contemporary 
historians have modified their approach of that period. 
Her study offers a new line of attack by focusing on a thematic inves- 
tigation of theories and actions, strategies and solutions, rather than on 
individual biographical studies or  philosophical analysis. As the work 
progresses, this approach succeeds in uncovering continuities within a 
movement that has changed its discourse markedly as it has grown from 
a repressed minority to a important locus of political power. 
The author's analysis shows very clearly the important fact that all 
socialist writers concentrated on concrete economic issues, even when 


John H.M. Laslett — Colliers Across the Sea: A Comparative Study of Class Formation in Scotland and the American Midwest, 1830-1924

Cooper, Lisa

144 Left History 8.1 
Laura Hapke, Labor's Text: The Worker in American Fiction (New Brunswick; 
Rutgers University Press, 2001). 
Laura Hapke further solidifies her influential position in the field of working- 
class studies with her most recent project, Labor's Text: The Worker in 
American Fiction. A work of both labour and love, Hapke admits in her pref- 
ace that this book represents a decade's worth of research and writing, which 
started with "revisiting [her] immigrant father's novella, serialized in a radical 
journal of the early 1930s" (xi). By revealing her very personal connection with 
American labour fiction, Hapke establishes her ethos as a scholar invested both 
academically and personally in the fiction of the American worker. 
For those in the field of working-class studies, Laura Hapke, a professor of 
English at Pace University, has long been prominent in both research and writ- 
ing. Her earlier works, Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and 
Fiction in the American 1930s and Tales of the Working Girl: Wage-Earning 
Women in American Literature, 1890-1925 are both integral texts to working- 
class studies. Her new work only further establishes her as a major academic in 
the field. 
In Labor's Text, Hapke takes the reader on a journey to discover the 
American labourer - an oft-overlooked, if not discounted, character in litera- 
ture. Hapke's work is impressive not only in its comprehensive view of 
American literature, which investigates everyone from the expected Upton 
Sinclair to the more obscure W.H. Little and Reginald Wright Kauffman, but 
also in the attention it bestows upon both historical events and cultural studies. 
Hapke includes in-depth looks at how the American worker is represented in 
the fiction of the antebellum period, through the Progressive Era, both World 
Wars, the Civil Rights movement, and Vietnam, to a more present-day investi- 
gation of the impact of "mass firings and plant closings" in the 1980s and 
1990s (319). Further, Labork Text gives attention to those workers who have 
been dually marginalized not only because of their socioeconomic status but 
also due to their ethnicity, sexual orientation, andor gender. Some of the most 
revealing and fascinating sections of the book are those that look at the Native 
American, Chinese, or African-American labourers and their place in worhng- 
class literature. 
In addition to the comprehensive and wide-ranging historical, cultural, and 
literary scope of Laborh Text, perhaps the book's greatest strength is its atten- 
tion to those literary genres that are significant in terms of radical andor work- 
ing-class writings but tend to be ignored in favor of the more canonical works. 
For instance, Hapke's section on The Masses, the "oppositional arts magazine," 
is particularly astute in realizing the struggles that radical writers faced when 
trying to reconcile their politics with aesthetic ambitions: "most of the other 
Socialist magazines . . . had little political patience for the arts. The cultural 
Left History 8.1 145 
rebels of The Masses, in contrast, found no contradiction between a radical 
commitment and imaginative literature" (1 30). This statement typifies Hapke's 
dual emphasis on the political and literary implications of labour writing. 
Along with attention to Socialist publications such as The Masses, Hapke 
also looks at works such as the "sex-trade novel" (157). Here, Hapke explores 
the gender and class implications of novels, particularly of the early twentieth 
century, that featured the young working-class girl turned prostitute. One might 
also recall that Hapke's 1989 text, Girls Who Went Wrong: Prostitutes in 
American Fiction, 1885-1917, also focused on this marginalized group of 
women workers. As Hapke remarks, Reginald Wright Kauffman's 1910 best- 
seller, The House of Bondage, was the "product of ten years of interviews in the 
vice districts of major American cities and an intensive knowledge of local and 
