Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Minaker, Joanne C.

170 Left History 8.1 
Joan Sangster, Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in 
Ontario, 1920-1 960 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 200 1). 
The erring female captured late nineteenth century philanthropic attention and 
the scientific gaze of reformers and 'psy' professionals in the early twentieth 
century. In recent decades the erring female has recaptured the attention of fem- 
inist social historians. Joan Sangster's Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, 
Family and the Law in Ontario, 1920-1960 is a prime example of this renewed 
interest in understanding the connection between expert knowledge, forms of 
governing and gender. 
Sangster's main concern is the differential treatment females received under 
the law in the area of familial and sexual regulation between 1920 to 1960 in 
Ontario, Canada. Drawing on journals, govenunent documents, newspapers, 
and correctional case files, her study explores several key issues that drew girls 
and women into criminal and juvenile courts both as victim and offender in the 
early to mid twentieth century. The book is organized thematically, including 
chapter discussions on: incest and sexual abuse; wife assault; prostitution; 
female delinquency; and the sexual regulation of Aboriginal women before the 
law. In Regulating Girls and Women Sangster finds women and girls, in partic- 
ular those of marginalized race andtor class positions, at the intersection of sex- 
uality, family and the law. Consequently, they found themselves the object of 
scrutiny by experts imbued with the power to regulate and discipline them. 
Sangster claims that a sexual double standard betrayed the treatment of girls and 
women who came before the courts and adjudicated (inljustice for their own 
good. In her study this can be seen at the level of regulation and the power of 
law, as well as in, as Sangster puts it, "moments of transgressive disagreement 
when women queried whether they were really on the receiving end of 'justice"' 
(204). Sangster reveals the race, class, and gender interconnections that shape(d) 
both the construction of the female offender and her regulation in the context of 
changing social and legal definitions of "normal" versus "criminal" sexual and 
family relations. Sangster demonstrates that discourses and practices reinforce 
the sexual/social order, but through various social actors they defined "the very 
nature of sexual 'order' and 'disorder' against which women were measured in 
the criminal justice system" (199). 
Sangster's analysis is based in the traditions of materialism and feminism, 
post-structuralism, and deconstruction. To understand the ways in which 
women, sexuality, and the family intersected with legal regulation in 20th centu- 
ry Ontario, Sangster draws on premises of critical legal thinking; that is, "the 
plurality of law, the need for constant cross-examination of its fabrication and its 
meaning, and the idea that law is only comprehensible in its social, economic, 
and political contexts" (194). In this way, she represents law not as a monolith- 
Left History 8.1 17 1 
ic text but as a combination of discourses, practices, personnel, and strategies 
that worked together to regulate and punish errant female sexuality. Sangster 
suggests, the plurality of law and complexity of the modem state notwithstand- 
ing, that "we can still identify concentrations of power that both unobtrusively 
and more vigorously protected dominant ideologies and interests" (203). In 
attending to discourse she does not lose sight of the material contexts in which 
discourses are employed. In a similar vein, attending to structural social oppres- 
sions she attends to the ways in which discourse mediates social practice. 
Sangster contends that a continuum of sexual regulation existed whereby 
different definitions and rationales, imbued by class, race and gender relations, 
shifted the focus of concern and the methods used to censure women who were 
deemed sexually deviant. An excellent example of this process is the Female 
Refuges Act (FRA) which enabled the incarceration of erring females deemed 
problematic for sexual promiscuity, illegitimate pregnancies, andlor venereal 
disease. As Sangster puts it, "'dissolute' [a key term used in the FRA] was equat- 
ed with errant sexuality" (1 16). She argues that notions of racial difference were 
integral to how gender and sexuality were regulated. Through the FRA this 
racialization took two main forms: punishment of white girls for their involve- 
ment with men of colour, and punishment of First Nations women for presumed 
immorality and promiscuity. 
Sangster's attention to racialization and difference in the form of sexual 
criminalization experienced by First Nations women, their legacy of abuse and 
colonialization is one of the most significant contributions of this book. She 
argues that the ideological construction of race that naturalized the hegemony of 
middle-class "white" family forms served to translate, interpret, and legitimate 
the gender order, political economy, and culture of Canadian society. She goes 
on to explain: 
Discourses on sexuality, laden with power, constituted class, gen- 
der, and race as they were lived out by women in conflict with the 
law. Censures of sexuality may have been subject to human 
agency, redefinition over time, or negotiation and context, but 
these contexts were highly sensitive to the dominant relations of 
class, gender, and colonial power (203). 
In paying close attention to the conflicts that brought women and girls into 
the legal arena, Sangster examines not only how law regulated the erring female, 
but her attempts to use or defy law. In so doing, Sangster highlights both domi- 
nant claims made by legal and medical authorities, as well as the muted voices 
of those disqualified from dominant discourse (and she acknowledges that the 
former are more easily heard). Two examples among the many Sangster presents 
are illustrative of the power of expert knowledges in forms of governing and the 
gendered character of this process. In one case a girl's story was rejected when 
a medical exam proved her hymen was intact. She had repeatedly run away and 
was sent to the Ontario Training School for Girls for incorrigibility. The 
172 Left History 8.1 
Children's Aid Society claimed that "'she was as much to blame as her father' 
for tension in the family" (162-3). In another case, a young Afro-Canadian 
woman's claims that she had been raped by a group of boys in a downtown 
church were silenced. "She was dismissed as a wild storyteller; after all, said the 
psychiatrist, 'this is probably a fabrication [otherwise] the minister [whom she 
told] would have investigated"' (1 63). 
The strongest parts of the book are those in which the author articulates 
how powerknowledge relations are at work in the lives of women who come 
before the court. Drawing extensively on case files Sangster provides an account 
rich in theoretical interpretation. One of the book's greatest strengths is also a 
drawback. The breadth of her examination is both revealing and limiting. I was 
left wanting more, especially in Chapter Six, "Native Women, Sexuality and the 
Law" where Sangster outlines the ways in which sexual regulation of First 
Nations women was shaped through law by race and the politics of colonialism. 
As a reader I became caught up in the vivid details of legal, familial, and sexu- 
al encounters. I found myself waiting for a return to the theoretical connections 
so clearly and convincingly laid out in the introduction. For instance, how does 
age intersect with gender? What are the differences between regulating girls and 
regulating women? Though she explores this best in her chapter, "Promiscuity 
and Prostitution," the book could have benefited from further unpacking of the 
category age, and its relation to class and race. 
Sangster's study is timely in the current socio-legal climate with legislation 
like Alberta's Protection of Children Involved in Prostitution and similar bills 
recently passed in other provinces, and in the wake of recent cases of femicide 
such as the murder of Gillian Hadley in Ontario. A more substantial comment 
on the significance of her research for current debates could have been made. 
Although Sangster situates her work as providing "second thoughts on current 
debates," the book does not return to its contemporary point of departure - the 
regulation of sexually precocious young females in the name of protection (1). 
How does her study shed light on the ways legal reforms, such as the recent safe 
houses for child prostitutes, facilitate or hinder women's ability to confront 
oppression? 
Regulating Girls and Women makes a significant contribution to the theo- 
retical and substantive literature in women's history and socio-legal studies. 
Supporting evidence for Sangster's claims can be found in the works of Carolyn 
Strange, Mariana Valverde, Karen Dubinsky and others who have documented 
the regulation of women and girls. The book's clarity of style and well articulat- 
ed analysis make it a useful text for upper level courses in women's studies, soci- 
ology, and women's history. This is a valuable book and useful addition to a 
growing socio-legal scholarship in women's history. 
Joanne C. Minaker 
Queen's University 


Joan Sangster — Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in Ontario, 1920-1960

Korinek, Valerie J.

