The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party

Author Biography

Alex Riggs is an MA History student at the University of Nottingham. He will be starting a Midlands4Cities funded PhD there in September, studying Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson’s presidential primary campaigns.

Book Review: ‘The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party’ by John Nichols

In recent years, the American left has experienced significant growth in its prominence on the national political stage. Bernie Sanders has twice finished second in Democratic Party presidential primaries, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become highly influential and the Democratic Socialists of America have expanded from around 6,000 members in 2015 to 66,000 in 2020.[1] In The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party, journalist and author John Nichols draws upon original archival research and oral history gathered throughout his journalistic career to argue that rather than an unprecedented phenomenon, the contemporary American left can call upon a significant historical tradition.

Alongside other recent historical works by journalists showcasing aspects of the Democratic Party’s left, including Ryan Grim’s exploration of the movement’s evolution from Jesse Jackson’s 1988 Presidential campaign to the present, and Jon Ward’s account of the 1980 Presidential Primaries between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, Nichols pinpoints the pivotal place of Henry Wallace in this history.[2] A Republican farmer turned ardent New Dealer and ally of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wallace served as FDR’s Vice President in his third term.[3] With the President’s health ailing as he sought a fourth term in 1944, Southern segregationists and industrialists organised to replace Wallace as the Vice-Presidential nominee, winning a tightly contested vote to install Harry Truman, who would take office upon Roosevelt’s death in 1945.[4] For Nichols, this is the decisive moment in altering the Democrats’ ideological trajectory, bringing about an intellectual shift away from the politics of the New Deal and towards one which embraced a form of managerialism that precluded transformational change.[5]

The opening chapters focus on Wallace’s time as Vice-President, and Nichols effectively situates his politics within the Second World War context. Just as social democrats in Britain, India and Scandinavia looked to build an egalitarian society out of the destruction of the conflict, in an American context Henry Wallace championed similar causes, looking to build on the foundations laid by the Atlantic Charter, ‘Four Freedoms’, and Economic Bill of Rights to create a peaceful and just international settlement.[6] This context also meant a focus on the reasons for Fascism’s ascent in the 1930s, emphasising the need for economic security while simultaneously rooting out racism and xenophobia. Fighting ‘American fascism’ became a key part of Wallace’s speeches in the latter part of his Vice Presidency.[7] Nichols also demonstrates the resistance of the status quo to this agenda, including Winston Churchill’s anger at Wallace’s denunciations of imperialism and segregationists’ fury over his steadfast support for civil rights.[8] This leads Nichols to the conclusion that rather than failing on its own merits, it took a deliberate effort of groups whose power would have been diminished by Wallace’s agenda to undermine the ascendency of the New Deal.

Wallace faded into obscurity after his disastrous presidential run in 1948, so the remaining chapters of the book chronicle the Democratic left’s trajectory to the present. This begins in the 1950s, highlighting how the Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower outflanked the Democrats in its progressivism on civil rights, economics, and foreign policy, most famously with its denunciation of the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’.[9] The analysis of the era’s presidents poses questions of Nichols’ key thesis, namely that Wallace’s removal from the Vice-Presidency constituted the end of the New Deal. If Eisenhower kept a Keynesian economic settlement, gradualist Civil Rights agenda and challenged confrontational foreign policy stances, can the New Deal really have ended in 1944? The book then skips over John F. Kennedy’s presidency, before briefly discussing the Johnson administration and its advances in Civil Rights legislation before being bogged down by the Vietnam War.[10] Given the complicated legacies of these Democratic presidents, having enacted important advancements in Civil Rights, the welfare state, and healthcare, but also overseeing the brutality of Vietnam, a discussion of how these figures related to the left and how they should feature in its history remains a significant omission.

The significance of grassroots groups is then highlighted, including Students for a Democratic Society, a key organisation in representing emerging student radicalism, whose alliance with civil rights, anti-war, and feminist groups would give birth to the ‘New Politics’ that increasingly defined the Democratic left from the late 1960s onwards.[11] Both Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy made use of these sentiments in the 1968 primaries, before George McGovern harnessed their support to gain the 1972 Presidential nomination.[12] One of the most effective parts of the book comes in its reading of the 1970s, showing how this decade, often pinpointed by historians as a battleground for the future of the nation, also affected the Democratic Party.[13] For Nichols, the 1970s represented another missed opportunity for the Party, as they rejected the chance to use this new base to counter increasingly organised right-wing interest groups and instead doubled down on the managerial politics that saw Democrats lose their position as the dominant party in the 1970s.[14] This is also shown through the role of Michael Harrington, a socialist activist who saw in the emergence of the ‘New Politics’ an opportunity to make the Democrats a vehicle for policies such as full employment and national health insurance. These policies became part of the 1976 Party platform, before significantly influencing Ted Kennedy’s 1980 bid for the presidential nomination.[15]

These battles over Party direction would continue into the 1980s as the Reagan presidency encouraged centrist Democrats further away from liberalism, whilst organisations like the Democratic Leadership Council emerged to ensure the Party remained orientated to the political centre. In this decade, Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist and confidant of Martin Luther King, would become the standard bearer of this cause, running for the presidency in 1984 and 1988 on a platform that sought to represent the working-class constituencies most affected by the changes of Reaganism.[16] Though his supposed general election shortcomings were a key reason for his defeats in the primaries, Nichols interestingly highlights the significance of low turnout in urban areas and amongst young voters for the Democratic defeat of 1988, suggesting Jackson’s ability to galvanise these groups had potential as an alternative to centrism.[17] Despite this promise, however, the Democrats continued to compromise with right-wing policies on areas including criminal justice and financial deregulation during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Despite the initial liberal promise of the Obama campaign, a shift towards a transformational politics was not forthcoming, forcing the party to rely on Presidential charisma for electoral success, a tactic that obliterated its strength at the local level.[18] The book ends, however, on a hopeful note by highlighting the contemporary success of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a sign of the left’s strength, with these youth-powered campaigns providing optimism for future fulfilment of Wallace’s ideals.[19]

Nichols’ work is an important one, highlighting the possibility of alternative directions in post-war American politics and providing a welcome antidote to the histories of the Democrats that portray its left as an inconvenience, contributing nothing other than defeat.[20] However, Nichols’ role as an activist as well as an author means there are limits to its uses. As Ilhan Omar writes on the blurb, this is, ‘more than a history book- this is an examination of what progressives must do to retake our democracy’, showing how Nichols seeks to give today’s left a sense of purpose and historical grounding in its common cause with past political actors. Therefore, Nichols places greater emphasis on continuity in charting the history of this movement, highlighting the consistencies in political aims across time, to give a sense of tradition and legitimacy to the cause described. For instance, he describes Tom Hayden’s 1978 Senate manifesto as having, ‘anticipated the progressive politics of Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the generation of leaders that would come to the fore in the late 2010s’.[21] Whilst it is correct to point out the continuities across these different contexts, Nichols’ approach obscures the variations that also exist across time. In particular, this overestimates the degree of separation between the Democratic left and the wider political environment.

Therefore, the ‘neo-consensus’ school of contemporary American political History, which minimises the divides of party, ideology and region in favour of highlighting areas of agreement across the spectrum, including convergence in criminal justice and neoliberalism, has use for building on Nichols’ work.[22] Although this school has mostly focused on areas of consensus across partisan lines, its theories could be applied by historians to the study of the Democratic left. This is applicable to the New Deal itself, which faced criticism for being insufficiently bold in its economic reforms from the likes of Huey Long and incorporated ideas that challenge its status as the height of progressivism. This included the facilitation of the conservative goal of repressing ‘subversives’ through the development of the FBI.[23] With regard to later periods, Geismer highlights how George McGovern played an instrumental role in popularising a political economy based around the high-tech sector, a cause commonly identified as instrumental to the agenda of ‘neoliberal’ politics in the 1980s.[24] Moreover, the Kennedy and Jackson campaigns were not inoculated from these developments. Kennedy was keen to highlight his role as a deregulator of the airline and trucking industries during his campaign, whilst Jackson’s campaign included a strong anti-drug message similar to the ‘Just Say No’ message of the Reagan administration.[25]

The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party, therefore, represents an important historiographical development by providing a more balanced history of the Democratic left, highlighting the left’s important intellectual contribution and exploring alternative directions in post-war American politics. Given that all historical works are influenced by the perspectives of their authors, this book should not be dismissed as that of an ideologue. Its limits, however, should be recognised. More work needs to be done to layout the ideological nuances of this important movement in American political history, to show how it adapted to the myriad of contexts that the post-war United States brought about, but Nichols provides a good starting point.

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Notes

[1]             D. Henwood, ‘The Socialist Network’, The New Republic, 250/6 (June 2019), p.15; E. Godfrey, ‘Thousands of Americans Have Become Socialists Since March’, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/dsa-growing-during-coronavirus/611599/accessed 04/08/2020.

[2]             R. Grim, We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to AOC, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement (Washington D.C., 2019); J. Ward, Camelot’s End: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party (New York, 2019).

[3]             J. Nichols, The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party (London, 2020), pp. xi-xii.

[4]             Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp. 83-84

[5]             Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp. xiv-xv.

[6]             Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp. 4, 21-22.

[7]             Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp. 60-61.

[8]             Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp. 68-69.

[9]             Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp. 146, 152-53.

[10]           Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp. 155-56.

[11]           Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp. 170-71.

[12]           Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp. 160-61, 167, 171-73.

[13]           E. Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political Cultural Overview of the Seventies (New York, 2006), p.1; T. Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, 2011), p.3.

[14]           Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp. 169-71.

[15]           Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp.183, 186-87.

[16]           Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp.198-99.

[17]           Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, p.200.

[18]           Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp.203,2 07-08, 215-16.

[19]           Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, pp.236-38.

[20]           R. Radosh, Divided they Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996 (New York, 1996), pp. x-xi, xiii.

[21]           Nichols, The Fight for the Soul, p.193.

[22]           B. Schulman, ‘Post-1968 U.S. History: Neo-Consensus History for the Age of Polarisation’, Reviews in American History, 47/3 (2019), pp.482-83.

[23]           ‘Huey Long’s Senate Speeches’,https://www.ssa.gov/history/longsen.html, accessed 09/09/20; K. O’Reilly, ‘A New Deal for the FBI: The Roosevelt Administration, Crime Control and National Security’, Journal of American History, 69/3 (1982), pp.638-39.

[24]           L. Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, 2015), pp.164-65.

[25]           N. Birnbaum, ‘How Much of the Way with E.M.K.?’, The Nation, December 22, 1979, p.649; ‘Jackson Announcement’, https://www.c-span.org/video/?3311-1/jackson-announcement, accessed 10/07/20

Bibliography

Primary Sources

 

Birnbaum, N., ‘How Much of the Way with E.M.K.?’, The Nation, (December 22, 1979), pp.648-51.

 

Godfrey, E., ‘Thousands of Americans Have Become Socialists since March’, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/dsa-growing-during-coronavirus/611599/accessed 04/08/2020.

 

Geismer, L., ‘Jesse Jackson’s Political Revolution’, Jacobin, (Winter 2020), pp.103-06.

 

Henwood, D., ‘The Socialist Network’, The New Republic, (June 2019), pp.12-19.

‘Huey Long’s Senate Speeches’, https://www.ssa.gov/history/longsen.html, accessed 09/09/20.

 

‘Jackson Announcement’, https://www.c-span.org/video/?3311-1/jackson-announcement, accessed 10/07/20.

 

Secondary Sources

 

Berkowitz, E., Something Happened: A Cultural and Political Overview of the Seventies (New York, 2006).

 

Borstelmann, T., The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, 2011).

 

Geismer, L., Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, 2015).

 

Grim, R., We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to AOC, The End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement (Washington D.C., 2019).

 

Nichols, J., The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party (London, 2020).

 

O’Reilly, K., ‘A New Deal for the FBI: The Roosevelt Administration, Crime Control and National Security’, Journal of American History, 69/3 (1982), pp.638-658.

 

Radosh, R., Divided they Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996 (New York, 1996).

 

Rodgers, D., Age of Fracture (Cambridge, 2011).

 

Schiller, R., ‘The Curious Origins of Airline Deregulation: Economic Deregulation and the American Left’, Business History Review, 93/4 (2019), pp.729-53.

 

Schulman, B., ‘Post-1968 U.S. History: Neo-Consensus History for the Age of Polarisation’, Reviews in American History, 47/3 (2019), pp.479-99.

 

Ward, J., Camelot’s End: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party (New York, 2019).

Book Review: ‘Greek Military Service in the Ancient Near East, 401-330 BCE’ by Jeffrey Rop

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Author Biography

Gillian Owen is a Masters Student studying Classics at the University of Nottingham. Gillian‘s interests cover a range periods and cultures centred around the Mediterranean. Her current dissertation focuses on the image of the sea in Etruscan burials.

LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/gillian-owen

Twitter: @Gillianowen97

Book Review: ‘Greek Military Service in the Ancient Near East, 401-330 BCE’ by Jeffrey Rop

Gillian Owen

 

Jeffery Rop’s, ‘Greek Military Service in the Ancient Near East,’ questions several of the core theories around the use of Greek mercenaries in the 4th century, providing a critical analysis of ancient sources and modern scholarship. His book serves as a reply to several comprehensive accounts of Persian and Egyptian military history, such as Stephen Ruzicka’s, ‘Trouble in the West,’ and John Hyland’s, ‘Persian Interventions’, both of which serve as the inspiration for this book.  Rop’s core argument is a reconsideration of the ‘Greek thesis’ – a term coined by Pierre Briant, referring to the trend in modern scholarship to accept accounts of Greek military superiority.  Through a series of case studies, Rop challenges the ideas of Greek military superiority presented by the Greek thesis; offering alternative reasons for the presence of Greek mercenaries in the Persian and Egyptian armies that go beyond the theory that they were selected as superior, hoplite troops. He uses this to contest the notion that the appearance of these troops was a sign of the decline in the Achaemenid Empire in the 4th century. Rop’s overarching argument addresses two core theories. First, the Greek thesis is a misconception created by the ancient sources, and perpetuated in modern scholarship. Second, Greek soldiers in foreign armies were not mercenaries, but were recruited through political alliances. Rop utilises a strong military history approach, uncommon in current scholarship, to reconsider the evidence through a break-down of battle narratives. This method provides new insights and alternative versions of events that may explain the appearance of Greek mercenaries in foreign armies.

 

The book is aimed at scholars, drawing heavily from modern debate.  However, Rop also intends it to be accessible to a more general audience.  Its intrinsic relation to modern debate and reconceptualization of certain events and ideas, requires at least, a basic understanding of the period, if not the modern scholarship. Therefore, the book is perhaps more suited to specialist Greek, Persian and Egyptian military and/or political historians; especially as the book is inciting a new take on this field. This should not deter undergraduates from approaching the book, as Rop’s clear presentation of his arguments and modern debate makes it accessible to those willing to fully engage with Rop’s arguments and analysis. Throughout the book, Rop supports his arguments with basic contexts and diagrams where necessary, enabling it to be read by a range of audiences and providing an inroad into modern discussions. The opening of the book provides general geographical maps and campaign routes, many of which would be familiar to those with a background in Greek military studies. The more poignant diagrams appear in the battle narratives, as Rop provides basic visual reconstructions of the battle formations. These provide essential context and understanding for the argument, particularly for readers unfamiliar with military history and battle sequences. Rop’s analysis of the ancient sources and the literary techniques that influenced their accounts are, overall, worth consideration for future works addressing Greco-Persian political and military relations as they provide new insights and methodology. Discussion of the existing academic literature at the beginning of each section clearly situates the book within modern scholarship and challenges the reader to reconsider existing interpretations of Greek military history. As such, it is perhaps best read alongside other relevant works – although Rop provides enough scholarly context for all his arguments to be understood as a standalone piece.

 

The introductory chapter provides the foundations to the rest of the book. Rop presents an account of contemporary historiography highlighting specific elements of scholarship that are addressed through the rest of the work. He also provides a background to his primary sources; outlines his key arguments and key terms; and explains his methodology in the chapter. The chapter is titled, ‘The Greek Thesis’, borrowing Briant’s term to describe the tendency of ancient and modern authors to attribute the presence of Greek soldiers in foreign armies as indicators of Greek military superiority.  This chapter explains the Greek Thesis, from its conception by the primary sources, through to modern scholarship. Rop establishes the existing arguments and justifies the need for his book.  Rop’s secondary argument, exploring political motivations for the hire of Greek mercenaries, is also established here.  This argument challenges the idea that the Achaemenid Empire was in decline, and is developed much more in chapters three and six. He argues that Persia had political influence in Greece and was not reliant on Greek military power. The two literary tropes that Rop draws on throughout his critique of the ancient sources – the dynamic subordinate and the tragic advisor – are defined in this chapter, as a reference for the later discussions.  Overall, the first chapter provides a solid basis for Rop to develop his own analyses in the subsequent chapters.

The second chapter, ‘The Battle of Cunaxa’, addresses the revolt of Cyrus the Younger, with the aid of the Greek contingent known as the Ten Thousand, against his brother King Artaxerxes II in 401BC.  It is the first of two chapters in the book that deeply analyse one source through one event.  In this chapter, Rop considers Xenophon’s account of the battle of Cunaxa, discussing the literary techniques and biases of Xenophon. Xenophon is the generally preferred account for Cunaxa, as sources for battle narratives can vary dramatically.  An example of this would be Xenophon’s and Diodorus’ account of the battle of Aegospotami, as they display remarkable differences; such as the way in which the Spartans attack the Athenian ships.  Rop presents a critical analysis of the source and battle tactics to argue that Xenophon created a false perception of the Greeks’ role in the battle. His analysis aims to combat two assumptions about the battle: one, that the Greeks were the best on the battlefield; secondly, that Cyrus ordered his Greeks to advance against the King in the centre. Rop develops a battle reconstruction to suggest that these ideas came about due to Xenophon’s narrative techniques, for example, his use of focalisation highlighted the achievement of the Greeks, creating the impression that the Greek contingent was more important than it was.

 

The third chapter, ‘Greece and the Rebellion of Cyrus the Younger’, continues the discussion of chapter two and addresses a potential hole in the argument. The previous chapter argued against Greek superiority as the motive for their inclusion in Cyrus’ army. Rop uses this chapter to suggest an alternative reason for their inclusion. He argues that Greek troops were more loyal than the Persians troops, contesting the argument that mercenaries were unreliable, as they were motivated by money. Rop develops the argument that Greek mercenaries were contracted through patron-client relationships, similar to the Greek idea of xenia. Similar ideas have been presented by Trundle as he discusses how ritualised friendship was common in mercenary relationships.  Rop, however, expands this beyond what has been considered previously. He regards the concept of xenia in a Greco-Persian context, exploring how the power difference created a form of patron-client relationship that differed from the Greek concept of xenia – which was between equals. He argues that Greek mercenaries were contracted through personal relations to powerful Persian figures, who could support their personal ambitions in return for military service. He uses this idea to explain the Greeks’ loyalty to Cyrus over the wealthier Artaxerxes, as their personal relations to Cyrus allowed him to offer different incentives.  His presentation of Cyrus’ army as a chain of patron relationships, and the political implications of the chapter, present a particularly interesting argument within the book and for the definition of a mercenary. It is something to be considered in future scholarship.