national reports on the 'social evil,' [and] it tried to do with the sex trade what 
a few years before Sinclair had done with the meatpacking industry" (157). 
These valuable connections that Hapke makes between a variety of working- 
class novels as well as her attention to the more obscure or taboo working-class 
trades establishes Laborb Text as perhaps one of the most inclusive projects 
about the American worker. 
While her attention to a variety of workers as well as her own familial 
interest reveal the very personalized investment Hapke has in Labor b Text, she 
is also dedicated to providing a face to those workers whose voices we do not 
often hear in American fiction. Aside from the literary investigations, Hapke 
also provides the reader with poignant photographs and drawings of labourers 
at the beginning of each chapter. The strong connections between visual art and 
writing, particularly working-class writing, is further established in Labork 
Text and these photos seek to remind the reader of the very humanized nature 
of working-class fiction and characters. 
With a work as comprehensive and compelling at Labor b Text, one can 
find little room for improvement or change. Hapke even leads the reader to the 
present-day works of such contemporary writers as Paula K. Gover and Janisse 
Ray. Further, Hapke makes important connections between contemporary fic- 
tion about labourers and that of their working-class predecessors as well as 
showing what new directions are underway in American labour writing: "If the 
memory of labor's hardships rather than the new voice of struggling or empow- 
ered labor is taking over the fiction of today, the memoir is creating a space for 
working-class people to represent themselves" (338). Here, Hapke acknowl- 
edges, that there is an important shift from bourgeois writing about labourers 
to a promotion of a more authentic, working-class-constructed writing and con- 
sciousness. 
Labor k Text: The Worker in American Fiction is a seminal work for schol- 
ars of working-class studies, literature, and American history. Hapke gives a 
voice to American workers who have long been silenced an4 in the process, 
146 Left History 8.1 
provides the field of working-class studies with a comprehensive view of  how 
writers have long depicted the labour force. Perhaps Hapke herself best sums 
up her work in Labor's Text when she states that the "very characteristics that 
have rendered the best work literature controversial have ignited its strengths: 
a critical engagement with the classism of the everyday; an insistence that iden- 
tity dwells apart from economic gain; and a humanity that issues from acknowl- 
edging rather than disowning working-class origins" (339). If scholars and 
readers can take away these insights not only from Hapke's project but also 
from labour fiction itself, then there is hope that working-class literature will 
no longer play a marginalized role to the more dominant, canonical discourse. 
Lisa Cooper 
Texas Christian University 
Laurie Lisle, Mthout Child: Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness (New 
York: Routledge, 1999). 
In the midst of the increasingly confused and confusing debate surrounding the 
implications of new reproductive technologies for individuals, families and 
society comes a book that addresses the most fundamental question of all. Is it 
so bad for women not to have children? 
Merely posing such a question presents an author with a host of difficul- 
ties from the outset. Even finding an acceptable vocabulary to describe women 
who are without child is an impossible task. As Lisle points out the medical 
term for a woman without a child, nullipara "comes from the Latin root for 
empty, void, zero, like the word for a female who has never been pregnant, nul- 
ligravida." Lisle casts around in vain for neutral terms and concludes that she 
is forced to employ a vocabulary that "polarizes us for or against parenthood 
but never indicates the dignity of nonparenthood." Part of her task then is to 
establish the childless as occupying a fruitful and honourable role in women's 
history. This is a theme that is addressed throughout the book, but given par- 
ticular focus in Chapter Three "Searching History, Remembering our Maiden 
Aunts." 
Women have lived fulfilling and useful lives without giving birth, even 
though the dominant pronatalist discourse would have us believe that such an 
assertion is a contradiction in terms. Despite powerful cultural pressures for 
women to submit to reproduction, modern contraception, legal abortion and 
increased economic independence contribute countervailing social forces in the 
shaping of women's lives. At the heart of the issue lies the pervasive represen- 
tation of motherhood as "the essential female experience." Real women have 


