An Undergraduate Journal of History

Volume 1 | Spring 2021

2

Letter from the Editors

Welcome to the first issue of the Historical Review at the University of Washington, or
the Historical Review at UW. Back in November of 2019, this team came together to establish
the first ever undergraduate history journal at the University of Washington. However, our first
issue was, like many things, impacted by the global COVID-19 pandemic, with a hopeful
publishing date moving from Spring 2020 to Spring 2021. After a challenging year, we are
incredibly proud to present this issue, highlighting the amazing work of our team of
undergraduate writers and Editors.

In this issue we are sharing the work of six UW undergraduates, with topics ranging from
the American hippie movement to Black labor unions in South Africa. First, we have Emma
Goolsby’s “The Hippie Movement from 1960-1975: An Analysis of Social and Political
Factors,” which explores how the hippie movement harnessed social and political factors in a
way that allowed their legacy to continue on into the present. Next is Melinda Whalen’s article
“Lost in the Twilight Zone: Two Approaches to Civil Rights and Code Censorship in 60s Sci-Fi,”
which looks how the 1960s American television shows Lost in Space and The Twilight Zone
approached production, discrimination, and censorship under the Hayes Code. Ryan Mealiffe’s
“Familiar Ecology: The Demonization of Spirit Knowledge in Early Modern England and its
Ecological Ramifications” investigates the demonization of pre-Christian traditional ecological
knowledge and argues how this demonization allowed for increased ecological exploitation in
the 18th century. Kristina Nguyen examines the hypersexualization of Asian women following
the Vietnam War in “The Asian Fetish and White Dominance: How U.S. Involvement in Foreign
Wars Popularized and Normalized the Hypersexualization of Asian Women.” Selma El-
Badawi’s “The Sweet Fruit of Labor: An Examination of Black Labor Unions in South Africa”
looks at how Black labor unions and union federations developed within the context of
apartheid-era South Africa. Finally, Frances Johnson’s “The Pink Scare: The Woman Patriot and
the Gendering of Radicalism” analyzes how the anti-suffrage newsletter The Woman Patriot
bolstered its influence throughout the early 20th century.

We hope that you find this issue both entertaining and educational, and enjoy reading it
as much as we enjoyed creating it.

Sincerely,
Wendi Zhou & Meredith Weinstock
Editors-in-Chief
The Historical Review at UW
Volume 1 | Spring 2021
 3

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all of the undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff
who helped us get this journal to where it is now. First, we must thank Executive Board members
Pattie Unakul and Lillian Williamson for their tireless work over the last year and a half, as well
as Elizabeth Su, who has been a member of our 2019-2020 team. We also wish to thank our
fantastic team of Editors, Sophie Carter, Cameron Molyneux, Hope Morris, Rachel Sun, and
Yolanda Yang. We would also like to give special thanks to History Department Chair Prof.
Glennys Young, Director of Academic Services Tracy Maschman Morrissey, and Undergraduate
Adviser Shannon Vacek for all of their support and advice. Finally, we wish to thank our writers
for their willingness to publish their work within the pages of our first issue.

Executive Board

Wendi Zhou
Meredith Weinstock
Pattie Unakul
Lillian Williamson

Editorial Board

Sophie Carter
Cameron Molyneux
Hope Morris
Rachel Sun
Yolanda Yang
4

Table of Contents
The Hippie Movement from 1960-1975: An Analysis of Social and Political Factors Emma
Goolsby ............................................................................................................................................5
Lost in the Twilight Zone: Two Approaches to Civil Rights and Code Censorship in 60s Sci-Fi
Melinda Whalen .............................................................................................................................13
Familiar Ecology: The Demonization of Spirit Knowledge in Early Modern England and its
Ecological Ramifications Ryan Mealiffe .......................................................................................24
The Asian Fetish and White Dominance: How U.S Involvement in Foreign Wars Popularized
and Normalized the Hypersexualization of Asian Women Kristina Nguyen ................................36
The Sweet Fruit of Labor: An Examination of Black Labor Unions in South Africa Selma El-
Badawi ...........................................................................................................................................44
The Pink Scare: The Woman Patriot and the Gendering of Radicalism Frances Johnson ............53
 5

The Hippie Movement from 1960-1975: An Analysis of Social and Political

Factors
Emma Goolsby

The Hippie movement from 1960-1975 was a socio-cultural movement with anti-war
political undertones. This essay aims to compare the Hippie movements’ social and political
facets to create a clearer understanding of the movement’s impact on modern American life.
Stemming from the Beat generation, the Hippie ideology centered around the principles of
individualism, rejection of mainstream life, and spiritualism. Hippies stressed communal living
and repudiation of material things. They wore loose colorful clothing, grew long beards, and
wore jewelry. Aside from their characteristically different social tropes, the Hippie belief in
universal love made them staunch opponents of the war. In favor of peace, Hippies joined anti-
Vietnam protests. Despite the Hippies’ frequent involvement in political protests, they remained
political by affiliation, rather than by strategy. On the other hand, the Hippies festivals, concerts,
and gatherings such as the Human-Be-In and Summer of Love made them a compelling cultural
force that drew hundreds of thousands of supporters. Despite the Hippies’ growing influence in
the 1960s, the waning of their movement came about due to a blend of social and political
factors. Public distaste with Hippie drug use and anti-establishment sentiment paired with the
Manson murders drove the social decline of the movement. Simultaneously, the end of the
Vietnam War signaled the political end of the movement. Despite the Hippies’ short-lived
influence, their ideology and culture permanently affected modern American culture. The Hippie
movement is credited with increasing sexual freedom, the legalization of marijuana, fostering
personal expression, the beginnings of the environmental movement, lessening societal
formality, along with many other things.
6
As blue jeans, beards, body
adornments, natural foods, legal marijuana,
and gay marriage have gained acceptance in
mainstream American society in recent
years, it can be argued that the Hippies have
finally won the culture war they began in the
1960s.1 The success of their counter-cultural
movement was attributed to the harnessing
of social and political factors that allowed
their legacy to permeate western society up
until the present day.
Hippies, who were almost all white
and middle class, owed a lot to the Beat
Generation. The Beat Generation was a
literary movement started by a group of
authors whose work influenced American
culture and politics in the post-war era of the
1950s. The Beats were famous poets,
novelists, and publishers that explored
spiritualism, cultural experimentation, and a
rejection of standard society values.2 The
movement’s main ideologies morphed into
the counterculture of the 1960s that would
eventually be labeled as the ‘Hippie
Movement.’ While the Beats were a more
sophisticated, philosophical predecessor to
the Hippies, they provided the Hippie
movement’s foundations in drugs,
spiritualism, and sexual freedom.
Essentially, the Beat Movement influenced
the Hippie movement by glamorizing
behaviors that were previously considered
taboo. In addition, the Beat’s preached an
ideology of disaffiliation from political life,
while the Hippie movement arose at a key
point in the United States intervention in
Vietnam, tying their core values to those of
anti-war sentiment.3 Although it was not the
first counter-cultural revolution the U.S. has
seen, the Hippie movement uniquely
1 4
W.J., Rorabaugh, American Hippies. (New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 6.
2
Paul Varner, Historical Dictionary of the Beat
Movement (Lanham, Scarecrow Press, 2012).
3
Eugene Burdick, “The Politics of the Beat
Generation”, Political Research Quarterly 12, no. 2
(1959)
incorporated elements of desire for societal
change and involvement in political protests.
In order to analyze the Hippie
movement, the terms social and political
must be defined. A social movement is a
loosely organized effort by a group to carry
out, resist or undo a social change.4 The
Hippies sought to normalize drug use, live
communally, and enjoy life without the
constraints of the modern material world.
Their core societal and cultural values are
displayed in their use of drugs, love of
music, and way of dressing. Alternatively, a
political movement is a collective attempt by
a group to change government policy and is
usually in opposition to an element of the
status quo.5 The Hippies’ involvement in the
broader American anti-war movement did
politicize the group. However, the Hippie
movement was only political by association
due to its anti-war ideology, not because of
political strategy. It is important to note that
social and political components were
inevitably intertwined and worked hand in
hand to garner the movement’s success, as
well as its decline. The Hippie movement is
nuanced, and both factors are valid
dissertations of its overall impact. This essay
will consider both the political and social
aspects of the Hippie movement, factors that
led to its decline, and the impact of Hippies
on modern-day America. Ultimately, the
Hippie movement was a successful counter-
cultural movement that can be considered
both as a political movement through its
association with the Vietnam War and a
social movement due to anti-establishment
ideology.
The Hippie subculture began as a
youth movement in the Haight-Ashbury
Robert Alan Goldberg, Grassroots resistance:
Social movements in twentieth century America
(Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1996)
5
Ralph W Nicholas, "Social and Political
Movements". Annual Review of Anthropology. 1973

neighborhood of San Francisco and the East
Village of Manhattan in the early 1960s. The
Hippies embodied a new cultural style that
diverged from the existing condition of
American society. A Hippie listened to rock
music, took psychedelic drugs, dressed in
loose, bright-colored clothing, and rejected
mainstream mores in exchange for an
individualistic life in nature.6 At the core,
Hippies’ counterculture was about three
things: a search for authenticity, an
insistence upon individual autonomy, and a
desire for community.7 Being truly free
meant rejecting middle-class culture in order
to “do your own thing,” thus, a spiritual
search was often part of the quest. Hippies’
use of drugs, particularly LSD, was a major
part of their drive for individualism and
spiritualism. Hippies stressed communal
living and rejected capitalism, citing their
foundational ideology of universal love.
The Hippie movement was a
political movement because of the
philosophy of “make love not war.” While it
is plain that the Hippies’ motivations
stemmed from a desire for personal
autonomy, the Vietnam War drew the
Hippies into politics. Hippie dogma strongly
advocated for universal love and freedom,
making them both anti-war and anti-draft.8
As a result, many Hippies joined anti-war
protests across the nation, including the
largest anti-war march in history on
Washington D.C. in 1967. Newspapers were
plastered with Hippies on the front pages,
holding up signs filled with peace signs and
phrases like ‘love not war’ and ‘drop acid
not bombs.’9 Although Hippies were avid
6
“The Flowering of the Hippie Movement”, On
Bohemia, 2017
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315125503-29
7
Rorabaugh, American Hippies, 7
8
Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The
Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory
(Ithaca: ILR Press, 2013).
9
“Drop Acid, Not Bombs :),” American
Counterculture, December 5, 2011,
7
participants in anti-war demonstrations, their
own festivals and protests were mostly
apolitical. In general, Hippies had no desire
to dictate legislation, lobby, or change the
political system. Thus, Hippies were not
political due to strategy. They were far more
interested in enhancing their personal
freedoms through drugs, music, and
togetherness than through typical legislative
channels.10 Ultimately, the Hippie
movement was born of a desire for social
change, and only became anti-war by
association. However, Hippies often
combined anti-war rhetoric into their
concerts and gatherings, blending the social
and political aspects of the movement.
Despite the Hippies’ relative
indifference to legislative politics, the
collective organization against the Vietnam
War categorizes the Hippie movement as
political by affiliation. The Hippie
movement had captured the minds of
America’s youth and consequently amassed
a force to combat the war, therefore altering
political thought.11 For example, the
gathering of 30,000 Hippies in Golden Gate
Park for the Human-Be-In combined Hippie
culture with a political message. It was an
unconventional protest by societal standards:
many rock musicians performed, and drug
use was widespread. Nevertheless, the sheer
number of participants and the event’s core
anti-war values do make this event a
political protest, although it is doubtful that
many Hippies in attendance saw it this way
or desired it to be one. The Human-Be-In
deviated in practice from past social
movements such as the Civil Rights
https://uscounterculture.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/d
rop-acid-not-bombs/.
10
Independent Voices database, Los Angeles Free
Press, Volume 5, issue 190, page 24, March 8-14,
1968
11
Independent Voices database, Los Angeles Free
Press, Volume 5, issue 197, page 23, April 26 - May
3, 1968
8
Movement or the Women’s suffrage
movement in terms of political message and
nature of the protest, but it nevertheless
perpetuated a latent anti-war message. Thus,
the Hippie movement both existed in and
affected the social and political spheres of
American life. However, it is important to
note that very few Hippies, in fact, only a
few isolated groups, actually advocated for
political involvement. Their disillusionment
with law enforcement and the government
meant few Hippies desired legislative
representation or power. It was the Hippie
ideology of love that coincidentally placed
them at the center of the anti-war movement.
Unlike other social movements that grew out
of political aspirations, such as a drive for
increased rights or a desire for a new law,
the Hippies wanted to be as far away from
politics as possible. They were simply
against the war because being pro-war
would contradict the core values of being a
Hippie. Ultimately, the Hippie movement
was often engaged in anti-war protests but
had no larger political impact, such as
legislative change.
Figure 1: Edwards, Gavin. “The Man Who Photographed
Woodstock's Most Iconic Couple.” The New York Times.
The New York Times, August 8, 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/arts/music/woodstock
-famous-couple.html.
12
John Anthony Moretta, The Hippies: A 1960s
History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.,
2017)
On the other hand, the Hippie
movement was a social one. The Hippies are
generally remembered as a counter-cultural
social force, and their music festivals and
communities are perhaps the most
memorialized aspects of the movement.
During the Summer of Love in 1967, the
Hippies reached their apex of influence and
media attention. Inspired by the success of
the Human-Be-In, hundreds of thousands of
Hippies, students, and young adults gathered
in Haight-Ashbury to participate in a
summer of music, sex, and drugs. Unlike the
Human-Be-In, this event was apolitical and
functioned as a three-month-long utopian
society of fun and community. Two years
later, the Woodstock music festival was held
in upstate New York. Woodstock was the
most widely known and remembered Hippie
event as approximately one million people
attended it. Like the Summer of Love,
Woodstock was a symbol of Hippie culture
but lacked a political element. Woodstock
was a defining moment in popular music
history and helped to jump-start the new
genre of acid-rock. Both festivals are
representative of the Hippies’ main focus on
spirituality, peace, and love rather than
politics.12 The Hippies’ rapidly emerging
radical style of concert-going, dressing, and
lifestyle made them a target by law
enforcement across the country. Hippies’
long hair, drug use, and loose concept of
sexuality made them the common focus of
police beatings and arrests.13 As a result, the
Hippies became increasingly suspicious and
distrusting law enforcement, reinforcing
their base against any common government
13
Jennie Gritz, (2015, July 08). The Death of the
Hippies. Retrieved December 14, 2020, from
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2
015/07/the-death-of-the-HippieHippies/397739/

