93: Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open

Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America is a conscious attempt to excavate and describe the legacy of the women's movement - primarily second wave feminism - for generations of women (and men) who didn't live through it, so that a kind of living, breathing social history can keep the struggle for gender equality alive.  In particular, Rosen charts the change in women's consciousness from the 1950s to the 1990s through a vast compendium of the many issues, events, people, ideas, books, successes, and failures of the women’s movement in the United States, with some connections to women’s movements outside the US.

This book is written for a popular audience in response to her discovery that her undergraduate students in the 1980s had no idea what the women's movement had redefined.  Accordingly, it hits all the highlights: Betty Freidan, SNCC and other civil rights groups, the coming together of the Old and New Left in what she calls the “female generation gap,” Kennedy’s commission on women and the tension between liberal and radical feminism, NOW, Gloria Steinem, the Vietnam War, abortion, the naming of hidden injuries, sexuality, the body, intersections between feminism and race and class, protests and happenings, consciousness-raising groups, sex, pornography,  ideological factionalism, trashing, paranoia, the FBI, commodification, the superwoman, and Ronald Reagan and the spread of global feminism.  Throughout, she attempts to characterize the depth and breadth of the women’s movement as much as she can while also showing just how interconnected this historical period was.  She also tries to account for the successes and failures of the women's movement and the legacy of the movement as a whole.

Rosen's faith in the power of narrative to continue the perpetual gender revolution is clear, and I think her point that we will lose the gains we have made if we are not vigilant is a good one - just look at the attacks on affirmative action.  However, I would very much like to read a history of this iteration of the women's movement written by someone who was not there, to get a sense of the larger social and political context and a more thoroughgoing critique (instead of a celebration) of the movement itself.

33: D'Emilio & Freedman's Intimate Matters

This one got a bit technical... oops ;)

John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman's Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America has the modest goals of surveying the history of American sexuality from the colonial era to the present AND rewriting both American history and sexuality in the process.  The authors draw on mostly secondary sources  to make three main arguments: that political movements to change sexuality usually occur in the context of larger economic, social, and political upheavals; that gender inequality and sexual politics are inseparable, and that sexual politics develop out of both real and symbolic (or representational) issues.  They are also keep to connect individual sexuality with larger cultural constructions of it, and to show that struggles over empowerment and oppression outside the bedroom are often connected to those same struggles within it.

The authors divide their history of US sexuality into four periods, and trace continuities and ruptures within and among them.  (No, don't worry, they don't tell a story of slow but steady progress.)  These are:

28: Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights

In Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt links the development of universal human rights - the idea that all people, as a rather formative American document puts it, "are created equal" and have "certain unalienable rights" - to two 18th-century events: the French Revolution and the rise of the epistolary novel.

The French Revolution resulted in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which argues for the existence of a universal humanity - "man" - and the necessary connection between the rights of this universal body and the body politic.  If that language feels a lot like that in the Constitution, that's because it is: universal humanity and equal rights were both Enlightenment concepts, and the framers of the Constitution were Enlightenment men.

But the novel?  Hunt argues that novels, which didn't even exist before the 18th century, were hugely important in the construction of human rights because they created a sustained, intimate relationship between the reader and characters whose lives were very different from their own.  In particular, epistolary novels - especially ones about women - drew readers in with the most intimate details about characters' lives; if reading through fictionalized correspondence seems pedantic today (er, it does to me, anyway), back then, this extended snooping allowed readers to become familiar with, even attached to, people they had nothing in common with.  Arguing that familiarity breeds empathy, Hunt finds in the novel a necessary corollary to abstract concepts like "universal" and "equality:" individual empathy.  This empathy, she says, is necessary for universal human rights to work, since you can only see another person as an equal when you can see yourself in them.

Hunt thus puts a very human face on universal human rights.  While she could pay a little more attention to the lives of non-readers and the complex power structures in which they live and work, in this book she still provides a compelling intellectual and cultural history of a very formative idea.