Left History 8.1 159 
Amy Erdman Farrell, Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of 
Popular Feminism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 
In "Personal Report from Ms." published in January, 1973, the editors enumer- 
ated the Ms. philosophy to their readers: "If you asked us our philosophy for 
ourselves and for the magazine, each of us would give an individual answer. 
But we agree on one thing. We want a world in which no one is born into a sub- 
ordinate role because of visible difference, whether that difference is of race or 
of sex. That's an assumption we make personally and editorially, with all the 
social changes it implies. After that, we cherish our differences. We want Ms. 
to be a forum for many views" (59). Those lofty, and often contradictory, goals 
are analyzed in detail in Yours in Sisterhood, Amy Erdman Farrell's history of 
Ms. from its launch in 1971 until 1989, the year that the magazine published its 
final commercial issue. 
Though Ms. has been alternately lauded or scorned by media and cultural 
analysts alike for daring to venture into mass-market periodical publishing with 
a liberal feminist agenda, Farrell's monograph is the first comprehensive study 
of the magazine. This study is all the more groundbreaking in that few media 
historians or cultural studies works devoted to American women's magazines 
engage with the contemporary products, preferring instead, to focus on the ori- 
gins of the format, and the early years of the traditional standard bearers, the 
Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. Here, Farrell explores what she 
refers to as a "revolutionary hybrid" which dared to propose that a commercial, 
mass-market magazine could have, as its key editorial hook, a feminist mes- 
sage. Farrell provides historical context about both the second wave feminist 
and anti-feminist currents in the United States during the era. Ultimately, she 
illustrates that Ms. was both a product of its time and a gutsy challenge to the 
periodical industry, 
Ms. was launched in 197 1, in an era where women's movement newsletters 
and small magazines were increasingly common. The trio of founding members 
- Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Forsling Harris and Patricia Carbine - dreamed of 
creating a woman's magazine that would successfully challenge and change the 
genre, create space for non-sexist advertising, and serve as a means to dissem- 
inate feminist ideas to a mass-market of American women. Energized with ide- 
alism about a woman-controlled, woman-run periodical (a radically different 
concept at a time when even the major women's magazines were, primarily, 
headed by male editors and all were financed and controlled by male advertis- 
ing and circulation departments) the trio envisaged that Ms. would both "main- 
stream" and popularize feminism. It was to be a forum for American women. 
Furthermore, a critically important piece of their vision was that this would 
be a periodical that women could find on newsstands, sitting cheek by jowl, 
160 Left History 8.1 
with Cosmopolitan and Redbook, not a specialized product available only 
through subscriptions. It is to Farrell's credit that she adroitly deals with both 
the lofty ideals and the crushing realities - the unfulfilled and impossible proj- 
ect of creating a universal sisterhood of readers and, perhaps more dire, the 
commercial challenges from advertisers which would eventually cause Ms.' 
demise. 
Farrell offers readers an excellent case study of how to write a history of a 
popular culture product because she successfully and literately weaves togeth- 
er the three major issues: production history and personnel; the text; and read- 
er reception. Based on extensive archival work, along with oral histories with 
Ms. stalwarts, and close readings of the text, she is able to demonstrate the ten- 
sions and complexity involved in staffing, producing and marketing such a rev- 
olutionary product. Her behind-the-scenes portraits into how the editorial 
offices were organized, with their emphasis on non-hierarchical office space 
and editorial meetings (particularly in the seventies) provide a colourful por- 
trait of the founders' naivete and their idealism. It was also, ironically, in the 
editorial offices that the issues of the privileging of white, heterosexual, mid- 
dle-class and extremely well-educated women's voices and perspectives were 
first challenged, long before reader's demands for diversity and recognition of 
multiple points of oppression were articulated. In keeping with their uncon- 
ventional organization of power in the editorial offices, the editors and writers 
quickly carved out a space for themselves as a politically motivated women's 
magazine that refused to conform to the standard format of women's maga- 
zines. Unlike other women's "service" magazines, Ms. refused to include 
departmental features (food, fashions, beauty) which, in effect, were editorial 
pages that supported the advertisers' products. Nor did Ms. focus primarily on 
women's private lives. 
None of this is new, but what Farrell is skilled at illustrating is how these 
radical decisions had very specific editorial and financial repercussions. In the 
seventies, in particular, the editors' resistance to the traditional women's maga- 
zine format both energized editors and writers, and produced healthy reader- 
ship numbers. At the height of their popularity, Ms. had half a million sub- 
scribers and nearly 3 million readers per issue (1). However, this circulation 
success which should have translated into advertisers wanting to "buy into" Ms. 
fell flat. At first the lack of skilled advertising personnel, Ms.' demands for 
"non-sexist" advertising copy and their refusal to run departmental material 
meant that advertisers refused to buy space in the periodical because it was not 
as supportive as the traditional women's magazines. Nor could advertisers, real- 
istically, afford to re-work their advertising campaigns just for one periodical. 
However, in the eighties as the periodical attempted to make itself both more 
accessible to a new generation of younger, less political readers and to modify 
Left History 8.1 161 
its content to attract advertisers, the advertisers continued to resist because they 
had branded the periodical as too political and hence not a good fit for their 
material. In the words of the editor of Good Housekeeping, "Ms. has remained 
a cause in the eyes of a lot of advertising people rather than being a marketing 
opportunity" (1 8 1). 
Beyond the commercial and editorial tensions, Farrell is at her best when 
describing the relationship between the readers and the magazine. Ms. took 
their relationship with readers very seriously, devoting multiple pages in each 
issue to their letters. Again, this was atypical for women's magazines which, at 
most, devoted only one page to reader commentary and many, like Vogue, had 
absolutely no editorial space for the readers' opinions. Ms. was rewarded by 
readers like this one from the mid seventies who characterized the experience 
thus: "writing to Ms. seems more like sending a message to a comrade or a love 
rather than a magazine" (1 59). For others, however, writing to Ms. was more 
about criticizing the privileged perspective given to white, middle-class femi- 
nist issues and the failure to adequately embrace diversity. Later, there was con- 
siderable tension over the magazine's refusal to address multiple oppressions, 
in particular, those of sexual orientation and race, although class was another 
persistent blind spot. Farrell contends that it is overly simplistic to dismiss Ms.' 
brand of feminism as liberal feminism preferring instead to call it "popular 
feminism" which she defines as "a shared, widely held cultural and political 
commitment to improving women's lives and to ending gender domination that 
is both articulated and represented within popular culture" (196). While that 
might have been the goal of the editors the reality of the magazine's content, its 
primary readership (who were overwhelmingly urban, afluent, white, well- 
educated women) and the composition of its editorial staff, meant that it failed 
to realize their noble goal of "sisterhood." 
Ms.'s most successful decade was the seventies, because it fit the spirit of 
the times in terms of both activism and enthusiasm about the potential of sec- 
ond wave feminism. By the eighties they were facing difficulties, as the maga- 
zine market became more segmented, as the traditional magazines desperate to 
maintain readers began to offer some feminist material, and as a host of women 
grew either complacent or disenchanted with feminism. The turn to more right 
wing political perspectives and increasing advertiser intransigence dealt the 
final death blows. The first Ms. era came to an end in December, 1989, when 
the advertisers pulled out nearly en masse after a controversial issue declaring 
"war" on those who sought to challenge women's right to abortions. 
Farrell refuses to speculate about whether the death of Ms. was inevitable 
given their badly miss-matched challenge to the corporate ethos that dominates 
women's magazine publishing and advertising in the United States. Rather, she 
prefers to highlight the challenges Ms. provided to the status quo, the space it 
162 Left History 8.1 
provided for women to engage with a commercially, readily available mass- 
market feminist product, and of the ways in which Ms. worked to publicize the 
goals of second wave feminism. Merely to proclaim its "feminism" from the 
magazine racks was, according to Farrell, a boldly revolutionary statement. 
Some might dispute that, and had Farrell provided more space for her post- 
structuralist and semiotic emphasis on the text and the images from Ms. it 
might have strengthened her case for the revolutionary nature of Ms. Equally, 
though she had access to a vast amount of unpublished correspondence, she is 
not completely convincing in her assertions that the anger some readers 
expressed regarding the lack of diversity in the periodical were primarily due 
the requisite tensions of trying to satisfy a mass audience. Nor is her defense of 
popular feminism, as opposed to liberal feminism, as consistent with her find- 
ings as she might care to admit. 
What is clear, is that caught between the juggernaut of advertisers and the 
noisy complaints of readers, MS' editors attempts to modify their message to 
make it more palatable to the advertisers was never successful, and indeed, was 
the beginning of the end of their vision of a commercial, feminist periodical. 
The first Ms. era might have gone out boldly, buoyed up by the fight to main- 
tain American women's reproductive rights but the real end came years earlier 
when Ms. compromised their editorial vision to make themselves a better buy 
for advertisers. Those caveats aside, Farrell has produced a significant book 
within the field of second wave feminism and periodical history, and it is hoped 
that it finds an audience. Those who do find this gem will be rewarded by a 
study of an icon of American mass-market feminism that is both engaging and 
provocative reading. 
Valerie J. Korinek 
University of Saskatchewan 
Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Kraflt-Ebing, Psychiatry and the 
Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 
Responding to Michel Foucault's provocative claim that homosexuality was a 
nineteenth century medical invention, historians of modem sexuality are show- 
ing an increasing interest in the history of medicine, and especially psychiatry. 
In this context, the much accomplished but little remembered psychiatrist 
Richard von Krafft-Ebing emerges as a key figure, not only in Austria and 
Germany where his influence was most immediately felt, but in Europe, Britain 
and North America as well. Krafft-Ebing was on the frontlines of a movement 
to expand the courtroom role of forensic psychiatry beyond the assessment of 