establishment.14 It is not surprising that
those who deviate from the social norm are
assailed by upholders of the status quo. The
Hippies were no exception, and with every
violent encounter with police, the Hippies
became even more disillusioned with
middle-class life. This disillusionment led
many Hippies to experiment with drugs in
order to achieve a transformed way of living
and thinking.
Drug usage was a cornerstone of the
Hippie scene that permeated all social
gatherings, yet to the public, it was also the
most commonly abhorred Hippie trope. The
two most frequently used drugs by Hippies
were marijuana and LSD. Hippies believed
that LSD introduced the user to new levels
of reality, something that every Hippie
should desire in order to escape the
trivialities of American life. However, the
use of LSD divided the broader American
public on the sincerity and morality of the
Hippie counterculture. Most Americans
believed Hippies were irresponsible junkies
that lacked a concrete ideology. There was
an overwhelming consensus that Hippies did
not know what they wanted socially or
politically and rather preferred to be left
alone, undeterred in their use of drugs.15
While it may be true that Hippies refused to
engage in middle-class life, many
academics, most notably Timothy Leary and
Richard Alpert, supported LSD as a
transformative drug and saw it instead as a
way to question the rationality of western
society.16 Furthermore, Hippies used drugs
as an outlet to voice political concerns, the
most prominent being the desire for the
legalization of LSD and marijuana. It was
14
Independent Voices database, Los Angeles Free
Press, Volume 5, issue 214, page 17, August 23-29,
1968
15
Independent Voices database, San Francisco Good
Times, Volume 2, page 10, issue 22, 6/4/1969
16
Timothy Leary. Accessed May 18, 2021.
https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/timothy-
leary.
9
mainly their positive view of drugs that
increased unfavorable public opinion of the
Hippies. The Hippies’ carefree outlook on
life, especially their looseness with drugs
and sex, prompted many Americans to see
the movement as a danger to society. Critics
saw the Hippie movement as nothing but
young people yearning to be free from
society’s burden.17 Their complacency with
drugs and music left many Americans
fearing for the future of their children. As a
result, the public became very skeptical of
the Hippies in the early 1970s.
The fear of Hippies and their
ideology was only exacerbated by the
Manson murders of 1969 and the end of the
Vietnam War, further accelerating the
decline of the Hippie movement. Charles
Manson was a cult leader living in a
commune with his followers. He did not
identify as a Hippie, but he did borrow
Hippies’ imagery of the time by dressing in
Hippie garb, taking drugs, and living
communally. Manson twisted the Hippies’
anti-establishment beliefs as a way to isolate
his followers.18 He effectively convinced
them that Hollywood and its supporters were
evil, culminating in the murder of five
people in the summer of 1969, including
famous actress Sharon Tate. The murders
turned public opinion even further against
the Hippies; with many now believing that
any person who looked like a Hippie was a
killer and a cultist.19 The murders, paired
with the public’s already heightened distaste
for the Hippie lifestyle, culminated in the
social downturn of the movement.
Ultimately the Manson murders resulted in
the labeling of Hippies as a peril to society
17
Independent Voices database, San Francisco Good
Times, Volume 2, page 10, issue 22, 6/4/1969
18
Independent Voices database, Los Angeles Free
Press, Volume 6, page 3, issue 283, December 19-24,
1969
19
Independent Voices database, Los Angeles Free
Press, Volume 6, issue 282, page 13, December 12-
19, 1969
10
and the future of America. With the Hippie
movement’s influence already waning due
to a decrease in popular opinion and the
Manson murders, the withdrawal of U.S.
troops from Vietnam conclusively ended the
Hippie movement in 1973. It is widely held
that protesting the war was a mutual goal of
the Hippies, and without such, their base
unraveled.20 The end of the Vietnam War
signifies that the longevity and success of
the Hippie movement relied significantly on
political factors and protest participation.
Although the Hippies were solely political
by affiliation, the end of the Vietnam War
displayed the importance of anti-war
rhetoric to the strength of the Hippie
movement. So, the Manson murders turned
the social tide against the Hippies, while the
end of the Vietnam War ended the
movement’s key anti-war foundation. The
decline of the movement coinciding with
withdrawal of troops from Vietnam is
symbolic of the idea that the Hippies’
existence was kept alive by both social and
political factors.
Despite the end of the Hippie
movement in the mid-1970s, the legacy of
the Hippies continues to permeate Western
society to this day. The legalization of
marijuana stemmed from the Hippies’
experimentalization and openness towards
drugs. Increased religious acceptance and
diversity in the following decades devolved
from Hippie spiritualism and
experimentation with eastern religions.
Greater sexual freedom arose from the
Hippie era, coming from their ideology of
universal love. Natural foods and herbal
remedies came about from Hippies’
experience with communes in the
countryside.21 Hippies also influenced a new
20
Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The
Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory.
21
Jonathan Kauffman,. Hippie Food: How Back-to-
the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries
Changed the Way We Eat (New York: William
Morrow, 2019)
style of dressing that focused on personal
expression and freedom. These new styles
morphed into the brightly colored, eccentric
fashion trends of the 1970s, 1980s, and
1990s. Hippie culture spawned the pro-
environment movement, including the
establishment of the first Earth Day in 1970.
Hippies were often mocked as ‘tree-
huggers,’ but ultimately, their culture led to
taking care of the Earth through recycling,
organic food, vegetarianism, and food
preservation.22 Furthermore, the Hippies
pioneered activism that proved that social
and political change could be achieved
through peaceful protest. They liberated
sexual stereotypes, encouraged change,
individual pride, and self-confidence
through festivals such as Woodstock and the
Human-Be-In that fostered acceptance and
love. They were a key group in turning the
public tide against the Vietnam War.
Hippies’ unconventional protest tactics that
involved drug use and music prove that
activism can be accomplished in any way.
Although the Hippies were not as organized
as the Black Panther Movement or the Civil
Rights Movement that was operating at the
time, they effectively accomplished their
goals by saturating American culture with a
new desirable way of living. Perhaps most
importantly, the Hippie movement achieved
an overarching lessening of formality in all
aspects of American social life, giving more
deference to individuals rather than
institutions and norms. By the mid-1970s,
most Americans began to accept and wear
beards, jeans, and loose clothing. Rock
music became an increasingly popular
genre, and music festivals and concerts were
commonly attended. It is important to note
that the legacy of the Hippie movement
22
L Atkins “Hippies' proud legacy: Peace, love,
activism” Retrieved December 14, 2020, from
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2007-
06-21-0706210034-story.html
 11

combines both social and political

components, once more underpinning the
idea that the Hippie movement was both a
social and political one and has had
repercussions in both of these fields in the
modern-day.
In this sense, the Hippie movement
was political because of its association with
anti-war sentiment. However, it did lack
certain political ambitions that would make
it purely political. In effect, it is most useful
to categorize the Hippie movement as a
counter-cultural revolution with anti-war
undertones. The Hippies embraced social
change faster than American society could
integrate, thereby creating tension and
conflict. While Hippies did not invent the
ideas of drug use, free sex, and rock and roll,
they brought these ideas into the open,
making them more acceptable in
conventional society. By the 1980s, the
United States had been drawn back into an
era of commercialism and relative
conformity, but Hippie ideology and culture
continue to live on in modern society.
Therefore, while the Hippie movement was
a relatively short-lived moment in history,
ultimately, the Hippies won the culture war
they began in 1960.

Emma Goolsby is a member of the

class of 2022; she is currently a junior
majoring in History and Political Science
with a minor in International Studies. This
paper was written for HSTRY 388:
American Social Movements Since 1900, a
course taught by Prof. James Gregory.
12
Bibliography
Atkins, L. “Hippies' proud legacy: Peace,
love, activism.” 2018. Retrieved
December 14, 2020, from
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/
bs-xpm-2007-06-21-0706210034-
story.html
Burdick, Eugene. “The Politics of the Beat
Generation.” Political Research
Quarterly 12, no. 2, (1959) 553-555.
doi:10.1177/106591295901200214
“Drop Acid, Not Bombs :).” American
Counterculture, December 5, 2011.
https://uscounterculture.wordpress.co
m/2011/12/05/drop-acid-not-bombs/.
Goldberg, Robert Alan. Grassroots
resistance: Social Movements in
Twentieth Century America. Long
Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1996
Gritz, Jennie. “The Death of the Hippies.”
2015. Retrieved December 14, 2020,
from
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nment/archive/2015/07/the-death-of-
the-HippieHippies/397739/
Independent Voices database, Los Angeles
Free Press, Volume 5, issue 190,
page 24, March 8-14, 1968
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Free Press, Volume 5, issue 197,
page 23, April 26 - May 3, 1968
Independent Voices database, Los Angeles
Free Press, Volume 5, issue 214,
page 17, August 23-29, 1968
Independent Voices database, Los Angeles
Free Press, Volume 6, issue 282,
page 13, December 12-19, 1969
Independent Voices database, Los Angeles
Free Press, Volume 6, issue 283,
page 3, December 19-24, 1969
Independent Voices database, San Francisco
Good Times, Volume 2, page 10,
issue 22, 6/4/1969
Kauffman, Jonathan. Hippie Food: How
Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and
Revolutionaries Changed the Way
We Eat. New York: William
Morrow, 2019.
Lewis, Penny. Hardhats, Hippies, and
Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar
Movement as Myth and Memory.
Ithaca: ILR Press, 2013.
Moretta, John Anthony. The Hippies: A
1960s history. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017.
Nicholas, Ralph W. "Social and Political
Movements". Annual Review of
Anthropology. 1973
Rorabaugh, W. J. American Hippies. New
York, NY: Cambridge University
Press, 2015.
“The Flowering of the Hippie Movement.”
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2021.https://psychology.fas.harvard.
edu/people/timothy-leary.
Varner, Paul. Historical Dictionary of the
Beat Movement. Lanham, Md:
Scarecrow Press, 2012
 13

Lost in the Twilight Zone: Two Approaches to Civil Rights and Code Censorship
in 60s Sci-Fi
Melinda Whalen

This paper evaluates the influence of the Motion Picture Production Code, known as the
Hays Code, on science fiction television during the height of the Civil Rights movement from the
late 1950s to the late 1960s. As references, this paper uses the popular sci-fi television shows
Lost in Space and The Twilight Zone to present two differing responses to network censorship
and explore the ways that each program handled issues of character diversity, racism in the film
industry, and conventional social norms. After describing the premise, main cast, and one
episode of each show, the paper examines the approaches to plot, character archetypes, and racial
stereotypes in both examples in the context of the Civil Rights movement. The paper utilizes
comparative analysis to note the differences between each shows’ use of science fiction to
achieve their respective goals. Lost in Space exemplifies the complete adherence to even the
most discriminatory demands of the Hays Code: the show uses the fantastical nature of outer
space adventures as a scapegoat for whitewashing and the reinforcement of White superiority
and traditional societal roles. The Twilight Zone aims to push the limits of the Hays Code by
using the science fiction genre as a veil to disguise his discussions of heavier issues, such as
human morality and prejudice, from the watchful eyes of censorship boards.
14
The 1960s in America were
indisputably a time of cultural revolution,
renovation, and reconstruction. Cutting-edge
technology brought television into the living
rooms of more American homes than ever
before, while the civil unrest that demanded
African American rights divided the nation,
old prejudices and new ideals violently
clashing in the streets. Despite this, ongoing
controversy surrounding the role of film in
social issues restricted the ways in which
media could discuss the rapidly-evolving
society, as filmmakers and screenwriters
were constantly threatened with
unemployment, censorship, or ostracization.
However, with the new frontier of science
fiction television now on the horizon,
censors were unsure how audiences would
interact with the material and how to
proceed policing the newfound genre of
monsters and aliens. Shows like Lost in
Space embarked on space adventures while
indulging audiences with uncritical
entertainment that remained within the set
boundaries of the era’s societal norms. The
Twilight Zone, however, opted for a more
provocative approach to the censorship
loophole, often devising fantasy plotlines
that commented on racism and forced
audiences to acknowledge their own
complicity in the perpetuation of
discrimination.
The experimental nature of film
media in the early 20th century caused
heated discussion among the nation’s
religious leaders, who demanded federal
restrictions be imposed on American
filmmakers. The 1915 Supreme Court case
23
Chris Skelton, Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial
Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230 (JUSTIA US
Supreme Court, 1915),
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/236/230/.
24
Skelton, Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial
Commission of Ohio.
25
Kristin Hunt, “The End of American Film
Censorship,” JSTOR Daily, February 18, 2018,
https://daily.jstor.org/end-american-film-censorship/.
“Mutual Film Corporation vs the Industrial
Commission of Ohio” ruled that films were
not considered art and were instead
“business, pure and simple.”23 Films were
“not to be regarded as part of the press of the
country or as organs of public opinion” and
thus were not protected under the First
Amendment’s right to free speech.24 With
this ruling came the push for federal
censorship of movies to which the film
industry responded with the self-imposed
Motion Picture Production Code, known
commonly as the Hays Code.25 Active from
1934 to 1968, this strict production code
barred filmmakers from depicting
“immoral” values in mass media:
particularly scenes that showed or implied
sex, criticism of religion, or substance
abuse, but also that discussed divisive social
topics. The vague language of the Code
required that films be “wholesome” and
encourage “correct thinking.”26 As
audiences were not to be convinced to
sympathize with “the side of crime, wrong-
doing, evil or sin,” scripts often took a more
linear approach so that characters could be
designated “good” or “bad,” resulting in
plots that were relatively simple and easily
digestible.27
Among the most controversial of the
bans was the depiction of miscegenation,
relationships between Black and White
characters, which was indicative of the state
of racial tensions at the time the code was
created.28 The Code’s first general principle
prohibited content that would “lower the
moral standards of those who see it,” which
indirectly posited that interracial
26
Bob Mondello, “Remembering Hollywood's Hays
Code, 40 Years On,” NPR, August 8, 2008,
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9330
1189.
27
Mondello, “Remembering Hollywood's Hays
Code, 40 Years On.”
28
Mondello, “Remembering Hollywood's Hays
Code, 40 Years On.”

