Sex & Citizenship in Antebellum America

Nancy Isenberg. Sex & Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Isenberg locates the roots of Antebellum feminism in discussions and activism predating the Seneca Falls convention. She also considers the broader goals of antebellum feminists, who saw suffrage as a means to an end rather than a particular goal in its own right. And that end was to achieve "co-equality", a concept which posited that in a republican society women needed to be allowed the ability to speak for themselves and defend their personal sovereignty--including control over their own bodies--while at the same time living in a separate, gendered sphere. Antebellum feminists were engaged in a complex struggle to redefine the role of women both in their private lives and in the public sphere.

This struggle was complicated because feminists understood that the implications of republican thought--particularly in a society which had sanctioned race-based chattel slavery--on those regarded as "dependents" was fraught with challenges. Women had to find ways in which to engage in a public sphere which was gendered as a (white) male theater of action.

The push for "personhood", then, had to contend both with societal norms restricting the legitimacy of feminine engagement with politics, and longstanding legal norms denying women the agency and legal autonomy to speak or act on their behalf. The push for rights--the right to divorce, the right to own property, guardianship of their own children, etc.--was the real goal of antebellum feminism. Suffrage and appeals to abstract notions of citizenship were a means to an end.

The Straight State

Margot Canday. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.
Princeton University Press, 2009.

Canady argues that because the American national state was late in developing--specifically, because (unlike Western European states) it formed after the "discovery" of  homosexuality by sexologists in the late nineteenth century (2)--the state itself took a leading role in creating a definition of homosexuality as part of the larger process of defining citizenship and policing the borders of the latter. As she admits in the conclusion, the result is a study which necessarily has little to say about the suffering and injustice suffered by an unknown number of Americans, resident aliens, and immigrants who were--or were suspected of--"homosexuality" as it was (often ill-) defined by various agencies and individual bureaucrats. On the other hand, what this study lacks in terms of the perspective of those who felt the brunt of state power, it makes up for in its nuanced and focused examination of how "the State" was actually personified by the individuals responsible for articulating and interpreting policy and law at the level of implementation.

Canady argues for the slow development of a binary notion of citizenship along the axis of sexuality; by the 1960's, the state had defined people as either heterosexuals or homosexuals, with the latter being unworthy of full citizenship. The development of this binary was a long process--while many historical accounts date the Federal codification of homophobia to the McCarthy era, Canady argues that the Cold War "lavender scare" was rather the culmination of a much longer process dating back to turn-of-the-century attempts to control immigration, then growing with the mobilization of World War I and later the rise of the New Deal State, finally culminating in World War II. The Second World War, unlike the First, lasted long enough so that the inclusion of a significant percentage of the population in the military created an imperative to determine the "fitness" of Americans and their sexual behavior and adherence to gender norms. The mechanisms created to police this would, like the military-industrial complex itself, survive the end of the war, where they would be further refined and institutionalized to meet the ideological aims of the Cold War state.

The hard-and-fast binary nature of Canady's analysis might be a little too pat, but her emphasis on how notions of homosexuality were intertwined with notions of defining citizenship in conjunction with the rise of the state is interesting. Her insight that there was an inversion built in to the liberal state--that the Federal government took the lead in pushing back against state and local laws limiting racial civil rights while simultaneously creating limitations on homosexual rights--is interesting as well.

Citizenship in Cold War America

Andrea Friedman. Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent. University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.

In the Introduction, Friedman admits that her book "tell citizenship stories that at first glance seem only loosely related, although a close reading will reveal the many ways in which they overlap and intertwine." (12) There is much to admire in her book, but in the end even a second or third look will likely leave the reader feeling that the commonalities between the five chapters are not strong enough or convincing enough to justify the title or the contention that there is a large truth about citizenship being told here. If one sets aside the claims made in the Introduction and the even-less-convincing Conclusion, however, the reader can profit from this book as a collection of five Cold War-era case studies in which a handful of themes recur to varying degrees.

The problem with Friedman's attempt to turn this collection of case studies into a cohesive argument is that she shifts the center of her interpretive framework back and forth through the book. While Chapter 1 puts the emphasis squarely on Cold War psychology, later chapters will focus more on the concept of state violence and its legitimization as well--the psychological focus is still there, but it's hard to see how much the chapter on juvenile delinquency and comic books has to do with Cold War citizenship. The commonalities that actually do tie Chapters 2 through 5 together have more to do with the ways in which psychology was used to either resist or justify state violence against various groups and individuals than with Friedman's argument on the shaping of citizenship by dissent.

There are many interesting tangents in this book--considerations of how Communism was defined in contrast to "healthy" psychologies; the role of masculinity and aggression in defining Cold War citizenship; the degree to which state violence was justified and masked by the emerging security state; and more. Friedman might have been better off dividing this study into more than one book, as some of the chapters only hint at what might be a more fleshed out narrative given time and space to provide context. Also, she sometimes fails to make it clear where the reader's focus should be. Chapter 4, a study of Puerto Rican nationalism, does not focus on the ostensible subject until more than halfway through.