Amy Erdman Farrell — Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism

Renton, David

The Life and Politics of David Widgery

Kennedy, Neil

122 Left History 8.1 
tion whatsoever of the wage labour opportunities for First Nations men, a group 
that for the main are invisible throughout. 
On the whole, On the Edge of Empire is a powerful and cogent argument 
that illuminates the strategies used to create a white society in British Columbia 
during the colonial period. It is absolutely convincing in its portrayal of the 
region as a tenuous exercise in British imperialist expansion, often dominated 
by forms of white masculinity that ran counter to the dominant form of British 
Christian ideals. The huge amount of historical evidence amassed by Perry 
serves to demonstrate that there was a tremendous gap between imperial theo- 
ry and ideals and the experience of those who participated in the project of so- 
called empire-building. Moreover, one of the book's main strengths lies in its 
discursive analysis, clearly explaining how the entire exploitative imperialist 
project was supported by dominant ideas of the period, namely, white suprema- 
cy, Christianity, anti-miscegenation and capitalism. 
The current debate in the teaching of history in public schools has been 
dominated on the one hand by the traditionalists such as Jack Granatstein, who 
call for more teaching of the accomplishments of nation-building, and on the 
other hand, the social historians like Ken Osborne, who want a history taught 
that includes those who have been mostly silenced throughout history. Adele 
Perry's book suggests that there may be a third perspective on the matter, one 
that incorporates discursive analysis and the effects of these powerful dis- 
courses in creating and maintaining hegemony for only a very few, as the Other 
underwent social processes that resulted in all of them being gendered and 
racialized to different locations in the social hierarchies of the day. 
Paul Orlowski 
University of British Columbia 
Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (Chapel 
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 
Expanding his influential earlier work on the interchange between economic 
conditions and demographic realities in the development of southern cultures 
in the Chesapeake, Allan Kulikoff has produced an ambitious and richly 
detailed agrarian history of the mainland Anglo-American colonies. The first 
of two projected books on the American small farm economy in the period 
before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, From British Peasants to Colonial 
American Farmers examines patterns of European migration and settlement in 
America, the evolution of relationships of production, and the CO-development 
of markets and neighbourly exchange. A immense array of literature is called 
Left History 8.1 123 
upon here to recover the history of farms and families who by the middle of the 
eighteenth-century participated in, but were not dominated by, a world of goods 
and markets. The forthcoming partner volume, titled The Making of the 
American Yeoman Class, will then deal with the class identity and mentalite of 
this group, though in places the important contributions of the present book 
would have been strengthened by the inclusion here of some of that material. 
This is particularly true when overly bold claims about the self-awareness and 
expectations of these farmers repeatedly strain the demonstrated evidence. 
Kulikoff self-consciously presents Colonial American Farmers as a new mas- 
ter narrative of early American development, and like all such projects there is 
much put aside in the interest of grand synthesis. Still, he succeeds admirably 
in reasserting the centrality of farms in colonial America, and in positioning the 
farm household as the fundamental component and shared aspiration of white 
American society in his period. 
Kulikoff begins with a broad study of two centuries of English rural eco- 
nomic and social change in the period prior to English colonization of the New 
World. This chapter grounds Kulikoff's central argument that there existed a 
direct relationship between what he terms the dispossession of European peas- 
antry and persistent migration to America - although the cyclical connections 
between the two are made somewhat more explicit for eighteenth century pat- 
terns of Scots, Irish, English and German migration in a later chapter. This 
account accentuates the manner by which agrarian capitalists "stole peasant 
land" (2), reduced many farmers to tenants and wage labourers, and drove the 
reduction of the landownership rate of England's rural population from more 
than two-thirds of heads of households in 1500 to under two-fifths in the course 
of three hundred years of displacement (166). The author is particularly effec- 
tive in evolung the results of the enclosure of open fields and commons, which 
in this account disrupted both family organization and local customs, increased 
rural mobility, created episodes of social disorder, and decreased the standard 
of living of England's peasantry. To these fundamental economic and demo- 
graphic changes, and to the many distresses of the English Civil War, Kulikoff 
also attributes the erosion of patriarchal power within the English household 
and the creation of conceptions of secular contractual marriage and gendered 
public and private spheres. There is much in this chapter which is more debate- 
able than even Kulikoff's honest notes suggest. His emphasis on sixteenth cen- 
tury enclosures as the wholly non-consensual imperatives of agrarian capital- 
ism, which exacerbated class antagonism and impelled migration, is not sup- 
ported by the weight of current scholarship and at any rate is weakened by his 
own data (l  8). 
This background of rural dispossession provides the basis for the author's 
argument that virtually all European migration to the mainland American 
colonies can be attributed to a driving hunger for land and for the communal 
124 Left History 8.1 
rights and self-sufficiencies believed to come from widespread landownership. 
Kulikoff energetically describes the processes of settler recruitment, financing, 
transportation, and dispersal into the New World and argues that, despite some 
cyclical and personal differences in motivation, economic factors underlay 
every settler's decision to migrate and that "all male migrants did expect some 
kind of secure land tenure" (7 1). Farm building in the coastal plains and river 
valleys depended on the dispossession of Indians, a process repeated on the 
moving frontier as new immigrants arrived and as older regions matured and 
filled. He is particularly effective in building regional pictures of a common 
experience of population pressure, and farm size reduction as family fertility 
grew, sending younger children to the west in search of cheap land and avail- 
able credit. But despite the tendencies of recent scholarship, in Kulikoff's 
account, Indians and slaves had remarkably little to contribute to colonial agri- 
cultural developments. Beyond assertions about the strength of the patriarchal 
household, there is little here on how labour relations that could encompass the 
ownership of humans as property, and the incorporation of children and 
orphans as bound labourers, may have complicated colonial farmers' under- 
standing of the independency believed to reside in property. 
Kulikoff's master narrative is particularly welcome for its emphasis on 