relationships were innately immoral.29 The
Code’s ban on miscegenation, more often
than not, translated into the complete
exclusion of actors of color entirely as
cautious studios feared accidental code
violations. As a result of both the Code and
commonplace prejudice, Black actors were
rarely casted in network television and
scarcely were they in roles that were as
important to the plot as White characters.
Including African American actors in their
films was akin to making a statement in
support of the Civil Rights movement,
which studios avoided so as to retain the
viewership of bigoted audiences. Ironically,
the Code also required that “prominent
people and citizenry of all nations shall be
represented fairly,” which, in the context of
its ban on miscegenation, reinforces that
African Americans were neither a
“prominent people” of America nor included
in the right to fair treatment.30
Upon violating the code, Film
studios could not be threatened with federal
punishment, but were instead barred from
showing their movies in American theaters,
which would cost filmmakers thousands of
dollars in revenue.31 As television emerged
as the newest form of mass consumption
media, the Hays Code naturally extended to
encompass the censorship of television as
well. However, when the Space Race culture
of the 1960s awakened audiences to the
exciting idea of space travel, the
introduction of science fiction television
began to weaken the grip of the Hays Code.
Content was not so easily banned when it
concerned fantastical elements such as outer
space, martians, or dystopian societies. The
nature of the show then largely fell into the
29
Mondello, “Remembering Hollywood's Hays
Code, 40 Years On.”
30
Mondello, “Remembering Hollywood's Hays
Code, 40 Years On.”
31
Hunt, “The End of American Film Censorship.”
32
Jordan Hoffman, “Excited for Netflix's New 'Lost
in Space'? Here’s What to Know About the Original,”
15
hands of its writers, who ultimately
determined whether its subject matter would
comment on the social issues of its time or
ignore them.
Between its all-white cast and
picture-perfect family, the popular Lost in
Space, airing from 1965 to 1968, is a prime
example of the lighthearted “moral” content
that the Hays Code desired for its audiences.
Aptly described as a “candy-coated morsel
of classic American TV,” Lost in Space is
set in 1997, which was then considered
futuristic, and revolves mainly around the
plights of the Robinson family.32 Often
warmly referred to as Space Family
Robinson, the main family unit consisted of
parents John and Maureen, their darling
daughters Judy and Penny, and their bright
young son Will. Lost in Space’s choice of
character types mirrored other popular
mainstream shows of the era like Father
Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver; the
“nuclear family” archetype was
commonplace in 60s television as it was
representative of the “correct standards of
life” that the Hays Code desired.33 The
Code’s defined moral righteousness as
white, pro-American do-gooders, which
easily describes the cast of Lost in Space.
The absence of racial representation can be
explained away by the show’s nature and
structure; the only other characters aside
from the main cast are alien antagonists who
are introduced and subdued within the same
episode. The show used the otherworldly
nature of science-fiction and the Code
guidelines as a loophole to avoid criticisms
of whitewashing or discrimination.
The increasingly divisive social
climate of the 1960s had embittered the
New York Times, April 11, 2018,
www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/watching/lost-in-
space-netflix-original-guide.html.
33
Mondello, “Remembering Hollywood's Hays
Code, 40 Years On.”
16
American public, who were more sensitive
to content that even marginally related to
topics of racism and discrimination. As an
accommodation, most television shows, like
Lost in Space, aimed to provide audiences
with simple escapist content that would
distract families from the complicated,
emotionally-draining woes of the Civil
Rights movement. The show begins on the
basis that the Robinsons are determined to
be the first family to colonize another planet
and set out in their spaceship, the Jupiter 2,
manned by pilot Don West. As the title
suggests, the characters soon become lost in
space after the nefarious Dr. Smith attempts
to sabotage their ship, accidentally trapping
himself along with them. Dr. Smith was
originally the show’s antagonist, but his evil
qualities were quickly written out of his
character; his clever quips and clumsy
nature caused audiences to regard him as
more “lovably annoying” than villainous,
leaving the protagonists without any
consistent opposition.34 The characters of
Lost in Space are relatively simple, as they
invariably do what is considered ethical
without question or hesitation: saving the
helpless and vanquishing the evil. Clearly
fitting the Hays Code’s definition of
“moral,” audiences could sympathize or
identify with any of the characters in good
conscience and network censors could rest
easy.
The episode “One of Our Dogs is
Missing” represents the perfect balance the
show struck between science fiction
elements and relatable plot lines that
provided audiences with pleasant escapist
entertainment. In this episode, John, Don,
and Will are separated from the main ship
after a heavy meteor storm temporarily
34
Hoffman, “Excited for Netflix's New 'Lost in
Space'?.”
35
Lost in Space, “One of Our Dogs is Missing,”
directed by Irwin Allen, aired December 8, 1965, on
Columbia Broadcasting System, 20:46.
maroons their exploration rover, the Chariot.
During the first night of the mens’ absence,
Maureen, Judy, and Penny fear for their
safety after they hear ominous howling and
find that their food has been ransacked. The
threat appears to be a scrappy little dog that
the women immediately adopt, unaware of
the looming beast that stalks them as they
search for the Chariot. Multiple scenes serve
no other purpose than showing the young
children playing with the dog and the
women tending to the garden. The comedic
relief, Dr. Smith, is suspicious of the dog
and rambles to young Will about its possible
plots of espionage and assassination. After
the dog strays a bit too far from the ship, a
heartbroken Penny begs Judy to find her
“little fella.”35 As a loving older sister
should, Judy goes out alone to search for
him, but is once again unknowingly tailed
by the beast. The men are eventually
reunited with the Jupiter 2, but soon rush out
to save Judy whose screams are heard for
miles as she is attacked by the monster. The
men slay the beast, save the woman, and the
dog comes home safe.36 While the
characters are often met with the various
trials and tribulations similar to this, their
cooperation and good old-fashioned hard
work satisfyingly solves the issue by the
episode’s end. Here, the Robinsons once
again prevail without harm and leave
audiences feeling content knowing that the
heroes have won.
Despite being set in the vastness of
outer space, the episode’s low-stakes plot
was purposefully designed to be as
accessible as possible to American
audiences. Serving as uncritical family-
friendly entertainment, the show was
described to viewers as “fun, spoof, zany,
36
Lost in Space, “One of Our Dogs is Missing,”
44:10.

and camp” which offered “a tongue-in-
cheek fantasy...blending a balance of
normalcy.”37 The plot of the episode largely
concerns a lost dog, a pedestrian issue for a
science fiction television show, but one
Americans could easily relate to. Scenes of
Maureen smiling fondly as her children play
with the dog in the front yard were familiar
to families watching at home and provided
an aspect of comfort for audiences who
could identify with the characters. While
still supplying the thrill of space adventures,
Lost in Space also conformed to many
cultural norms of the era: white men in
positions of superiority and white women as
domestic caretakers, all while avoiding the
time’s social issues.
The show aired from 1965 to 1968,
in the immediate wake of both the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, essentially the most productive
period of the Civil Rights movement. The
show’s content made no mention of racial
issues but also never claimed to, instead
simply promising its viewers that every
episode would be “delightful adventure with
the Robinsons.”38 The content and
characters of the show were meant to be
taken exactly as they were presented,
without coded language or double meanings,
so that they could be consumed by a wide
variety of audiences, with the main objective
being avoiding controversy. Lost in Space
offered to its viewers the excitement of
cutting-edge sci-fi special effects and plots
that distracted audiences from the current
political climate rather than discussed it.
Though working within the same
Code restrictions as Lost in Space, The
37
Paul Smith, “Lost In Space Original 1966
Interviews,” YouTube, Published February 7, 2014.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB9TMZLwkIQ. 0:21.
38
Smith, “Lost In Space Original 1966 Interviews,”
8:01.
39
Parisi, Nicholas, and Anne Serling, Rod Serling:
His Life, Work, and Imagination (Mississippi:
University Press of Mississippi, 2018), 3.
17
Twilight Zone took advantage of the
imaginative genre of science fiction to serve
a progressive agenda; using monsters,
magic, and martians to discuss pressing
social issues. Known as “Television’s Angry
Young Man,” Rod Serling, writer and
producer of The Twilight Zone, notoriously
fought with network censorship for the right
to create scripts that purposefully subverted
long-standing racial stereotypes.39 Serling
famously claimed that “[the writer] must see
the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and
he must focus on the issues of his time.”40
Infuriated by court proceedings and verdict
of the Emmett Till murder, Serling
attempted to write an episode for the
program United States Steel Hour that
commented on the gross racism in America,
titled “Noon on Doomsday.” Considered
much too provocative for daytime television,
censors stripped Serling’s script until its
connections to Till were nearly
unrecognizable by the time it aired.41 After
his failure with “Noon on Doomsday,”
Serling became vehemently opposed to the
censorship of his work, believing that “the
moment you begin to censor the writer...so
begins a process of decay in the body politic
that ultimately leads to disaster. What begins
with a blue pencil...very often ends with a
concentration camp.”42
This experience encouraged Serling
to venture into science fiction television via
The Twilight Zone as Code censorship
boards were much more generous with the
40
Jacky Mansky, “An Early Run-In With Censors
Led Rod Serling to 'The Twilight Zone',”
Smithsonian Magazine, April 1, 2019, Smithsonian
Institution, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-
culture/early-run-censors-led-rod-serling-twilight-
zone-180971837/.
41
Serling, Rod Serling, 125.
42
Serling, Rod Serling, 123.
18
new genre.43 On writing episodes for this
new series, Serling commented on the
generosity of the fantastical genre, noting
that it was “alright to have Martians saying
things Democrats and Republicans could
never say.”44 It is crucial to emphasize that
Serling’s main purpose for pursuing The
Twilight Zone was the creative liberty he
gained as a writer to comment on social
issues, which explains his consistent
discussion of racism and bigotry in most of
the episodes he produced.
Known as one of Serling’s most
explicitly anti-racist episodes, “I Am the
Night, Color Me Black” explored the nature
and reprecussions of discrimination while
navigating the restrictions of the Hays Code.
The episode is set in a rural nameless town
on the day that Jagger, a White townsman
convicted of murder, is set to be executed at
9:30 am. As his execution nears, the sun still
has yet to rise for the day, blanketing the
town in a perpetual midnight darkness. His
victim, whom Jagger admits feeling no
remorse in killing, was a violent racist who
regularly assaulted the Black locals. The
town reporter reveals that Jagger’s trial was
invalid, as both Sheriff Koch and Deputy
Pierce admit to lying on the witness stand at
the request of the townspeoples’ committee.
Before his execution, Reverend Anderson, a
Black clergyman, attempts to reconcile
Jagger with his fate, acknowledging “you
stood up for me and mine...you killed for
us...I feel you deserve some measure of
peace.”45 The crowd of townspeople erupt in
animalistic cheers as Jagger is pushed to the
gallows but are dreadfully silent as he is
hanged. The town is then immediately
plunged further into darkness. After a
revelation, Reverend Anderson addresses
43
Mansky, “An Early Run-In With Censors Led Rod
Serling to 'The Twilight Zone'.”
44
Serling, Rod Serling, 191.
45
The Twilight Zone, “I Am the Night, Color Me
Black,” directed by Rod Serling, aired March 27,
1964, on Columbia Broadcasting System, 16:59.
the frightened crowd, preaching that the
darkness is “the hate [Jagger] felt, the hate
you felt, the hate all of us feel… now it’s
choking us.”46 The town remains consumed
in the darkness as the radio reports that these
patches of darkness are happening
worldwide; among the places listed are
Chicago, Illinois, Birmingham, Alabama,
the Berlin Wall, and Northern Vietnam.
Uncharacteristically, Sterling addresses the
audience directly in his closing narration: “A
sickness known as hate...Don't look for it in
the Twilight Zone—look for it in a mirror.
Look for it before the light goes out
altogether.”47
Airing in March of 1964, “I Am the
Night” came when the future of the US and
the world seemed hopelessly bloodied and
bleak. The episode came shortly after the
assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X,
and John F. Kennedy, and as America
trudged into its ninth year of war in
Vietnam. The unexplainable curtain of
darkness that descends over the town
provided the episode just enough fantasy to
be considered science fiction and overall
obeyed Hays Code restrictions. The
characters could not be considered immoral
as Jagger pleaded guilty to murder and was
subsequently executed, which technically
follows the due process of justice. However,
the episode critically examines the definition
of right to a fair trial, borne from Serling’s
inability to discuss Till’s case in his failed
“Noon on Doomsday.” Aspects of Jagger’s
case were botched in the same way Till’s
was, using false witness statements and
decided by an entirely biased jury, which
proves the impossibility of a fair verdict.
The race of the characters, their roles
within the town, and the real-world parallels
46
The Twilight Zone, “I Am the Night, Color Me
Black,” 21:19.
47
The Twilight Zone, “I Am the Night, Color Me
Black,” 23:57.