Laura Hapke — Labor's Text: The Worker in American Fiction

Creagh, Ronald

152 Left History 8.1 
Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French 
Romantic Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 
Social history is generally disheartening. Whereas the story of the powerful is 
often narrated in the epic mode, the chronicle of crusaders and activists who 
fight to improve the human condition usually generates melancholic reflection 
on the contrast between an optimistic faith in an ultimate triumph and the lim- 
ited influence of such lives. Yet there is much to learn from the history of the 
losers, because their failures cannot blot out the quality of their lives and ideas 
and they remain a lesson in human resistance to the powers that be. 
Victor Considerant (1 808-1 893) is a striking example of such a contrast. 
This manic-depressive former polytechnician, whom the cartoonists enjoyed 
representing with his huge red moustache and other appendages, is known in 
the United States for his failed communal experiment in Texas. Yet, for better 
or worse, Fourier's works would have probably remained relatively obscure in 
his time had he not had such a devoted follower as Considerant, who wrote and 
lectured with "sincere enthusiasm," clarity and elegance, and who inspired 
large audiences, even though he was not a brilliant speaker. Half a century later, 
the Russian Tcherkezov would even accuse Marx of plagiarizing Considerant's 
Manifeste de la DCmocratie au XIXe sidcle. Considerant's symbolic role was 
important, as can be attested to by the people who attended his funeral, which 
included "the socialists Jean Jaurks, Alexandre Millerand . . . the anarchist 
brothers Elie and Eliske Reclus, the feminist Paule Mink . . . and Karl Marx's 
son-in-law Charles Longuet" (444) 
However, Considerant's influence on the development of Fourierism can 
only engender mixed feelings. He censored all of Fourier's speculations on love 
or what he considered to be eccentric in the thought of his master. But he also 
made a number of positive contributions to what was called the science of man 
and society. He rejected the ascetic version of socialism, - resignation, the 
denial of the flesh, and proposed a hedonist view that included "the passions of 
love, ambition, intrigue, the need for change, or the penchant for luxury" (134). 
His idea of association did not apply only to productive activities but to every- 
day life: why should a village of 2000 inhabitants have 400 kitchens, 400 din- 
ing rooms and 400 cooks? He popularized the view of contemporary society 
"as riven by class conflict - a conflict not simply of rich and poor but of capi- 
talists and wage workers" (164-5)? He popularized the demand for the right to 
work and disseminated the ideas of association, community and democracy. 
Still, one may wonder why Beecher, the author of two important books on 
Charles Fourier, of whom Considerant was only a disciple, has devoted so 
much time and work to this second rate do-gooder. The reason may be in his- 
torians' current disenchantment with Marxism and their quest for alternative 
Left History 8.1 153 
roots in a socialist period that largely antedates Marxist influence. Whatever the 
case, this contribution to the historiography of a leading Fourierist also presents 
a more general setting. Considerant's own evolution and the issues he had to 
face can best be understood within the context of this period, which was that of 
the emergence of French romantic socialism. 
The author thus soberly reevaluates a number of assertions about early 
French socialism. There was a movement for change and it had political, intel- 
lectual and literary impacts, but the word socialisme only came into common 
usage after the 1848 revolution. Prior to that event, for some contemporary 
observers, "Babouvism," "Saint-Simonism," "Fourierism," etc. merely repre- 
sented "sectarian movements or Ccoles, each with its own particular remedy 
and its own theoretical jargon" (145). Such a comment, which of course 
delighted the conservative press of the time, calls however for some nuances. 
The babe1 of voices was a symptom of the fertility of the social thought of that 
period, which witnessed the appearance of such a rich variety of reformers: 
Buchez, Cabet, and Proudhon, to name but a few. For political exiles like 
Wilhelm Weitling, Moses Hess, Arnold Ruge or Mikhail Bakunin, France was 
"a desert oasis" (160). Women, too, performed functions and the author justi- 
fiedly emphasizes their roles, particularly those of Clarisse Vigoureux and her 
daughter, Julie, who would become Considerant's wife, but also Flora Tristan 
and even Dksirke Vkret, to whom Charles Fourier himself had made a love dec- 
laration. Last but not least, Beecher shows, again and again, how in spite of 
their bitter quarrels, all these intellectuals often met with one another and man- 
aged to command respect from each other. That was particularly true of 
Considerant who succeeded to some extent in maintaining a certain level of 
serenity as well as some lifelong friendships with people who did not share his 
ideas. 
This well documented book, clearly written, maintains a critical distance 
from its main protagonist. It succeeds in sustaining the reader's interest as the 
different phases of Considerant's life succeed one another. And it will remain 
an important work for those who are concerned with human endeavours to 
improve our world. 
Ronald Creagh 
Universite Paul Valery 