gender relations and household organization. He draws on what is now a large 
body of work on a multitude of topics in colonial family history to describe 
common colonial patterns of young marriages of companionate form, large 
families, and farm labour organized around notions of the patriarchal house- 
hold, even when those households often included servants or slaves. Here 
quaint notions of farmer self-sufficiency are dismissed by Kulikoff's rich evi- 
dence of the neighbourly exchange networks which sustained the farm econo- 
my and which prevented the majority of small farmers from being engulfed by 
either local grandees or international markets. In the absence of a sustained 
comparison with European developments many readers will wonder, though, 
how unique to the small farmer class really was the evolution in household rela- 
tions he describes. One wants to hear more about the craft persons and mer- 
chants - especially the rural shopkeepers - and to hear the stories of those who 
turned from the farmer's toil toward the urban centres. To what degree were 
American developments related to early modern experiences of consumerism, 
secularism, political change, and urban growth shared across the Atlantic 
world? What effect did pervasive cultural and kinship contacts between old and 
new worlds have in shaping his farmers' world views and aspirations? Kulikoff 
repeatedly asserts that "only landownership could bring" economic security, yet 
his discussion of divorce rates indicates women from the merchant, trade and 
artisanal classes were far more likely than farm women to imagine the possi- 
bility of alternative lives (236). In light of American patterns of rural mobility, 
population density, and ecological challenge, one wonders whether small 
Left History 8.1 125 
farmer's participation in commerce may have became more of a measure of 
their own success than Kulikoff suggests. 
In building his narrative, Kulikoff deploys the expected interlocutors from 
Hector St. John Crevkcoeur, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, though 
on the matter of the easy acquisition of land by peasant immigrants each seems 
a somewhat conflicted witness. They are used in support a dominant vision of 
an agrarian republic, but there is little sense here of the manner in which gen- 
try agrarian discourse in the second half of the eighteenth century may have 
served a hegemonic function, disguising the fault lines created by possessive 
individualism and the halting achievements of yeoman popular democracy (and 
despite the author's own cautions regarding the earlier English agricultural 
improvement literature as well as the fictions of the colonial promotional liter- 
ature). Nonetheless, the reader is presented with a rewarding variety of voices 
judiciously culled from Kulikoff's deep reading of the literature on small farm- 
ers, bringing impressive detail to his account, and supporting his assertion that 
for a majority of white settlers "land meant everything" (74). By the time of the 
upheavals of the 1770s, landownership rates in vast areas of the thirteen 
colonies approached or exceeded two-thirds of heads of households, far sur- 
passing European levels, and forming the basis of a democratic citizenry and 
sustaining the small farmer economy. 
The book concludes with a novel reconsideration of the American 
Revolution as a farmer's war, an account which foregrounds the pervasive expe- 
rience of violence and the near catastrophic failure of the farm economy during 
the war. The collapse of markets and massive loss of labour are vividly told, but 
there is nothing here on the yeomanry's relationship to longstanding political 
and economic grievances, and his reckoning of the decisions farmers made 
about participating in the war is unconvincingly tied only to loyalty to local gen- 
try. This limited account of the Revolutionary years likely will not satisfy many 
readers, and Kulikoff moves far too swiftly from the communal and patriarchal 
attributes of his yeoman popular democracy to the latter's "defeat" in the politi- 
cal dispensations following the war (289-292). Like his smallholder subjects, the 
author's vision of American exceptionalism is fixed on the compelling house- 
hold near-independence believed to reside in landholding, and in the possibili- 
ties inherent in westward migration. Land acquisitions and speculation follow- 
ing the Revolution renewed the cycle of Indian dispossession, settlement, and 
farm building by families who rejected (or were rejected by) the increasingly 
commercial and manufacturing imperatives of the old settled regions. On the 
frontier the small-farmer class preserved through the nineteenth century an 
older agrarian culture based on "energetic labor by the entire family, subsistence 
production, neighborly exchange, sale of surpluses, and movement to new 
lands." Here families created an "empire of freeholders" that moved ever west- 
ward, turning "potential wage laborers into independent farmers" (292). 
126 Left History 8.1 
It is a great pity that the extraordinary richness of the text was not accom- 
panied by more suitable maps and tables, as the four included maps are not 
tremendously valuable and the great quantity of data presented in the text is 
somewhat harder to digest than should have been the case. The changing rates 
of landownership and farm size described here lend themselves to graphic 
presentation, and in this form might well have invited comparison with Euro- 
American experiences beyond Kulikoff's disappointing exclusion of all but the 
canonical thirteen mainland colonies. As a master narrative, ColonialAmerican 
Farmers succeeds in elegantly synthesizing a massive body of literature, prob- 
ing the relationships between economy, demography and society, and in vigor- 
ously shaping and inspiring debate on the formation of American society for 
years to come. 
Neil Kennedy 
University of Western Ontario 
Daniel A. Coleman. The Anarchist: A Novel (Chapel Hill, NC: Willowbrook 
Press, 2001). 
The assassination of Pres. William McKinley in September 1901 seriously 
shook the bubble of comfort and optimism that had developed within the 
American middle class. The depression of the 1890s was well behind them; 
increasing wealth was apparent in the cities and on the farms. The U.S. had won 
its "splendid little war" against Spain in 1898, and found itself a newly impe- 
rial power, stretching across the Pacific and the Caribbean. 
Two things at the turn-of-the-century epitomized this confidence. The first 
was McKinley's reelection in 1900. He seemed to represent the new, expand- 
ing, industrial and commercial America, unified and stable; while his oppo- 
nent, as in 1896, was William Jennings Bryan, echoing the pre-industrial past 
and a discordant society. McKinley and his Republican Party were definitely in 
control. 
Second, nothing seemed to better express America's new-found leadership 
in commerce, science, and world affairs than the place where McKinley was 
shot - the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, an ebullient exhibit of indus- 
trial development and American wealth, and the greatest display of the power 
of electricity anyone had ever seen. 
There was, of course, a darker side, which middle class America tried to 
ignore but which tended to intrude at regular intervals. Wealth in the new 
America was hardly general: the new urban working class, largely immigrant, 
was consistently exploited and many led lives of true desperation. That, in turn, 