are also key to understanding the racial
intricacies of this episode. Had Jagger been
a Black man, tried and hanged for murdering
a White man, the racial implications of
televising a lynching would have been more
than any network censor would allow, no
matter how lenient. Since Jagger is a White
man whose death is demanded by his fellow
White townsfolk and carried out by the
White sheriff, Serling then also introduces
the connotations of White on White crime.
The audience is then forced to attempt to
reconcile their remorse for Jagger, a
fictional White man, with their indifference
to real lynchings happening across the
nation.
The only Black character of
relevance is Reverend Anderson, arguably
the episode’s protagonist, who ultimately
enlightens the townspeople on the
consequences of their hatred. He is in a
position of indisputable prominence in the
episode and is neither interrupted by the
townspeople nor ridiculed for his race, but
instead listened to with respect. His
resemblance to Martin Luther King Jr. goes
without question; Reverend Anderson, a
composed man of religiosity, is not only
indispensable to the episode’s plot but also
more dignified and insightful than his White
counterparts, prone to sermon-like speeches.
The premise of the episode, specifically
utilizing the metaphor of darkness and
hatred, seems to draw directly from King’s
quote: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness,
only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out
hate, only love can do that.”48 Using the
fantastical nature of the science fiction
genre, Serling brought the sentiment of
King’s quote to life, showing audiences the
haunting consequences of their resentment.
Unlike Lost in Space, the Twilight
48
“Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Quotations,”
National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the
Interior,
19
Zone does not have a consistent main cast as
it is an anthological drama series which
changes its premise, characters, and plot
with every episode. While a majority of the
characters are White, there are a number of
well-written title roles in some of Serling’s
most successful episodes which featured
actors of color, like Reverend Anderson.
Serling’s treatment of the science-fiction
genre is drastically different than that of
Lost in Space; rather than indulge in
intergalactic aliens and spaceship
adventures, he attempts to create characters
and situations as close to reality as possible
so that the moral is not obscured by the
heavy-handed use of sci-fi gimmicks. His
insistence on including actors of color in his
main roles both worked against the Hays
Code’s light ban on diverse characters and
subverted Black-inferiority stereotypes in
mass media.
The moral of this episode is
substantially more literal than Serling’s
usual Twilight Zone commentaries,
signifying Serling’s complete exasperation
with the violence that governed American
society. The ending narration boldly
mentions the Civil Rights movement’s most
violent battleground cities as well as the
Vietnam War and the postwar division of
East and West Germany. He describes hate
as the sickness that plagues American
society, the foundation of every issue that
exists in the US, which Serling begs the
audience to realize before it is too late. The
episode is meant to make audiences
uncomfortable, forcing them to confront the
consequences of their actions, as there is no
satisfying resolution by the episode’s end;
Serling instead offers the cancerous spread
of the darkness as a cautionary tale to
American audiences.
https://www.nps.gov/mlkm/learn/quotations.htm#:~:t
ext=%22Darkness%20cannot%20drive%20out%20d
arkness,only%20love%20can%20do%20that.%22.
20
Additionally, by designating
prejudice as the root of both racism and the
war on Communism, Serling also suggests
that American policy abroad is innately
borne of hate as opposed to domestic safety.
By the standards of 1960s television, a
social critique of this caliber was
unprecedented; not only did Serling
condemn discrimination, but also the nature
of American war interests long before
antiwar movements had mobilized. Though
these scenarios are supposedly set in the
fantastical realm described in the show’s
title, the content of Serling’s episodes are
relevant enough for audiences to consider its
real-world applications in the light of current
issues. His use of mass media refuted the
ruling of the court case that produced the
Hays Code and revolutionized the role of
films and television in the social landscape.
These two approaches to Hays Code
censorship in Sci-Fi represented the new
role television played in the cultural
landscape of the 60s as a vehicle for social
comment. In compliance with the Hays
Code, Lost in Space represented comfort and
tradition, upholding long-standing American
values of moral righteousness but also of
white superiority and conventional gender
roles. The Twilight Zone proposed fantasy
situations that openly invited audiences to
discuss social problems and to recognize the
ways in which they have personally aided its
continuation. The damage the Hays Code
inflicted stretches far beyond the 1960s;
whitewashing and White America’s
apathetic disposition to social issues were
not created by the Code, but provided a legal
basis for its justification and normalization.
Despite the Code’s obsoletion by the 1970s,
its ideals were already posited into the
American consciousness and further
contributed to the systems of
institutionalized racism that continue to
wreak havoc in modern society long after its
lifetime.
Melinda Whalen is a sophomore,
graduating in the year 2023. They are
majoring in History: War and Society and
Russian Language, Literature, and Culture
with interests in Chinese language and
postwar cinematography and poetry. This
paper was written for HSTAA 465: From
Kennedy to Counterculture: The 60s in
America with Prof. Nathan E. Roberts.
 21

Appendix

Lost in Space

The “Space Family Robinsons”

and Company.

Image Citation:
Hoffman, Excited for Netflix's
New 'Lost in Space'? Here’s What
to Know About the Original.

… Dr. Smith’s antics were often the result of his

deep fear of capture and of alien species,
specifically the former by the latter, which
culminated in a mild delusional paranoia. Here,
he timidly surrenders to the small dog who
mistakenly picks up the laser gun when playing
fetch with Penny.

Throughout the episode, Dr. Smith is convinced

the dog is of an alien species who have come to
eliminate the Robinsons’ explorer unit. Here, in
the hopes of his own survival, he pitifully
submits himself as well as his entire
unconsenting crew.

Image Citations:
Allen, “One of Our Dogs is Missing,” 20:36.
22

The Twilight Zone

A conflicted Sheriff Koch struggles with the

moral dilemma of sending an innocent man to
the gallows. In his lament, he repents the
choices he has made--undue process, perjury,
obstruction of justice--which he attributes to
serving his own selfish desire to be reelected
sheriff. Here, he resigns to Jagger’s blood on his
hands despite the fact that, at this point in the
episode, he had not been hanged yet.

Image Citation:
Serling, “I Am the Night, Color Me Black,”
13:44.

… In addition to their visual similarities, rhythms; in his address, he speaks in short

Reverend Anderson also mimics Martin evocative sentences with prolonged pauses
Luther King’s distinct speech patterns and and utilizes the light/darkness binary
favored by King.

Image Citation:
Serling, “I Am the Night, Color Me Black,”
21:36.
 23

Bibliography Serling: His Life, Work, and

Allen, Irwin, dir. Lost in Space. “One of Our
Dogs is Missing.” Aired December
8, 1965, on Columbia Broadcasting
System.
Hoffman, Jordan. “Excited for Netflix's New
'Lost in Space'? Here's What to
Know About the Original.” The New
York Times, April 11, 2018.
www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/watc
hing/lost-in-space-netflix-original-
guide.html.
Hunt, Kristin. “The End of American Film
Censorship.” JSTOR Daily,
February, 18, 2018.
https://daily.jstor.org/end-american-
film-censorship/.
Mansky, Jackie. “An Early Run-In With
Censors Led Rod Serling to 'The
Twilight Zone'.” Smithsonian
Magazine. April 1, 2019.
Smithsonian Institution.
www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-
culture/early-run-censors-led-rod-
serling-twilight-zone-180971837/.
Imagination. Mississippi: University
Press of Mississippi, 2018.
Serling, Rod, dir. The Twilight Zone. “I Am
the Night, Color Me Black.” Aired
March 27, 1964, on Columbia
Broadcasting System.
Skelton, Chris. Mutual Film Corp. v.
Industrial Comm'n of Ohio, 236 U.S.
230 (1915). JUSTIA US Supreme
Court,
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/fede
ral/us/236/230/.
Smith, Paul. “Lost In Space Original 1966
Interviews.” YouTube. Published
February 7, 2014.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB9T
MZLwkIQ.

“Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial

Quotations.” National Parks Service,
U.S. Department of the Interior.
https://www.nps.gov/mlkm/learn/quo
tations.htm#:~:text=%22Darkness%
20cannot%20drive%20out%20darkn
ess,only%20love%20can%20do%20t
hat.%22.

Mondello, Bob. “Remembering Hollywood's

Hays Code, 40 Years On.” NPR,
August, 8 2008.
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p
hp?storyId=93301189.

Parisi, Nicholas, and Anne Serling. Rod

24

Familiar Ecology: The Demonization of Spirit Knowledge in Early Modern

England and its Ecological Ramifications
Ryan Mealiffe

During the English witch trials of the mid-sixteenth century to 1735, more was on trial
than just the accused humans before the bar. Witch trials also threatened an entire mental
landscape, the beings that inhabited it, and their relationships with both the accused and the
general populace. This ecological ontology coalesced in the other party on trial: the intersectional
helpers known as familiar spirits. Spirits animated the natural world, intermingled with flora and
fauna, and impacted many aspects of everyday life, representing a keystone species in popular
conceptions of nature in early modern England. The assumption of malevolence present in witch
trials and the use of familiar spirits as evidence of witchcraft slowly warped these ambivalent
creatures from domestic helpers, companions, and sources of knowledge into malevolent,
demonic servants. Drawing from the fields of historical ecology, anthropology, and philosophy,
this paper focuses on the conception of the familiar spirits as intersectional beings,
environmental agents, and bearers of ecological knowledge, arguing that their demonization
marked a turning point in how many English men and women viewed their relationships with
other organisms and the environment they shared.

Initiated with the trial of the
Chelmsford witches in 1566 and concluding
in the early 18th century, the English witch
trials lasted over one hundred and fifty
years, during which time southeast England
saw 785 indictments brought against a total
of 474 accused witches. However, more was
on trial than the accused humans before the
bar. Their professions and practices were
ruled illicit, their beliefs deemed anti-
Christian, and their supernatural knowledge
and power judged as demonic and
maleficent by both courts of law and by
regular English men and women. At stake
were the ontologies of popular folklore and
the supernatural beings that inhabited this
mental landscape. Linking the fates of
accused witches to these broader ontological
and supernatural realms were familiar
spirits, a hybridized and diverse group of
supernatural beings that straddled modern
conceptions of what is natural and
supernatural, human and animal, magic and
science. Companionate to human witches,
familiars were a species in the broader genus
of spirits that constituted a keystone species
in the conceptualized ecology of early
modern England. Over the course of the
trials, magical practitioners, their familiar
companions, and the broader genus of spirits
to which they belonged, once considered
morally ambivalent, were jointly
condemned, resulting in a gradual but
critical shift in English collective ecological
49
Known by a variety of names, “cunning folk”
were popular magical practitioners in England with
specialized knowledge of magical practices beyond
what the average person knew. Cunning men and
women were numerous in Britain and used their
power for a wide range of purposes including
healing, finding lost or stolen goods, and divining. In
this paper, as in other writing on the period, the term
“cunning folk” will be used to describe the generally
benevolent magical practitioners, while the term
“witch” will be used to describe supposedly
25
ontology starting in the 16th century and the
eventual existential rejection of spirits and
witchcraft by the mid-18th century.
Although it is likely that the origin of
the witch’s familiar lays in the elite
magicians and sorcerers of the Middle Ages,
by the early modern period, the idea that
both cunning folk and witches were assisted
by a familiar spirit had entered the popular
consciousness and constantly recurred in
pamphlet accounts.49 Familiars might be
called imps, demons, fairies, ghosts, or
spirits and appeared in a variety of forms
from animal to human, hybridized,
mundane, and fantastic.50 They were
intersectional creatures, “hybrids, not totally
animal, nor totally spirit, neither completely
old, nor entirely novel, creating, and created
by the narratives of witchcraft that emerged
in England.”51 Whether a familiar was
described as a devil, fairy, ghost, or spirit,
they all belonged to a larger supernatural
world filled with other beings similar to
themselves.
The confessions of accused witches’
familiar encounters all follow a similar
structure. Magical practitioners commonly
encountered their familiars while in a state
of economic and psychological stress and
are offered supernatural aid by the spirit.
The individual, agreeing to make a pact with
the spirit, provisioned the spirit with
domestic comfort, food and drink, as well as
blood, although demon familiars
additionally asked witches to renounce their
Christian faith and pledge their souls to the
malevolent magical practitioners. Magical
practitioners, whether malevolent or benevolent, were
believed to have a “familiar,” a spirit-helper who acts
on the witch’s behalf. James Sharpe, Instruments of
Darkness, 71-72.
50
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
3.
51
Helen Parish, “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads,
and Weasils,” 11.
26
Devil.52 The pamphlet accounts detailing the
trial of Essex witch Elizabeth Francis in
1566 exemplify a secondary familiar
encounter narrative: familiar inheritance.
Francis had been given a demon familiar
called “Satan... in the likeness of a white
spotted cat, and [that her grandmother]
taught her to feed the said cat with bread and
milk.”53
The 1566 account also exemplifies
the peculiarly English “animal familiar.”
Descriptions of familiar spirits given by
early modern English magical practitioners
were quite ordinary with a pervading sense
of naturalism and only occasionally
displaying fantastic traits or conforming to a
devilish stereotype. In most instances,
familiars would visually resemble ordinary
creatures, including humans, and in England
specifically, animals. Familiars were
believed to shapeshift and appeared in a
variety of animal guises ranging from apes,
stags, horses, lambs, ferrets, dogs, cats, and
mice to birds, bees, spiders, grasshoppers,
snails, and frogs. To match their
commonplace appearance, animal familiars
were given the same types of personal
names given to both fairies and pets,
reflecting an affectionate and intimate
relationship often found between magical
practitioners and their spirits.54 The
relationship between English witches, such
as Elizabeth Francis, and their animal
familiars were notoriously close.
Joan Prentice (accused of witchcraft
in Essex in 1589) and her ferret familiar
display the symbiotic working relationship
and domestic intimacy that supposedly
developed between many magical
practitioners and their familiars. Joan and
her familiar shared an affectionate
relationship centered around the sucking of
52
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
92-96.
53
Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft in England, 1558-1618,
74.
blood. When the spirit first appeared to
Joan, she was terrified; however, their
relationship quickly improved and soon Joan
was calling to her familiar in a similar
fashion as one summoning a beloved pet,
asking, “Bid, Bid, Bid, come Bid, come Bid,
come suck.” Their dialogue also displays a
close reciprocal relationship as Joan lies in
bed while her familiar sucks her blood. One
night, the ferret asked, “Joan, wilt thou go to
bed,” and after she had done so, hopped onto
her lap and sucked blood from her left
cheek.55 A human kind of intimacy was
present between a cunning woman or witch
and their familiar, and yet familiars also
acted like pets of the time.
Although whether English familiar
spirits were illusory or real remains a hotly
debated topic in scholarship, the similarities
between animal familiars in early modern
witchcraft trials in England and common
pets of the day suggest that, at least, real
animals could easily be mistaken for a spirit,
and vice versa. Some scholars, including
Walker-Meikle, believe that many of the
alleged familiars appear to have been the
pets of the accused, citing earlier medieval
precedents like the 1324 trial of Dame Alice
Kytler from Kilkenny, Ireland, who was
visited by an incubus in the shape of a large
furry cat, and one of the earliest cases of a
cat familiar in an English witch trial,
Elizabeth Francis’s large white spotted cat
familiar Satan.
The example of Renaissance magus
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535)
provides an example of how real animals
could be identified as familiars. Agrippa was
very affectionate toward his dog, Monsieur,
who he allowed to eat beside him and sleep
on his bed. Some of Agrippa’s
contemporaries, correlating his intimacy
54
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
63.
55
Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft in England, 1558-1618,
187-188.