Jonathan Beecher — Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism

Loch-Drake, Cindy

154 Left History 8.1 
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in 
the New West (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000). 
What has become of the New Western History that erupted on the American 
historiographical scene in the 1980s? Distinctive in its emphasis on the four 
"C"S - continuity, convergence, conquest and complexity - this new interpreta- 
tion of the history of the American West challenged beloved myths and ortho- 
dox notions that had dominated American historiography since Fredrick 
Jackson Turner published his "Frontier Thesis" in 1893. The simplistic tale of 
the frontier adventures of white men prior to 1890 when Turner declared the 
frontier officially closed was disrupted by a new portrait of the West that 
extended into the twentieth century and included Natives, Mexican Americans 
and women. In this New Western History the word conquest made explicit the 
seizure of land and resources by white Americans often using violent means. 
The result was a "messier" but more vibrant history that was also more relevant 
to the experience of late twentieth century Americans. 
Patricia Limerick's Something in the Soil is a loose collection of essays that 
further elaborate the precepts of the New Western History, which she first 
described in The Legacy of Conquest twenty years earlier. The essays are unit- 
ed by Limerick's attempt "to provide a more-grounded and down-to-earth ver- 
sion of the history of the American West" (28) Equally central to Limerick's 
purpose, is an attempt to revitalize the historical profession itself, which has 
been under siege in recent decades. To both of these tasks Limerick brings a 
populist style of writing and clarity of language that seems guaranteed to 
achieve her stated goals of reaching a larger audience than specialists and aca- 
demics and rehabilitating the public image of historians. While at times her tac- 
tics for conveying an argument verge on the goofy - such as a suggesting envi- 
ronmental prizes for "people who didn't go anywhere" (178) and an academic 
prize for "The Most Dramatic Escape from Academic Specialization and 
Jargon" (331) - for the most part this approach holds interest and promotes 
understanding without becoming silly. 
The book's loose structure reflects the genesis of each chapter as a self- 
contained essay or talk conceived for a unique purpose. Apart from the intro- 
duction, only one of the sixteen chapters was written for this book and the 
majority have been previously published. One of the book's strengths is its abil- 
ity to demonstrate the continuing power and relevance of the New Western 
History as a means to uncover alternative ways of seeing the American West. 
"The Case of the Premature Departure," for example, demonstrates the persist- 
ently East coast standpoint or perspective from which most American history 
survey texts continue to view the American West. Drawing on the first "c" in 
the tenets of the New Western History, Limerick argues convincingly that 
important continuities exist between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that 
Left History 8.1 155 
are obscured by this historical model, which emphasizes a westward moving 
line of frontier development that ended in 1890. Similarly, a section on 
"Beleaguered Great White Men" re-examines three major figures in Western 
American history or historiography through the lens of the New Western 
History, which, she argues, reveals a complexity that makes them infinitely 
more interesting and yields valuable "lessons" in history (109). 
Limerick's most insightful and evocative essay, "Disorientation and 
Reorientation: The American Landscape Discovered from the West,'' explores 
the reaction of Asian Americans to coercive relocation to the Western interior 
after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Using the words of Japanese Americans in 
poetry and prose, Limerick powerfully conveys feelings of humiliation, fear, 
despair, and also hope as Japanese-Americans confronted the arid interior and 
eventually planted successful gardens. As she notes, the gardens' success rais- 
es interesting new questions about the environment. In this way Limerick's pur- 
poseful reversal of the conventional model for discovery of the Western land- 
scape raises complex environmental questions and clearly illustrates the themes 
of conquest and complexity that are key elements of the New Western History. 