Allan Kulikoff — From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers

Cohen, Bruce

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 
Left History 8.1 157 
River mills remained formally unorganized" she also argues that "they contin- 
ued to support labor protest and ten-hour reform" (97). 
The author finds that the call for the ten-hour movement was revived after 
the Civil War. As New Bedford developed as a textile community, it joined with 
Fall River as key strike sites in the struggle. Eventually labour reformers were 
able to push a flawed ten-hour act through the Massachusetts legislature in 
1874. This act was strengthened in 1879. While the ten-hour act applied to 
women and children, nearly half of the rapidly growing Fall River workers were 
men. While the city's industrial elite was weakened by depression and scandal, 
the English immigrant workers, led by women weavers, struck twice in 1875 
over wage cuts. They were successful in their fight. Another move in 1875 was 
a vacation strike to prevent wage cuts but this led to reprisals against the strik- 
ers and a split in labour's ranks between the mule spinners and the weavers. 
Blewett finds that other strikes in the 1870's (Lonsdale, R.I. 1876 and New 
Bedford 1877) were not successful, although she points out that "the decisions 
to strike in both Lonsdale and New Bedford reflected the defiant code of the 
English weavers to resist wage cuts" (245). The 1879 strike in Fall River over 
wage cuts was not followed by electoral success for the Democrats. Although 
attempts to establish an amalgamated textile union by weaver George Gunton 
were not successful, political gains were made by a fellow Lancashire immi- 
grant, Robert Howard in 1880. As Blewett argues, "New England labor politics 
also involved crucial ideological, strategic, and deeply personal political strug- 
gles over the alternatives of amalgamation or trade unions" (291). In contrast 
to Gunton's focus on amalgamation, the author shows that mule spinner Robert 
Howard was a leader dedicated to trade unionism and labour politics. Howard 
was more politically successful, and he organized the mule spinners at the 
expense of the weavers. 
By 1884 two distinct strikes revealed not only splits between weavers and 
mule spinners, but also the hardening of the Fall River system of "protecting 
market dominance with a retaliatory wage cut and massive production" (299). 
The failure of the strikes contributed to the mule spinners joining the AFL in 
1889 at the expense of the other workers. The weavers struck again in 1889 but 
were defeated as were the New Bedford weavers in 1894 when they struck 
against a paycut. The weavers' "vacation" walk out in 1894 after a wage cut 
caused divisions within the Fall River textile elite. According to Blewett 
"[Matt] Borden was trying to fix regional wages and the cloth prices ... ful- 
filling Fall River's market dominance" (384) 
While the industrialists continue to follow the Fall River model, there 
would be a dramatic strike in New Bedford in 1898 over a region-wide wage 
cut for weavers. After the state legislature called a hearing on the regional wage 
cut and the fining system, New Bedford became the site for a tussle over labour 
158 Left History 8.1 
politics as well according to Blewett. Although other textile centers varied in 
their response to the wage cut, Fall River strikers split over staying out (mule 
spinners v. ring spinners) and in New Bedford the weavers stayed out while the 
mule spinners went back. 
According to the author, not only did the strike of 1898 bring changes in 
union developments but it also led to the manufacturers being elevated to a 
trade association. In addition women's status continued to decline in the textile 
industry; skilled weavers often left and were replaced by immigrants from 
Quebec and southeastern Europe. A battle among manufacturers over wage 
cuts pushed the Fall River operatives close to a strike in 1902, but splits among 
the workforce prevented a walk out. Certainly the trade unionism of Robert 
Howard and the consolidations of Matt Borden were creating a fin-de-sitcle 
legeacy. 
Blewett concludes that trade unionism and (industrial) combinations had 
become the dominant expression of industrial politics" (386). However she 
points out that by the 1920's over production was no longer an important fac- 
tor in New England as textile production continued to decline and shift south- 
ward. In addition English immigrants and women weavers were no longer key 
players in the region's textile industry. 
In evaluating Constant Turmoil this reviewer has stuck close to Blewett's 
story of the shaping of an industrial order in southeastern New England in the 
nineteenth century. While the author smoothly intertwines her social analysis 
of this order in the body of the text, one wonders whether she is attempting to 
cover too much: 1) social, political, labour, and business history, 2) gender 
analysis, manhood, and masculinity 3) ethnic and immigration history, labour 
politics, and corporate political culture. She defends her approach in the book's 
prologue: "The structure of my book offers the reader a mix of narrative and 
analysis based on empirical evidence and discourse analysis" (15). To this read- 
er the strength of Constant Turmoil is its fascinating narrative of an emerging 
industrial order. This narrative is helped by the judicious use of photographs 
and primary sources as well as extensive use of appendices, which include such 
topics as comparing nativity, employment and population patterns in the cotton 
cities of Fall River, Lowell, and Lawrence. Mary Blewett has written the defin- 
itive book on the emergence, development, and finalization of the industrial 
order in southeastern New England in the nineteenth century. 
Bruce Cohen 
Worcester State College 


Mary H. Blewett — Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England

Elvins, Sarah

Left History 8.1 165 
David Blanke, Sowing the American Dream: How Consumer Culture Took Root 
in the Rural Midwest (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000). 
The burgeoning literature on the history of consumption in America has for the 
most part concentrated on the experiences of city dwellers. In the city, many have 
argued, the new professional middle class resided, with their taste for mass-pro- 
duced goods and mass-market magazines. In the city, new forms of media and 
new institutions like the advertising agency and department store were located. 
In the city, the culture of consumption first found its fullest expression and soon 
radiated out to encompass the rest of the nation. For example, Richard Wightman 
Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears noted in the introduction to their influential 1983 col- 
lection of essays on the topic, the study of consumer culture "should begin by 
concentrating on the activities of urban elites."l David Blanke's Sowing the 
American Dream: How Consumer Culture Took Root in the Rural Midwest con- 
vincingly challenges this assumption by examining the participation of 
Midwestern commercial farmers in the consumer marketplace from 1865 to 
1930. He argues that farmers fully participated in the evolving modem consumer 
culture, and articulated a collective consumer ethos based on their own experi- 
ences as both producers for the marketplace and purchasers of consumer wares. 
Blanke traces the ideological development of the Grange movement, noting 
the inherent tensions in a movement which posited collective solutions to the 
problems of independent agrarian capitalists. Farmers were informed consumers: 
agricultural journals and fairs ensured that rural customers were aware of the lat- 
est developments in farm machinery or domestic items. The problem, as many 
rural Midwesterners identified it, was that the existing distribution system was 
not responsive to their needs. The Grange hoped to tip the balance of power back 
into the rural customer's favour through the use of strategies like cooperative 
stores and collective purchasing. At first, this fusion of "market and moral 
economies, of individual savings and communal ethics," attracted thousands of 
farmers to the organization (1 17). Ultimately, however, the organization was 
unable to overcome both internal divisions and strong opposition from town mer- 
chants. Blanke's depiction of this story is tinged with a sense of loss. For one brief 
moment, rural consumers managed to take an active role in shaping their partic- 
ipation in the market. Eventually, but not inevitably, he argues, rural consumers 
lost their sense of collective purpose and succumbed to the lure of individualis- 
tic materialism. 
Sowing the American Dream will be of interest to scholars in a diverse group 
of fields. Business historians will find his nuanced analysis of the changing role 
of middlemen in rural distribution illuminative; scholars of rural history will 
appreciate his careful use of the voices of farmers themselves, found in the cor- 
respondence and diaries of farm men and women. Perhaps of particular interest 
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 


David Blanke — Sowing the American Dream: How Consumer Culture Took Root in the Rural Midwest