Chapter four takes a different approach than the rest of the chapters, as Rop discusses pairs of figures; exploring the use of the dynamic subordinate and tragic advisor trope. The dynamic subordinate relates to accounts where a subordinate, in these cases a Greek, out performs their superior – here a Persian or Egyptian commander. The Tragic advisor trope refers to a case when the commander ignores the advice of another and subsequently fails. The lack of event focus creates a slight disjoint between the sections, as discussions of the specific individuals rely on a solid understanding of events between 400-360 BC. This can be aided slightly by use of the timeline provided at the start of the book. Each subsection within the chapter works as a separate unit, highlighting a case where the dynamic subordinate, and/or the tragic advisor is present. As such, the chapter requires Rop’s preliminary conclusion, found at the end of the chapter, to draw all the arguments together.  The chapter considers five pairs: Conon and Pharnabazus, Chabrias and Acoris, Agesilaus and Tachos, Agesilaus and Nectanebos, and Iphicrates and Pharnabazus, the latter being the longest and most comprehensive. The discussions surrounding these pairings presents a convincing case for the use of the dynamic subordinate and tragic advisor as a cause for misconceptions over the superiority of Greek generals, but, suffers from a slight sense of repetition, as the same tropes are discussed across all five case studies. Rop’s analysis provides interesting breakdowns of individuals’ contributions, strategies, and the two tropes, but could have been supplemented by a slightly broader range of arguments, such as the value these individuals had in controlling their forces.  Rop suggests three conclusions for the chapter, with the argument against the superiority of the Greek generals being predominant. Rop’s other two conclusions; that Greek mercenaries were valued due to alliances, and that they were selected as specialist marines, are slightly overshadowed. It would have been interesting if Rop had made more of these conclusions in his individual pairs’ analysis, as it is not until the preliminary conclusion that their significance is strongly highlighted, although they are discussed throughout the chapter. Despite this slight criticism, the arguments covered in the chapter are presented well. Each pair is discussed thoroughly, and the preliminary conclusion highlights the key ideas while citing previous discussion in the chapter to support them.

 

Both chapter five and six consider single events. Chapter five discusses the revolt of Artabazus, while the sixth chapter considers the Persian conquest of Egypt through a critique of Diodorus. Rop uses these chapters to reinforce ideas that have been previously presented, displaying how Rop uses this book to effectively argue a couple of key theories, by exploring them in different situations. The revolt of Artabazus, a relatively minor part of Persian history, is discussed in chapter five as it strongly pertains to Rop’s critique of the Greek thesis, as it presents the only case of the threat of Greek mercenaries being officially recognised by a Persian king.  Through this chapter, Rop challenges the Greek thesis by questioning the validity of the mercenaries’ decree and the accuracy of the sources’ accounts.  The chapter highlights a key agenda of Rop’s book, as he uses the revolt of Artabazus to illustrate how easily modern scholarship accepts accounts that support the Greek thesis. Rop’s methodology in addressing this event, displays how an in-depth critique of the sources can produce different interpretations of events; something he wants contemporary scholars to do in regards to the Greek thesis. In contrast, chapter six uses one source to analyse one event. In his analysis of the event, Rop re-engages several of his previous arguments, such as the dynamic subordinate and tragic advisor trope, in a new context. His argument that the Greek mercenaries were valued as sailors and marines is discussed at length in this chapter. The chapter displays how Rop’s book is building an in-depth case for the reconsideration of a few key ideas, rather than an extensive exploration of a wide variety of events and theories.

 

The final two chapters discuss the appearance of Greek mercenaries in the Persian armies, opposing Macedonian conquest. Rop discusses the appearance of Greeks in the three main battles against Alexander the Great: Granicus River, Issus, and Gaugamela. Chapter Seven focuses in particular on the contributions of Memnon of Rhodes to the Persian army, arguing that he has a more modest role than the sources convey. The highlight of these two chapters is Rop’s battle narratives, as he presents a lucid summary of the strategies used in these three key battles. He supplements this with simple, yet effective, diagrams displaying the battle lines, providing key visual tools to outline the battles’ progress. Chapter eight’s primary value is Rop’s military analysis, as he uses it to counteract the idea that the Persians depended on Greek mercenaries. Rop suggests that the Greeks appear in the Persian armies as a way for them to unofficially oppose Alexander. He suggests that they required Persian aid, rather than the Persian generals being reliant on superior Greek forces. The arguments of these latter chapters, while still relevant and convincing, are perhaps less impactful on Rop’s overall discussion on the Greek thesis and political motivations for the hiring of Greek mercenaries. Unlike some of the previous chapters, the conclusions here do not pose vastly significant changes to the dynamic of Greco-Persian relations.

 

Rop’s work presents an in-depth analysis of the ancient sources and offers a new take on conventional theories in Greek and Near Eastern military history. Rop’s work deviates from the often-Greek centric narrative and manages to presents a concise and well-rounded picture of Greco-Persian and Egyptian military history, that does an impressive job of considering sub-context and dynamics obscured by the primarily Greek source base. Rop’s book manages to address a hole in contemporary scholarship highlighted by Gómez-Castro, who acknowledges historian’s strong reliance on their sources and their fear of speculative analysis.   Rop’s method of combining military history with several literary approaches is innovative and highlights how this type of speculative analysis can provide interesting and new interpretations. Throughout the book, Rop successfully highlights the need for a reconsideration of the Greek thesis and reinterpretations of Greek mercenary actions. Rop’s suggestion for the political implications of Greek mercenaries, particularly the idea of a patron-client relationship, presented an interesting take on Greco-Persian relationships that appears worth considering by future works on 4th century history.  Rop’s book has opened up a challenge to some of the more conventional ideas and it will be interesting to observe future academic dialogue raised in response to his critiques.

 

 

Bibliography

Bigwood, J. M., ‘The Ancient Accounts of the Battle of Cunaxa’, The American Journal of Philology 104(4) (1983), pp. 340-357.

Briant, P., From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, Daniels, P. T. (trans.)(Indiana, 2002).

Gómez-Castro. D. ‘Ancient Greek Mercenaries: Facts, Theories and New Perspectives’, War & Society, 38(1) (2019), pp. 2-18.

Hyland, J., Persian Interventions: The Achaemenid Empire, Athens, and Sparta, 450-386 BCE (Baltimore, 2018).

Rop, J., Greek Military Service in the Ancient Near East, 401-330 BCE (New York, 2019).

Ruzicka, S., Trouble in the West: Egypt and the Persian Empire 525-332 (Oxford, 2012).

Strauss, B. ‘Aegospotami Reexamined’, The American Journal of Philology, 104 (1) (1983), pp. 24-35.

Trundle, M., Greek Mercenaries: From the Late Archaic Period to Alexander (London and New York, 2004).

 

 

Book Review: Horden, P. and Purcell, N., The Boundless Sea: Writing Mediterranean History (London, 2020)

Book Review: Horden, P. and Purcell, N., The Boundless Sea: Writing Mediterranean History (London, 2020)

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Nicholas Thompson

Unlike this year’s Wolfson History Prize Winner The Boundless Sea: A Human History of Oceans, The Boundless Sea: Writing Mediterranean History (hereafter, Boundless) focuses on methods of approaching the Mediterranean.[1] Boundless is a reflection on The Corrupting Sea (hereafter, Corrupting) and the developments of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s approach over the last two decades.[2] In Corrupting, Horden and Purcell presented the Mediterranean holistically, discussing prehistory, antiquity, and the Middle Ages through ecological, anthropological, and geographical analyses. In 2001, Brent Shaw admired Corrupting’s vision of replacing Fernand Braudel’s 1949 definitive text on Mediterranean history ‘with something better’ and Corrupting’s second volume – discussing climate, disease, demography, and interactions with other regions – remains eagerly awaited.[3] In Boundless, Horden and Purcell summarise Corrupting as providing a focus on ‘common ecological denominators’ to develop study of the Mediterranean region.[4]

Boundless comprises eleven previously published articles and one new chapter which are loosely grouped in central themes: rebuttal to Corrupting’s critics (1-3); economy and power (4-7); and water (9-12).  Chapter eight, the only previously unpublished article, bridges discussions of economy and water, presenting water mills as economic development markers. The lack of definition of these themes hampers formation of an overarching argument. Thus, despite edits removing some overlaps and replacing the authorial ‘I’ with ‘we’ in cases of solo authorship, the volume feels disjointed.[5]

As most of the chapters have been published previously, their initial purpose does not always align with their intended function in Boundless. This may be seen most clearly in chapter one which began The American Historical Review’s 2006 forum entitled ‘Ocean History’.[6] Kären Wigen introduced its study of maritime regions as one of ‘modern cultural constructs’ with Horden and Purcell attributing maritime regions’ instability to their being ‘essentially contested’.[7] Horden and Purcell use ‘seaborne connectivity’ to mend this instability, quoting Socrates’ observation that Greeks lived ‘around the sea like…frogs around a pool’ and others lived ‘elsewhere in many such places’.[8] The omission of Wigen’s introduction alters the dynamic of the article. With Wigen’s introduction, the article presented a chronological starting point for discussing similar cultural constructs in the Atlantic and Pacific. Without it, Horden and Purcell’s hopes of refining ‘the ways in which we frame a global history’ lack the outlook they initially held, now beginning a volume focused on Mediterranean history.[9]

In chapter eight, Horden and Purcell consider 500 to 1000 AD the best period for assessing interactions between Northwest Europe and the Mediterranean as it charts the realignment of Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire.[10] They present the Mediterranean during this period as a ‘crucible of institutions and techniques that will…come to seem simply European’.[11] Horden and Purcell begin by quoting Dr Johnson’s remarks about touring sites from antiquity, ‘almost all that sets us [Europeans] above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean’.[12] Horden and Purcell temper this with Michael Herzfeld’s 2003 concept that Mediterraneanism was equivalent to European orientalism, with Mediterraneans as ‘other’.[13] They consider the Mediterranean a characteristic set of special relationships, unhampered by geographical confines.

The debate between understanding the Mediterranean as innovative, ultimately shaping European developments, and understanding the Mediterranean as ‘backward’, is summarised as developments being Mediterranean imports or ‘endogenous to northern Europe’.[14] This controversy takes up the majority of the chapter, discussed through a literature review of Corrupting (2000), Michael McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy (2001), and Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005) and The Inheritance of Rome (2009).[15] The works are grouped into two viewpoints, firstly that the Mediterranean maintained ‘a continued “connectivity”’ despite declining trade (Corrupting and McCormick).[16] Secondly, there was a ‘systemic break’ in the seventh century separating ancient and medieval economic models (Wickham).[17]

Wickham’s Marxist approach directs his focus to ‘modes of production’ from slave to feudal to peasant; the latter, Horden and Purcell suggest, is Wickham’s creation.[18] Wickham uses bulk good trade over moderate distances as his economic marker regarding McCormick’s marker, long-distance luxury trade, as ‘surface gloss’.[19] Horden and Purcell temper Wickham’s endogenous understanding of Northwest European economics with Mediterranean agricultural developments.[20] They cite Roman bipartite estate management amongst Carolingians and the spread of water mills throughout Europe by Roman soldiers.[21] Irish and Italian monastic records demonstrate widespread European usage of water mills by the seventh century AD.[22] Thus modified, Horden and Purcell repurpose Wickham’s arguments as evidence for Mediterranean farming technology causing agrarian intensification in northern Europe which generated wealth and demand for luxuries.[23]

The final chapters return to water with Horden’s 2002 Linacre Lecture concerning Water Management, originally delivered to an interdisciplinary audience of scientists and arts scholars.[24] Chapter eleven hints at Horden and Purcell’s ideas for Corrupting’s sequel. It originally began the ‘Framing Saharan Africa’ section of McDougall and Scheele’s Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa.[25] Horden argues to replace Braudel’s argument that the Sahara was ‘the second face of the Mediterranean’.[26]  Instead, Horden contrasts the ‘introversion’ of the Mediterranean compared with the Sahara’s interconnectivity.[27] He concludes that better comparisons for Saharan connectivity are interconnected regions like the Great Lakes or Philippine archipelago. Despite noting that Benedetta Rossi (2015) argues for Braudel’s model to be reinstated, Horden offers no further defence, hopefully this will come in Corrupting’s sequel.[28] Thus, although suited to a volume discussing Northwest Africa, this chapter clashes with Boundless’ focus on approaches to Mediterranean history and seems more suited to the frontier-exploring second volume of Corrupting. This disconnect highlights Boundless’ identity crisis between being a collection of essays discussing study of the Mediterranean or Corrupting’s sequel.

In summary, Boundless presents the key points of Horden and Purcell’s works of the last two decades in an easily accessible manner. These articles come from a wide range of fields, demonstrating the scope and influence of Horden and Purcell’s ideas, and the impact of Corrupting. Chapters range from ancient to early modern history, studies of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, archaeology, and social anthropology. It is therefore improbable that readers will be familiar with all topics covered, but this breadth is the book’s success. An ancient historian may be interested in chapter six’s discussion of ancient maritime taxation but find useful material concerning the development of Mediterranean economics in chapter five’s discussion of ‘meshwork’ in Mediterranean cities and chapter eight’s discourse of agrarian technologies. Many readers would benefit from reading the original publications of the chapters to understand the initial role the articles fulfilled. For example, chapter one focuses on developing a style for approaching maritime ecologies generally because it precedes articles concerning the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Ultimately, Boundless whets the reader’s appetite for the forthcoming sequel to Corrupting, now two decades in the making, which will provide more room for Horden and Purcell’s ideas to be explored.

 

 

Bibliography

Abulafia, D., The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (London, 2019).

Braudel, F., La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris,     1949).

Coswell, J., Hill, G. B. (ed.), and Powell, L. F. (rev.), Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Oxford, 1936).

Games, A., ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, American Historical   Review, Forum: ‘Oceans of History’, 111/3 (2006), 741-757.

Herzfeld, M., ‘Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for Everything, from Epistemology to Eating’, in Harris, W. V. (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2003), 45-63.

Horden, P., ‘Water in Mediterranean History’ in Trottier, J. and Slack, P. (eds), Managing      Water Resources Past and Present: The Linacre Lectures 2002 (Oxford, 2004), 35-49.

Horden, P., ‘Mediterranean Excuses: Historical Writing on the Mediterranean since Braudel’,             History and Anthropology, 16 (2005), 25-30.

Horden, P., ‘Situations Both Alike?: Connectivity, the Mediterranean, the Sahara’, in J.           McDougall and J. Scheele (eds), Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest    Africa (Bloomington, IN., 2012), 25-38.

Horden, P. and Purcell, N., The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford,           2000).

Horden, P. and Purcell, N., ‘The Mediterranean and ‘The New Thalassology’’, American         Historical Review, Forum: ‘Oceans of History’, 111/3 (2006), 722-40.

Horden, P. and Purcell, N., The Boundless Sea: Writing Mediterranean History (London,           2020), vii.

Matsuda, M. K., ‘The Pacific’, American Historical Review, Forum: ‘Oceans of History’, 111/3       (2006), 758-780.

McCormick, M., Origins of the European Economy (Cambridge, 2001).

McDougall, J. and Scheele, J. (eds), Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest               Africa (Bloomington, IN., 2012).

Plato, Phaedo 109b in Emlyn-Jones, C. and Preddy, W. (eds and trans), Plato: Euthyphro;          Apology; Crito; Phaedo (Cambridge, MA., 2017).

Rossi, B. From Slavery to Aid: Politics, Labour, and Mobility in the Nigerian Sahel, 1800-2000      (Cambridge, 2015).

Shaw, B. D., ‘Challenging Braudel: a new vision of the Mediterranean’, Journal of Roman     Archaeology 14 (2001), 419-453.

Wickham, C., Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800          (Oxford, 2005).

Wickham, C., The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London,          2009).

Wigen, K., ‘Introduction’, American Historical Review, Forum: ‘Oceans of History’, 111/3       (2006), 717-721.

[1] D. Abulafia, The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (London, 2019).

[2] P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000).

[3] B. D. Shaw, ‘Challenging Braudel: a new vision of the Mediterranean’, JRA 14 (2001), 419-453, 419. Referencing F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris, 1949).

[4] P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Boundless Sea: Writing Mediterranean History (London, 2020), vii.

[5] Chapters 5, 8, 9, 11, and 12 are by Horden; 3, 4, 6, 7, and 10 are by Purcell.

[6] P. Horden and N. Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean and ‘The New Thalassology’’, American Historical Review, Forum: ‘Oceans of History’, 111/3 (2006), 722-40.

[7] K. Wigen, ‘Introduction’, American Historical Review, Forum: ‘Oceans of History’, 111/3 (2006), 717-721.

[8] P. Horden and N. Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean and ‘The New Thalassology’’, Boundless, 1-21, 13; Socrates in Plato, Phaedo 109b.

[9] The article preceded A. Games, ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, and M. K. Matsuda, ‘The Pacific’, American Historical Review, Forum: ‘Oceans of History’, 111/3 (2006), 751-757 and 758-780.

[10] Boundless, 137.

[11] Ibidem.

[12] Dr Johnson, J. Coswell, G. B. Hill (ed.), and L. F. Powell (rev.), Boswell’s Life of Johnson, (Oxford, 1936), vol. 3, 36, Boundless, 136.

[13] M. Herzfeld, ‘Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for Everything, from Epistemology to Eating’, W. V. Harris (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2003), 45-63, P. Horden, ‘Mediterranean Excuses: Historical Writing on the Mediterranean since Braudel’, History and Anthropology, 16 (2005), 25-30; Boundless, 136.

[14] Boundless, 137, 136.

[15] Corrupting, Boundless, 137-144; McCormick, 144-147; Wickham, 147-149.

[16] Boundless, 152.

[17] Boundless, 150.

[18] Boundless, 147-148.

[19] Boundless, 148, 149.

[20] Boundless, 149-152.

[21] Boundless, 150-152.

[22] Boundless, 152.

[23] Boundless, 152.

[24] P. Horden, ‘Water in Mediterranean History’, J. Trottier and P. Slack (eds), Managing Water Resources Past and Present: The Linacre Lectures 2002 (Oxford, 2004), 35-49.