with Monsieur and his work on magic,
concluded that Monsieur was a familiar
demon.56 The rumors of witchcraft that
followed Agrippa during his lifetime
became increasingly virulent after his death
when it was rumored that, upon Agrippa’s
passing, “people noticed a black dog, which
he called Monsieur coming out of the room,
which went into the Rhone, and was not
seen again.”57 Had Agrippa been a poor, old,
widowed English woman instead of an
influential and wealthy German polymath,
perhaps his case would have differed little
from those of Elizabeth Francis or Joan
Prentice.
Even the diets and living conditions
of animal familiars were indistinguishable
from pets. Accounts like that of Elizabeth
Bennet in 1582, who fed her animal
familiars from a milk bowl, parallel fairy
superstitions in many parts of Britain.58
Substances such as ale or milk could be
sacrificed to the fairies when poured on
springs, trees, and rocks, and housewives
commonly left bowls of bread, milk, or
water in the kitchen overnight to appease
domestic fairies.59 And both of these
practices, in turn, reflect the diets of pets, as
the standing fee for familiars and other
fairies – breed, milk, and ale – were
commonplace foods for companion animals.
Spirits and pets were even provided similar
living conditions. Irish legal texts refer to
cats kept indoors by women and allowed to
sleep in special baskets or on a pillow on the
bed, a practice common in early modern
England. Many animal familiars were kept
in such baskets, including Elizabeth
Francis’s cat familiar, which had its own
sleeping basket, and Essex witch Margery
56
Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets, 61.
57
Boria Sax, “The Magic of Animals: English Witch
Trials in the Perspective of Folklore,” 318-319.
58
Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft in England, 1558-1618,
122-123.
59
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
109-111.
27
Sammon’s toads “Tom” and “Robin.”60
Even familiar inheritance parallels the
gifting of a pet, a common mode of
acquiring a pet in the early modern period.61i
Pets inhabited a very close personal
space, being held in their owners’ arms or
lying by their feet, an association that would
not go unnoticed if a woman was suspected
of witchcraft. And, at least for dog owners,
being bitten was likely part of owning them,
a bad habit that could produce injuries easily
interpreted as a witches’ mark – the location
where a familiar sucked the witch’s blood.62
This fact was made even more likely given
the kinds of animals taken in by the lower
classes, which were unlikely to be the
groomed, passive lap animals of the
aristocracy. For example, the aristocracy had
expensive, imported Syrian cat breeds with
brown and black stripes as pets, while the
native grey, striped cats, which show up
both in medieval iconography and witch trial
records, were cheaper and relatively
abundant. Comparing petkeeping and the
relationship between women and their pets
in the early modern period to the
relationship between Joan Prentice and her
ferret familiar, it is clear that they share
many similarities. The keeping of pets
outside of the aristocracy became common
during the 16th and 17th centuries and almost
certainly provided models for familiars.63
Yet, even vermin and other animals
simply in the general proximity of a woman,
often within the domestic sphere and
especially near a suspected witch, could
easily end up being interpreted as a familiar.
The practice of “watching” prisoners in mid-
seventeenth century trials resulted in the
interpretation of a passing rodent as the
60
Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets, 4, 13;
Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft in England, 1558-1618,
125.
61
James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 71.
62
Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets, 47, 58.
63
Boria Sax, “The Magic of Animals: English Witch
Trials in the Perspective of Folklore,” 327-328.
28
suspected witch’s familiar.64 Cunning
women periodically used live animals in
their healing magic, such as frogs and
spiders, which could be either ingested or
put onto afflicted parts. Some cunning
women even transferred sicknesses from a
patient onto an animal, themselves, or
inanimate objects.65 Frogs in particular were
abundant in many parts of England and are
found in archaeological assemblages from
the period.66 Collecting and keeping frogs
for patients would have been fairly easy in
rural England. The keeping of live frogs and
other animals in containers such as baskets
would not, then, seem out of the ordinary
given a cunning person’s profession and
could explain why frogs, often kept in such
containers, appear in witch trial records.
In their relationship with magical
practitioners, familiars adopted the practices
of keeping and tending for a pet that had
solidified by the beginning of the early
modern period, but often occupied a
working, intimate position rather than a
subordinate one. They communicated, co-
evolved, cohabitated, and worked with their
human partners. Familiars, therefore,
represent a kind of supernatural companion
species. Familiars and their magical
practitioners, in their long-term
companionship, engaged at the extremes of
natureculture and significant otherness,
relating to not just a different species but a
different kind of being altogether.67 The
familiar, like animals, were part of the
household and the community and were
equally persecuted as accused “witches.”
Just as some people have dogs, and the dog
has their human, the magical practitioner has
a familiar, and the familiar has a magical
practitioner, a human companion. The pact
64
Helen Parish, “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads,
and Weasils,” 5.
65
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
32-41.
66
Aleksander Pluskowski, ed., Breaking and Shaping
Beastly Bodies,” 2.
relationship made with a familiar, then, was
reciprocal, symbiotic, and contractual – a
working relationship, the moral nature of
which reflected the moral disposition of the
magical practitioner, often ambivalent or
even benevolent in general and definitively
malevolent in witchcraft accounts. Familiar
assistance came in the form of the skillset
necessary to become a magical practitioner –
healing, finding lost goods, identifying
thieves, divining, and even conversing with
the dead and spirits.68 Through this
companionship with the familiar, the
magical practitioner gained the agency,
power, and knowledge of the spirit, while
the spirit was afforded domestic intimacy,
food, drink, and on occasion blood.
When considered this way, the acts
of the magical practitioner were supposedly
as much a result of human agency as
familiar agency. Depending on their moral
(or amoral) disposition, a familiar could
heal, injure, sicken, or kill crops, animals,
and humans. They could divine the future,
act as mediators between the living and the
dead, identify criminals and witches, and
were skilled in matters of love. Malevolent
spirits could make men impotent, sabotage
the fields and domestic activities like the
churning of butter or the fermentation of
beer. In some cases, they might even cause
pestilences, famines, bad weather, and
shipwrecks. Familiar spirits held
unparalleled knowledge about the world,
medicine, astrology, fairyland, and the
supernatural, which cunning folk drew from
in their profession.69
The entire genus of spirits, or fairies,
held an almost omnipresent place in the
ecology of early modern Britain. The
category of animism best defines the
67
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species
Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness.
68
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
60-80.
69
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
21.

ontology of the common people, in which
the harsh and unyielding physical world was
also an enchanted realm teeming with
invisible supernatural entities – of which
familiars were merely a notable variety.70
These entities constantly influenced the
natural world and the lives of men. They
could answer prayers, guide a housewife’s
spinning hand or a husband’s plow-arm,
charm crops in the fields or the animals in
the barns, bringing good luck and gold, or
famine and disease.71ii Thus, any mishaps
which occurred around the homestead could
be attributed to fairy displeasure. In this
way, relationships between fairies and
English households have much in common
with the Rincón Zapotec, who emphasizes
reciprocity with supernatural actors and
maintenance of social relations with those
same supernatural forces to help the
household successfully sustain itself.72 And
spirits were not a homogenous group,
having various “species” with various names
including elves, faunes, puckrels, brownies,
siths, Robin Goodfellows, good people,
good neighbors, or subterraneans.73
With their extensive knowledge of
the natural world, fairies could manipulate
the rate of natural processes, attract
desirable animals, and repel undesirable
vermin and predators.74 Fairies were
believed to cause and cure most diseases and
thus possess unparalleled skills in human
health with an extensive knowledge about
the use of herbs, plants, stones, minerals,
creatures, beasts, and astrology.75 In these
70
Emma Wilby develops the analogy between
indigenous shamanistic belief systems and practices
and familiar beliefs and practices. That British
familiar beliefs were folkloric in nature and grounded
in an animist belief system synchronous with
Christianity is assumed here based on Wilby’s
ethnographic argument. For more information, see
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
50-146.
71
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
8.
29
ways and more, fairies were believed to be
able to use their supernatural powers to
influence almost any aspect of the natural
world, including the lives of humans.
Consequently, people were anxious to be in
their favor.
This diverse genus of beings was
associated with the natural landscape,
particularly hills and subterranean caves that
concealed the great halls of elfhame. Fairies
danced in the woods, skies, and waters, in
mines and stars, and even lived in domestic
settings where brownies would help clean
houses and potentially leave silver in shoes
in exchange for bread and milk.76 As animist
beliefs hold, such spirits were a part of every
crack and crevasse of the universe. They
populated the “middle” realm of the earth as
well as the subterranean and astral planes
and had a part in almost every aspect of
ecology. From the failure of a crop to the
putting-out system and the spawning of
“fairy rings” of mushrooms, these
relationships constituted a kind of spiritual
ecology, one that would have been familiar
to many English men and women.
But familiars did not just live among
animals; they also interacted with them.
Animals were essentially indistinguishable
from animal familiars, were victims of
maleficium themselves, were herded and
repelled by spirits, and acted as integral
parts in the magic and healing of the magical
practitioner and her familiar. They were also
guardians against malicious spirits. One
function of a woman’s pet beyond
72
Roberto González, “The Conceptual Bases of
Zapotec Farming and Foodways,” 16.
73
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
16.
74
Sophie Page & Brigitte Resl, ed., “Good Creation
and Demonic Illusions: The Medieval Universe of
Creatures” In A Cultural History of Animals. Vol. 2,
“In the Medieval Age,” 53-54.
75
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
21.
76
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
18-19.
30
companionship, especially for dogs, was to
guard against the fairies while she was in
labor. In Old Irish law, if someone killed a
woman’s pet dog, they had to compensate
for the pet by hiring a priest to read scripture
at her bedside.77 These laws stemmed from a
widespread belief that, without the
guardianship of the pet, fairies would
exchange the healthy child for an inferior
replica known as a “changeling” (a sickly or
deformed child) in the womb, spiriting away
the real child to fairyland.78 Particular spirits
might assume the form of a pet, similarly
fulfilling the function of companionship and
protecting the “owner” and others against
maleficent fairies and their magic, or in the
case of witch’s familiars, subverting this
second function. Animal familiars, then,
were not just at the intersection of natural
and supernatural, but at a twilight zone
between human, animal, and spirit. They are
evidence of a permeable boundary between
humans and animals and echo a debate over
the nature of animals and animal-human
relations.79
Perhaps the most revealing example
of human-animal-spirit interaction is the
case of Saint Guinefort, a greyhound
mistakenly killed after protecting its
master’s baby from a snake. Local women
who worshipped the animal saint would
bring their changeling children to the place
of the greyhound’s death and pray for the
saint to intercede by forcing the fairies to
take back their sick changeling children and
return the real, healthy children. Abandoned
by their mothers as part of the ritual, the
children were left as prey to passing wolves
or “the devil in disguise.” The unnaturalness
77
Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets, 26-27.
78
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
151.
79
Helen Parish, “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads,
and Weasils,” 2-3.
80
Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets, 46-47.
81
Agustín Fuentes, "NATURALCULTURAL
ENCOUNTERS IN BALI,” 608.
of the reverence for an animal led the
preacher Stephen de Bourbon to interpret the
ritual as worship of demons rather than a
real animal.80 Although classified by de
Bourbon as an idolatrous cult, the place of
the saint’s death became a site of
interspecies interaction, a geographical
location and ecological niche where an
animal mediated between humans and
fairies, between the middle and lower
realms, between “natural” and
“supernatural” environmental agents.
Repurposing the words of the anthropologist
Agustín Fuentes, the medieval and early
modern world was enchanted “in that natural
and supernatural worlds (and niches)
coexist, equally and simultaneously.”81
During the almost two centuries of
witch trials in England, the magical
practitioners on trial and their familiars were
effectively “demonized” by their neighbors,
elite prosecutors, and themselves. 82 A
cunning woman stepping into the
“reductionist glare” of the law courts would
have had “little chance of escaping the
charge of covenanting with Satan.” Even if
she did not consider herself to be in a
relationship with a supernatural being, it
would not have been all that difficult for an
angry community or a zealous prosecutor to
persuade her that it was so.83 The
accusations of witchcraft brought against
these cunning women “demonized the
remedies that they peddled as magic and
superstition, illicit natural knowledge
acquired by contract with forces beyond
their control.”84 This ultimately resulted in a
wide elimination of animal sages, guides,
and protectors from English folklore due to
82
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
123.
83
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
119-120.
84
Helen Parish, “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads,
and Weasils,” 10