Camfield, David

Left History 8.1 173 
C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America S Labor Leaders, 
Introduction by Nelson Lichtenstein (Urbana and Chicago: University of 
Illinois Press, 200 1). 
In recent years, sections of the US intelligentsia have taken more interest in the 
union movement than has been the case for quite some time. Under the leader- 
ship of the "New Voice" slate elected in 1995, the AFL-C10 has charted a 
course that seeks to expand the ranks of the unions through aggressive organ- 
izing while trying to convince US business to take the "high r o a d  and boost 
competitiveness through cooperation with labour. Distancing itself from long- 
held Cold War international policies, the AFL-C10 has also reached out to uni- 
versity students and faculty in search of allies and committed young staffers. 
The "blue-green" alliance of unions and environmentalists in the global justice 
movement so prominent after the Seattle protests of 1999 further increased sup- 
port for labour in progressive circles. While there has been no change in the 
Canadian Labour Congress analogous to that in the AFL-CIO, union involve- 
ment in global justice protests has had some similar effects in Canada. Thus a 
new paperback edition of the classic 1948 study The New Men of Power by the 
radical sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916- 1962) with an introduction by promi- 
nent US labour historian Nelson Lichtenstein must have seemed a smart pub- 
lishing move, especially before the change in political climate after 11 
September, 2001. 
The New Men ofpower was researched and written in an historical moment 
whose vantage point may be hard for some contemporary readers to grasp. US 
unions had grown enormously after finally succeeding in organizing large 
numbers of less-skilled workers in mass production industries and elsewhere. 
The forward march of the unions had not yet been decisively shown to be con- 
tained by bureaucratic conservatism and Cold War politics. The launch of a 
labour party did not appear outlandish. A major economic crisis seemed possi- 
ble; the long post-war expansion was still ahead. Mills, then working at the 
Bureau of Applied Social Research attached to Columbia University, also 
moved in the world of New York's anti-Stalinist left. Here he was influenced by 
the "Third Camp" socialists whose best-known figure was Max Shachtman. At 
this time, Mills had not yet distanced himself from working-class socialist pol- 
itics. 
The subject of The New Men of Power is the US union officialdom. Unlike 
the subsequent generation of work in US labour sociology, Mills was not inter- 
ested in conducting research to help make industrial relations more harmo- 
nious. Rather, Mills set out to study top union leaders because of their key 
political role: "What the US does, or fails to do, may be the key to what will 
happen in the world. What the labor leader does, or fails to do, may be the key 
174 Left History 8.1 
to what will happen in the US" (3). Mills argues that the "the main drift" of US 
society is towards a political economy characterized by labour-management 
cooperation under the regulation of an increasingly undemocratic state prepar- 
ing for war and integrating unions and other organizations into its apparatus. 
When the next slump hits, the politically-passive majority of the population 
will become active and look to the competing ideological currents that Mills 
dubs "political publics" and discusses in the book's first chapter. "Who will 
catch the people when the system fails them?" (28) is the burning question. 
Mills fears that those he calls the "sophisticated conservatives" are best pre- 
pared to triumph in the coming crisis, and that they will accelerate the "main 
dnft," using the union officialdom to control workers at home while waging 
war abroad. Union leaders are strategically important because the unions are 
the only organizations which could bring about an alternative progressive and 
democratic resolution to the crisis. 
This perspective is presented in the book's early pages and concluding 
chapters. In between, the bulk of The New Men of Power describes and analy- 
ses US union leaders, drawing on empirical social research, including three sets 
of questionnaires mailed to over one thousand AFL and C10 leaders in 1946. 
These chapters outline the basic shape of the two labour federations of the day, 
focussing on their leaders, whose social origins and views on various issues are 
examined. From this research emerges a picture of "responsible" leaders going 
along with the "main drift" and guided more by expediency than with the lib- 
eral politics they most often espouse. Doubting the ability of such a group to 
rise to the demands of the coming crisis, Mills concludes that "union-made 
intellectuals" offer "the only guarantee of the union of power and ideas" (287) 
that he deems necessary. 
As Lichtenstein's useful introduction suggests, Mills's account of US eco- 
nomics and politics has obvious weaknesses. These do not, however, deprive 
the book of relevance to contemporary readers. Unlike most academic social 
science today, radical or not, The New Men of Power is written in a clear, engag- 
ing style and does not hesitate to deal directly with political dilemmas and pro- 
pose strategy. Its insights about the union officialdom, while less innovative 
now than when they originally appeared, have lost none of their force. Mills's 
observations about radical activists evolving into conservative officials and his 
description of the officialdom as standing between employers and workers and 
"operating as a shock absorber for both" (224) have been repeatedly confirmed 
during the rank and file upsurge in the US and Canada between the mid- 1960s 
and the mid- 1970s and the subsequent quarter-century offensive by employers 
and state power against labour. 
That said, Mills's Weberian account of the union officialdom as one of sev- 
eral formal bureaucratic hierarchies of modem society is theoretically inade- 
Left History 8.1 175 
quate. It does not provide an adequate explanation of how union officials come 
to exist within class relations as a social layer with distinct interests. Nor does 
it capture how bureaucracy in the worlung-class movement involves the rela- 
tions between members and officials. This is not unrelated to the book's weak- 
ness in terms of working-class history, especially in light of its enormous 
advances first sparked by New Left scholarship. The New Men of Power only 
mention African-Americans and women in passing in a handful of places, with 
no sense of the significance of racism and sexism for class formation and pol- 
itics in the US. Mills's suggestion of the importance of worker intellectuals is 
correct. Unfortunately, it is plain that the heirs of the leaders he studied in the 
mid- 1940s have not helped develop the kind of worker intellectuals needed to 
deal with the crisis wrought by decades of bureaucratic business unionism, and 
this book provides no clues about how they can be fostered. 
David Camfield 
York University 
Robert Seguin, Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in 
American Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 200 1). 
Robert Seguin, in common with many visitors to the United States, is both 
fascinated and disturbed by the absence of any substantial discourse on class 
conflict. For a country that has experienced such violent labour struggles and 
visibly exhibits so much disparity in wealth and opportunity this absence has 
proved to be a constant puzzle. Seguin, in Around Quitting Time, examines 
the role and concept of the middle class in perpetuating and explaining this 
lack of class discourse. In the United States almost anybody from an assem- 
bly line worker to a wealthy stockbroker can make a legitimate claim to be 
middle class. Seguin identifies this ubiquity of middle classnessness as iron- 
ically and inextricably entwined within the American belief in a classless 
society. The novels under study here, by Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, 
Nathanael West, John Barth and Ernest Hemmingway, in various ways 
dramatise and engage with the development of what he terms a "middle class 
imaginary" from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. 
This middle class imaginary is produced between the real material con- 
ditions of life and the realm of ideas and cultural discourse. This space is sig- 
nificant in that it creates a particular identity - the middle class - which 
appears to have a real anchor in the material conditions, but which is in fact 
ideologically driven and only a partial reflection of real conditions: 


C. Wright Mills — The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders

Burley, David G.