[25] P. Horden, ‘Situations Both Alike?: Connectivity, the Mediterranean, the Sahara’, J. McDougall and J. Scheele (eds), Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa (Bloomington, IN., 2012), 25-38.

[26] J. McDougall and J. Scheele (eds), Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in Northwest Africa (Bloomington, IN., 2012), 5-6.

[27] Boundless, 201.

[28] B. Rossi, From Slavery to Aid: Politics, Labour, and Mobility in the Nigerian Sahel, 1800-2000 (Cambridge, 2015); Boundless, 205n.52.

Bad or Mad? Infanticide: Insanity and Morality in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Bad or Mad? Infanticide: Insanity and Morality in Nineteenth-Century Britain

PAIGE MATHIESON

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Introduction

Infanticidal mothers have been murdering their newly born offspring for hundreds of years. Historically, infanticide was used as a form of contraception by hunter-gatherers in nomadic tribes, when their societies were at war and food supplies were scarce.[1] The horrific act of infanticide has been practiced throughout history amongst communities for various reasons, the most common motivations being, social, economic and religious.[2] Historian Anne Kilday describes infanticide as an ‘international phenomenon’.[3] Economic motivations behind infanticide can be seen woven throughout history and in the nineteenth century, women often resorted to infanticide as a form of delayed abortion amongst the most destitute of women.[4] For a considerable part of the Victorian era, London accounted for roughly half of all infanticide cases carried out in England and Wales; ‘Edwin Lancaster, coroner for Central Middlesex, claimed that some 12,000 London mothers had murdered their infants without detection.’[5] Infants were killed during this period by means of strangulation, suffocation and drowning.[6]

Responses to cases of infanticide in the nineteenth century saw an increasing connection to feminine ideals. Although the vast majority of infanticide victims were new-born infants, the murder of a child up to one year of age was categorised as infanticide under Victorian law. Single women and those working as domestic servants were the most frequently acknowledged social group of women to commit infanticidal acts during this time period.[7] James Kelly believes that this was a result of women longing to escape the ‘consequent social ostracism and economic marginalization’ they faced when giving birth to an illegitimate child. The ideal Victorian woman was held in high regard as an emblem of inherent purity. As a result of this, the nineteenth century saw an increase in reported infanticide cases as it contradicted the new-found values of womanhood, becoming a threat to the strong principles of family that stood at the roots of Victorian society.[8]

Nineteenth-century society in Britain saw a growth in fascination with infanticide cases. The horrors of child-murder were sensationalised in the press and became a catalyst for Victorian anxieties and fears surrounding motherhood. Infanticide spread alarm throughout Victorian society regarding the innocence and vulnerability of new-born infants.[9] Horrifying cases of infanticide were often published: local and national newspapers identified public areas such as parks and streets in which the bodies of infants were found.[10] ‘It has been said of the police, with too much truth’, reported Mrs Baines in the Journal of Social Sciences in 1866, ‘that they think no more of finding the dead body of a child in the streets than of picking up a dead cat or dog’.[11]

Throughout the early 1800s, doctors of medicine developed and established the medical term ‘infanticide’ as an indication of insanity. Scholars have been inclined to focus on infanticidal women and the questions surrounding infant murder, such as puerperal insanity, poverty and illegitimacy.[12] Puerperal insanity was one of the few psychiatric disorders that was recognised in the Nineteenth-Century, understood as insanity caused by the trauma of childbirth.[13] Nineteenth-century Britain saw dramatic changes to the legislation of infanticide and insanity. The National Health Service states that the 1800s saw a ‘new found interest in the causes and treatment of mental illness’, which shaped the way in which the insane were assessed and treated as a result of their condition.[14] Additionally, the changing legislation of insanity shaped society’s responses to infanticidal mothers and created a more ‘sympathetic approach’ to cases of infanticide as a result of insanity.[15] The changing legislation surrounding the murder of children demonstrates an already ongoing changing perception of women prior to the nineteenth century. The Infanticide statute of 1624 became the first written law for the killing of children and was established to ‘prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children’, demonstrating the strong link between illegitimacy and infanticide already embedded in the seventeenth century.[16]

Infanticide carried with it a sentence of execution in the nineteenth century, however, it was widely accepted that a woman who committed acts of infanticide did so because she had been driven to insanity.[17] Consequently, judges avoided sentencing such women to death by charging them with concealment of birth rather than infanticide which carried a prison sentence rather than execution; not reporting the birth of a child would be considered concealment of birth.[18] Lord Ellenborough’s Act of 1803 saw dramatic change in the conviction of infanticide and overrode the harshness of the Stuart Bastard Neonaticide Act of 1624, which decreed that the mothers of bastard children, if found attempting to conceal the child’s birth by hiding the body, were assumed to have murdered the infant and were therefore subject to the death penalty. Yet, the newly established 1803 Act assumed the mother innocent of infanticide until proven guilty. As a result of the newly established law no women were executed in Britain for the crime of infanticide after 1849.[19]

This article recognises that the changing perception of insanity shaped the responses to infanticidal women in nineteenth-century Britain. Society understood that poverty and illegitimacy were also causes of infanticide. In addition to this it is argued that mothers who committed infanticide as a result of poverty, illegitimacy and insanity were recognised as victims of society and were thus treated with increasing sympathy. Furthermore, although there was increasing sympathy for infanticidal mothers in this period, there was a continuous recognition that female baby-farmers and infanticidal fathers were murderous and thus were increasingly villainised in society. Nineteenth-century baby-farmers consisted of women who offered their services to take on other women’s children in exchange for payment, and young children who were taken to these establishments often died within a short period of time; thus young vulnerable mothers who could not cope with motherhood would use baby-farmers as a desperate solution in an attempt to rid themselves of their child.[20]

 

Bad?

Records from the nineteenth century evidence the existing stereotypes illustrated in society when discussing infanticide. The majority of those convicted of both infanticide and concealment of birth were un-married, working-class women in domestic service.[21] It was not uncommon for single working-class women of very little means to enter the workhouse in order to give birth as their pregnancy left them destitute and desperate. Therefore, it is significant to note that a considerable number of infanticide cases during this time period involved women who had recently entered the workhouse with limited and fragile support networks; Jackson argues that for these single women there was no place for them in society, even in working-class culture.[22] Society acknowledged that poverty became one of the primary causes of infanticide in Britain during the nineteenth century; in conjunction with the ‘avoidance of shame of an illegitimate child’, illegitimacy was perceived to be a far more influencing factor resulting in child-murder.[23] However, impoverished women were perceived as unwell as they did not fit into the Victorian ideology of femininity and thus were treated with increasing sympathy. This was because motherhood was such a strong Victorian ideal that only women who were in mental and social distress would commit acts such as infanticide and break away from the strongly implemented ideals of femininity and motherhood.[24] This section explores Victorian perceptions of poverty and illegitimacy as influencing factors of infanticide; whilst acknowledging societies’ increasing sympathetic responses to infanticidal women. Furthermore, this section analyses the way in which baby-farmers and infanticidal fathers were continually villainised in society.

Prior to the 1624 Infanticide Act equal numbers of mothers with legitimate and illegitimate offspring were tried with child-murder. However, after the 1634 statute the majority of mothers found guilty of infanticide were unmarried women, further suggesting that during the nineteenth century, illegitimacy was perceived to be associated with guilt and the mothers of illegitimate children were therefore more likely to be found guilty of infanticide in a court of law.[25] Nineteenth-century Christianity preached that, ‘virginity was not only an admirable human condition, but also the only appropriate state for an unmarried woman.’[26] The very existence of an illegitimate child would have deemed a woman in ‘poor mental state’, as the connection between female sexuality and insanity had been progressively woven into Victorian society.[27] Moreover, illegitimacy in the nineteenth century presented a threat to female reputation.

Thorn states that the Victorian period brought about a medical transformation in which the body of the infant became a vast source of medical knowledge and thus medicalised the criminal trial; consequently the judge and jury were no longer dependent on the mother’s testimony and were made reliant on the medical autopsy.[28] New medical understandings of the body and insanity led to the end of executions as a punishment for infanticide: the doctor’s testimony ensured that though the mother had been found guilty of infanticide she would not be sentenced to execution or become a public spectacle, but would be disciplined under the newly developing procedures of social welfare.[29] Therefore, the medicalisation of infanticide trials shaped the legislation surrounding child-murder and created a new classification of crime for infanticidal mothers. One doctor in 1865 stated that:

Above all let, women feel that they should not be visited with so much indignation for simple pregnancy as for murder… Let society, if possible, look on the fact of illegitimate pregnancy with a more forgiving eye, and pity at least the unhappy victims of seduction, or the otherwise innocent who may have fallen. Let such victims have their future course through life of a less hopeless character. [30]

This demonstrates an increasing sympathy toward infanticidal women. When illegitimacy was a factor, such women were regarded as victims of a discriminating society, as opposed to simply being irredeemably cruel. In the nineteenth century juries were reluctant to commit the infanticidal mother to death whom had suffered deplorable and distressing social conditions that were instrumental in her committing of the crime.[31] Nevertheless, the act of infanticide in itself contradicted the Victorian idealised role of femininity in which motherhood was seen as central to their identity.[32] Committing child-murder was perceived to be unnatural and society demanded a solution for the eradication of infanticide and punishment for the offender.[33]

The harshness of the Bastardy Clauses originating in the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act placed full moral responsibility for the illegitimacy of a child on the mother, ensuring that the mother carried the full financial burden of the child.[34] Therefore, illegitimacy and poverty can be perceived as a viable cause for the increase in infanticide.[35] Hoffer and Hull have argued that the 1624 Act to prevent the ‘Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children’ consequently became a motive for avoiding the ‘economic burdens of bastardy’ resulting in child-murder.[36] In order to understand the motives behind nineteenth-century infanticide, it is important to recognise the Victorian understandings of sexual liaisons and social practices connecting to marriage. The inherent abundance of shame in association with pre-marital fornication and the sexual ignorance apparent within nineteenth-century society created a platform upon which infanticide would be conceived as a viable option to combat illegitimacy.[37]  On 23 October 1851, The Morning Chronicle reported a case of infanticide near Bury St. Edmunds in which, ‘a young woman named Maria Stewart was charged, on her own confession, with the murder of her two illegitimate children’. The accused stated that:

It was born about 9 o’clock in the morning and was alive in the afternoon. When I laid hands on it, held it to my breast and let it suck it began to cackle and I thought someone would hear it, and that I must kill it. I put my hand over the mouth and nipped the throat with my fingers, and then took my garter and tied or put it around the neck so that it might die okay. I killed it because I thought I should not have a father for my child…It is the second little girl I have murdered, I strangled the both.[38]

This case illustrates that illegitimacy was Maria Stewart’s central reason behind the murder of her two children. Maria’s reasoning for murdering her two children is representative of the way in which illegitimate single mothers were ostracised from polite society.  The profound sensationalism of infanticidal cases in nineteenth-century publications scandalised child-murder and shaped the responses to infanticidal women portraying them as victims of illegitimacy and thus created an increasing sympathetic response to infanticidal mothers. [39]

Whilst infanticide was a criminal act, it was viewed as a lesser crime than that of the murder of an adult. This can be partly attributed to society’s observations of Victorian women and how they were generally regarded as acting under the extreme ‘pressures of poverty and social stigma’.[40] Poverty was a crucial factor that unquestionably contributed to women committing infanticide.[41] D’Cruze presents the case study of Sarah Cooper in 1847 in which poverty is shown to be the significant factor behind the murder of her child. The young women is said to have stood before the Central Criminal Court accused of murdering her new-born infant, her circumstances being ‘very bad indeed’, she showed no sign of having a regular occupation and thus no income. After she was in custody, a police sergeant stated that:

… it would not have happened had she not been in such a bad state of poverty, that she and her children had been starving all the winter…she said that the child was hers…that she must have fainted after she was delivered, and she had put it where it was found.[42]

In support of this, it is important to note that some mothers turned to infanticide as their last option to prevent the infant from growing up in a life of poverty and suffering. [43]  A mother’s act of intentional infanticide can therefore be seen as an emotional reaction and an act of love in order to stop the child from suffering as opposed to an act of inherent violence and cruelty. The police sergeant’s admission to Sarah Cooper’s distressing conditions further illustrates the changing perceptions of infanticidal women during this period and further demonstrates that mothers who committed infanticide as a result of poverty, were seen as victims of society and treated with increasing sympathy in the nineteenth century.

During the eighteenth century violence was an accepted code of male behaviour yet, upon the emergence of the Victorian period, violence became less tolerated in polite society.[44] Violence against children in the nineteenth century became much less tolerated as it contradicted the ideals of the new Victorian gentlemen and the expectations of a father as a moral protector.[45] Child-murder was a heinous criminal act committed historically by both parental figures yet, during the Victorian period the word ‘infanticide’ was labelled only on the murders committed by women.[46] Men accused of child-murder often killed their offspring in an attempt to conceal the evidence of their illicit sexual relations. Nonetheless, infanticide historians have often concentrated on unmarried mothers, whose fear of shame upon exposure of their illegitimate child had come to be associated with puerperal mania and infanticide. Men also attempted to evade association with illegitimate children either because they were married or they feared for their social positions.[47] Historian Jennifer Thorn discovered that there were around eighty articles written by The Times that document paternal child-murder between the years of 1807 and 1905; these articles described the murders as being, ‘committed largely by working-class fathers who reportedly strangled, stabbed, beat, and drowned their children’.[48]

Frost argues that the act of child-murder committed by men was less frequent in comparison to that of women and therefore has received much less historical attention.[49] Furthermore, Victorian masculinity encompassed the significance of male honour and ‘saw the pride and status of the patriarchal family’ at the central core of fatherhood; this transgression of the Victorian ideals of fatherhood became of significant importance in infanticide cases and thus shaped the way in which infanticidal men were perceived as a more severe threat to society than that of infanticidal women.[50] As a result of this, men suffered from fewer leniencies in court as a consequence of their violent aggression in order to conceal the shame of their infidelity.[51] It was assumed in the nineteenth century that men were sexual aggressors who ‘seduced women into falling’ and were therefore released from their parental responsibility. However, whilst women could claim to have committed infanticide as a result of insanity or poverty, men could not.[52]  Jackson has argued that men were to blame for tempting women into sexual acts more so than women were to blame for yielding to them and thus society held little sympathy for men in infanticide cases.[53] Furthermore historian Jade Shepherd states that murderous fathers were treated unsympathetically, as savage tyrants due to their inability to plead insanity as motivation behind the murder of their children.[54]

Male infanticide cases were very much dependent on the masculine characteristics of respectability and class. Frost argues that the higher the social standing of the accused gentleman, the more he had to lose as a result of an allegation of illegitimacy; the courts held very little sympathy for men in cases of infanticide as they held the strong belief that men were themselves responsible for their position in both society and familial situations.[55] The few accounts of child-murder committed by men during the nineteenth century provide insight into the ‘ideological pressures and fears underlying constructions of fatherhood’ that existed during this period. Whilst the press and popular fiction often represented the infanticidal mother as a young single woman in stifling poverty, men were usually depicted as violent, hostile and unable to provide for their families, a complete contrast to the idealised Victorian gentleman.[56] As Jackson has argued, women were seen as ‘passive, compassionate, pitiable, and innocent victims of society’s heathen principles and of men’s criminally cruel behaviour… acknowledged in part by the wider public.’[57] This further illustrates the lack of sympathy for men accused of child-murder and demonstrates society’s perception of the infanticidal father as a violent aggressor. One of the chief motivations behind fatherly violence came as a consequence of objecting to pay for financial support, despite the Victorian ideals of masculinity that inherently obliged men to provide for their family.[58]  Men were more frequently executed for infanticide unlike women; this was often due to women being able to claim postpartum ‘mania’ and puerperal insanity whilst men were unable to do so.[59] Victorian courts considered that men were able to obtain sufficient amounts of self-control in regards to violent behaviour. [60] Hunter in 1783 argued that, ‘the father of the child is really criminal, often cruelly so; the mother is weak credulous and deluded’.[61] This suggests that the attitude towards men was one of continuity while that toward women changed throughout the century becoming much more understanding and lenient in their attitudes to infanticidal women.

Nevertheless, infanticidal fathers and baby-farmers were continuously villainised in the Victorian period in contrast to the way in which infanticidal mothers were treated. By the mid-1800s resourceful women from within the working-classes began establishing child minding businesses in exchange for payment. These businesses were commonly known as baby-farms and allowed single unmarried women to continue in employment and function within the public sphere.[62] Established baby-farms often ran on overstrained resources and as a consequence resulted in an extremely low standard of care for the infants.[63] For the majority of people during the nineteenth century, seeking out a baby-farm was usually a last resort and was, ‘probably restricted to unmarried mothers…and social outcasts such as casual prostitutes or members of the petty criminal classes’.[64] Nevertheless, the children in these late-Victorian enterprises were dying at alarmingly high rates and the ‘farms’ were soon exposed as corrupt and murderous trades.[65]

Commonly known as ‘she-butchers’ in the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century baby-farmers were a consequence of societal anxiety surrounding ‘over-breeding’ within the poorer classes. Baby-farming was a pejorative term that grouped together all working-class females involved in the same criminal class.

[n]o respectable woman . . . would have called herself a baby farmer, ‘Baby farming’ was an accusation, not a profession. In normal usage, the term conflated the criminal acts of wilful murderers with the daily labor of honest nurses. [66]

It is significant to note that Annie Cossins villainises the term ‘baby farmer’ when she states that, ‘[n]o respectable woman . . . would have called herself a baby farmer’ suggesting that the mothers were exempt from blame in cases of infanticide that occurred within baby-farms. Printed in the early 1860s, this poem reveals the public’s abhorrence to Mrs Winsor’s baby-farm and is representative of society’s repugnance to the baby-farming industry during the nineteenth century.

This dreadful woman, Charlotte Winsor,

Took children in to nurse,

A devil she was in human form

We could not call her worse;

She would tamper with their young mother,

With if you would like to pay,

For a few pounds, say three of four,

I will put your child away.

Those children belong to some poor girl

That has been led astray.

Mrs. Winsor would take them to nurse

As long as they would pay.

She would murder them – yes, strangle them

For this paltry gain,

By putting them between beds,

Or pressing the juglar vein.[67]

It is significant to note that the poem presents the mother of the child as a victim of the baby-farming industry when it states that the mother has been ‘led astray’ and is supportive of the ongoing argument that society increasingly sympathised with the infant’s mother. Additionally, the ‘baby-farmer’ is endlessly associated with blame similarly to that of the infanticidal father. The interesting use of language by the poet such as ‘young mother’ and ‘poor girl’ suggests that it was perceived by Victorian society that only young, single, vulnerable women living in poverty sought out baby-farms as a desperate solution to rid themselves of shame.