The final section of the book is a "how-to guide" for historians to become 
more engaged and more engaging writers and speakers. This is a theme inter- 
woven throughout the essays, reflecting Limerick's vision of history as one of 
the "applied" humanities: history can help us "to step away, at least momentar- 
ily, from the bitterness of current controversies and to place those controversies 
in a more reflective context . . ." (15). Limerick argues that historians can best 
perform this role if they are highly involved with the public, actively exchang- 
ing information and attending to the views of non-academics. 
The sheer variety of audiences targeted by these essays seems to demon- 
strate the success of Limerick's approach. Popular success may also explain the 
book's lack of political edge with respect to class and gender issues. The book 
would have been strengthened by more explicit reflection on the ways in which 
class and gender influenced Limerick's perspective, as she did to good effect in 
discussing her religious upbringing and ethnic roots. Its effect can be seen in 
her perceptive analysis in the areas of ethnicity and the environment, which 
may be less politically perilous topics. For example, while her arguments 
address the stark economic disparity faced by different people in the West, and 
touch on the gendered nature of Western historiography, she fails to probe 
deeply in these areas. There is no systematic critique of the American econom- 
ic system. She seems to poke fun at her belief, implicit in The Legacy of 
Conquest, that "if people from backgrounds of privilege took seriously the his- 
tory of people from backgrounds of scarcity, then the privileged people would 
redistribute their wealth, pay equitable wages, and forswear economic advan- 
tage" (264). Yet Limerick does not indicate where her analysis of class has 
moved since then. 
156 Left History 8.1 
Similarly, the New Western History would be enriched by a more in-depth 
analysis of gender. Limerick touches on the importance of the West as a "myth- 
ic region where men are men, and women recognize and celebrate the maleness 
of men" in her essay exploring why the interior West became enormously pop- 
ular in the late twentieth century (280-1) There is much scope for a more sus- 
tained treatment of gender throughout her work that would enrich our under- 
standing of both the West and the larger American culture. The absence of such 
analysis in these essays, given the extensive literature on gender history in the 
West, makes this omission seem glaring. 
Despite these limitations, Something in the Soil further demonstrates the 
analytic power of the New Western History and provides many fascinating 
glimpses of the American West - past and present. Limerick's latest offering is 
also valuable in that it highlights the popular appeal of the New Western 
History. Finally, Limerick's focus on useful tools of the trade and provocative 
ideas offers fresh inspiration to all historians. 
Cindy Loch-Drake 
York University 
Mary H. Blewett, Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in 
Nineteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts 
Press, 2000). 
Mary H. Blewett has written a comprehensive work about the coming of and 
the growth of the industrial order in southeastern New England in the nine- 
teenth century. Much attention is given to the textile world there epitomized by 
the sister cities of Fall River and New Bedford. While the author discusses the 
early role of the Borden family in Fall River's industrialization first, she also 
covers the role of other families, including the Chaces, Durfees, and Stickneys 
in Fall River's rise as a textile center after 1865. 
The manufacturers concentrated on increasing production at the expense 
of their workers' lives. Overproduction led to wage cuts based on the "laws" of 
supply and demand. When the workers countered with calls for a ten-hour day, 
the manufacturers' thrust for cheap production came to the fore. Eventually the 
workers' fight for the ten-hour movement and against wage cuts led them to 
engage in strikes in Fall River in 1848 and 1850. As Blewett states "British 
immigrants and New England workers joined together to oppose unjust treat- 
ment in 1848 and in 1850 they did it again" (84). While conceding that "The 
defeat of the strikes in 1848 and 1850 meant that the textile workers in the Fall 


Patricia Nelson Limerick — Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West