Charles Tilly — Durable Inequality

Orlowski, Paul

Left History 8.1 1 19 
mystique of pirates - the reason why their theatre is so attractive - is not their 
show of macho masculinity. On the contrary, it is the subversive femininity in 
their masculinity. That makes a blurred genre of living, an attractive model 
because that is what living actually is. It is the "reality" of rhetorical certainty 
that is so unreal. The good in evil; the evil in good: the centre in the margins; 
the margins in the centre. Piracy is a parable on the edginess of living. 
This is what I hear in Turley's wonderful chapter on Daniel Defoe's novel 
Captain Singleton, anyway. Quite rightly Turley brings this chapter into Rum, 
Sodomy and the Lash from elsewhere in his writings. Turley's gentle, wistful 
style lingers on the sweetness of a life-long relationship that Defoe presents 
between Captain Singleton and Quaker William. These two dissenters - 
Singleton dissenting to the power of the state, William dissenting to establish- 
ment belief and values - marry their edginess. The love of men for one anoth- 
er is truly subversive. Defoe, Turley writes, "challenges the standards by which 
individuality must be integrated with and defined by social norms."(127) 
That's piracy for you! 
Greg Dening 
Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, 
Australian National University 
Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender; Race, and the Making of British 
Columbia, 1849-1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 
Adele Perry's On the Edge of Empire offers a very unique study of the history 
of colonial British Columbia. By carefully combining feminist theory with 
post-structuralism, post-colonial research an4 to a lesser extent, Marxist theo- 
ry, Perry adeptly weaves a powerful argument that the region Jean Barman calls 
"the West beyond the West" was a colonial project at once powerfUl and vul- 
nerable, asserting whiteness as the dominant norm despite the resistance to 
Victorian ideals by working-class white men, many working-class white 
women, and, of course, the numerous First Nations peoples of the region. 
Perry's analysis uses gender as the central category to demonstrate the signifi- 
cant gap between imperialist theory and actual imperialist experience, particu- 
larly emphasizing "the importance of race to the social experience of gender in 
nineteenth-century British Columbia" (8). 
Perry's study locates her within several schools of research. First of all, by 
placing gender as the central organizing principle describing the colonial expe- 
rience, Perry is positioned within feminist postcolonial scholars such as AM 
Laura Stoler, Robert J. C. Young, and Anne McClintock, all of whom she refers 
120 Left History 8.1 
to in the book. At the same time, Perry puts much effort into demonstrating the 
need to interrogate "whiteness as a race," thereby placing herself within the 
recent spate of historians concerned with challenging "the assumption that 
whiteness is normal," such as David Roediger and Grace Hale. In The Wages of 
Whiteness, Roediger contends that, for the most part, "attempts to apply post- 
structuralism to history have foundered" (1 S), yet Perry's discursive analysis 
demonstrates the "historically constructive character of social relations" in 
colonial B.C. (4). As well, Perry's work contributes significantly to the work of 
historians of British Columbia, of course, including Jean Barman, Patricia Roy, 
and Tina Loo. 
There are numerous strengths to Perry's study, too many to list here. Of 
major significance are the valuable insights gained from her meticulous 
research into the shifting and unsettled nature of all of the imperial categories 
for the peoples of the colony. The critical forms of resistance to Victorian ideals 
occured mainly on two fronts: the backwoods white male homosocial culture 
and the mixed-race couples of white males and Aboriginal women, both the 
result of the under-representation of white women, common to resource-based 
colonial economies. Perry provides excellent historical evidence demonstrating 
the resistance to the anti-miscegenation discourse that was in its heyday during 
this period throughout the British empire. Moreover, the positioning of middle- 
class Christian settlers to act as moral reformers to white working-class men 
and Aboriginal people is clearly seen to be a social construction of a historical 
moment designed to outline the distinctions of nineteenth-century bourgeois 
identity. The failure of the reformers to significantly alter these social arrange- 
ments, as well as the failure to attract British settler families to the region 
resulted in four recruitment campaigns of British women during the colonial 
period. This strategy was somewhat successful in creating white settler families 
more in keeping with Victorian ideals, as many of the working-class female 
recruits became the wives of labouring men and the domestic servants of white 
middle-class families. As Perry points out, however, concern arose because 
"[alssisted white female migration . . . delivered the disturbing presence of 
worlung-class female independence7' in a variety of ways (192). Perry high- 
lights these acts of resistance and examples of domestic violence in all-white 
couples to deliver one of the most profound insights of her research, namely, 
that there was a "sharp disjuncture between colonial discourse and colonial 
practice on this edge of empire" (167). 
There are several passages in On the Edge of Empire that yield valuable 
insights at the same time that they contain historical inaccuracy or loosely 
defined theoretical terms. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and 
Race, Robert J. C. Young describes the attitudes of nineteenth-century scholars 
toward the white working classes, equating them with savages (Young, 56, 59). 
In a similar fashion, Perry makes it clear that a similar analogy was at work in 
Left History 8.1 121 
the colony of British Columbia, as some Christian reformers considered white 
gold miners "an appropriate object of civilizing efforts akin to those directed 
against First Nations people" (95). The implications of this are hugely signifi- 
cant, as "settler men's claim to membership on the white side of the imperial 
divide was far from secure" and yet Perry fails to invoke what Roediger calls 
the "wages of whiteness" to explain why the backwoods white men strove to be 
considered white rather than as working class with their non-white labouring 
colleagues. This omission suggests a binary racial divide that runs through the 
entire book but did not run through colonial British Columbia. Indeed, Perry 
addresses the omission of Chinese labourers in her study because she intended 
"merely to probe the fault line that cut most strongly through British 
Columbia" at the time (9). Yet by the time British Columbia joined 
Confederation in 187 1, there was one Chinese male for every five white peo- 
ple, and the "yellow hordes" discourse was becoming part of mainstream 
thought. 
Although Perry never defines what she means by the term "discourse," it 
is clear that she utilizes it in the Foucauldian sense of the word, connecting 
desire and power to language itself by focusing on not only what can be said, 
but who is allowed to say it. Perry persuasively demonstrates the strength of the 
discourse of imperialism that allowed five hundred or so white settlers even to 
believe that they had the right to exert power over the original inhabitants of the 
land through this inclusionary/exclusionary system of rules, as Vancouver 
Island became a British colony in 1849. Perry makes it clear how the imperial 
discourse, buttressed by powerful sub-discourses such as white supremacy, 
Christianity and capitalism, enabled whiteness, or more specifically, 
Britishness to be the norm in B.C., a region in which First Nations people still 
made up 71 percent of the population at the end of the colonial period despite 
massive losses from smallpox epidemics in the 1860s. In fact, Perry's work 
asks the question, "Which is most influential on the other: ideas or reality?" 
Perry clearly demonstrates that the process is both simultaneous and bidirec- 
tional. 
The strengths of On the Edge of Empire greatly outweigh the few flaws. 
For the sake of being critical, I found Perry's rendering of First Nations resist- 
ance to be lacking throughout much of the work, their portrayal emphasizing 
passivity rather than agency. For instance, the mixed-race couples in colonial 
B.C. had much to do with building alliances, sometimes between Hudson's Bay 
Company officers and the daughters of Aboriginal chiefs, a strategy that is not 
considered at all in the book. Moreover, although Perry claims to be informed 
by certain aspects of Marxism (4), her contention that "class relations are cen- 
tral to social relations" in the imperial context receives little attention, espe- 
cially considering this period as being the beginning of the contentious nature 
of employerlemployee relations in British Columbia. Further, there is no men- 
122 Left History 8.1 
tion whatsoever of the wage labour opportunities for First Nations men, a group 
that for the main are invisible throughout. 
On the whole, On the Edge of Empire is a powerful and cogent argument 
that illuminates the strategies used to create a white society in British Columbia 
during the colonial period. It is absolutely convincing in its portrayal of the 
region as a tenuous exercise in British imperialist expansion, often dominated 
by forms of white masculinity that ran counter to the dominant form of British 
Christian ideals. The huge amount of historical evidence amassed by Perry 
serves to demonstrate that there was a tremendous gap between imperial theo- 
ry and ideals and the experience of those who participated in the project of so- 
called empire-building. Moreover, one of the book's main strengths lies in its 
discursive analysis, clearly explaining how the entire exploitative imperialist 
project was supported by dominant ideas of the period, namely, white suprema- 
cy, Christianity, anti-miscegenation and capitalism. 
The current debate in the teaching of history in public schools has been 
dominated on the one hand by the traditionalists such as Jack Granatstein, who 
call for more teaching of the accomplishments of nation-building, and on the 
other hand, the social historians like Ken Osborne, who want a history taught 
that includes those who have been mostly silenced throughout history. Adele 
Perry's book suggests that there may be a third perspective on the matter, one 
that incorporates discursive analysis and the effects of these powerful dis- 
courses in creating and maintaining hegemony for only a very few, as the Other 
underwent social processes that resulted in all of them being gendered and 
racialized to different locations in the social hierarchies of the day. 
Paul Orlowski 
University of British Columbia 
Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (Chapel 
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 
Expanding his influential earlier work on the interchange between economic 
conditions and demographic realities in the development of southern cultures 
in the Chesapeake, Allan Kulikoff has produced an ambitious and richly 
detailed agrarian history of the mainland Anglo-American colonies. The first 
of two projected books on the American small farm economy in the period 
before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, From British Peasants to Colonial 
American Farmers examines patterns of European migration and settlement in 
America, the evolution of relationships of production, and the CO-development 
of markets and neighbourly exchange. A immense array of literature is called 