Motherhood was seen as central to the construction of female identity in the nineteenth century, therefore, female ‘baby-farmers’ in this period juxtaposed these strongly implemented feminine ideals.[68] ‘The Execution of Mrs Winsor’, demonstrates the Victorian anxieties surrounding child-murder and the conflict between femininity and motherhood in the fourth stanza when it states:

While the babes on her would smile,

She would kiss and feed him tenderly,

And murder all the while.[69]

Anxiety around illegitimate children and the practice of baby-farming erupted in the late 1860s and the women involved became objects of scorn and derision.[70] On 25 September 1867, The Pall Mall Gazette stressed that ‘care of illegitimate children has become a regular trade’ and that the death of a child whilst in the care of a baby-farm was often a ‘happy release’ for the parent.[71] The press’s evaluation of the nineteenth-century baby-farm suggests that these establishments murdered children upon the instruction of the mother(s) and therefore should carry the same amount of blame as infanticidal fathers. Nevertheless, the language presented in the first stanza of the poem ‘Baby-Farming Mothers Bewareis illustrative of society’s attitudes towards Victorian mothers and the ‘baby-farming’ trade during the nineteenth century:

Oh, mothers, fond mothers your attention I pray.

And listen a while to a pitiful late. It’s a out baby farming a scandalous trade.

And shocking disclosures have a lately been made.

Near Brixton in Surrey this system so base.

Has at last! Been discovered a social disgrace.[72]

The phrases such as, ‘scandalous trade’ and ‘social disgrace’ are representative of the societal distain against the new found practice and thus become a contradiction of the Victorian familial ideals of gentility and sensibility. [73] The language used in this poem demonstrates the continuation of the idealisation of motherhood when it describes the parental figures as ‘fond mothers’. As a result of the Victorian ideals of motherhood ‘baby-farming women’ were seen as transgressors of their natural roles as women and thus presented a threat to society as they prevented mothers from fulfilling their natural duty. Consequently, baby-farmers were villainised by society and were judged with more severity than infanticidal mothers.

Perceptions of poverty and illegitimacy as justified causes of infanticide shaped the way in which infanticidal women were viewed in the nineteenth century. Men of the courts increasingly anticipated that infanticidal women were, ‘young, poor… naive victims of a wily seducer’ and thus justified the sympathetic treatment they received.[74] Perceptions of infanticidal women have fashioned more sympathetic reactions from society as shown by the poems in Appendix 1 and 2 which villainise the baby-farming industry. Furthermore, society’s perception of male infanticide as a villainous crime further weakened the impact of female infanticide; the medicalisation of insanity ensured that ‘mad’ women were being medically diagnosed as insane and were no longer a threat to the Victorian ideals of motherhood. [75] Furthermore, society’s perception of infanticidal fathers as ‘criminally cruel’ suggests the possibility that the nineteenth century saw an increasing shift away from the infanticidal woman as ‘bad’ and instead seeing them as victims of insanity and society.[76] Moreover, the transgression of the Victorian ideals of fatherhood became of significant importance in infanticide cases and thus shaped the way in which infanticidal men were perceived as a more severe threat to society than that of infanticidal women. In the Victorian period women were seen as ‘innocent victims of society’s heathen principles and of men’s criminally cruel behaviour.’[77] There was substantial emphasis on the mother’s ‘natural capacity for love and nurture’ and as a result, the nineteenth century saw a growing shift of sympathy for infanticidal mothers who were seen as victims of insanity or of society itself.

 

Mad?

Alongside the understanding that poverty and illegitimacy caused infanticide, child-murder was also perceived to be a product of insanity in the nineteenth century. The 1800s saw significant changes in the legislation of the Lunacy Acts. The Lunacy Act of 1845 and the County Asylums Act of 1845 combined to form mental health law in England and Wales.[78] Their most significant provision was in categorising mentally ill people as patients in order to stop the abuse of the insane; patients were admitted to licensed premises and institutionalised care was established for lunatics in public asylums.[79] This act was revisited in 1853 and ensured that a medical examination and certificate was to be issued and signed by a medical practitioner when administrating a patient to an asylum.[80] Finally, the Lunacy Act of 1890 generated a set of rules evoking legal controls over the psychiatric admissions of private patients.[81] The newly founded legislation of the Lunacy Acts during the course of the nineteenth century demonstrates the ongoing formal treatment of insanity during the Victorian era. This formalised treatment of the ‘insane’ enabled the Criminal Justice System to utilise the new medical advances in mental illness to diagnose women with puerperal insanity and which constituted an ‘appropriate charge’ in place of a prison sentence.[82] The emergence of ‘moral insanity’ into the medical profession saw the appearance of a body of ‘alienists’ whose job was to identify and treat mental conditions. This section assesses perceptions of insanity and establishes insanity as the chief influential factor in cases of infanticide during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, this section evidences that there was a growing sympathy for infanticidal mothers in Victorian Britain.

Puerperal insanity became a popular topic amongst ‘alienists’ and by the middle of the nineteenth century it had been readily implemented into the discourse of insanity.[83] The 1800s saw an increasing development of medicine as a natural science consequently leading to the rise of the medical profession and the specialisation of mental illnesses.[84] The medicalisation of infanticidal cases in the nineteenth century was dependent on medical professionals ‘pathologising’ puerperal mania, consequently treating the accused as subjects of ‘medical rather than legal attention and treatment rather than punishment’.[85] In the nineteenth century, the role of doctors as witnesses in infanticide trials became increasingly prominent; this was a consequence of the complex forensic evidence they were required to provide; in the case of doctors whom worked in mental asylums legal proceedings such as infanticide trials could be considered opportunities to improve their status and repertoire.[86]

This section assesses perceptions of insanity and establishes insanity as the chief influential factor in cases of infanticide during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, this section evidences that there was a growing sympathy for infanticidal mothers in Victorian Britain as a result of the increasing awareness of mental health disorders.

On the 10 October 1881, Catherine (Kate) Rumsby from Hertford was accused of the murder of her new-born infant. The case demonstrates the newly founded importance of the doctor in infanticide trials. The attending registered medical practitioner, George Marshall Phillips, concurred that:

the umbilical cord was broken off and had not been tied. There was a long abrasion on the front of the neck about the length and width of a finger, blood on the brain, bruises to the right hand side of the face and blood in the ear. Both lungs inflated and were filling up the cavity of the chest nearly covering the pericardia. The ten portions of arms and legs were immersed in hot water sufficiently long enough to solidify the flesh. There were patches of blood on the accused’s dress corresponding to the size of the placenta.[87]

Doctor Phillips confirmed that the bruising on the forehead and blood on the brain were sufficient to cause death and that the lungs were capable of working upon birth. He also stated that he could not verify that the umbilical cord had been severed before death. The bruising on the top of the infant’s cranium, as Doctor Phillips stated ‘may have been caused by the child falling on the floor not in birth.’ The remains of the infant were found in two separate places, the head and the torso in a paper box and the remaining limbs in a cooking pot upon the kitchen stove. Medical practitioner George Phillips deducted that the violent mutilation and trauma to the body were a consequence of the mother’s insanity and concluded that Catherine Rumsby was in a ‘state of much mental distress and excitement at the time of the murder’.[88] In 1859, Forbes Winslow, writing about puerperal insanity, argued that subsequent to giving birth the woman’s temper ‘changes completely, and family affection is apparently changed into the bitterest hatred; this is particularly observed as regards the child, which the mother often attempts to destroy.’[89] Catherine Rumsby pleaded not guilty of infanticide in court. Although a conviction on this case could not be found it might be considered that as a result of the statements given by Doctor Phillips and the apparent Victorian anxieties surrounding puerperal mania, Miss Rumsby may have been confined to an asylum as a result of suffering from puerperal insanity. In 1815, historian William Hunter declared that, ‘it is only murder when it is executed with some degree of cool judgement, and wicked intention. When committed under phrenzy from despair, can it be more offensive in the sight of God, than under a phrenzy from a fever, or in lunacy?’ In addition to this, Hunter also stated that, ‘the insane are not to be held responsible for their actions’.[90] The case of Catherine Rumsby provides evidence to suggest that insanity was perceived to be the main influencing factor behind her act of infanticide.

Victorian notions of femininity understood the female body to be associated with unconditional love and nurture of her husband and offspring.[91] These illustrations of the ideal women were based upon images of motherhood, domesticity and passive obedience, compared to ‘the sexually aggressive harlot’ exiled from society as a consequence of defying the Victorian codes of conduct that deemed their behaviour as ‘irrational’ or ‘wicked’. Women who denied ideological codes of behaviour were understood as ‘becoming more like the animal within, she was a mythical figure of power and destruction, selling her soul to the powers of Darkness.’[92] The behaviour of mothers suffering from puerperal insanity was shocking to Victorian society as their unsettling and frightening behaviour became a risk to new-born children, a time when the young infant is in constant need of its mother’s care and protection. ‘The hand that rocked the cradle was also the hand that slapped, smothered or strangled the infant’, as women suffering from insanity put their baby at risk of injury and even fatality.[93]

During the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘child-murder became a modern secret…the modernity of this secret was signalled in the vigorous publicity that surrounded it: everybody was talking about how no one was willing to talk about it.’[94] In 1862, William Burke Ryan described his first-hand account of living in a time of heightened infanticide rates.

[T]he feeble wail of murdered childhood in its agony assails our ears at every turn, and is borne on every breeze. The sight is horrified as, day after day, the melancholy catalogue of murders meets the view, and we try to turn away the gaze in hope of some momentary relief. But turn where we may, still we are met by the evidence of a widespread crime. In the quiet of the bedroom we raise the box-lid, and the skeletons are there. In the calm evening walk we see in the distance the suspicious-looking bundle, and the mangled infant within. By the canal side, or in the water, we find the dead child. In solitude of the wood we are horrified by the ghastly sight; and if we betake ourselves to the rapid rail in order to escape the pollution, we find a journey’s end that the mouldering remains of a murdered innocent have been our travelling companion; and that the odour from that unsuspected parcel truly indicates what may be found within.[95]

The Victorian era was a period surrounded by an atmosphere of elevated anxieties concerning the endangerments of childbirth ‘and threats to the sanctity of the bourgeois home offered an ideal medium for it to take hold and flourish’.[96] The period saw the introduction of the new term and medical jargon ‘puerperal insanity’ and ‘puerperal mania’ into medical texts which incorporated the newly established forms of mental illness associated with childbirth.[97] Expectant mothers before the introduction of ‘puerperal insanity’ were still thought to fall victim to mental disorders, such as hysteria.[98] Women’s biological weaknesses that had been medically determined in the nineteenth century were thought to have put them at risk of developing insanity during pregnancy or subsequently months after giving birth due to their weakened mental state.[99]

Giving birth in the Victorian era was increasingly described as, ‘dangerous and pathological rather than normal and natural’; in his introduction to ‘Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery’, Robert Lee states that that all women were ‘exposed to great suffering and danger during pregnancy and childbirth’.[100] Although the disorder became a complete contradiction to the social norms of behaviour during this period, puerperal insanity became so frequently identified by male medical professionals that it became an accepted accomplice to the process of giving birth.[101] The new medical jargon and legislation surrounding insanity and puerperal mania ensured that childbirth was perceived to be a threat to new mothers and also became a ‘successful defence strategy’ in infanticide cases during this period.[102] The Victorian period saw the introduction of the term ‘puerperal insanity’ and its use in both a medical and social setting; violent mania, severe melancholia, or postpartum dysphoria were accredited by physicians to be accepted as a common consequence of childbirth.[103] In the 1880s the eminent psychiatrist Thomas Clouston described how childbirth, ‘One of the most joyous times of life is made full of anxiety and the strongest affection on earth is then often suddenly converted by disease into an antipathy: for the mother not only ‘forgets her suckling child’, but often becomes a danger to its life’.[104] In 1848, James Reid, physician to the General Lying-in Hospital in London, described how:

the mothers urged on by some unaccountable impulse to commit violence on herself or on her offspring… the infant is usually the object … in puerperal insanity; an impulse to destroy, haunts the mind continually, and struggles with maternal tenderness… The sufferer, in some cases, implores that the infant may be removed from her, lest she should altogether lose her self-control, and is heard praying to heaven to prevent her from yielding temptation.[105]

It is significant to note the juxtaposition of the emotional and dispassionate language used by Reid, when he refers to children as the ‘object’ and cause of the mothers suffering yet, he discusses ‘maternal tenderness’, juxtaposing ‘puerperal insanity’ with ‘maternal tenderness’.[106]

In the case of Rose Earle for the murder of her new-born child (in Appendix 3) who was also named Rose Earle in Liverpool October 1899, (by cutting of the throat) the mother is explicitly described as showing extreme physical signs of insanity. Medical Officer (MO) Arthur Price stated that:

Her general health has not been good. She has been depressed in her manners subject to outbursts of crying, swinging of the hands and generally chewing…She also suffers from delusions to the effect that God told her to kill her child to save it from suffering and she hears impossible voices urging her to commit suicide, says she must die as she is not fit to live…I consider her to be unsound of mind.[107]

Rose Earle’s apparent affection and maternal tenderness for the child was demonstrated when she stated that she must save it from ‘suffering’. The MO’s evaluation of her physical symptoms and emotional verbal outbursts demonstrates the changing nature of how women were perceived to have developed insanity during the nineteenth century as a result of giving birth. [108] In addition to this, the certificate (in Appendix 3) provides evidence to suggest that the medicalisation of insanity born of the nineteenth century shaped the way in which infanticidal women were treated in court. The certificate confirms that Miss Earle was incarcerated in the Liverpool Lunatic Asylum in 1899.

Marland states ‘that doctors saw infanticide as an actual symptom of puerperal insanity, so prevalent was the extraordinarily deranged and dangerous behaviour of the women, expressed in sexual obscenity, filthy language, self-neglect, attempted suicide and violence to others.’[109] This can be evidenced through the confinement of women to asylums as punishment for infanticidal crimes in replacement of execution. Subsequent to both the mental and physical pain of giving birth, new mothers were seen as predisposed to developing deranged, neglectful and violent behaviour. Thus, they became a risk to themselves, their family members and most importantly their new-born infant(s). These behaviour traits were categorised as mental conditions and labelled as puerperal insanity or mania. This newly established diagnosis in new mothers led to its increasing use in defence of the mother in cases of infanticide in the Criminal Courts.[110] Furthermore, Logan states that, ‘deliberate infanticide by a sane woman has far different connotations from the unaccountability of a random act prompted by insanity,’ further demonstrating the ongoing understanding of mental health and how this resulted in growing sympathy for infanticidal mothers in the nineteenth century. [111]

In the case of Bridget Doyle accused of the murder of Ellen Doyle in Liverpool in 1899, the witness statement from Mrs Doyle’s eight year old son John shows that the accused made statements such as ‘Oh my Jesus, begin today tomorrow is too late.’ After that she remained in a kneeling position on the bed and seemed to be praying silently until 4 o’clock the next morning when she said, ‘the devil is coming into me and it is not Kate Holland.’[112] The accused was, according to young John Doyle, ‘sitting on the floor bleeding from a wound in her throat and the deceased lying a little to the right in a pool of blood.’ Bridget Doyle was under mental observation since her reception on 27 September 1899 and was assessed by Medical Officer Arthur Price who found her to be:

very violent, behaving in an excited maniacal fashion shouting incoherently. It had been necessary to transfer her to prison in a strait jacket, restraint was continued for two days when she became stuporous…She still refuses to speak nor has she spoken since I have seen her. I consider her to be unsound of mind.[113]

Though the incriminating evidence suggests that Bridget Doyle was guilty of the murder of her child and thus of infanticide the certificate in Appendix 4 demonstrates that Bridget Doyle was ‘unfit to plead’ and was ‘to be detained in strict custody as a criminal lunatic until her Majesty’s pleasures be known’. Bridget Doyle’s indefinite confinement to a lunatic asylum in Liverpool as punishment for her crime further supports the argument that the changing legislation of insanity shaped responses to infanticidal mothers and created a more ‘sympathetic approach’ in infanticidal trials as a result of the medicalisation of insanity.[114]

Puerperal mania was of great interest to psychiatrists during this period as it not only ‘developed their theories which tied women’s mental disturbances to their intrinsic weakness and the rigours of reproductions, but also linked women to a wider range of social, environmental and moral factors’.[115] It was mania which appeared most frequently in infanticide cases with its, ‘temporary nature and sudden onset, typified by the struggle that mothers felt… between not wanting to harm their infants and the inability to prevent themselves from doing so’.[116] This can be evidenced in the case of Mary Harrison who was charged with the murder of her two children on the 28 September 1894 at the parish of Bootle in the County of Cumberland; her charge reads as follows, ‘She did feloniously wilfully and of her malice afterthought did kill and murder one Hannah Mary James and John Harrison against the peace of our Sovereign Lady the Queen her Crown and Dignity.’ Upon questioning at H. M. Prison Carlisle on 11 October 1894, the accused stated that:

On Friday morning last I brought my children down stairs soon after my husband had left the house. I got a step ladder and put it against the water tub. I went up the ladder with Hannah Mary and baby in my arms. I got into the water with them I held them in the water until they were dead. I intended to drown myself but the water in the barrel was not deep enough… I have been troubled in my mind for the last three years…I told Hannah Mary I was going to drown them both she cried bitterly and said oh mamma mamma don’t. I now sincerely regret I have done… I hope the lord will forgive me.[117]

Women who suffered from puerperal insanity often displayed outbursts of deranged and dangerous behaviour such as ‘attempted suicide and violence to others’ as displayed by Mary Harrison.[118] The Victorian period saw a general consensus about puerperal insanity and its sub-divisions: Melancholia, ‘a form of intense misery which was likely to result in permanent insanity’ and Mania, ‘distinguished by overexcited, disruptive and deviant behaviour, usually curable within a few months.’[119] Mary Harrison’s initial regret for the murders of both her children in her confession provides confirmation that she was suffering from mania; her apparent ignorance to her child’s cries at the time of the murders suggests a poor emotional and mental state and that she may have been suffering from post-partum melancholia. Furthermore in a statement made by J. A. Campbell the Medical Superintendent of Cumberland and Hertfordshire concludes that, ‘Mary Harrison was insane at the time her two children were drowned on September 28th 1894’. [120] This is further supported by the certificate in Appendix 5 in which the verdict reads that Mary Harrison was ‘Found insane on arraignment by a jury duly empanelled for this purpose’ and certifies that the accused will be, ‘detained in custody until Her Majesty’s pleasure shall be known’. The courts verdict in response to Mary Harrison’s exhibit of insane behaviour further illustrates that there was a growing recognition and perception of insanity that shaped the responses to infanticidal women in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the treatment of Mary Harrison as a victim of insanity in conjunction with the case studies of Rose Earle and Bridget Doyle demonstrates that the newly perceived consequences of insanity became the most important factor in cases of infanticide in nineteenth-century Britain.