their close similarity to familiars, a trend
that stripped animals of much of their
positive cultural significance. To understand
the changing attitudes in England, it is
instructive to look at the changing witchcraft
legislation of the Tudor and Stuart eras.
Witchcraft accusations, endemic at
low levels across Europe by the High
Middle Ages, became epidemic during the
end of the 15th century and continued into
the middle of the 18th century. Even though
witchcraft accusations in England coincided
with this overall trend, accusations there did
not follow the pattern set on the continent
where ecclesiastical elites hunted witches.
Rather, a series of laws enabled prosecutions
for witchcraft without the widespread hunts
so commonplace in continental Europe. Four
witchcraft laws underlie the accusations of
the period and exhibit the attitudes of the
aristocracy toward witchcraft and magic
over almost two centuries from 1542 to
1735.
The first statute was passed against
witchcraft in 1542 when the Henrician
government and the newly established
Anglican Church began to view witchcraft
as a problem demanding serious attention.85
The act identified the use of invocations and
the conjuration of spirits as undesirable
practices, declaring witchcraft a felony
(rather than heresy as in continental
Europe). Setting a precedent for future
legislation, it focused on a specific type of
magic known as maleficium (Latin for
causing harm), condemning the malicious
use of magic to harm persons or their
property. However, the law also targeted
ambivalent or even benevolent uses of
magic commonly employed by popular
85
James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 23-25; 28-
29.
86
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
53.
87
Charity Urbanski, “Witchcraft and Magic” (lecture,
HSTAM 215 Tudor England, University of
31
magical practitioners, including “to get or
find money or treasure... [or] to tell or
declare where goods stolen or lost shall
become.”86 The statute was not much used
and was repealed five years later under
Edward VI’s reign; however, it set the
baseline for witchcraft accusations from
which future statutes would expand and
increasingly blur– and eventually eliminate
– the already gray distinction between
malevolent and benevolent spirits and spirit–
aided magic.
The next piece of legislation
condemning witchcraft came after the
turbulent period under Mary I and the
accession of Elizabeth I. The Witchcraft Act
of 1562 again condemned the invocation of
evil spirits for maleficium. The 1562 act was
in place until the accession of James I, who
passed the Witchcraft Act of 1604, The Act
against Conjuration, Witchcraft and dealing
with evil and wicked spirits.87 Elaborating on
an earlier 1602 act, the 1604 statute saw a
subtle but significant shift from defining
witchcraft in terms of doing harm
(maleficium) to the invocation or conjuration
of familiars: to “consult, convent with,
entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil
and wicked spirit to or for any intent or
purpose.”88 By 1604, then, witchcraft law
had broadened from defining witchcraft as
maleficent use of magic to the simple act of
harboring, caring for, or employing
“wicked” spirits. As Parish notes, under the
1604 act, “the relationship between the
person and the familiar was, in law,
evidence of witchcraft itself. The specific
reference to feeding or rewarding an evil
spirit in the Jacobean legislation was an
Washington, Seattle, November 14, 2019); Helen
Parish, “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads, and
Weasils,” 134.
88
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
56.
32
important moment in the definition of
witchcraft in England.”89
Under the 1604 act, the distinction
between benevolent cunning folk and
maleficent witch was completely obscured.90
Exemplifying the new legal definition of
witchcraft and the need for new proofs of
witchcraft, barrister Michael Dalton
published a guide to establishing legal proof
for witchcraft in The Country Justice (1618).
In his work, Dalton writes that the two most
important evidences for witchcraft were the
presence of a familiar in the shape of ‘a
man, woman, boy, dogge, cat, foale, fowle,
hare, rat, toad, &c,’ and the witch’s mark
made by the familiar’s sucking blood from
the witch. Dalton considered these the most
damning proofs that the witch had made a
pact with a familiar and was in league with
the Devil.91 By the beginning of James’s
reign, not even the moral state of their
familiar spirits separated the cunning folk
from witch, as the judicial prosecutors were
legally bound to define any kind of familiar
spirit employed for any magical purposes as
wholly malevolent, regardless of whether
the defendant was a witch or a cunning
woman or the spirit used for maleficent of
benevolent ends.
The legal demonization halted when
Parliament broke with past precedent,
passing the witchcraft act of 1735, which
repealed the earlier witchcraft acts and
changing the charge of witchcraft from
treason to fraud. Rather than characterize
familiars as malevolent beings, the
legislation rejected the existential possibility
of spirits altogether, malevolent or
benevolent. And by the late 17th century, a
stark realism can be detected in the attitudes
of the aristocracy towards familiar beliefs –
89
Helen Parish, “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads,
and Weasils,” 2.
90
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
56.
91
James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 94.
no doubt a product of scientific
Enlightenment thought. Dr. Harvey,
physician to Charles I, claimed that ‘being at
the Newmarket, he called on a reputed
witch, and ingratiated himself by pretending
to be a wizard, persuading her to introduce
her imp, which she did by calling a toad
from under a chest and giving it milk.” After
sending her away, Harvey seized the animal,
cutting it open with a dissecting knife,
demonstrating it to be “nothing but a plain
natural toad.”92
The gradual dissipation of legal
recognition of familiars denotes an
ontological shift that ultimately resulted in a
wide elimination of stories of non-
malevolent animal sages, guides, and
protectors from English folklore, since these
too closely resembled familiars. Animals
and pets, easily and often misinterpreted as
animal familiars, also lost much of their
spiritual significance, which may have
opened the way for their increased
exploitation.93 Ordinary English men and
women would have begun to think about
natural phenomena and systems, once
believed to be the handiwork of spirits, in
different terms. The witch trials changed
popular English ecological ontology by
pushing spirits to the fringes of the
environment and altogether removing the
niches, eco-spiritual systems, sacred spaces,
and animist ontology that had been mentally
constructed since pre-Christian times. This
left the ecology and landscape of England,
once believed to be alive and animated with
supernatural beings, largely devoid of their
influence. With the spread of new scientific
notions of nature, the popular conceptions of
human-animal-spirit relations and its impact
on the environment and everyday life slowly
92
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
170-171.
93
Boria Sax, “The Magic of Animals: English Witch
Trials in the Perspective of Folklore,” 317.
 33

became unintelligible and unfamiliar. Never

again would spirits feature so heavily in the
ecological conception of the English
landscape.

Ryan Mealiffe is currently a junior

majoring in History and Anthropology at the
University of Washington, Seattle. “Familiar
Ecology” was originally written for ANTH
461: Historical Ecology taught by Professor
Ben Fitzhugh in Autumn 2020. The paper
was subsequently shortened and revised for
the Phi Alpha Theta Pacific Northwest
Conference hosted by Portland State
University in April 2021 and again refined
for publication in this journal.
34

Appendix

Source: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-
9780198614128-e-70257#odnb-9780198614128-e-70257-headword-9

Description: Woodcut from a 1589 Chelmsford (Essex) witch trial pamphlet depicting Joan
prentice with her ferret animal familiar “Bid” along with other familiars belonging to the
Chelmsford witches.

Source: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/witchcraft-pamphlet-a-rehearsal-both-strange-
and-true-1579

Description: Depiction of a witch feeding her familiars in a box from a pamphlet recording the
trial of Elizabeth Stile, Mother Dutten, Mother Devell, and Mother Margaret at Windsor in
1579.

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ENCOUNTERS IN BALI: Monkeys,
Temples, Tourists, and
Ethnoprimatology." Cultural
Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 600-
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González, Roberto J. “The Conceptual
Bases of Zapotec Farming and
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Sierra of Oaxaca, page-page. 1st ed.
Austin: University of Texas Press,
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Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species
Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Significant Otherness. Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Kaplan, Jed, Kristen Krumhardt, and
Niklaus Zimmermann. “The
Prehistoric and Preindustrial
Deforestation of Europe.”
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27–28 (2009): 3016-3034
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009.09.028.
Nef, John U. "An Early Energy Crisis and
Its Consequences." Scientific
American 237, no. 5 (1977): 140-51.
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Parish, Helen. “’Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise,
Toads, and Weasils’: Witche,
Familiars, and Human-Animal
Interactions in English Witch
Trails.” Religions 10, no. 2 (2019):
134. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10020
134.
35
Pluskowski, Aleksander, ed. Breaking and
Shaping Beastly Bodies: Animals as
Material Culture in the Middle Ages.
Havertown, PA: Oxbow Books,
2007.
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x6.1.
Resl, Brigitte, ed. A Cultural History of
Animals. Vol. 2, “In the Medieval
Age.” English ed. Oxford, UK ; New
York: Berg, 2007.
Rosen, Barbara, ed. Witchcraft in England,
1558-1618. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1991.
Sax, Boria. “The Magic of Animals: English
Witch Trials in the Perspective of
Folklore.” Anthrozoös 22: 317–32,
2009.
Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness:
Witchcraft in Early Modern
England. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World:
Changing Attitudes in England 1500-
1800. New York: Penguin Books
USA Inc., 1983.
Walker-Meikle, Kathleen. Medieval Pets.
Suffolk: Boydell & Brewster,
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7722/j.ctt1x738m.
Wilby, Emma. Cunning Folk and Familiar
Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary
Traditions in Early Modern British
Witchcraft and Magic. Chicago:
Sussex Academic Press, 2005.
36

The Asian Fetish and White Dominance: How U.S Involvement in Foreign Wars
Popularized and Normalized the Hypersexualization of Asian Women
Kristina Nguyen

Trigger Warning: Extensive discussion of sexual violence and/or assault

The tragic love story of a heroic American soldier and a loyal Vietnamese prostitute
captivated the American people in 1989; America remembers the flashy brothel
“Dreamland” in the musical, Miss Saigon, and the heartbreaking death of a young Vietnamese
woman in her lover’s arms, yet forget the horrific and traumatizing actions done during the
Vietnam War. The popular musical ignores the deaths of millions of Vietnamese people and
normalizes and romanticizes sexual abuse done to Vietnamese women. To understand the
popularization and normalization of Asian fetishization, we have to examine how history shapes
and solidifies a new “distorted form of racist love.”94 The United States involvement in the
Vietnam War influenced white citizens to believe themselves dominant to Asian people. Because
of this influential power dynamic, white men believe their fetish of Asian women are justifiable.
The normalization of the Mỹ Lai Massacre, and many other instances like it, erase the sexual and
brutal violence done by American soldiers to the Vietnamese people. The musical Miss Saigon
and its controversial topics are an example of how the erasure of America’s violent history
romanticizes the trauma and sorrow of Vietnamese women and paints white men as their hero.
The hypersexualization of Asian women derives from the ongoing white supremacist ideologies
and is sustained by the misrepresentation of Asian wars in popular culture.

94
Lisa Wong Macabasco, “Princeton Incident Shows Extreme Case of Asian Fetish” Asianweek (2005):
https://search.proquest.com/docview/367613000?accountid=14784.

Mỹ Lai Massacre & Operation: Kill
Everything that Moves
On the evening of March 15, 1968,
the people of Mỹ Lai went to sleep and the
next morning, all its inhabitants were
brutally murdered in their own village and
homes. American soldiers infiltrated the
South Vietnamese village consisting of
women, children, and elderly men—people
who were not able to fight in the war.
Soldiers shot elderly men unable to run
away, bombed houses full of children, and
raped and shot women as they tried to shield
themselves and their loved ones. They were
civilians enjoying a quiet morning,
preparing breakfast for themselves and their
young ones; why were they attacked,
brutally killed, and raped by U.S. militia?
While the Vietnamese people prepared
themselves for bed on March 15, members
of the Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th
Infantry prepared themselves to “kill
everything that moves,” an important
incentive rooted in American troops.95 The
phrase “kill everything that moves” was a
common phrase chanted by soldiers, which
meant to kill any Vietnamese person who
ran from them. The American people, when
hearing the true events of this massacre one
year later, believed this was the only
massacre done by American soldiers in
Vietnam, that it was a rare occurrence done
by the worst soldiers and evil commanders,
but Mỹ Lai was only one of the thousands of
violent military-led operations targeting
South Vietnamese villages.
Before the crimes committed in Mỹ
Lai, the same operation occurred in the
village of Trieu Ai; dozens of civilians were
mercilessly shot as they watched grenades
tossed into a place they call home. Survivors
of the Trieu Ai massacre tried to call
attention to their village, but were silenced
95
Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2013), 2.
37
by the South Vietnamese authorities who
jailed those trying to spread the word of
violence to officials. The massacre is only
known because of one soldier filled with
guilt and remorse, but still, no justice came
from the reveal. No one was charged for the
crimes done in Trieu Ai because to
Americans, it was impossible to know who
was a civilian and who was an enemy. In the
case of Mỹ Lai, one man, Lieutenant
William Calley, was charged for the most
well-known massacre in Vietnam. Calley
was sentenced to life in prison, but was
freed and moved to house arrest by Nixon’s
doings. Every American soldier in the
Vietnam War who committed such horrific
acts of violence has never been fully
convicted of their crimes because such
actions were normal. The American military
is so highly regarded, especially those who
served in Vietnam, that if shame was
brought to them, the American people would
revolt. Those who killed, abused, raped, and
assaulted Vietnamese people and women
were able to walk free in society; their
actions are erased, which normalizes and
justifies the gory history of Vietnam.
Dehumanization of the Vietnamese People
Although it was common, how is it
possible for a soldier, a young adult or late
teen, able to hit a woman with the back of
his rifle, to rape her while she runs for her
children, to brutally murder her children as
they hide for cover; how are they able to
bomb villages and watch them burn to the
ground while families take cover and try to
escape the flames from touching themselves
and their children? To understand how
young soldiers performed such murderous
and vulgar attacks, it is important to know
how they were briefed and trained before
heading to Vietnam. The Vietnamese were
38
never referred to their ethnicity or as people,
but instead as “gook,” “dink,” “rice eater,”
and other derogatory terms.96 Women and
children, or anyone who ran from them,
were thought to be enemies who needed to
be exterminated, according to high ranking
militia. Dehumanization of the Vietnamese
people made murder and mass extermination
easier for American soldiers; if the
Vietnamese people were only “gooks” and
inhumane beings, then they were not killing
humans.
Dehumanization is a war tactic
designed to unleash a killer instinct in these
young men serving in the war; this war
tactic was embedded in soldiers in order to
kill more Vietnamese people than could be
revived so that they could not regenerate as
a country. All Vietnamese people were
viewed as Viet Cong, a term for Communist
followers, and therefore if any Vietnamese
were to be alive, then Communism would be
sustained, and the Americans took all
measures to ensure it would not. Soldiers
would compete with each other, fighting
over who had the highest “body count,”
which refers to Vietnamese corpses; soldiers
knew to move up in rankings, they had to
have a higher body count, which created a
game of people’s lives. Violence against
Vietnamese people became normalized
because they were stripped of their
humanity, even amongst those who deemed
themselves to be “good people.” One soldier
recalled how a Vietnamese lady ran to him,
screaming about the noise the soldiers were
making. He then took out his rifle and
smacked her in the face with it, which
bloodied and injured her face; he laughed as
he watched the pain wash over her face and
her mouth turn silent. The soldier tried to
96
Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2013), 28.
97
Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2013), 16.
98
Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2013), 167.
recall why he attacked a woman for no
reason, a woman who was rightfully angered
by the rambunctious soldiers destroying her
village; she was silenced after the attack
which solidifies the power inequalities in
Vietnam.97 The military’s chants to kill
anything that moves was embedded into this
soldier’s mind. He became influenced
enough to harm an innocent woman; this
was common amongst the American
military. The combination of orders to
destroy Vietnam’s land and fight over body
count led soldiers to kill any Vietnamese
they encountered and burning entire villages
to do so; the dehumanization of the
Vietnamese led American soldiers to turn
the war into a battle of pride and dominance
over minority groups.
Sexual Violence against Vietnamese
Women
In the American military, sexual
violence was used as a “weapon of war” to
assert dominance over Vietnamese women;
all Vietnamese women were seen as wives
to the Viet Cong, making them dangerous
enemies.98 The dominance of men is
sustained by the submissiveness of women;
sexual assault and gang rape was common to
sustain white male dominance. White
soldiers would “taunt Vietnamese
schoolgirls with sexual violence” in order to
assert their male dominance; they
comfortable used threats of rape and sexual
violence as a weapon, since all Vietnamese
were considered an enemy.99 American
soldiers tortured and assaulted Vietnamese
women in the fields in an attempt to force
secrets of their supposed Viet Cong
husbands. When women refused sexual
99
Philip K. Jason, “Sexism and Racism in Vietnam
War Fiction,” Mosaic: A Journal for the
Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 23 (1990): 3,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780443