24: Laura Pulido's Black, Brown, Yellow and Left

Laura Pulido squeezes several agendas into this book.  As an LA activist who worked with an antiracist, anticapitalist group called the Labor/Community Strategy Center to organize a multiethnic left, she is interested in learning from the history and mechanics of previous multi-racial organizing attempts; she is also interested in fostering a class-based leftist politics among her readers.  As a scholar, she is fascinated by the sixties and frustrated that histories of radicalism in that period are either mostly white or centered around the Black Panther Party, so she wants to expand the history of racial/ethnic activism to incorporate more of LA's racial and ethnic groups; and she wants to complicate racism by breaking down the black white binary and investigating racial hierarchies and collaborations (or not) in the people she is studying.
 
Therefore, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left is part history of the Third World Left, part empirical study of what she calls "differential racism," and part analysis of the growth, development, and decline of a social movement.  Pulido accomplishes all of these goals via a comparative analysis of left-leaning activism among three racial/ethnic groups in LA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, using three organizations as stand-ins: the Black Panther Party for African Americans; East Wind, a Japanese American group, for Asian Americans; and CASA, a Chicano/a group, for Latino/as.

Although the details of each case make for good reading, her historical conclusions about the relationship between race/ethnicity, racism, and Left activism reveal the complexities of the Third World Left.  Her study of the Black Panther Party suggests that their two main concerns of self-defense and community service were directly related to African American racialization (as the 'Other' to whites, they were at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy and over-policed) and their class position as urban poor.  CASA, by contrast, focused on labor organizing and immigration issues reflected Chicano/as position as a 'problem minority': their racial status and particular historical experiences as immigrants and low-wage workers meant that they were a needed part of the economy, but only as subordinated and exploited workers.  And as a Japanese American group in a multiethnic, multi-class Asian American community, East Wind focused on issues of identity, community service, and solidarity work; their activities reflected their mixed economic position and their status as a 'middle minority.'

Though Pulido found enough connections among groups to indicate a relatively coherent Third World Left, she quickly discovered that these connections were rather thin.  All three organizations were interested in the connection between their own identity as a racial or ethnic 'nation' and anticolonial struggles worldwide, and all three were fighting racism and economic exploitation at home, but they were unsure how to work with other communities in LA.  This uncertainty had a lot to do with the complex racial hierarchies in LA at the time: African Americans, for instance, were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but through the millitancy and visibility of the Black Panther Party they were at the top of the social movement hierarchy. Uncertain positioning, as well as uncertainty regarding the status of one's own group, made lasting coalitions difficult.

Pulido argues that despite a strong need for a multiethnic left today, the situation is much the same as it was in the 1960s and 1970s: strong ethnic groups with weak connections among them, and a weak Third World Left as a result.  Despite some issues with scope (using a single organization to stand in for all ethnic/racial organizing, for instance), Pulido's book provides a thoughtful analysis of the intersections between race and class in LA that may well be a useful guidebook for folks trying to build political capital today.

16: McAdam, Tarrow & Tilly's Dynamics of Contention

Dynamics of Contention is not the easiest to get through (ok, so it made me want to put an ice pick through my head), but it's a pretty important book in social movement theory, so here goes.

Back in the day (like, before the 1960s), social movement theory was a lot closer to social psychology, or crowd theory, or theories of contagion: basically, scholars knew that social movements could and did form and that they could be really dangerous for the social order (see the French Revolution, for instance), but they blamed them on mob mentality and temporary insanity.  And in the 1960s and 70s, when all that social unrest was going on, social scientists did develop more complex theories, but these were still relatively simple: people join organizations which in turn build a mass following and put enormous pressure on the government and the rest of society.  (So claim the authors of this book, anyway.)

Dynamics of Contention builds on the theories from the 60s and 70s, but it updates them for the Postmodern era in three ways:

• combines lots of different kinds of uprisings - revolutions, strikes, wars, social movements, and so on - under the more general umbrella of "contentious politics," so that the things scholars have learned about these different struggles can be pooled together in hopes of finding commonalities among them
• shifts the thing being studied from organizations and individuals to relationships between different organizations and actors, and looks at these relationships as being unstable, shifting, and "dynamic" rather than fixed
• systematizes the study of political struggle from holistic histories to systematic analyses and a search for "processes" and "mechanisms" that all political struggles share.

Basically, they make things more complicated, since it's a lot harder to keep track of a bunch of individual people who are all parts of different political organizations and friends with different people at different times than it is to just talk about, say, battles between SNCC and the Black Panthers.  And a more complicated model means that whatever they come up with with look more like real life, right?