The ambiguity surrounding the definition of puerperal mania contrasts the increasing levels of precision that were used in the establishment of procedures evaluating the circumstances of new-born infant mortality; this included establishing the difference between stillborn infants and those who had been born alive. It was difficult to establish evidence whether the child had breathed independently from the mother, whether strangulation by the umbilical cord was accidental and occurred during the birthing process, or whether the infant had been deliberately suffocated.[121] This can be seen in the case against Florence Dolman who at the parish of South Bearsted in the county of Sussex on the 15 March 1881 ‘did feloniously wilfully and of her malice aforethought did kill and murder a certain female infant child born of her body’. After Dolman’s employer discovered the body of the new-born infant, Dr Samuel Maughan was called to the scene and noted:

There was blood in serval places of the carpet in the small room. I saw two boxes underneath the basin on the shelf, upon opening the box I found the body of a female child. The child had the head turned downwards, it was dead but quite warm. On examining the body, I found two wounds on the neck (one either side). The wound on the right was 2-2.5 inches long, deep. Superficial on the left around 1 inch. The windpipe and the gullet were both severed underneath the skin. The head was bruised at the back, potentially from birth. They did a test hydrostatic, the lung floated. I cannot say whether the child was fully born when the wounds were inflicted but it had respired. The deep wounds had the appearance of being done with scissors. I saw the scissors at the time on the floor…The right wound was such as would have caused death had the child been born alive. The umbilical cord was torn about 3 inches from the trunk. There was a loose piece about 6 inches long in the same vessel as the after birth. This appeared to have been cut. Jugular veins had been divided but not the main artery, assuming the child was born alive the wounds would have been fatal. There is not medical proof of the child being born alive. I think the wounds may have been inflicted before the child was fully born by the mother, I have heard of such cases and believe it to be possible.[122]

The denial of either pregnancy or of the new-born infant there after often resulted in the death of the infant.[123] Miss Dolman when approached by Dr Maughan and asked about the child said ‘I have not had one.’ Upon asking a second time the accused simply denied having had the child. Her denial further illustrates her weakened mental state. Although the verdict for this case could not be found, it demonstrates the difficulties that both medical and legal professionals had in finding concrete evidence to convict women of infanticide in the nineteenth century, as Dr Maughan could not find ‘medical proof of the child being born alive’.[124] Sit, Rothschild and Wisner stated that patients involved in cases of infanticide often ‘denied their pregnancy and the pain of childbirth; they often experienced dissociative hallucinations, brief amnesia, and depersonalization’.[125] Moreover, the case of Florence Dolman provides evidence to support that the changing legislation of the Infanticide Acts in the nineteenth century increased convictions of concealment of birth which further supports the fact that there was an ever increasingly sympathetic reaction to the infanticidal mother in the Victorian period.

To further illustrate the difficulties in evidencing still-birth and infanticide it is important to note that all forms of abortion were illegal. However, abortion after the fifth month of pregnancy remained a capital crime throughout the nineteenth century.[126] Nevertheless, unwanted pregnancies often resulted in abortions at all different stages of pregnancy; some desperate women who lacked networks in order to have an abortion resorted to infanticide.[127] Thorn describes the killing of new-born bastard infants during this time period as a ‘kind of belated birth control, regrettable but nonetheless understandable’.[128] In 1862, George Graves noted that the law’s classification of live birth in contrast to stillbirth could be seen ‘in the eye of the law of England, that it is, no crime to strangle a child with a cord, to smash its skull with a hammer, or to cut its throat from ear to ear… [if] its lower extremities are at the time within the body of the mother’.[129] Using Graves’s statement as a platform for the perceptions of society in the Victorian period, the case of Florence Dolman becomes representative of a more prominent sympathetic reaction to infanticide in cases of belated abortion.

The changes to the legislation of the Lunacy Acts during the nineteenth century had a profound effect on the establishment of the mentally ill as medical patients; further supported by historian Michael Foucault who has argued that madness has been understood to be a ‘phenomenon assessable and resolvable within the terms of the nineteenth-century explanatory programmes of chemistry, physics and biology’ and that prior to the nineteenth century there were no specific scientific regulations that classified a diagnosis of insanity.[130] Thus the medicalisation of insanity in this period created a more protective environment for the patients and established an improvement in their care in institutionalised asylums.[131] The case of Florence Dolman demonstrates the difficulty that doctors had in evidencing that the child was alive after birth in conjunction to establishing still-births in infanticide cases. Moreover, the cases of Rose Earle and Mary Harrison provides evidence to demonstrate that women who were accused of infanticide in the nineteenth century could now be verified as victims of a mental disorder and in association, not be convicted on a murder charge but treated more sympathetically escaping the death penalty.[132] The growing recognition and perception of insanity in the nineteenth century shaped the responses to infanticidal women and the way in which patients were treated in a court of law and by medical professionals.[133] This new found perception of puerperal mania as a mental illness shaped the way in which women were treated in infanticide trials evoking an increased sympathetic response from both judge and jury.[134] Similarly, the newly established language around ‘puerperal mania’ and ‘puerperal insanity’ demonstrates a shift away from the historical perceptions of hysteria and insanity that attacked women for their madness towards a more medicalised diagnosis and thus provided justification for infanticidal crimes.

 

Conclusion

Victorian periodicals sensationalised crimes of infanticide linked to illegitimacy and poverty in the nineteenth century. Acknowledging women as the victims of distressing social conditions shaped the way in which infanticidal women were received with compassion in both the criminal courts and in society. Although, illegitimacy juxtaposed the Victorian ideals of femininity and motherhood, single vulnerable mothers were seen to be victims of men who were perceived in the nineteenth century to be sexual aggressors and thus infanticidal women were treated with increasing sympathy.

Infanticidal fathers challenged the new-found ideologies of fatherhood as a moral protector and were treated with a greater sense of hostility both in society and in the court of law. Victorian society became progressively lenient towards the crime of infanticide when committed by women as a consequence of suffering from emotionally distressing conditions such as insanity, poverty and illegitimacy and therefore shaped society’s responses to infanticidal women. Nevertheless, female baby-farmers were treated with greater hostility as they juxtaposed the construct of motherhood that was seen as central to female identity in the nineteenth century. Additionally, female baby-famers were continuously villainised during this period as they disrupted the duty of other mothers and presented a threat to society. Male offenders accused of infanticide and the proprietors of baby-farms were punitively judged in society and were increasingly portrayed in a negative light as they became a threat to the Victorian ideologies and society’s well-being. Although the majority of the people accused of infanticide were women, it is significant to note that infanticidal fathers were also tried for the crime. Even though there were significantly fewer cases of infanticide committed by fathers during the course of the nineteenth century, men were treated considerably harsher than women in court as a consequence of transgressing the moral codes of masculine behaviour.

Nineteenth-century Britain saw a period of increased anxiety around child-murder; female infanticide was an act of emotional desperation in response to distressing social conditions. Newly established medical knowledge and recognised treatments of the insane confirmed society’s perception of insanity as the most influential factor instigating child-murder in this period. The new-found perception of puerperal mania as a mental illness fashioned the way in which women were treated in infanticide trials with an increasingly sympathetic response from both judge and jury. The social constructs of femininity by Victorian definition, similar to those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contained women to the domestic sphere and defined women as being, ‘virginal, passive and obedient’.[135] Insanity became a threat to Victorian society and  a solution was therefore needed. Overall, there were shifts in the nineteenth century in how infanticide was viewed; there was a growing recognition of the impact of insanity, poverty and illegitimacy in shaping the actions of mothers who killed their babies.

Appendices

Appendix 1:

Anon, ‘The Execution of Mrs Winsor’ (1865), in M. Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000 (Aldershot, 2002)

You mothers all, come listen to me,

While a dreadful tale I tell.

Of all she crimes upon this earth,

This one does all excel.

Children slaughter’d fearlessly,

And by a woman’s hand,

Just for the sake of getting gold,

This woman you command.

 

This dreadful woman, Charlotte Winsor,

Took children in to nurse,

A Devil she was in human form,

We could not call her worse;

She would tamper with their young mother,

With if you would like to pay,

For a few pounds, say three or four,

I will put your child away.

 

Those children belong to some poor girl,

That had been led astray,

Mrs. Winsor would take them to nurse,

As long as they would pay.

She would murder them – yes, strangle them,

For this paltry gain,

By putting them between beds,

Or pressing the juglar vein.

 

What must this wretch’s feelings be,

While the babes on her would smile,

She would kiss and feed him tenderly,

And murder all the while.

She would tamper with their motuers,

And of them beg and pray,

With get four pounds together dear,

And your child shall die to day.

 

She stifled one just three weeks old,

Jane Harris, she would say,

You will never see them after,

They will sink in the Torquay.

Dead children tell no tales,

And cause no more strife,

And with children smiling on her,

She would take away their life.

 

No one knows this woman’s crime,

Bet God’s a l eeing eye,

But justice overtook her,

And for these crimes she died.

The tempter and the murderess,

As you see by these lioes,

As gone to face their Maker,

And to answer for her crimes.

Appendix 2:

Anonymous, ‘Baby Farming Mothers Beware’ (London, 1871), in P. Chassaigne and W. Heppel, ‘Popular Representations of Crime: The Crime Broadside – A Subculture of Violence in Victorian Britain?’ Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, 3/2 (1999), pp. 23-55.

Oh, mothers, fond mothers your attention
I pray.
And listen awhile to a pitiful lay.
It’s a out baby farming, a scandalous trade,
And shocking disclosures have lately been made,
Near Brixton, in Surrey, this system so base,
Has at last! been discovered, a social disgrace.

Then mothers, fond mothers, of your children take care,
And against baby farming I pray you beware.

What is baby farming, some mothers may say
Tis a practice that takes a poor infant away
From the care of it’s mother by a stranger instead,
The poor little creature is foster’d and bred.
It encourages vice and [?] I won’t name,
Tis a means to get rid of the offspring o’shame.

Sometimes a young woman has been led astray,
Sends the child of her guilt to be out of the way.
She pays a few pounds, tis a bargain, and then
She gives it up never to see it again,
While the indolent wife in luxury fed,
Pays a stranger to suckle her offspring instead

In a Terrace, at Brixton, two sisters did dwell
And of their sad doings the newspapers tell.
How they tempted poor mothers their offspring to leave,
To their tender care, but alas to deceive.
They starved them to death, for of late has been found.
The bodies of infants in the fields there around.

Poor children half-naked, their state we deplore,
Too weak for to stand, they laid on the floor
Unwashed and neglected by night and by day,
Till their dear little souls from life pass away
And what cared the nurse for the dead ones, [?]
The [?] of a child, why a saving would be.

Will the hen drive the chicken from under under her wing,
And leave it to perish, the poor little thing,
Or will dumb brutes desert their offspring, ah ! no,
What proofs of affection animals show.
Yes mothers alas their children will slay,
Or else pay another to put it away.

Appendix 3:

Rose Earle Certificate. The National Archives, ASSI 52/44, Murder: Earle, Rose (Infanticide), 1899.

Appendix 4:

Bridget Doyle Certificate. The National Archives, ASSI 52/43, Murder: Doyle, Bridget (Infanticide), 1899.

Appendix 5:

Mary Harrison Certificate. The National Archives, ASSI 52/20, Murder: Harrison, Mary (Infanticide), 1894.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Anonymous, ‘The Case of Infanticide Near Bury St. Edmund’s’, The Morning Chronicle, 23 October 1851, Issue 26478, in British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800-1900.

Anonymous, ‘Baby-Farming Mothers Beware’ (1871) in P. Chassaigne and W. Heppel, ‘Popular Representations of Crime: The Crime Broadside – A Subculture of Violence in Victorian Britain?’ Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, 3/2 (1999), pp. 42-43.

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Thorn, J., ‘Introduction: Stories of Child-Murder, Stories of Print’, in Thorn, J. (ed.), Writing British Infanticide Child-Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722-1859 (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 13-42.

Tosh, J., Manliness and Masculinities: Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow, 2005).

Trowbridge S. and Knowles, T., Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2015).

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[1] N. Goc, Women, Infanticide and the Press, 1822-1922: News Narratives in England and Australia (Surrey, 2013), p. 1.

[2] S. Wilson, ‘Infanticide, Child Abandonment, and Female Honour in Nineteenth-Century Corsica’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30/4 (1988), p. 762.

[3] A. A. Kilday, History of Infanticide in Britain, c. 1600 to the Present (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), p. 2.

[4] R. G. Fuchs, Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2005), p. 192.

[5] A. R. Higginbotham, ‘Sin of the Age: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London’, Victorian Studies, 32/3 (1989) p. 319.

[6] Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, pp. 99-100.

[7] Fuchs, Gender and Poverty p. 99.

[8] Goc, Women, Infanticide and the Press, p. 1.

[9] Higginbotham, ‘Sin of the Age’, p. 320.

[10] J. Thorn, ‘Introduction: Stories of Child-Murder, Stories of Print’, in J. Thorn (ed.), Writing British Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722-1859 (Newark, 2003), p. 13.

[11] H. Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder? Puerperal Insanity, Infanticide and the Defence Plea’, in M. Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000 (Aldershot, 2002), p. 169.

[12] J. Shepherd, ‘“One of the Best Fathers until He Went Out of His Mind”: Paternal Child-Murder, 1864 –1900’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18 (2013), p. 17.

  1. Shepherd, Institutionalizing the Insane in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 2014), p. 9.
  2. Mauger, The Cost of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public, Voluntary and Private Asylum Care (Basingstoke, 2018), p. 155.

[13] I. Loudon, ‘Puerperal Insanity in the 19th Century’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 81 (1988), p. 76.

[14] Anon., ‘19th Century Mental Health’, National Health Service (2014), <http://www.ashfordstpeters.nhs.uk/19th-century-mental-health>, accessed 16.01.2018.

[15] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 173.

[16] A. Loughnan, ‘The “Strange” Case of the Infanticide Doctrine’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 32 (2012), p. 690.

[17] Kilday, A History of Infanticide in Britain, p. 167.

For more information on infanticide and execution see: J. Gregory, Victorians Against the Gallows: Capital Punishment and the Abolitionist Movement in Nineteenth Century Britain (New York, 2011).

[18] S. D’Cruze, Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850-1950: Gender and Class (Essex, 2000), p. 58.

[19] M. L. Arnot, ‘The Murder of Thomas Sandles: Meanings of a Mid-Nineteenth-Century Infanticide’, in Jackson (ed.), Infanticide, p. 150.

  1. L. Berry, The Child, The State and The Victorian Novel (Charlottesville, 1999), p. 179.

[20] L. M. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (New Jersey, 1989), p. 88.

[21] Thorn, ‘Introduction’, p. 28.

[22] Arnot, ‘The Murder of Thomas Sandles’, p. 150.

[23] J. Kelly, ‘Responding to Infanticide in Ireland, 1680–1820’, in E. Farrell, She said she was in the family way’: Pregnancy and Infancy in Modern Ireland (London, 2012), p. 189.

Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 99.

  1. Andrews and A. Digby (eds.), Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry (New York, 2004), p. 109.

[24] Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 100.

For more on motherhood and maternal instincts see: A. Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction & the New Woman (Oxford, 2003), p. 176.

[25] Thorn, ‘Introduction’, p. 28.

For more on Infanticide law see: L. Rose, Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Great Britain 1800-1939 (Oxford, 2016), p. 77.

[26] Kelly, ‘Responding to Infanticide in Ireland’, p. 189.

[27]  J. A. Sheetz-Nguyen, Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital (London, 2012), p. 38

[28] L. C. Berry, ‘Confession and Profession: Adam Bede, Infanticide, and the New Coroner’, in Thorn (ed.), Writing British Infanticide, p. 202.

[29] Higginbotham, ‘Sin of the Age’, p. 331.

[30] Berry, ‘Confession and Profession’, p. 202-03.

[31] Arnot, ‘The Murder of Thomas Sandles’, p. 150.

[32] E. Gordon, and G. Nair, ‘Domestic Fathers and the Victorian Parental Role’, Women’s History Review, 15 (2006), p. 551.

[33] Arnot, ‘The Murder of Thomas Sandles’, p. 150.

[34] S. L. Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 2012), p. 201.

[35] D’Cruze, Everyday Violence in Britain, p. 57.

[36] P. Hoffer and N.E.H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558–1803 (New York, 1981), cited in Thorn, Writing British Infanticide, p. 20.

[37] D. A. Logan, Fallenness in Victorian Women’s Writing: Marry, Stitch, Die, Or Do Worse (Columbia, 1998), p. 18.

[38] Anon., ‘The Case of Infanticide Near Bury St. Edmund’s.’, The Morning Chronicle, 23 October 1851, Issue 26478, in British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800-1900.

[39] Kelly, ‘Responding to Infanticide in Ireland’, p. 189.

[40] R. Sauer, ‘Infanticide and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Population Studies, 32 (1978), p. 92.

Andrews and Digby, Sex and Seclusion, p. 109.

See for example: C. Chinn, Poverty amidst Prosperity: The Urban Poor in England 1834-1914 (Lancaster, 2006).

[41] Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 192.

[42] D’Cruze, Everyday Violence, p. 57.

[43] D’Cruze, Everyday Violence in Britain, p. 58.

For more on the link between poverty and insanity see Chapter 6 in A. Gestrich, E. Hurren, and S. King (eds.), Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe: Narratives of the Sick Poor 1780-1938 (London, 2012).

[44] R. Shoemaker, ‘Male Honour and the Decline of Public Violence in Eighteenth-Century’, Social History, 26 (2001), p. 194.

[45] C. Emsley, Crime and Society in England 1750-1900, 2nd edn (Harlow, 1996), p. 107.

  1. Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities: Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow, 2005), p. 130.

[46] M. V. Gregory, ‘“Most revolting murder by a father”: The Violent Rhetoric of Paternal Child-Murder in the Times (London), 1826-1849’, in Thorn (ed.), Writing British Infanticide, p. 71.

[47] G. Frost, ‘“I am master here”: Illegitimacy, Masculinity, and Violence in Victorian England’, in L. Delap, B. Griffin, and A. Wills (eds.), The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 30.

[48] Gregory, ‘Most revolting murder by a father’, p. 72.

[49] Frost, ‘I am master here’, p. 31.