Adele Perry — On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871

Thurston, Michael

138 Left History 8.1 
rative. In sum, this is a solid contribution to the political history of the French 
labour movement, one which readers both familiar with and new to the sub- 
ject will find engaging. 
Sean Kennedy 
University of New Brunswick 
1 Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934- 
1938 (Cambridge, 1988), 85, 95-96. 
2 For a succinct argument to this effect, see William D. Irvine, "Domestic 
Politics and the Fall of France in 1940," in Joel Blatt, ed., The French Defeat 
of 1940: Reassessments (Providence, 1998), 85-99; for an account highlight- 
ing an ambivalent public mood of solemnity coupled with determination, see 
Robert J. Young, France and the Origins of the Second World War (New York, 
1996), 113-129. 
Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American 
Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 
I imagine I am not alone in having grown up with the definitions of anar- 
chy memorably advanced by Johnny Rotten (aka John Lydon) and the Sex 
Pistols in their trenchant cultural analysis of 1977, "Anarchy in the U.K." 
Between repetitions of the chorus ("I wanna be anarchy"), RottenILydon 
snarls two phrases that encapsulate a common understanding of anarchy: 
"Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it," and "I give a wrong 
time, stop a traffic line." We might nominate these the personal and polit- 
ical faces of contemporary commonsense anarchy. While the former artic- 
ulates a drive toward untrammeled self-gratification, the latter implies a 
repertoire of strategies for interrupting business as usual and preventing 
the hostile corporate takeover of the lifeworld (the line continues "your 
future dream is a shopping scheme"). The lines certainly capture an anar- 
chy richer than is often imagined in more academic accounts. They pre- 
serve an understanding of anarchy as tricksterish, libidinal, humorous and 
creative as well as angry and potentially destructive. 
One of the most useful and impressive things about Allan Antliff's 
fine study of anarchism in American politics, culture, and art between 
1908 and 1920 is the success with which it conveys precisely the multiple 
and creative aspects of anarchism condensed and recirculated by Johnny 
Rotten. By this, I do not mean simply to say that Antliff recovers the 
Left History 8.1 139 
numerous subdivisions of early twentieth-century anarchism, though he 
does helpfully describe these sometimes confusing and often overlapping 
categories: anarchist mutualism, anarchist collectivism, anarchist commu- 
nism, anarchist syndicalism, anarchist individualism, parliamentary 
socialism, Bolshevism. Much more importantly, Antliff's readings of the 
lives and works of such anarchists as Robert Henri, Emma Goldman, Max 
Weber, Man Ray, Adolf Wolff, Car1 Zigrosser, Robert Minor, Rockwell 
Kent, Bayard Boyesen, and Ananda Coomaraswamy show the striking vari- 
ety of ways in which anarchist principles were manifested in poems, 
essays, plays, paintings, sculptures, readymades, and those unclassifiable 
artworks, individual human lives. Most of the cases Antliff examines in 
detail trace the connections between the personal and political faces of 
anarchism. More than this, the discussions deftly move from biography 
and history to formal analyses so as to illuminate each with the other. 
Antliff sets out not only to locate anarchism at the center of American 
modernism, but also, by so doing, to correct three powerful myths that 
continue to dominate scholarly study of the period: American modernism 
is defined by degrees of stylistic abstraction; American modernism "was 
an exercise in formalist innovation" (2); and American modernism was 
"apolitical." To this end, he defines anarchism rather broadly, arguing that 
"an artist's anarchism could unfold entirely in an artistic context, as a 
mode of personal liberation" (1). Admitting the various forms anarchism 
might take, the many ways in which its personal, political, and aesthetic 
commitments might be balanced, Antliff posits as a unifying core Emma 
Goldman's famous distillation of the movement's aims: the creation of "a 
society where 'individual desires, tastes, and inclinations' could flourish" 
(1). The capaciousness and flexibility allowed by this minimal definition 
of anarchism at once enables some of Antliff's most compelling analyses 
and threatens to stretch the concept of anarchism beyond analytic utility. 
Antliff's standards for calling an artist "anarchist" often resemble those 
used by the United States government in the late 1910s. Anyone who spent 
much time in the company of anarchists, anyone who read books by anar- 
chists, anyone who attended a lecture given by an anarchist, anyone who 
did much more than shake hands with an anarchist qualifies as an anar- 
chist. While the book ultimately succeeds in locating anarchism as a force 
for coherence in American modernism, that success is bought with this 
occasional oversimplification and excessive expansion of "anarchism." 
This problem is especially apparent in the book's early chapters. While 
those chapters provide important information about anarchist organiza- 
tions, especially the Ferrer Center in New York, and while they recover 
personalities and political writings most modernist scholars might other- 
wise never know about, they also show Antliff making occasionally tenu- 
140 Left History 8.1 
ous connections between modernism and anarchism. Discussing Robert 
Henri's 1908 Macbeth exhibit, for example, Antliff first dubs the show 
"anarchist" because its critics did (17), a weak justification at best. He 
goes on to describe the event's importance, calling it "an attempt to estab- 
lish a countercommunity in the arts whose defining features - individual- 
ism, freedom of expression, contemporary subject matter, and egalitarian- 
ism in art schools and exhibition spaces - owed much to the anarchist 
movement" (17). It is difficult to see how this set of aims is distinctly anar- 
chist. Indeed, none of these objectives would much bother most liberals, 
neoliberals, or constitutional monarchists. Antliff next adduces the fact 
that Henri gave to his friend John Sloan a copy of Mikhail Bakhunin's God 
and the State, which includes Bakhunin's claim of the anarchist label. He 
amplifies this evidence with Henri's study of writings by Wilde and 
Tolstoy, whom Antliff calls anarchists though one wonders whether either 
thought of himself in those terms. 
On the anarchy thus proven, Antliff then hangs an analysis of the aes- 
thetic Henri promulgated: "[Tlhe art Henri encouraged was engaged, inno- 
vative, and modern by virtue of its grounding in the individuality of the 
artist. This discourse elevated artistic individualism as the guarantor of 
originality, authenticity of expression, and a relationship to contemporary 
life - in a word, the hallmarks of Henri's modernism were anarchist" (22). 
This argument verges on the tautological. Henri's anarchism depends on 
his aesthetic commitment to modern subject matter and artistic individual- 
ism. Those modernist aesthetic commitments are anarchist. But the anar- 
chism of modern subject matter and artistic individualism depends on their 
institutionalization by Henri, an anarchist. 
Happily, later chapters draw their connections with greater care and 
stronger evidence. Moreover, the later discussions explicitly treat the con- 
tradictions in some anarchist thought and the complex arguments conduct- 
ed between exponents of various anarchisms. Antliff most admirably (and 
usefully) performs the latter service in his chapter on "Anarchist 
Unanimism." Growing out of the poetry of Jules Romains and imported to 
the U.S. by Randolph Bourne, Walter Pach, Albert Gleizes, and others, 
unanimism "argued that new forms of collective consciousness generated 
by the urban industrial environment were a progressive force that would 
bring about peace between nations and the coming socialist order" (167). 
On American shores, unanimism propagated competing strains. Car1 
Zigrosser, Antliff writes, "inscribed unanimist collectivism with the values 
of anarchism: spontaneity, self-government, and the affirmation of indi- 
vidual freedom" (172). Pach, on the other hand, explained in his writings 
on cubism and enacted in his own canvases a collectivist version of unan- 
imism quite at odds with Zigrosser's individualist type (176-77). And 
Left History 8.1 141 
Gleizes argued explicitly that anarchism undermined unanimism (180). 
This argument works out in miniature the broader arguments about collec- 
tivism and individualism and the relation of artistic styles to each within 
modernism's vast variety. In so doing, it provides a model for understand- 
ing the political valences of aesthetic styles and schools, from cubism to 
futurism to vorticism and dadaism, without unnecessarily arguing that any 
of these is somehow "anarchist." 
Antliff's strongest chapters recover and examine little known artists 
and writers Ananda Coomaraswamy and Rockwell Kent. In each case, 
Antliff provides strong evidence for the artist's anarchist inclinations. In 
his chapter on Kent, for example, Antliff can point not only to Kent's 
friendships with New York anarchists like Boyesen and Zigrosser, and not 
only to books Kent once owned or might have read, but to Kent's own writ- 
ings about Nietzsche and anarchism, about art and anarchism. He traces 
Kent's membership in groups with a philosophical foundation in anarchism 
and Kent's activism while a teacher in Minnesota. He reproduces Kent's 
cover illustrations for anarchist periodicals. This strong and convincing 
portrait of Kent as an artist deeply influenced by anarchist thought informs 
Antliff's readings of Kent's engravings and prints, especially his illustra- 
tions for Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure, Kent's own prose 
account of his sojourn in Alaska. 
Antliff concludes his study with a chapter detailing the assaults on 
anarchism (and artists associated with anarchism) from both the Right 
(government repression in the United States) and the Left (the rising 
enthusiasm for Bolshevism among American radicals after the Russian 
Revolution). Tracing this two-front assault through the late-teens career of 
illustrator Robert Minor, Antliff powerfully shows how "the project of 
individualist liberation sustaining the movement's artistic discourse lost its 
currency" (183). On one hand, Antliff overstates the consequences of anar- 
chism's "demise." Although the specific political aims of various anar- 
c h i s m ~  lost cultural purchase by 1920, the relationship between revolu- 
tionary politics and modernist culture remained. Antliff's account of anar- 
chism's denouement should not be equated with an account of political 
modernism's denouement, since artists and writers across the political 
spectrum pursued linked aesthetic and political programs through the 
1930s. On the other hand, though, Antliff is right to eulogize a vision, at 
once artistic and political, whose internationalist and utopian aspects 
remain appealing. Living, thinking, responding, and working in a society 
whose dominant voice was Woodrow Wilson's, railing against political dis- 
sent at a Flag Day rally in 1917 - "Woe to the man or group of men that 
seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution!" - these artists 
sought to derail such discourses with all the tricks at their disposal. 
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- 


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