Having made things more like real life, then, they spend the rest of the book poking around in 15 different political struggles from all different points in history and all different parts of the world, and they come up with three - yes, three - processes that most of these struggles share.  These are:

• Actor constitution, where contentious groups form by developing a shared vision and then doing something unusual to get their demands heard and make their presence known
• Polarization, where all the moderates head to one or the other of two political or social poles, and the vacuum in the middle keeps the two sides from talking to each other and coming to peaceable conflict resolution
• Scale shift, where a local contentious group grows into a translocal, national, or international group by linking up with other groups who have similar interests or grievances

Thinking about the development of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, this model makes sense to me.  I'm not a huge fan of giant, transhistorical studies that don't collect their own data, though, and I'm also a little weirded out by two holes in their model: it doesn't seem to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful movements, and it only seems to account for the growth of movements, not their functioning or their decline.  But these guys are bigwig sociologists; perhaps these concerns are addressed somewhere else in their work.

9: Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (round 1)

Having just read James Miller's book on the 1960s, and  knowing that The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution was published in 1967, all I could think about while reading this book is what Bailyn thought about the social and political ferment all around him.  Was he hiding in an archive somewhere deep in the Harvard library system and researching the Revolution while his students were outside protesting in the streets?  Or was all that political unrest what drove him into the archives in the first place, and if that was the case, was he for social and political change, or against it?

Truthfully, I can't quite tell (though I can guess) what his position was, but I do think his research was driven by a desire to understand and explain the present.  Using close readings of some 400+ pamphlets published in the colonies between 1760 and 1776, Bailyn makes two major arguments about the American Revolution.  First, he argues that the Revolution was steeped in the intellectual, historical, and political traditions of Europe, and thus it was not as radical of a break with the past as we like to think.  Second, he argues that it was "ideological," or motivated by a desire to protect and extend a uniquely American worldview, and thus it was not as lofty and intellectual and idealistic as we like to think, either.

There are some obvious problems with Bailyn's method.  Most notably, he claims to want to recreate the world of the Revolutionary generation, but he does so primarily by reading political pamphlets, and of these, he really only focuses on those that supported the revolution because, as he says, no one cares about the losers.  And, judging by some of the truly amazing conspiracy theories he uncovers, this approach would be kind of like listening to either NPR or Rush Limbaugh and assuming they spoke to the worldview of most Americans (which, let's face it, they don't).

However, he also comes up with some really fascinating stuff.  He argues that the American Revolution was inspired by an Enlightenment belief in liberty after all (and not, as Charles Beard claimed, by class warfare) and by religious beliefs in American exceptionalism (with a nod to his former mentor, Perry Miller), but also by a strain of British oppositional thought that he dates to the English Civil War and the Commonwealth period.  Drawing on little-known (to us) British writers like Algernon Sidney, Henry Neville, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Benjamin Hoadly, Bailyn shows that this oppositional strain had two goals: to hold up and protect the liberty and freedom of the individual, and to expose the corruption, decay, and abuses of power in the over-centralized British government.  He then traces these two goals to American pamphleteers Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Otis (among others) and argues that, through them, Americans became increasingly suspicious of a vast British conspiracy to reclaim the colonies and take away their liberties.  And what better reason to start a revolution than to disconnect your pure, virtuous, simple new homeland from an ugly, corrupt, tyrannical, decaying, conspiratorial imperial power BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE??! 

Yeah.  That's what I thought.

While the whole conspiracy angle might be a bit much, Bailyn's connection between these oppositional British thinkers and the American Revolution does have important implications for the 1960s (and for today, too.)  Once he's made the connection, he goes on to talk about how a democratic government works.  In his view, a democracy functions via the productive tension between regulatory institutions and a populace of active, informed individuals; by making our voices heard, we can constantly readjust the regulatory institutions so that they both respect our civil liberties and control for abuses.  It's like we are in a perpetual revolution.  If the people rise up in an angry, unthinking mob (or lapse into uninformed submission), however, the system ceases to function, because in either case the government becomes too powerful.  The book reads, to me anyway, as both a cautionary tale about our responsibilities as American citizens and a narrative of faith in the flexible, evolving democratic system that the Revolution set in motion.

You can check out round 2 here.