[50] J.M. Ferraro, Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice: Illicit Sex and Infanticide in the Republic of Venice 1557-1789 (Baltimore, 2008), p. 12.

For more on masculinity see J. Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 133; H. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge, 1995).

[51] E. Farrell, ‘A most diabolical deed’: Infanticide and Irish Society 1850-1900 (Manchester, 2013), p. 149.

Chinn, Poverty amidst Prosperity, p. 114.

[52] Frost, ‘I am master here’, p. 31.

[53] Jackson, New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester, 1996), p. 118.

[54] Shepherd, ‘One of the Best Fathers until He Went Out of His Mind’, p. 21.

[55] Frost, ‘I am master here’, p. 31.

[56] Gregory, ‘Most revolting murder by a father’, p. 72.

[57] Jackson, New-Born Child Murder, p. 118.

[58] D. Rabin, ‘Beyond ‘Lewd Women’ and ‘Wanton Wenches’: Infanticide and Child-Murder in the Long Eighteenth Century’ in Thorn (ed.), Writing British Infanticide, p. 47.

Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 132.

[59] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 173.

[60] Frost, ‘I am master here’, p. 39.

[61] W. Hunter, On the Uncertainty of the Signs of Murder in the Case of Bastard Children (London, 1783), p. 6.

[62] A. Cossins, Female Criminality: Infanticide, Moral Panics and The Female Body (New York, 2015) p. 91.

[63] J. McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture 1720-1900 (Cambridge, 2003), p. 125.

[64] J. Himmill, cited in Farrell, A most diabolical deed, p. 35. Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 57.

[65] A. Clark, ‘Irish Orphans and the Politics of Domestic Authority’ in Delap, Griffin, and Wills (eds.), The Politics of Domestic Authority, p. 71. Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 46.

[66] Cossins, Female Criminality, p. 91.

[67] Anon, ‘The Execution of Mrs Winsor’, in Jackson (ed.), Infanticide.

[68] Gordon and Nair, ‘Domestic Fathers and the Victorian Parental Role’, p. 551.

Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 108.

[69] Anon, ‘The Execution of Mrs Winsor’.

[70] M. Jackson, ‘The Trial of Harriet Vooght: Continuity and Change in the History of Infanticide’, in Jackson (ed.), Infanticide, p. 10.

[71] Anon., ’Baby Farming’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 25 September 1867, Issue 819, in British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800-1900.

[72]  Anon., ‘Baby-Farming Mothers Beware’ (1871), in P. Chassaigne, and W. Heppel, ‘Popular Representations of Crime: The Crime Broadside – A Subculture of Violence in Victorian Britain?’ Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, 3/2 (1999), pp. 42-43.

[73] Anon., ‘Baby-Farming Mothers Beware’.

[74] E. Farrell, ‘A very immoral establishment’: The Crime of Infanticide and Class Status in Ireland, 1850–1900’, in Farrell (ed.), She said she was in the family way, p. 220.

[75] A. Loughnan, Manifest Madness: Mental Incapacity in the Criminal Law (Oxford, 2012), p. 154.

[76] Hunter, On the Uncertainty of the Signs of Murder, p. 6.

[77] J. Geyer-Kordesch, ‘Infanticide and the Erotic Plot: A Feminist Reading of Eighteenth-Century Crime’, in Jackson (ed.), Infanticide, p. 118.

[78] H. Small, Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800-1865 (Oxford, 1996), p. 21.

[79] C. Stebbings, ‘Protecting the Property of the Mentally Ill: The Judicial Solution in Nineteenth Century Lunacy Law’, Cambridge Law Journal, 71/2 (2012), p. 385.

[80] P. Bartlett, The Poor Law of Lunacy: The Administration of Pauper Lunatics in Mid-Nineteenth Century England with Special Emphasis on Leicestershire and Rutland (London, 1993), p. 192.

[81] I. Butler and B. Drakeford, Scandal, Social Policy and Social Welfare (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 22.

  1. Burtinshaw and J. Burt, Lunatics, Imbeciles and Idiots: A History of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century (Barnsley, 2017), p. 37.

[82] Loughnan, Manifest Madness, p. 154.

Small, Love’s Madness, p. 35.

[83] Loughnan, ‘The “Strange” Case of the Infanticide Doctrine’, p. 687.

Mauger, The Cost of Insanity, p. 155.

[84] T. Chakravarty, ‘Medicalisation of Mental Disorder: Shifting Epistemologies and Beyond’, Sociological Bulletin, 62/2 (2011), p. 21.

Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 132.

  1. I. Burney, ‘The Politics of Particularism: Medicalization and Medical Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in R. Bivins and V. J. Pickstone, Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 4

[85] Loughnan, ‘The “Strange” Case of the Infanticide Doctrine’, p. 687.

Small, Love’s Madness, p. 35.

Butler and Drakeford, Scandal, Social Policy and Social Welfare, p. 17.

[86] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 171.

[87] ASSI 72/04, Murder: Rumsby, Catherine (Infanticide), The National Archives, London (TNA).

[88] TNA, ASSI 72/04, Murder: Rumsby, Catherine (Infanticide).

[89] W. Forbes, ‘On Puerperal Insanity’, Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, 12 (1859), p. 21.

[90] Hunter, On the Uncertainty of the Signs of Murder, p. 5.

See also: K. Busfield, Men, Women and Madness: Understanding Gender and Mental Disorder (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 159.

[91] Cossins, Female Criminality, p. 57.

[92] Cossins, Female Criminality, p. 57.

[93] H. Marland, Dangerous Motherhood Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 4.

[94] Berry, ‘Confession and Profession’, p. 196.

[95] W. R. Burke, Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention, And History (London, 1862), p. 45-46.

[96] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 3.

[97] Shepherd, Institutionalizing the Insane, p. 9.

[98] Andrews and Digby, Sex and Seclusion, p. 165.

[99] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 3.

[100] R. Lee, Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery: Delivered in the Theatre of St. George’s Hospital (London, 1844), cited in Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 175.

[101] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 5.

[102] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 175.

[103] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 4.

For anxieties surrounding puerperal mania see: D. Brunton, Health and Wellness in the 19th Century (Oxford, 2014), p. 142.

[104] T. S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 2nd edn (London, 1887), p. 502.

[105] J. Reid, ‘On the Causes, Symptoms and Treatment of Puerperal Insanity’, Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, 1 (1848), p. 135. Reid was an author on puerperal insanity who was much cited in forensic texts.

[106] Reid, ‘On the Causes, Symptoms and Treatment of Puerperal Insanity’, p. 135.

[107] ASSI 52/44, Murder: Earle, Rose (Infanticide), TNA.

[108] TNA, ASSI 52/44.

[109] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 4.

[110] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 173.

[111] Logan, Fallenness in Victorian Women’s Writing, p. 184.

[112] ASSI 52/43, Murder: Doyle, Bridget (Infanticide), TNA. After extensive research it was not possible to identify what Mrs Doyle meant when referring to Kate Holland.

[113] TNA, ASSI 52/43.

[114] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 173.

[115] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 6.

  1. Trowbridge and T. Knowles, Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2015), p. 156.

[116] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 176.

[117] ASSI 52/20, Murder: Harrison, Mary (Infanticide), TNA.

[118] Marland, Dangerous Motherhood, p. 174.

[119] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 176.

[120] TNA, ASSI 52/20.

[121] Marland, ‘Getting Away with Murder’, p. 179.

[122] ASSI 36/25/14 Sussex. Accused: F Dolman. Offence: Infanticide, TNA.

[123] Thorn, ‘Introduction’, p. 13.

  1. I. Schwartz and N. Isser, Child Homicide: Parents Who Kill (London, 2007), p. 50.

[124] TNA, ASSI 36/25/14.

[125] D. Sit, A. J. Rothschild, and K. L. Wisner, ‘A Review of Postpartum Psychosis’, Journal of Women’s Health, 15/4 (2002).

[126] S. Mitchell, Victorian Britain: An Encyclopaedia (Oxford, 1998), p. 1.

[127] Fuchs, Gender and Poverty, p. 54.

[128] Thorn, ‘Introduction’, p. 25.

[129] G. K. Behlmer, ‘Deadly Motherhood: Infanticide and Medical Opinion in Mid-Victorian England’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 34/4 (1979), p. 411.

[130] A. Still and I. Velody, ‘Introduction’, in A. Still and I. Velody, Re-Writing the History of Madness Studies in Foucaults ‘Histoire de la folie’ (London, 1992), p. 2.

[131] Stebbings, ‘Protecting he Property of the Mentally Ill’, p. 2.

[132] Loughnan, Manifest Madness, p. 154.

[133] Stebbings, ‘Protecting the Property of the Mentally Ill’, p. 2.

[134] Chakravarty, ‘Medicalisation of Mental Disorder’, p. 21.

[135] Cossins, Female Criminality, p. 57.

‘A Political Fight Over Beer’: The 1977 Coors Beer Boycott, and the Relationship Between Labour–Gay Alliances and LGBT Social Mobility

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Featured image courtesy of Online Archive of California

Author Biography

Kieran Blake is a postgraduate student of History at the University of Lincoln, researching twentieth-century American social movements—specifically addressing queer studies and the history of sexuality.

Abstract

This paper examines the 1977 Coors beer boycott, to analyse the interplay of socio-political groups during 1970s America promoting the idea that labour and gay forces could form an alliance over economic disputes that were mutually beneficial. The workers’ strike demanded an end to the mandatory, homophobic polygraph tests; to do so, workers went on strike and asked San Franciscan gay bars to boycott Coors beer. By examining newspaper articles, trade union pamphlets and visual iconography, the paper highlights how labour forces invited the LGBT community because their bars were a powerful tool in forming a gay identity and allowed LGBT consumers to utilise their economic agency. Boycotting an alcohol brand allowed consumers to exercise their fundamental American rights, which, in turn, promoted their legitimacy as American citizens. Crucially, promoting a boycott enabled an economic spat to snowball into a wider social movement, as it was taken outside the parameters of the factory floor.

‘A Political Fight Over Beer’: The 1977 Coors Beer Boycott, and the Relationship Between Labour–Gay Alliances and LGBT Social Mobility

 

[Coors] is convinced that a boycott will not work because they

do not believe the consumer really cares about human rights or

the manner in which Coors violates the law.[1]

In 1977, brewery workers belonging to the trade union division Local 366 of the Adolph Coors Beer company printed and distributed a small flyer with one objective: to persuade the public to endorse their strike. The flyer was decorated with an illustration of a Coors beer can that had been crossed out. Displayed in a large font, the flyer told recipients to ‘BOYCOTT COORS BEER’.[2] Written overleaf was an informative bulletin in which Local 366 told readers why it was important to boycott the beer. The article was written in response to 1500 Coors employees walking out on strike against their employer in April of that year.

Local 366 was the trade union division which represented the workers of Coors. The strike was over a clause in employee contracts, which required all workers to take a mandatory polygraph test where they could be asked directly to reveal their sexual orientation. There was initial scepticism towards the strike, from Coors itself, workers and the public.[3] However, Local 366 found an unlikely partner in the gay community of America’s west coast—particularly San Francisco—courtesy of the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organizations (ALF-CIO) president, George Meany.[4] Meany allowed the strikers to advertise the boycott in the sixteen states Coors was sold, by informing communities that Coors infringed on the human rights of its employees.[5] Due to the homophobic element to the polygraph test, the workers’ dispute gained a receptive LGBT audience in gay bars when they removed the beer from their bars and backed Local 366’s campaign. This withdrawal of Coors from San Francisco bars helped to produce a de facto ten-year ‘political fight over beer’.[6]

This article examines the 1977 Coors beer boycott, arguing that the protest cemented a labour–gay alliance, which transformed an economic spat into a gay rights social movement. This enabled an emerging sub-culture to advocate and utilise its economic agency and consumer rights to campaign for an end to discrimination in the workplace. By using the boycott as a case study to examine the interplay of socio-political groups during 1970s America, this article promotes the idea that, as consequence of such alliances, labour and gay forces found an unlikely partner in one other’s advocacy. Moreover, an examination into newspaper articles, trade union pamphlets and visual iconography sheds light into how a narrative focused on a shared understanding of oppression ran through both labour and gay forces; the oppression they faced—albeit over different grievances—promoted a mutual respect towards each other’s campaign.

The LGBT community exercised its economic and consumer rights by choosing what alcohol they purchased. In doing so, they highlighted their American citizenship—by this, I am referring to the fundamental values of suffrage, integration and economic agency which they used to credit themselves as American in an era of ever-expanding socio-political mobilisation.[7] As a legacy of the boycott, cooperation between labour–gay forces highlighted an effective method in which discrimination could be tackled on a case-by-case basis. As a result of such alliances, workers could legitimise their strike by taking it out of the locus of the factory floor. The gay bars’ invitation to boycott Coors provided a platform to work in tandem with workers, who, like anti–Vietnam War protesters, second-wave feminists and African–American activists, felt disadvantaged in comparison to the hegemony of the white, middle-class heterosexual.[8] Alongside these movements, the LGBT community could perpetuate its own wish to increase its social mobility from their bars.[9]

The history of American sexuality has found its feet in the last thirty years. Scholars have written on the topic to understand how a gay identity and LGBT community came to fruition in the twentieth century. The work of Elizabeth Armstrong, John D’Emilio and Margot Canaday, for example, suggests the LGBT movement was not born from the infamous 1969 Stonewall Riot. Instead, homosexual activism groups of the 1950s were the crux of activism, by aiming to re-educate heterosexuals’ pre-conceived attitudes regarding a homosexual morality.[10] D’Emilio’s ground-breaking research, Sexual Politics and Sexual Communities, summarised how ‘the [gay] movement constitutes a phase, albeit a decisive one, of a much longer historical process through which a group of men and women came into existence as a self-conscious, cohesive minority’.[11] Armstrong goes on to support this hypothesis, by suggesting the gay protests regarding those arrested at Stonewall provided the catalyst for the emergence of activist groups like the Gay Liberation Front by 1970.[12] Research into LGBT application of economic agency and consumer rights has received some, but not extensive, analysis. Miriam Frank’s Out in the Union, constitutes some of the only solid research into the boycott. Frank argues the emergence of a visible LGBT movement in 1969 augmented a relationship where some LGBT workers wished to construct a labour–gay alliance to help collectively improve welfare politics for workers.[13]

The LGBT movement of the 1960s and 1970s marks itself as another social movement at a time when socio-political mobilisation was rife in US society. Social movement theorists have noted the importance groups regarded identity for defining criterion on which they campaigned. David Meyer, Nancy Whittier and Belinda Robnett have argued the ‘standpoint’ of a social movement’s ideology rests upon the identity acquired, or the cultural changes which have brought it into being.[14] In the context of this paper, the identity that was nurtured in the gay bars and the actions of those activists in the 1950s, along with customers’ ability to choose the alcohol they drank based on LGBT politics rather than just its price, was the driving force in campaigning for the workers’ dispute with Coors.[15]

This article focuses on the significance of San Francisco’s community, particularly examining the impact gay bars had on this remarkably understudied event in the history of twentieth-century American sexuality. Firstly, the context of LGBT social mobility—in a century of changing attitudes towards sex and gender—is drawn upon, to show why gay bars became crucial to the boycott in 1977. In doing so, it highlights how those who frequented gay bars came to acknowledge them as a place where individual and a collective gay identities were nurtured, as well as a location for enabling gay customers to exercise their economic free-will.[16] These factors were essential in promoting a link between labour concerns and LGBT political demands, and suggested the boycott was essential to validate the workers’ demands and promote the LGBT agenda of acceptance.

Secondly, the paper examines the different perceptions of the boycott. This section considers the key figures who helped orchestrate labour–gay interactions: Local 366 head, Alan Braid, and the unofficial mayor of Castro, Harvey Milk (Castro refers to Castro Street, the most prominent LGBT area in San Francisco). Both figures respected and understood the oppression faced by the other, and showcased the importance of validating citizenship for the LGBT community and striving to meet workers’ demands by creating a mutually beneficial alliance.[17] As well as this, this section considers the role written press played in ensuring an alliance between labour–gay was perpetuated. Badges, newspaper interviews and posters were specifically addressed to the LGBT community through local press which ensured they were targeted and invited to boycott the beer, instead of a quasi-pact between two distinctly separate forces. Crucially, the rhetoric invoked by these articles informed LGBT boycotters how Coors had no desire for their employees’ working or human rights.

It shall also consider what impact a gay boycott had on Coors’s profits, reception of workers, as well as its need to re-brand itself as a corporation that was pro-worker and pro-LGBT once profit-loss became a tangible marker that the strike and boycott held resonance with San Franciscans.

Finally, this paper goes on to evaluate the legacy of the boycott by tracking the progression of LGBT socio-economic rights. The paper does not assert that the boycott provided a turning point in the history of sexuality—indeed, LGBT progression, I argue, cannot be viewed linearly in positive correlation.[18] However, the pact that developed between labour–gay forces through the boycott presented a system of alliance which showcased how the two could work together to tackle discrimination on case-by-case bases through similar economic disputes such as Florida’s orange production. Further socio-economic disputes were also fought by a mutually beneficial campaign which respected and understood the oppression faced by each other in a strive for citizenship through self-determination of economic free-will.[19] This, in turn, counters Alexandra Chasin’s argument who suggests that although boycotts emphasized a captive gay market, they ultimately reduced the choices available for the community as personal choices are not mutually exclusive to political action.[20]

Making America Queer: The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-century America

The socio-political climate of America in the 1960s—a time of protests from African–Americans, anti–Vietnam War protesters, second-wave feminists, as well as the counterculture movements—provided both a framework and platform for homosexuals to articulate and defend their new-found gay identities.[21] The campaigns of the 1960s—all of which focused on promoting an equal, yet nuanced American identity—produced a new generation of campaigners who successfully used protests as a method of deconstructing the hegemony of the white, middle-class, heterosexual norm.[22] The campaigns in the 1960s suggest LGBT activists emerged at the end of the decade because they belonged to the same generation of protesters. As Simon Hall suggests, the gay rights movement of the 1970s ‘followed the example of the “black, the poor, and the student”—who had been actively confronting systems which deny and demean them—joining the “age of revolution”’.[23] Direct-action protests such as rallies, marches and launching petitions were established as an effective way for minority groups to tackle the disadvantages they faced from this hegemony.[24]

San Francisco in the 1960s was a city that could facilitate and maintain political activism for minority groups on the quest of civil rights. The LGBT community—both on the cusp of liberation after Stonewall and its long struggle for agency and acceptance in the previous two decades—came to view San Francisco as their pseudo home: ostensibly, it was a homosexual town.[25] San Francisco was almost unique in its position—synonymously known as a permissive town where social norms were not fulfilled—according to Nan Boyd’s study, Wide-Open Town.[26] As a result of San Francisco’s status as a city like no other in the United States, a more coherent and tangible LGBT community, therefore, had the potential for greater agency. Crucially, they could become an effective social movement to campaign for civic equality by the 1970s when the openness of the LGBT community became ever-more present.