Bell, Sandra

146 Left History 8.1 
provides the field of working-class studies with a comprehensive view of  how 
writers have long depicted the labour force. Perhaps Hapke herself best sums 
up her work in Labor's Text when she states that the "very characteristics that 
have rendered the best work literature controversial have ignited its strengths: 
a critical engagement with the classism of the everyday; an insistence that iden- 
tity dwells apart from economic gain; and a humanity that issues from acknowl- 
edging rather than disowning working-class origins" (339). If scholars and 
readers can take away these insights not only from Hapke's project but also 
from labour fiction itself, then there is hope that working-class literature will 
no longer play a marginalized role to the more dominant, canonical discourse. 
Lisa Cooper 
Texas Christian University 
Laurie Lisle, Mthout Child: Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness (New 
York: Routledge, 1999). 
In the midst of the increasingly confused and confusing debate surrounding the 
implications of new reproductive technologies for individuals, families and 
society comes a book that addresses the most fundamental question of all. Is it 
so bad for women not to have children? 
Merely posing such a question presents an author with a host of difficul- 
ties from the outset. Even finding an acceptable vocabulary to describe women 
who are without child is an impossible task. As Lisle points out the medical 
term for a woman without a child, nullipara "comes from the Latin root for 
empty, void, zero, like the word for a female who has never been pregnant, nul- 
ligravida." Lisle casts around in vain for neutral terms and concludes that she 
is forced to employ a vocabulary that "polarizes us for or against parenthood 
but never indicates the dignity of nonparenthood." Part of her task then is to 
establish the childless as occupying a fruitful and honourable role in women's 
history. This is a theme that is addressed throughout the book, but given par- 
ticular focus in Chapter Three "Searching History, Remembering our Maiden 
Aunts." 
Women have lived fulfilling and useful lives without giving birth, even 
though the dominant pronatalist discourse would have us believe that such an 
assertion is a contradiction in terms. Despite powerful cultural pressures for 
women to submit to reproduction, modern contraception, legal abortion and 
increased economic independence contribute countervailing social forces in the 
shaping of women's lives. At the heart of the issue lies the pervasive represen- 
tation of motherhood as "the essential female experience." Real women have 
Left History 8.1 147 
children and motherhood is a means of achieving a fully formed female identi- 
ty, but at the same time we all know the lengths to which women have gone now 
and in the past in order not to have children. 
This tension between the requirement of the species to reproduce itself, 
society's valourisation of motherhood, individual desires and the real difficul- 
ties, even dangers, attendant on motherhood are the real subject of Lisle's book. 
However, they remain as threads that are never fully gathered together. This is 
partly to do with the structure of a book that is part advocacy, part sociology 
and part personal narrative. Lisle is herself "without child" and the story of why 
this is so unfolds gradually and sometimes intrusively. I am not suggesting that 
the author should have refrained from personal reminiscence and reflection. 
This material adds to the book's authenticity, but could have been communi- 
cated with greater force and clarity if restricted to a single chapter. 
Another weakness of the book is its failure to provide a full discussion of 
the kinds of alternative forms of mothering that are open to women. On page 
108 Lisle observes that not only is it now possible for a child to have two bio- 
logical mothers, but also a whole range of psychological ones as well, includ- 
ing adoptive mother, foster mother, godmother, lesbian CO-mother and so on. 
The fit between biological mother and the social category of mother is extreme- 
ly rigid in Euro-American societies, especially when compared to the kinship 
system of many others societies. Lisle suggests that this could change and that 
new family formations open up quite different possibilities for childless women 
than might have been present in the past, but this interesting area warrants 
much more attention than it receives here. 
Sandra Bell 
University of Durham 
John H.M. Laslett, Colliers Across the Sea: A Comparative Study of Class 
Formation in Scotland and the American Midwest, 1830-1924 (Urbana: 
University of Illinois Press, 2000). 
The past twenty years have had an obvious chastening effect upon historians of 
the labour movement, and nowhere has this been more apparent than in Britain. 
There was a time when British coal miners were both lionized and envied for 
their self-evident solidarity, their determination to struggle even in the face of 
tremendous hardships, their organizational skills, and their vision of a society 
in which nationalized industry superceded private ownership and capitalist 
competition. They not only seemed to epitomize the labor movement generally 
but their initial particularist agenda was eventually writ large as the national 


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