advances of the soldiers, they were brutally
raped, tortured, and killed. One soldier of
the Americal Division recalled hearing
sounds of a typical rape around once every
third day during his service; he became
familiarized to the sound and soon, it
became a normal tradition to hear sounds of
sexual violence in the far distance.100 The
history of sexual abuse and rape of
Vietnamese women is erased because GIs
were prompted to display signs of sexual
aggression; none were charged or punished
for their crimes which shows that the
insidious acts were swept under the rug and
normalized amongst white men and society.
White aggression and white
dominance exerted on Asian groups is
normalized by repressing and romanticizing
violent and cruel acts done by white
American soldiers during the Vietnam War.
In 1989, around fifteen years after the end of
U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, a
musical titled Miss Saigon took America by
storm. The musical garnered major attention
from its controversial representation of the
Vietnam War, yet theaters are reviving the
musical which displayed inaccurate
depictions of the war today. Miss Saigon
features a young Vietnamese prostitute who
falls deeply in love with a white American
soldier. The musical begins by featuring
violence against the Vietnamese prostitutes
in Dreamland; the prostitutes were often hit
and shamed when they mentioned wanting
to come to America or when they were
being disobedient to their payers or boss.
The story of Miss Saigon fails to mention
how over five hundred thousand Vietnamese
women were forced into sex work as a way
to provide for their food, shelter, and stable
income because their former workplace was
demolished or entire villages and families
slaughtered.101 The traumatic experiences of
Vietnamese women are brushed over in Miss
100
Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2013), 167.
39
Saigon because of how the war was viewed
and represented in the media; sex work was
romanticized and sexual violence towards
sex workers was normalized.
Media Misrepresentation of Asian Women
& Its Consequences
The musical Miss Saigon
romanticizes the traumas of Vietnamese
women by ignoring the history of
Vietnamese prostitution and the history of
the Vietnam War. Vietnamese women were
cruelly raped and murdered by American
soldiers, yet the musical paints the white
men as their altruistic saviors. Kim, the
female protagonist, depends on Chris, the
soldier she falls in love with, to get to the
United States and uses him to heal her
aching trauma of the murder of her family.
She is loyal to Chris, yearning for him once
he leaves Vietnam and loving him despite
his American wife. The character Kim is the
protagonist of the musical because of her
loyal devotion to a white soldier. She
represents how the perfect Vietnamese
women should act; an ideal Vietnamese
woman must be obedient and not fight back
or become sexually involved with multiple
men like the other prostitutes in Dreamland.
They must act in a way that benefits white
men, their true saviors and the ones they
should love; this obedient image justifies
white men’s fetishization of Vietnamese
women. This disturbing image of love does
not only idealize the idea of a submissive
and obedient Vietnamese woman, but also
implies that Vietnamese women should want
white men. For white dominance to be
sustained in this situation, the media uses
fetishization as a compliment rather than
another form of racism.
The hypersexualization of Asian
women is sustained by the normalization of
101
Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2013), 147.
40
Asian fetishization which creates a new
form of racial violence. Miss Saigon
portrays two common images of Asian
women in the media: Asian women as exotic
beings who will fulfill a man’s desires and
Asian women as sexual and manipulative.
All the Asian women in Miss Saigon are
prostitutes, which further sexualizes Asian
women because of the lack of
representation.102 Kim is belittled to a sexual
being and a fetish because she is the mistress
of Chris, who finds a white American wife;
Kim is not shown as wife material for the
American public. Kim’s greatest sacrifice in
the film is when she kills herself, which she
does to save and honor the all-American,
white family. The audience never sees her as
a functional human; her presence in the film
is diminished to a heartbroken, Vietnamese
prostitute who only created problems for the
American family. Asian women are being
dehumanized and viewed as a sexual
temptress which erases the history of Asian
fetishization in the Vietnam War.
The romanticization of sexual
violence created a new “form of racist love”
which society paints as loving and sustains
white dominance in relationships.103 As seen
in Miss Saigon and other representations of
Asian women in media, Asian women are
depicted as “sexual objects to be conquered
by [a] white hero,” which white men use to
justify their sexual violence.104
Misrepresentation of Asian women
in the media propels the idea that Asian
women are not human, but rather objects
and racial fantasies. In a study when white
men were asked why they preferred Asian
females to white females, they argued that
they were not fetishizing them, but preferred
102
Celine Parreñas Shimizu, “The Bind of
Representation: Performing and Consuming
Hypersexuality in Miss Saigon,” Theatre Journal 57.
No.2 (2005).
103
ibid.
104
Timothy Yu, “What’s Wrong with Miss Saigon,”
University of Wisconsin-Madison (2019):
them because Asian females are submissive
during sex, and that factor was attractive.
This select group of white men with an
Asian fetish argued they enjoyed Asian
women during sex because they enjoy
“being spanked during sex” where white
females would react negatively to the act.105
Unintentionally, white men revealed they
preferred Asian women because they were
able to perform violent acts in the bedroom
and justified their words by saying all Asian
women enjoyed it. Although their partners
may enjoy it, white men justify their
fetishization by not using the term “fetish,”
but a “preference;” by doing so, they ignore
the long line of white male dominance over
Asian women in Asian wars. White soldiers
in the Vietnam War dehumanized
Vietnamese women which justified and
normalized their acts of sexual violence,
which is shown in this study. Asian women,
in the minds of white men with an Asian
fetish, have been belittled to a sexual fantasy
where white men can perform dominant and
violent acts on a compliant and submissive
woman.
Present-Day Consequences of the
Normalized Asian Fetish
Due to the effects of erased history
and dehumanization of Asian women, Asian
women are being targeted in sexual attacks
and violence that are only rising in today’s
climate. In 2005, Michael Lohman, a third-
year doctoral student at Princeton
University, was arrested on March 30 for
admitting to cutting locks of hair from
multiple Asian women and secretly
contaminating the drinks of Asian women
https://asianamerican.wisc.edu/2019/03/27/whats-
wrong-with-miss-saigon/
105
Bitna Kim, “Asian Female and Caucasian Male
Couples: Exploring the Attraction,” Pastoral
Psychology 60. No.2 (2010): 233-244,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-010-0312-9

with his urine and semen.106 He also stole
students' gloves and used them to
masturbate. Instead of causing an uproar,
Princeton ignored the crime and nuances
surrounding it and Asian students were
angered by the lack of coverage of the
crime. The normalization of the Asian fetish
has made it so the serious offense of a white
man sexually violating multiple Asian
women on a college campus has not had
serious effects in the school’s policies and
no media coverage.
The rise of anti-Asian violence
beginning in 2020 because of the anti-
Chinese rhetoric prompted by the first cases
of COVID-19 being found in Wuhan, China
has only reiterated the sentiments of the
“past.” The brutal and sexual violence
towards Asian women is still a modern
problem - and the erasure of this history
from Asian wars has further normalized this
gender-based and racist violence. On March
16 of 2021, Robert Lang opened fire at three
Asian-owned spas, murdering eight people,
six of whom are Asian women. Lang’s
argued that he was having a “bad day” and
had to eliminate “temptation” because of his
sex addiction; officers did not think this was
a racially motivated attack. By ignoring the
racist and misogynistic factors of this
shooting ignores the direct consequences
Asian women face as a result of white men’s
racial and sexual fantasies of them. Lang
viewed Asian women as “temptations” that
he wanted to “eliminate”—temptations he
wanted to kill. Because of the
dehumanization and infantilization of Asian
women in the media, including in Miss
Saigon, Asian women are viewed as sexual
beings and temptresses, not as humans. The
lack of accountability for these murders that
were influenced by the distortion of Asian
women in the wars and media have dire
106
Lisa Wong Macabasco, “Princeton Incident
Shows Extreme Case of Asian Fetish,” Asianweek
(2005):
41
consequences for Asian women where they
are not only dehumanized and subjected to
multiple kinds of fetishization and violence,
but also are murdered for the superiority and
distorted sense of ownership white men feel
over them.
Conclusion
The image of Asian women has been
distorted due to the erased knowledge of
forced assimilation into the Western culture
and erasure of a sexually violent history
during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War
is remembered and represented as a war that
the American soldiers bravely fought; the
GIs are still known to be heroes and saviors
of the Vietnamese people, not people who
hide, or have been forced to hide, inhumane
massacres and destruction of millions of
Vietnamese people and Vietnamese land.
The 1989 musical Miss Saigon did not force
an ideology on the American people, but
rather displayed the mindset of the
American people in the theater. The
musical’s romantic depiction of the Vietnam
War and Vietnamese women encouraged the
distorted truth to the public. The erasure of
trauma is so attractive to the American
public because they do not want to
acknowledge the white supremacist
ideologies that were forced upon
Vietnamese civilians. To acknowledge the
vicious sexual history of Vietnamese women
means white men have to acknowledge the
harm of their “yellow fever”—an Asian
fetish, but without the proper education and
representation of the sexual violence in
Vietnam, America will keep ignoring and
keep subjecting Asian women to merciless
https://search.proquest.com/docview/367613000?acc
ountid=14784.
42

killings and rapes which sustain and

encourage white supremacy.107

Kristina Nguyen is a Vietnamese and

Chinese American student who is a second-
year at the University of Washington. She is
a History major with a Diversity minor and
plans to become a high school history
teacher after she graduates. This article was
written in Autumn 2019 for HSTAA 231:
Race and American History; Kristina’s
family’s commitment to educate her on their
history and experiences as Vietnamese
refugees inspired her to conduct her own
research on the topic.

Audrea Lim, “The Alt-Right’s Fetish,” The New

107
https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A521686883/BIC?u=
York Times (2018): wash_main&sid=BIC&xid=106cb32b
 43

Bibliography
Elliot, Josh K. “Officer who cited spa
shooting suspects ‘bad day’ has
history of anti-Asian posts.” Global
News, 2021.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7704008/
atlanta-spa-shootings-bad-day-
racism/
Yu, Timothy. “What’s Wrong with Miss
Saigon.” University of Wisconsin-
Madison, 2019.
https://asianamerican.wisc.edu/2019/
03/27/whats-wrong-with-miss-
saigon/

Jason, Philip K. “Sexism and Racism in

Vietnam War Fiction.” Mosaic: A
Journal for the Interdisciplinary
Study of Literature 23, 1990.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2478044
3

Kim, Bitna. “Asian Female and Caucasion

Male Couples: Exploring the
Attraction.” Pastoral Psychology,
2010.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-010-
0312-9

Lim, Audrea. “The Alt-Right’s Fetish.” The

New York Times. Gale in Context,
2018.
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686883/BIC?u=wash_main&sid=BI
C&xid=106cb32b

Macabasco, Lisa Wong. “Princeton Incident

Shows Extreme Case of Asian
Fetish.” Asianweek, April, 2005.
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367613000?accountid=14784.

Shimizu, Celine Parreñas. "The Bind of

Representation: Performing and
Consuming Hypersexuality in Miss
Saigon." Theatre Journal 57, no. 2
(2005): 247-265.
doi:10.1353/tj.2005.0079.

Turse, Nick. Kill Anything that Moves. New

York: Metropolitan Books, 2013.
44

The Sweet Fruit of Labor: An Examination of Black Labor Unions in South Africa
Selma El-Badawi

Though labor legislation had favored the white minority since South Africa’s colonial
period, apartheid marked a significant reduction in labor rights for Black workers. The struggle
to regain labor rights largely coincided with the anti-apartheid movement as the two issues were
largely interconnected for Black workers, unions, and federations. Following the results of the
Wiehahn Commission and broader economic developments, as well as direct action by Black
workers, the government largely expanded the right to organize for Black workers. Newly
legitimized organizations such as the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the National
Union of Mineworkers emerged as early leaders of the new Black labor movement. Primarily
using contemporaneous analyses of the South African labor movement by both activist and
governmental organizations, this essay explores developments in the role of Black labor unions
and union federations within the context of apartheid-era South Africa.