San Francisco’s plethora of gay bars became a hub for the LGBT community during the mid-twentieth century. These places offered a place outside of heteronormative society where people’s heterosexual ‘mask’ lifted and they were free to partake in identity-building practices such as dancing, drag artistry and drinking.[27] However, their openness was not welcomed by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD). One defamatory article written in The San Francisco Examiner in October 1969 passes comment on the rocky relationship between the SFPD and gay bars. The author attributed this poor relationship to bars’ poor structural and hygiene control, as well as the clientele to whom the bars catered.[28] Undercover officers, ‘rookies’, the author said, solicitated with customers before ‘figurately blowing [sic] the whistle’ on the bar.[29] Officers tasked with entrapment were not, according to Christopher Agee, adhering to an anti–gay bar policy derived from the SFPD echelons, but were acting on their own personal prejudices.[30] This apparent lack of professionalisation allowed ‘gay bar owners to use [sic] an existing discourse about police organizational reform to integrate their movement into the mainstream political sphere.’[31] The Matachine Society’s president, Harry Call, argued:

the police are obsessed with the desire to supervise and regulate people […] for instance, they object to our dancing together. Next to sex, dancing is one of our most important of human joys. I believe that I speak for all homosexuals, and certainly for the Matachine Society, when I say we oppose police and other supervision.[32]

The gay rights movement, through the homophile organisations and bar-based culture, used the 1960s as a decade to express their hostilities to the civic order which deprived them of their fundamental rights. San Francisco’s bars and community therefore, according to union representatives of the boycott of Coors, appeared a fruitful place to engender and bolster the movement when they branched out for support. The gay scene was prepared to fight those who denied them their basic rights.

As San Francisco’s LGBT community expanded throughout the mid-decades of the twentieth century, its image as the ‘gay hub’ was cemented in the city’s psyche. One of the most prominent de facto homosexual communities was Castro Street. Located between Market Street and ‘19th Street’, the small district offered a public space for homosexuals to meet. Castro offered a plethora of gay bars for its LGBT customers, which played a critical role in creating a socio-political gay rights movement.[33] Gay bars were essential in helping to cement an identity and one necessary element was the liquor customers drank.[34] San Franciscan bars were noted as being extremely cheap—for example, one bar reportedly sold champagne for two dollars ‘served in a real champagne glass.’[35] As San Francisco developed into a de facto homosexual town, it also created a common market because gay bars provided a space where homosexuals specifically choose the types of alcohol customers could drink. Therefore, withdrawing an alcoholic brand from the bars held the potential to significantly impact a corporation’s profit margin.

Under this context, San Francisco, an ostensibly homosexual town, held a network of heavily frequented gay bars in which homosexuals were accustomed to fighting against oppression that denied their equality.[36] The foundation of the gay bars’ socio-political framework created a space useful for Coors strikers because it provided a capacity to transform their dispute into a community-led social movement. The cheap price of liquor ensured that bars became a hub for homosexual integration, whilst enabling customers to exercise their economic agency. It therefore meant that if a customer were to choose another brand—irrespective of price, but on a matter of politics—they promoted their rights as American citizens, by synthesising their spent revenue with political activism. Moreover, it served as a tangible act of defiance towards Coors, as their profit-loss threatened security as the Western States’ top beer seller. This outreach, in turn, validated the workers’ strike over their contracts. In doing so, the ensuing labour–gay pact ensured that the Coors boycott became a movement that was mutually beneficial.

We Need Some Milk: San Francisco, Gay Bars and People’s Reaction to the Boycott

In an interview in the New York Times in 1977, San Franciscan public figure Harvey Milk acknowledged the conservative attitudes of LGBT economic activity.[37] Milk argued that it was hypocritical for homosexuals to live a capitalistic lifestyle, but oppose conservative policies that denied LGBT-socio equality:

I’m a left winger, a street person… [m]ost gays are politically conservative, you know, banks, insurance, bureaucrats. So their checkbooks are out of the closet, but they’re not. So you get something going, and all the gay money is still supporting Republicans except on this gayness thing, so I say, ‘Gay for Gay’…[38]

Milk’s statement suggests if you were to campaign for full equality, gay meant gay. If one had consumer rights and economic agency, then it should be used to fight discrimination and recognise oneself as a full American citizen. This next section examines how the Coors boycott was received amongst the general public, and how the economic disruption of the factory floor became a labour–gay social movement in the community.

The merit of the boycott’s ability to become more than an workers’ dispute was its accessibility to an LGBT audience. After Local 366 was granted permission from the ALF-CIO, it was important to integrate themselves in the community to validate their concerns with the employment practices of Coors. Integration with the workers’ dispute was presented through the interaction of both Local 366s leader and Castro Street’s ‘unofficial’ mayor, Allan Braid and Harvey Milk, respectively. Moreover, trade union pamphlets, newspapers and visual iconography, all aimed to inform the community as well as invite them to take part, by invoking the idea that they were equals who understood the mutual oppression they faced.

The challenges faced by gay bars and the homophile movements during San Francisco’s journey for self-identity and openness in a heteronormative society, arguably made the gay rights movement a sensible choice for the union to approach to endorse their strike against Coors. As a key member in organising the Coors workers’ strike, Braid spoke with shop keepers asking for them to pledge to stop selling Coors beer.[39] Braid also met with Milk to inform him of Coors’s homophobic polygraph tests asking for support from the Tavern Guild to stop selling the beer.[40] The Tavern Guild was a network of gay bars established in the 1960s. As a resident of Castro himself, Braid was conscious of the potential agency LGBT people had allowing them to be useful allies in a social boycott. Sympathetic to Harvey Milk’s work, Braid’s eulogy to Milk highlighted his abilities to seemingly unify the LGBT movement, and create a safe and politically active space for the community in Castro.[41] As John Sweeney has argued, labour movements showed themselves as ‘capable of broadening to include and represent every class of workers’.[42] This highlighted that through Braid, the efforts of labour workers to manufacture a social movement benefited the LGBT community as it showed a progressive stance towards equality for all.

As Braid encouraged the gay bars to join the boycott, Harvey Milk brought it to the attention of the rest of the LGBT community. Milk had already encouraged members of Castro to boycott Coors’s beer in 1974; by 1977 Milk was a suitable figure to approach in order to gain support. Writing in the local San Francisco newspaper, Bay Report, in 1976, Milk delivered a speech in which he strongly urged folk to boycott Coors.[43] Milk implied that the LGBT community was closely related to the labour movement, therefore it was the LGBT community’s duty to call out Coors’s ‘very poor labour [sic] history’ as well as their ‘humiliating’ treatment to its employees.[44] Milk’s unique social status in Castro held him in good stead for engendering support for other minority groups’ struggles, like that of the workers; for the LGBT community to gain true equality, homosexuals had to use their economic agency, power of voting, and the commitment to better social relations with other minority groups in order to truly bring forth equality and legitimise LGBT citizenship.[45] The goal of key individuals was to appeal directly to the gay rights community, urging them to use their economic agency and strength as a new and open social movement to boycott the beer thus supporting the need of labour–gay relations. Newspapers and pamphlets, such as the one presented at the beginning of this paper, were a strong way to gain support because the radius of audience was specifically targeted at San Franciscans. Moreover, the language used specifically implied that Coors was breaching both the working and human rights of its employees. Local press and community members ensured that the LGBT community was informed of Coors’s homophobic actions and meant the workers could directly invite the LGBT community into a socio-political partnership.

As well as the promotion of economic agency, the relationship between Coors strikers and boycotters highlighted how the boycott promoted a united labour–gay alliance, rather than two separate movements. Cultural iconography helps assert the idea of a mutually beneficial socio-economic dispute. Mass produced artefacts such as posters, flyers and badges, which marked themselves as anti-Coors material, were designed to resonate with the recipient. One poster [Figure 1] emphasised the unethical nature of Coors’s homophobic polygraph tests. The illustration of a male and female worker strapped to the polygraph machine by a sinister-looking senior official, emphasised to its audience how workers were forced to take the test against their will. Moreover, badges and t-shirts advocating the Coors boycott, which were worn by some LGBT activists, cemented a direct affiliation to the protest [Figure 2]. Crucially, posters were directly addressed to ‘friends of labor [sic]’, as showcased in this article’s opening bulletin, by directly addressing the reader and commanding them to abstain from Coors’s alcohol.[46] The cultural products surrounding the boycott, more specifically the language they used, suggests LGBT customers were specifically chosen to engage with the boycott instead of attaching their agenda onto an altogether separate movement. Language had become a method in which homosexuals were able to express their concerns for their welfare.[47] Clothing and badges invited them to show their contempt when they were doing other activities.[48] Therefore, the LGBT movement was able to transform the boycott into a social movement that was mutually beneficial for both striker and LGBT boycotter.[49]

Figure 1: A Poster Promoting the Coors Beer Boycott, Online Archive of California (OAC), Unknown Author, Unknown Date, [online resource] <https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb7489p318/?brand=oac4>, accessed on 23 January 2019.

Cultural symbols and the language used in media representations allowed the LGBT community to express their support for the boycott. The protest shifted an economic dispute into a social movement because it synthesised a labour–gay alliance, through the invitation to protest for workers’ equality and the utilisation of economic agency by incorporating culture and language. This did not, therefore, mean the LGBT movement joined a labour-shaped bandwagon—instead it was a labour–gay protest movement.

Figure 2: Oklahoma State University Library, item oksa_phelps_11-07-0035, 1977, Edna Mae Phelps Collection, [online resource] <https://dc.library.okstate.edu/digital/collection/p17279coll7/id/1801>, accessed on 16 January 2019, and at the Digital Public Library of America, [online archive] <https://dp.la/item/786761a6c1c5a8b059539b62bcdb84c2?q=Coors%20Beer>, accessed 18 November 2018.

The boycott was successful in making the community aware of Coors’s employment practices. As polygraph tests and ‘search-and-seizures’ became common knowledge, Coors had to present their own side of the story. One consequence of the boycott’s establishment in the gay bars was profit loss, estimated at between eleven and twelve percent, to nineteen percent.[50] Coors’s damage control was three-fold: threaten workers with the sack, branch out their sales to Eastern States at extortionate prices, and donate to LGBT-charities.

Prior action from Coors employees had done little to dent Coors’s reputation as a leading beer brewer in the Western states. In 1974, Coors’s profits accounted for 49 percent of California’s beer sales—despite Teamster Union Local 888 (the truck driver division), Latino, and Chicano workers having already protested against their employer’s treatment towards them.[51] However, as the initial 1974 boycott progressed, and gained greater momentum through support from the LGBT community becoming increasingly aware of the discriminatory nature of Coors’s practices, sales of Coors’s beer began to falter. According to Milt Moskowitz’s article for The San Francisco Examiner, by 1976 Coors’s profits in the California region dropped by nineteen-point-six percent.[52] As Coors could lose the top-spot in California’s beer sales to the nationwide leader Budweiser, it suggests the boycott’s proliferation from the strikers and the LGBT movement held the capacity to threaten Coors’s economic security. In doing so, the boycott was something Coors could not ignore, especially when Local 366 joined in the strike in 1977. This is evident when chairman of Coors, William K. Coors, told The Wall Street Journal he would take ‘great satisfaction in opposing all the forces that would like to put [Coors] out of business.’[53] This also implies the power workers and the LGBT community had as social movements through their use of direct-action protests towards the heteronormative, middle-class establishment. When they worked in tandem, they could fight the capital interests of a company for the civil rights of workers.

Coors’s representatives presented a media front that was ready to fight against strikers and boycotters through antagonistic language. In the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, one article described how Coors employed permanent staff to replace those on strike—threatening strikers by suggesting ‘it may lead to the loss of your job.’[54] However, this threat was seemingly left unfulfilled through Coors’s rise in philanthropic work. The Empty Closet in 1980, an LGBT newspaper that emerged after the birth of the Gay Liberation Front, wrote an article about how Coors had donated a delivery truck to Denver’s Metropolitan Community Church (MCC).[55] This act of charity is crucial to understanding Coors’s seeming lack of desire to follow through on its threats because the MCC was an LGBT Christian church. This philanthropy not only showed that Coors donated to the church, but how it openly donated its own property to a LGBT institution in an apparent act of kindness. Coors highlight how it believed the boycott was an unfair attack, and this would therefore suggest they wished to present themselves as a pro-LGBT company.[56]

Coors found loopholes in strikers’ efforts to void them. Coors’s philanthropy to the church was one method of achieving this. Another method took the form of donations to AIDS-related charities when the epidemic took root in America in the mid-1980s.[57] Though profits may have decreased in Western states, in Eastern states Coors’s demand only increased. Writing about Coors’s acquittal on a trade restriction charge, the Fort Collins Coloradoan describes how beer sales were so quick that it was not even being refrigerated.[58] Because of the beer’s scarcity in Eastern states, Coors demanded prices of fourteen to eighteen dollars per case.[59] This suggests that Coors still held a captive audience in other states where the boycott was not as prolific and implies they capitalised on the deficits to ensure the company’s profits were not at a loss. Although these actions show soft forms of defence against the boycott, it emphasises how Coors was compelled to surrender to the LGBT movement. Ultimately they were left with little choice other than to make concessions in employment practices and the social conditions for LGBT people outside the factory walls.

Workers taking their grievance with Coors outside the parameters of the factory floor, ensured that the LGBT community was invited into dispute because workers were keen to emphasise both groups understood what it was like to be oppressed. Perpetuating the word through newspaper articles, posters and badges, a network of key figures both of whom held mutual respect for each other, along with having an inter-connected network of bars, allowed the LGBT community to utilise its economic agency by withholding the sales of Coors which promoted their citizenship. Crucially, the labour–gay pact that stemmed from moving the strike onto the streets brought Coors’s unethical practices into the public domain, something Coors was compelled to respond to given there was a quantifiable impact against their reputation as the top beer seller in Western states.

Tracking Progression: Labour–Gay Alliances, post–Coors Beer Boycott

This next section argues that the boycott did not create a psyche of LGBT acceptance to all, by considering the scope of acceptance towards homosexuality after the boycott began. On 28 June 1977, The San Francisco Examiner published a side story on the twenty-second page about a young man from Chicago who had been raped. This gentleman was a taxi driver who, on the night in question, was stopped by two male customers. As they got into the car, they informed him that this was a heist and ‘they [sic] have a .38 right here and if you see it, it will be the last thing you ever see’.[60] Taking control of the taxi, the two men drove around picking up passengers with the intention of stealing their possessions. Eventually, the taxi was stopped and—to ensure the victim would not go to the police—the victim was told he had to do something for them: ‘he’ll never cop (admit) to this. It will make him feel queer’.[61] The taxi driver was raped by the two men under the assumption that he would not report them to the police because he would feel homosexual. Indeed, the victim did not want people to find out for fear he may be labelled a homosexual—despite being heterosexual. The article’s publication date places it three months into the Coors workers’ strike, and the author, Roger Smith, pays homage to the active gay rights campaigns that were ongoing, such as the Florida orange juice boycott. Smith strongly asserts the law-abiding nature of homosexuals involved in the protest movements.[62] However, the subtext in the article’s message suggests the boycott did little to change the psyche of people’s attitudes surrounding homosexuality: for some, its connotations brought about feelings of shame and disgust.[63] Naturally, the boycott was limited in its scope, as its locus was specifically where Coors was a strong market force—the West coast. This article demonstrates that attitudes towards a person’s moral integrity—specifically, the perceived maxim that homosexuality was something perverse—had not wholly shifted after the boycott, despite labour–gay pacts promoting a shared understanding of oppression. What the boycott did bring, however, was an effective method of demonstration which involved linking economic agency and social movements, to vilify homophobic commercial figures or products.

One boycott which has received heavy scholarly analysis is the boycott of Florida’s orange juice, whose main commercial figure was singer and model, Anita Bryant. Her fundamental Christian values and strong anti-homosexual attitudes led her to run the Save Our Children campaign, which aimed to ban anti-discrimination laws against Florida’s LGBT community’s housing, employment and public accommodation welfare. Interestingly, the response towards Save Our Children was overwhelmingly negative.[64] Gay bars retaliated to these initiatives by banning orange juice in their bars, preferring to serve vodka with apple juice instead. The politics of this boycott appear to follow a similar pattern to the ones used in the Coors boycott: economic withdrawal from a homophobic organisation, and the social mobilization in the community to endorse the boycott and bolster support for the gay rights movement. However, this does not mean the gay rights movement should be viewed in positive correlation towards full equality. This is reflected in the origins of the orange juice boycott: it was a retaliation towards homophobic institutions. Though the Coors boycott therefore provided a blueprint to effectively campaign against anti-LGBT establishments through the promotion of LGBT economic agency, it did not provide a broad consensus amongst Americans to change their attitudes towards the gay rights movement.

The Coors boycott did produce some level of national support for the gay rights movement in so much as further boycotts such as the Orange boycott were spearheaded by a labour–gay alliance. However, some of the United States’ more conservative attitudes towards a person’s perceived moral integrity were not as easy to dissipate through social boycotts. Following the Save Our Children campaign in Florida, Proposition 6 was devised by San Franciscan governor John Briggs, which aimed to remove all gay and lesbian teachers from working in California’s public schools. Colloquially coined as the ‘Brigg’s Initiative’, the plan also received overwhelmingly negative responses. Opposition came from figures such as California’s then Governor Ronald Reagan, and President Jimmy Carter; amongst critics included the ALF-CIO and the Coors Boycott Committee. President of the California Federation of Labor, Al Gruhn, suggested it would ‘cause a witch hunt and destroy the basic functions of our education system.’[65] By pledging support towards fighting homophobia within other aspects of LGBT life, suggests that the labour–gay alliance was mutually beneficial: they ostensibly show that they recognized the daily struggles beyond oppressive conditions found in the locus of Coors’s factory floor. The labour–gay alliance showed continuing support for LGBT social mobility on a political dispute that affected the LGBT community’s rights as American citizens.

Despite the budding relationship between striking workers and gay boycotters, they had been unsuccessful at challenging the Christian values of the American status quo. Elizabeth Armstrong suggests this was a consequence of the United States’ federal governance.[66] Although the LGBT community was a pseudo-political organisation, and it could express it attitudes against the status quo, the federal nature of governance often made nationwide change a slow process because it was harder to implement pro-LGBT policies on a national scale.[67] The bureaucracy, in essence, ensured the government’s fundamentally conservative views stunted LGBT acceptance.

Although the Coors boycott was able to provide a systematic method per se to campaign against discriminatory institutions by forging of labour–gay relations and withholding gay economic agency, it could not transform the United States’ psyche into something overwhelmingly pro-LGBT due to the entrenched heterosexual binary in individual and federal politics.[68] Even the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978 showed little sign of instigating a complete overhaul of the American psyche. His small obituary shared a page with a large Christmas advertisement informing the reader on where to get the best, most cost-effective suit.[69]

Creating a labour link helped increase LGBT visibility. Ultimately this developed a relationship between workers and a gay community who could go on to tackle further discriminatory practices of both the economic giants and of individuals. Indeed, whilst the relationship forged by the Coors boycott allowed for a method to tackle discrimination in the working environment, it was not wholly successful in transforming Americans’ attitudes towards homosexuality. Jeffrey Weeks noted it is important not to examine the history of gay rights in a linear fashion because it was not one long path towards full political, social and economic equality.[70] Moreover, Michel Foucault asserted individual and collective notions of sexual identity were paradoxically built from the oppressive power which denied its existence.[71] What this does highlight, however, is that examining case studies determines how LGBT protested navigated the dichotomies of oppression they faced in that particular incident. Given each campaign focused on a different trigger—be it homophobic alcohol brands, commercial figure heads or homophobic legislature—they had to tackle what sparked that campaign in the first place.

Conclusion

It was not until Robert H. Chanin, the National Education Association’s general counsel—one of the largest union organisations in the United States—and Peter H. Coors—Coors’s brewery division president—met in 1985 that plans for an end to the boycott were discussed.[72] The New York Times made comment about the new-found necessity for labour forces and management to see fit to end the strike and subsequent boycott:

It [is] a classic tale of labour-management [sic] relations—of two enemies slinging arrows at each other for years, until, battered by a changing economy, they need each other badly enough to compromise.[73]

By this point both men were keen to see an end to strife; ‘the ALF-CIO had been caught up in implementing the boycott, not ending it.’[74] It was not until 1987, ten years since the first action was taken, that the boycott was brought to an end. How was it, then, that a boycott that initially captivated small interest—both in terms of its media representation and the strikers themselves—maintained itself as a ten-year ‘political fight over beer’?[75]

This article has examined the 1977 Coors beer boycott as a case study to understand the interplay of labour–gay alliances in the battle for LGBT social mobility and consumer citizenship. The utilisation of LGBT consumer rights and economic agency which developed in gay bars—some of the only open homosexual places for a person during the mid-twentieth century—created useful allies from homosexuals for the strikers. The rise of the gay rights movement at the close of the 1960s, and San Francisco’s unique position as an ostensibly homosexual town, created a receptive audience to the boycott. The LGBT community, like the strikers, were born from a generation who used protests to campaign for full equality. These direct-action protests were utilised with some degree of success. Workers and homosexuals utilised this to campaign for equality for workers overall.[76]

Through an analysis of the boycott and of social networks in 1970s America, this article offers two significant conclusions. Firstly, by examining the language used in newspapers, trade union flyers and cultural iconography, the article has demonstrated that the ensuing labour–gay alliance allowed an economic dispute around employment to transform into a social movement away from the factory floor and onto the streets of San Francisco. The Tavern Guild’s agreement to ban Coors from San Francisco’s gay bars not only presented a rejection of Coors’s ideology for invading workers’ privacy, it also impacted Coors’s sales and profits. Moreover, newspaper interviews by activists such as Harvey Milk and pamphlets written by Local 366 carefully selected the language they used when describing Coors’s employment practises. The language considered was deliberately hyperbolic to stress the indecency of invading workers’ working and human rights, which, therefore, informed those outside the factory walls precisely why the strike was creditworthy. Moving the strike onto the streets through a boycott meant Coors could not ignore the situation and had to respond through philanthropic donations to LGBT organisations. This resulted in Coors having little choice but to rebrand themselves as a pro-worker and pro-LGBT company.

Secondly, the use of the gay bars as an establishment in which a homosexual identity could develop was also significant in building up a gay economic agency.[77] As some of the only open spaces available of homosexuals, gay customers were given the choice to choose what they drank. Crucially, the customer’s choice was not only made on a financial level, but on a political level, too. Therefore, LGBT customers legitimised their American citizenship through this synthesis of economic and political matters within their daily life. The labour–gay alliances, which promoted and utilised the economic agency of the community, formed a blueprint of protest towards other homophobic individuals or organisations. This was repeated when gay bars removed Floridian orange juice to signify their contempt of Bryant’s homophobic ideology. Though the boycott did not produce an immediate national consensus of support, it did, however, provide a method in which the LGBT community could advance its social mobility towards the prospect of equality on case-by-case bases.

As Frank has suggested, labour–gay alliances linked two seemingly different groups into an entity that could become mutually beneficial.[78] While Chasin has commented that boycotts denote a captive gay market, she concludes that boycotts limit homosexual progression as individual choices do not constitute political legislation.[79] This paper has offered an alternative argument, suggesting that LGBT communities withholding their economic agency and consumer rights emphasizes they had the same rights to property as other American citizens. As a social movement, the exercising of economic free-will only enhanced the political agenda and identity nurtured from 1960s protests which highlighted the LGBT community was also excluded from white hegemony.[80] Therefore, withholding their expenditure against a homophobic organisation highlighted their citizenship in American society—especially when Coors’s profit loss became a tangible effect of a labour–gay assault against a homophobic, anti-labour organisation, highlighting that the boycott was a dispute that could not be ignored. The Coors boycott took LGBT consumers out of their bars and onto the streets of San Francisco, so they could openly throw away their beer.

 

Appendices

Appendix 1:

1a: Flyer cover written by Local 366 advertising their strike against Coors beer. For reference, please go to: Digital Public Library of America , (DPLoA), Eduardo Margo, 30 August 1977 [online archive] <https://dp.la/item/de2a73ab99c63e97739456e7c357d117?q=Coors%20Beer>, accessed on 16 November 2018.

1b: The overleaf of appendix 1a, the informative bulletin informing the recipient why they should boycott Coors beer. Please see: Digital Public Library of America , (DPLoA), Eduardo Margo, 30 August 1977 [online archive] <https://dp.la/item/de2a73ab99c63e97739456e7c357d117?q=Coors%20Beer>, accessed on 16 November 2018.

 

Appendix 2:

A compiled list of gay and lesbian bars in San Francisco. Please note, this list accounts for establishments founded from the 1960s up until 1977, only bars with complete dates of open and closure have been included, bars are listed in ascending geographical location. Full credit for this list goes to the Uncle Donald’s Castro Street online archive, without whom I would not have been able to gain such a comprehensive list of gay bars in the city. For the full table, please see: Uncle Donald’s Castro Street (UDCS), Uncle Donald, 12 January 2012, Castro Area Bars, [online archive] <http://thecastro.net/street/barpage/barpage.html>, accessed on 9 November 2018.

Bar Address Approx. date of open and closure
Twin Peaks 401 Castro 1973–open
Twilight 456 Castro 1971–1972
Dirty Dick’s 456 Castro 1973–1975
Le Bistro 456 Castro 1976
Nothing Special 469 Castro 1972–1984
Toad Hall 482 Castro 1971–1979
Elephant Walk 500 Castro 1975–1996
Midnight Sun 506 Castro 1971–1972
City Dump 506 Castro 1973
Midnight Sun (moved to 18th Street in 1981) 506 Castro 1974–1981
Mistake 3988 18th St. 1971–1976
Corner Grocery Bar 4049 18th St. 1973–1978
Village 4086 18th St. 1976–1988
Watergate West 4121 18th St. 1973–1974
BADLANDS 4121 18th St. 1975–1999
I-Do-No 4146 18th St. 1967–1968
Honey Bucket 4146 18th St. 1969–1971
Pendulum 4146 18th St. 1971–2005
Libra 1884 Market St. 1967–1972
Tree House 1884 Market St. 1972–1973
JB’s House 1884 Market St. 1973–1974
The Mint 1942 Market St. 1968–open
Naked Grape 2087 Market St. 1972–1975
Tool Box 2087 Market St. 1976
Hustle Inn 2087 Market St. 1976–1977
Rear End Bar – at Tuck Stop 2100 Market St. 1974–1976
Mind Shaft 2140 Market St. 1973–1977
Alfie’s 2140 Market St. 1977–1983
Cardi’s 2166 Market St. 1977
Bal ony (Balcony) 2166 Market St. 1977–1983
Purple Pickle 2223 Market St. 1972–1977
Shed (after hours) 2275 Market St. 1972–1977
Missouri Mule 2348 Market St. 1963–1973
Hombre 2348 Market St. 1973–1979
Scott’s Pit (Lesbian) 10 Sanchez 1971–1984
Caracole 3600 16th St. 1976–1979

 

Notes

[1] Digital Public Library of America , (DPLoA), Eduardo Margo, 30 August 1977 [online archive] <https://dp.la/item/de2a73ab99c63e97739456e7c357d117?q=Coors%20Beer>, accessed on 16 November 2018.

[2] The flyer’s cover and overleaf can be viewed in the appendices.

[3] M. Frank, Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America (Philadelphia, 2015), p. 79; [Anon], ‘Coors Bolsters Boycott’, Santa Ana Register, 22 April 1977, p. 48; R. West, ‘Coors Charges Brewery Union Workers’, The Los Angeles Times, 9 May 1978, p. 46.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] M. Moskowitz, ‘A Political Fight Over Beer’, The San Francisco Examiner, 18 April 1976, p. 104.

[7] J. E. Black and C. E. Morries III, Harvey Milk, An Archive of Hope: Harvey Milk’s Speeches and Writings, (London, 2013), p. 18.

[8] Black and Morries III, Harvey Milk, An Archive of Hope, p. 18; S. Hall, Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements of the 1960s (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); J. D. Suran, ‘Coming Out Against the War: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam’, American Quarterly, 53 (2001), pp. 452–88; P. Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory, reviewed in P. Joseph, Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research, 40 (2015), pp. 272–76; b. hooks, Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center (Oxford, 2015), pp. 18–19.

[9] E. Armstrong, ‘Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth’, American Sociological Review, 71 (2006), p. 725; Frank, Out in the Union, pp. 76–77.

[10] J. D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (London, 2nd Ed., 1998), p. 4; Armstrong, ‘Movements and Memory’, p. 725.

[11] D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, p. 4.

[12] The aftermath of the riots at the Stonewall inn became a turning point in homosexual vernacular; homosexuals began to use the previously pejorative term ‘gay’ as a marker of their identity. See Armstrong, ‘Movements and Memory’, p. 725.

[13] Frank’s insightful study of the relationship between labour forces and gay activists constitute some of the only concrete research into the Coors boycott. Her work has been invaluable to this thesis. For more of the relationship between gay activists and workers see Frank, Out in the Union, p. 8.

[14] D. Meyer, N. Whittier and  B. Robnett, Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and the State (Oxford, 2002), p. 121.

[15] D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, p. 4; Armstrong, ‘Movements and Memory’, p. 725.

[16] N. Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley, 2003), p. 160.

[17] Frank, Out in the Union, pp. 76–77.

[18] M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (London, Vol. 1, 1978), pp. 83–85.

[19] B. Shepard, ‘Bridging the Divide Between Queer Theory and Anarchism’, Sexualities, 13 (2010), p. 516.

[20] A. Chasin, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (New York, 2000), p. 161.

[21] ‘Homosexuality’ was the term used to define someone who had a sexual attraction to a person of the same gender. The binary of what constituted a man and what constituted a woman focused on heavily on gendered expectations. Chauncey offers an insightful examination into this perceived axiom in 1930s America; Canaday tracks this progression of categorizing homosexuality as a political state cemented post-Second World War, and how this helped construct a homosexual–heterosexual binary. Please see, G. Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940 (New York, 1994); M. Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (London, 2009); Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp. 77–89.

[22] J. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, in H. Abelove et al. (eds), The Gay and Lesbian Studies Reader, (New York, 1993), pp. 397–415; Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 79.

[23] M. Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972 (Chicago, 2000), pp. 277, 279, referenced in S. Hall, ‘Protest Movements in the 1970s: The Long 1960s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43 (2008), p. 662.

[24] Hall, ‘Protest Movements in the 1970s’, p. 657.

[25] After the Second World War, many of those soldiers who had been expelled from the army due to homosexual activity moved to cities such as San Francisco with the hope of starting a new life. For many, the fear of their community discovering their homosexuality was a risk they did not want to take. For more information, please see Boyd, Wide-open Town, p. 5; D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, p. 39; Canaday, The Straight State (New York, 2009).

[26] Boyd, Wide-open Town, p. 5.

[27] Historians of sexuality such as Craig Loftin and Matt Houlbrook suggest that homosexuals during early to mid-twentieth century often had a mask of heterosexuality whilst in the public sphere. This notion was common practice in both Britain and America as a method of ensuring homosexuals appeared to conform to the gendered expectations society required from them. This mask was always worn, except for their homes and upon entry to a gay bar or drag hall. For more, see C. Loftin, Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in Cold War America (New York, 2012), p. 11; M. Houlbrook, ‘Lady Austin’s Camp Boys: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London’, Gender Studies, 14 (2002), pp. 31–61.

[28] R. Patterson, ‘The Dreary Revels of S.F. “Gay” Clubs’, The San Francisco Examiner, 25 October 1969, p. 5.

[29] Ibid.

[30] C. Agee, ‘Gayola: Police Professionalization and the Politics of San Francisco’s Gay Bars, 1950–1968’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15 (2006), pp. 462–465.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Patterson, ‘The Dreary Revels of S.F. “Gay” Clubs’, p. 5.

[33] A compiled list of gay and lesbian bars in San Francisco can be viewed in the appendix. Please note: the list accounts for establishments that opened between 1960–1977, and only contains bars where full dates of approximate open and closure occurred. Bars are recorded in ascending address order. Full credit for the information goes to Uncle Donald’s Castro Street Archive, without whom I would not have such a detailed account of gay bars in the Castro Street area at the time of the boycott. To view all bars in order, please see Uncle Donald’s Castro Street (UDCS), Uncle Donald, 12 January 2012, Castro Area Bars, [online archive] <http://thecastro.net/street/barpage/barpage.html>, accessed on 9 November 2018.

[34] Boyd, Wide-open Town, p. 160.

[35] Patterson, ‘The Dreary Revels of S.F. “Gay” Clubs’, p. 5.

[36] Boyd, Wide-Open Town, p. 160.

[37] H. Gold, ‘A Walk on San Francisco’s Gay Side’, New York Times, 6 November 1977, referenced in Black and Morries III, Harvey Milk, An Archive of Hope, p. 19.

[38] Gold, ‘A Walk on San Francisco’s Gay Side’.

[39] Frank, Out in the Union, p. 78.

[40] Frank, Out in the Union, p. 78.

[41] Uncle Donald’s Castro Street (UDCS), Allan Braid, 19 May 2007, [online resource] <http://thecastro.net/milk/baird.html>, accessed on 9 November 2018.

[42] Sweeney. ‘The Growing Alliance’, p. 32.

[43] Harvey Milk, ‘Reactionary Beer’, Bay Area Reporter, 18 March 1976, referenced in Black and Morries III, Harvey Milk, An Archive of Hope, p. 125.

[44] Black and  Morries III. Harvey Milk, An Archive of Hope, pp. 125–26.

[45] Black and Morries III. Harvey Milk, An Archive of Hope, p. 18.

[46] [Anon], The Billings Gazette, (Montana), 12 Aug 1979, p. 55.

[47] In the introduction to his book, Letters to ONE: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s, Craig Loftin notes the power letter writing to LGBT newspapers had for homosexuals. For those who were not members of a homophile group, letter writing provided an opportunity to express their own understandings towards the treatment of homosexuals, as well as an opportunity to participate in some of the only networking organisations that allowed homosexuals from across the United States to express their attitudes and talk to others who arguably understood the difficulties faced. Also, letters offer a glimpse into the perceptions of homosexuality on a grass roots level. For more information, please read, C. Loftin, Letters to ONE: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s ([London], 2012). LGBT newspapers, such as The Empty Closet, frequently encouraged its readers to write in with their day-to-day concerns, socio-political issues and viewpoints. For examples of this, please see The Empty Closet’s archive through River Campus Libraries (RCL), Empty Closet: Past Issues [online archive] <https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/EmptyCloset>, for monthly issues dated 1971–2014.

[48] Loftin, Masked Voices, pp. 4, 6–7.

[49] Frank, Out in the Union, pp. 76–77.

[50] R. West, ‘Coors Charges Brewery Union Workers’, The Los Angeles Times, 9 May 1978, p. 46; Moskowitz, ‘A Political Fight Over Beer’, p. 104.

[51] Moskowitz, ‘A Political Fight Over Beer’, p. 104.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Ibid.

[54] [Anon], ‘Coors to Replace Striking Workers with Permanent Help’, Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, 11 April 1977, p. 2.

[55] M. Gay, ‘Coors Boycotted’, The Empty Closet, September 1980, p. 8.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Frank, Out in the Union, p. 80.

[58] [Anon], ‘Jury Acquits Coors, Cheyenne Firm of Anti-Trust’, Fort Collins Coloradoan, 8 June 1978, p. 28.

[59] Ibid.

[60] R. Smith, ‘Rape—A New Angle on the Same Story’, The San Francisco Examiner, 28 June 1977, p. 22.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ibid.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Chasin, Selling Out, p. 161.

[65] [Anon], ‘Protect Ours Schools Don’t Legalize Discrimination’, The San Francisco Examiner, 3 November 1978, p. 7.

[66] Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities, p. 161.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Canady, The Straight State.

[69] The obituary that I refer to, is a narrow piece located on the page’s right-hand side. Meanwhile, the gentleman’s cost-effective suit advertisement takes up the rest of the page. See: The Philadelphia Inquirer, 3 December 1978, p. 17.

[70] J. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (Harlow, 2nd Ed., 1989); Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp. 83–85.

[71] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp. 77; 83–85.

[72] J. Tasini, ‘The Beer and the Boycott’, The New York Times Magazine, 1 January 1988, p. 6019.

[73] Ibid.

[74] Ibid.

[75] Moskowitz, ‘A Political Fight Over Beer’, p. 104.

[76] Hall, ‘Protest Movements in the 1970s’, p. 657.

[77] Boyd, Wide-open Town, p. 160.

[78] Frank, Out in the Union, p. 8.

[79] Chasin, Selling Out, p. 161.

[80] Meyer, Whittier and Robnett, Social Movements, p. 121; J. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, pp. 397–415.

 

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