As the primary facet of economic
activity in apartheid-era South Africa, labor
was sharply divided amongst racial lines.
Though white elites had maintained
financial control of the mining and
manufacturing industries since the formation
of the state, Black workers, relegated to
blue-collar labor, outnumbered them. The
significant racial disparity in the South
African labor pool allowed labor itself to
become a site of protest against the
apartheid state. Because control over Black
labor, and thus over Black laborers
themselves, functioned as a constant
reminder of inequality, the collective power
of Black labor unions posed an existential
threat to the apartheid state; attempts by the
South African government to limit the
power of Black labor unions and
federations, either through anti-labor
legislation or state violence, functioned as a
means of mantaining apartheid. Strikes and
collective bargaining by Black workers,
especially Black mineworkers, generated the
conditions neccessary for easing apartheid
regulations in the government and the
workplace.
While South Africa had a significant
labor movement predating the apartheid era,
its successes were often segregated. During
the early 20th-century, several Black trade
unions emerged concurrently with white
trade unions. In 1917, the Industrial Workers
of Africa (IWA) was created as an offshoot
of the Industrial Workers of the World and
allowed Black and white workers from all
industries to join.108 Though IWA showed
potential in providing better working
108
Fransjohan Pretorius, A History of South Africa:
From Distant Past to the Present Day (Pretoria:
Protea House Books, 2014) 482.
109
“Black African Workers' Union Joins International
Federation.” New York Times, March 13, 1927,
https://nyti.ms/2QtkKEI, 184.
110
Pretorius, History of South Africa, 483.
111
Denis MacShane, Martin Plaut, and David Ward,
Power! Black Workers, Their Unions, and the
45
conditions for unskilled workers, it was
disbanded in 1918 following its infiltration
by police officers. One year later, the
Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union
of South Africa (ICU) formed as a trade
union for Black dockworkers in Cape
Town.109 By 1927, the ICU had over
100,000 members in a variety of industries.
Over the next decade, however, infighting
and budget concern chipped away at the
strength of the ICU. By 1934, the ICU
dissolved.110 In 1954, the government
passed the Industrial Conciliation
Amendment Act, which mandated that
unions be segregated, and in 1956, the
Industrial Conciliation Act, which
prohibited Black unions.111 Despite
government efforts, Black workers still
collectively bargained in non-recognized
labor groups.112 As these unofficial unions
grew, companies were given discretion in
terms of their recognition. For some, this
created a neutralizing effect—working with
company officials could limit the ability to
organize. For others, these unrecognized
unions became more radical, becoming more
reliant on direct action. This situation
presented a two-fold problem for the
government: non-recognized Black labor
unions could be susceptible to foreign or
political aid, particularly within anti-
apartheid campaigns, but legalizing those
unions would be unpopular with the racist
white minority.113 Unwilling to accept or
condemn Black labor unions, the
government’s inaction increased ongoing
tensions.
Struggle for Freedom in South Africa. (N.p.: South
End Press, 1984), 30.
112
Alide Kooy, Dudley Horner, Philipa Green, and
Shirley Miller. The Wiehahn Commission: A
Summary. (Cape Town: Southern Africa Labour and
Development Research Unit, 1979), 2.
113
MacShane et al., Power!, 22.
46
Union federations had a strong
history in South Africa, developing
alongside the trade unions themselves.
Union federations had greater resources than
any individual union, allowing for
coordination and massive collective action.
Workers had solidarity across industries,
meaning that their collective action could
have a much broader impact. In 1924, the
South African Trade Union Congress
(SATUC) formed, emerging out of the ICU
infighting.114 Its initial 30,000 members
included various Black industry unions.
Over the next several decades, federations
remained at the forefront of labor relations
in South Africa, though their forms shifted.
In 1928, SATUC merged into the Federation
of Non-European Trade Unions (FNETU),
which dissolved around the same time that
the South African Trades and Labour
Council (SAT&LC) formed.115 Though
SAT&LC was anti-apartheid and multi-
racial, the Council of Non-European Trade
Unions (CNETU) formed alongside it in
1942, affiliating with 29 all-Black unions.116
The SAT&LC dissolved in 1948 following
the loss of 30 pro-segregation white trade
unions which formed the South African
Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) and
the Co-ordination of Labour Council
(CLC)—both of which merged into the
South African Confederation of Labour
(SAFL).117 As apartheid was being officially
introduced in South Africa, union
federations crumbled under the pressure to
uphold or reject it. While there was
solidarity across industrial divisions,
CNETU’s status as a Black union federation
and SAFL’s as a white union federation
divided collective action along racial lines.
This further solidified the relationship
114
Pretorius, History of South Africa, 486.
115
Ibid.
116
MacShane et al., Power!, 28.
117
Pretorius, History of South Africa, 487.
between labor and apartheid for South
African workers.
From anti-communist measures to
explicit legislation outlawing their
existences, Black labor unions and
federations were comprehensively targeted
by apartheid policies in the 1950s. Due to
fears of potential Soviet interference against
the introduction of the apartheid state, anti-
communist policies were quickly enacted in
South Africa. Following the 1950
Suppression of Communism Act, the
majority of Black trade unions were forcibly
dissolved for having worked with members
of the South African Communist Party.118
Many ex-unionists joined the South African
Trade Union Council in 1954, which
became the Trade Union Council of South
Africa (TUCSA) in 1962.119 SATUC’s
ambivalence towards apartheid, however,
caused a fundamental rift between its Black
and white unions. Many of these Black
union members left to form the South
African Congress of Trade Unions
(SACTU), which too was eventually
outlawed for communist connections.120
These union federations constantly grew and
shifted during the early 20th-century,
reflecting the shifting tides of labor
relations. Progress was not linear; powerful
organizations like the SAT&LC could form,
consolidate union organizing, and collapse
within decades. The 1956 Industrial
Conciliation Act further impacted union
federations; while dissolved union
federations were quickly replaced before
1956, the legislation barred Black unions—
and thus Black labor federations—from
receiving official recognition. Labor
organizing shifted away from consolidated
118
“South Africa Reds Dissolve Just Ahead of
Suppression” New York Times, June 21, 1950,
https://nyti.ms/3fp2AfB. 1.
119
MacShane et al., Power!, 20.
120
MacShane et al., 22.

federations and towards direct action on a
more individual level.
The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre
marked the beginning of a new, more
intense struggle around labor and political
rights in South Africa. After the
uncomfortable stasis brought on by 1950s
legislation, labor rights and anti-apartheid
activists began advocating for more direct
action. By this point, the struggle against
apartheid and the struggle for better labor
conditions were seen as intrinsically
connected; apartheid laws created poor
working conditions and poor working
conditions strengthened the economic
conditions that supported apartheid.
Conditions came to a head in 1960
following the creation of the Pan Africanist
Congress (PAC), which served as a political
arm of the Black struggle against
apartheid.121 On March 21st, 1960, the PAC
organized a 10,000-man protest outside the
Sharpeville police department, objecting to
the pass system. Passbooks functioned as
personal and professional identification for
Black South Africans and had been
sporadically enforced since the early 19th-
century, though this wave of protests was
spurred by the 1952 Abolition of Passes and
Coordination of Documents Act, which
instituted a national pass mandate for all
Black South Africans over the age of 16
who were traveling through white areas.122
Though protests against pass laws—often
led by women—had been occurring for over
a century by this time, the Sharpeville
protest exemplified to the rest of the world
the brutality faced by activists at the hands
of the state.123 Without provocation, police
121
Pretorius, History of South Africa, 380.
122
Ibid., 615.
123
Ibid., 343.
124
Ibid., 381.
125
MacShane et al., Power!, 33.
126
Alex Lichtenstein, “‘We do not think that the
Bantu is ready for labour unions’: Remaking South
Africa's Apartheid Workplace in the 1970s.” South
47
fired on the protesters, killing 69 people and
injuring 180.124 As members of the
international community condemned the
brutality against protesters, the government
tried to prevent a similar situation from
occurring again. This came, however, in the
form of limiting protests, union
membership, and labor organizing in
general. Within weeks, the government
passed the Unlawful Organisations Act,
outlawing the PAC and further criminalizing
Black trade unions.125 Many union
organizers were arrested or otherwise forced
to flee the country. Though this failed to
stop Black workers from protesting, it did
decentralize organizing. Any institutional
leverage that Black unions might have had
was replaced by direct action on a more
individual level. In the aftermath of the
Sharpeville massacre, tensions rose even
higher.
In the following decade, Black
workers faced new challenges in both white-
and blue-collar work. While the government
attempted to direct all industrial growth to
white areas, South Africa experienced
significant GDP growth.126 Black workers
saw some gains in skilled-labor industries,
as white workers could not meet growing
economic demands. Training for most
skilled labor positions was only available to
white workers, though some exceptions
were made.127 By 1974, the Minister of
Posts and Telegraphs had temporarily hired
532 Black mailmen and permanently hired
an additional 284.128 Though official
segregationist policies were unchanged,
some middle-management positions
informally desegregated to make up for the
African Historical Journal 69, no. 2 (2017): 215-235.
10.1080/02582473.2017.1293718.
127
Ibid., 217.
128
Anthony G. Freeman and Diane B. Bendahmane,
eds, Black Labor Unions in South Africa: Report of a
Symposium (Washington, D.C.: Department of State
Publication, 1987), 25.
48
ongoing shortages. Still, these successes
occurred on individual levels as labor power
as a whole was still controlled by the white
minority and poverty remained extremely
prevalent for the Black majority. Unskilled
Black labor took a more direct approach to
political mobilization; while the South
African government refused to officially
recognize Black labor unions, they were still
able to build up considerable resources and
solidarity throughout the 1970s for direct
action. From 1970 to 1980, around 250,000
Black workers participated in approximately
1,800 strikes.129 Though the Minister of
Labor acknowledged that 92% of the strikes
were directly motivated by poor wages, the
government remained divided. Ultimately,
while the central government failed to
recognize the legitimacy of these strikes on
labor-related grounds, it did acknowledge a
purported political motivation behind the
strikes.
Though the two issues are deeply
connected, the political rights and the
material conditions associated with Black
workers during apartheid are not entirely
analogous. Political rights could lead to an
improvement of material conditions, while
improved material conditions are a necessity
for political rights. The most frequent causes
of labor disputes during this decade —low
wages, as previously mentioned, along with
poor working conditions and the absence of
formal complaint procedures—are
associated more with weak labor rights than
strictly political rights.130 By 1973, the
129
Freeman and Bendahmane, 25.
130
MacShane et al., Power!, 21.
131
Freeman and Bendahmane, Black Labor Unions,
26.
132
Nic E. Wiehahn, “Labor Reforms in South
Africa.” New York Times, April 23, 1982,
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/23/opinion/labor-
reforms-in-south-africa-by-nic-e-
wiehahn.html?smid=url-share.
133
Lichtenstein, “We do not think that the Bantu is
ready for labour unions.” 232.
South African government recognized 125
works committees and 773 liaison
committees set up for Black workers by
companies themselves.131 Black workers
would speak to management in a non-
enforceable, non-negotiable setting.132
Though these committees were initially seen
by the government and the companies as
analogous bodies to unions, many workers
viewed them as a facade meant to limit labor
actions. In addition to the widespread strikes
in 1973, Black workers in Durban began
forming unrecognized trade unions as a
means to collectively bargain.133 In contrast
to the management-led work committees
rejected by many Black workers, these trade
unions were created by and for other
workers and could represent their interests.
By 1973, approximately 40,000 Black
workers were union members.134 While
significant progress had been made during
the 1970s, much of it was limited to the
material conditions of black workers, rather
than strictly political rights for the black
populace.
The late 1970s were a turning point
for the legal status of Black workers as the
Wiehahn Commission granted institutional
legitimacy to Black unions. In 1977, the
government appointed Nic Wiehahn as the
chairperson of the Commission of Inquiry
into Labour Legislation (later known as the
Wiehahn Commission),135 purportedly as a
reaction to the skilled labor shortages of the
previous decade136, and it resulted in seven
major recommendations: allow Black
134
MacShane et al., Power!, 17.
135
United States Department of State. Your Meeting
with Professor Nic Wiehahn and Ambassador Donald
B. Sole of South Africa (Noon, April 7, 1982) 1982.
https://www.proquest.com/government-official-
publications/your-meeting-with-professor-nic-
wiehahn/docview/1679057516/se-
2?accountid=14784
136
Kooy et al., Wiehahn Commission, 1.

workers to join unions, let unions decide on
segregation, unions must be formally
registered, incorporate unions into the
present industrial council framework,
restrict political activities of unions, jobs
cannot be reserved for white workers, allow
Black South Africans to enter
apprenticeships.137 These recommendations
treat labor as a center for political regulation
rather than an active working-class struggle.
By legislating clear boundaries around
Black labor relations, the white government
attempted to shift the focus of Black labor
activism “from shop floor struggles to the
managerial conference room.”138 While they
grant novel recognition to Black labor
unions, the suggestions also formally limit
some potential avenues of political
mobilization. Still, granting legitimacy to
Black labor unions’ rights to collectively
bargain and organize provided a new outlet
for labor enforcement: the state. These
officially recognized unions had more
leverage and more resources at their disposal
in their advocacy for better working
conditions. Official recognition could also,
in theory, protect unions from state
repression.139 Considering the state’s use of
force against protestors in the past, political
legitimacy could grant an important degree
of protection to union organizers. As a result
of the Wiehahn Commission, Black unions
had the potential to meet more openly and
officially.
As individual unions were
strengthened by post-Wiehahn Commission
legislation, union federations also
experienced new life. The white-only South
African Confederation of Labour (SACOL)
continued to prohibit Black workers from
joining, despite losing half of its white
137
Freeman and Bendahmane, Black Labor Unions,
16.
138
Lichtenstein, “We do not think that the Bantu is
ready for labour unions.” 218.
139
United States Department of State, “Your Meeting
With.”
49
membership from 1980 to 1984 because of
its conservative, racist positions.140 TUCSA,
which had remained racially ambivalent
since the 1960s, adopted the Wiehahn
Commission’s suggestions to formally
register Black unions, though it held a
parallel shop policy in which workplaces
had to feature two racially-segregated
unions despite working through the same
union organization.141 Although TUCSA
boasted a membership of almost 450,000 in
1983, many workers soon left in response to
either the parallel shop policy or its support
of harsher government responses to union
organizing.142 From these controversies
grew the Federation of South African Trade
Unions (FOSATU), which was primarily
composed of Black heavy industry workers,
though the federation was explicitly non-
racial.143 Though FOSATU was anti-
apartheid, the organization viewed it as
subordinate to creating a working-class
solidarity movement. FOSATU viewed
worker solidarity as a driving force for
voting and civil rights for Black South
Africans. While FOSATU was the first post-
Wiehahn Commission multi-racial union
federation, it was soon overtaken by larger
and stronger union federations.
In the years following the Wiehahn
Commission and subsequent reforms, many
officially recognized Black unions emerged
as bastions of Black labor rights in South
Africa, including the Black National Union
of Mineworkers (NUM). As South Africa’s
economic development was dependent on
mining, capital was dependent on miners’
labor.144 Mineworkers were frequently at the
forefront of labor struggles in South Africa
because of the strength of their industry and
organization. In 1946, the African
140
MacShane et al., Power!, 35.
141
Ibid., 35.
142
Freeman and Bendahmane, Black Labor Unions,
40.
143
Ibid., 49.
144
MacShane et al., Power!, 76.
50
Mineworkers’ Union (AMWU) led a general
strike with 70,000 workers over post-war
shortages and low wages.145 Despite
significant participation, the strike was
unsuccessful. Minework in that period can
be characterized by poor wages and even
poorer working conditions. 8,209
mineworkers were killed on the job between
1972 and 1982.146 Workers were exposed to
life-threatening risks everyday and yet failed
to reap any of the benefits of their labor.
Any financial benefits of minework went to
a small group of white elites, maintaining
the socio-economic conditions of apartheid.
Because minework had significant
implications for both the capitalists and the
laborers, minework could be used as a nexus
for change in South Africa.
The NUM reflected the frequently
non-linear progress of labor rights in South
Africa. Though some of its larger campaigns
were blockaded by the state, it was still
responsible for incremental progress. In
1982, NUM formed with the help of the
Council of Unions of South Africa
(CUSA).147 In 1983, a works stoppage in the
Driefontein Gold Mine resulted in the
termination of 17 mineworkers after they
refused to enter an unsafe mine.148 NUM
argued in front of the industrial court that
workers had the right to refuse unsafe work,
especially when management had “failed to
take reasonable steps to reassure them of the
safety of the area.”149 The court decided to
overturn the workers’ terminations.
Subsequently, many mines published formal
grievances policies and safety concern-
145
Pretorius. History of South Africa, 487.
146
MacShane et al., Power!, 76.
147
Ibid., 42.
148
Jean Leger, "From Fatalism to Mass Action: The
South African National Union of Mineworkers'
Struggle for Safety and Health." Labour, Capital and
Society / Travail, Capital Et Société 21, no. 2 (1988):
270-92. Accessed March 17, 2021.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/43157831. 273.
149
Ibid., 274.
related dismissals became significantly less
frequent.150 Within months of NUM’s
founding, it successfully advocated for safer
working conditions. Later, In 1987,
negotiations failed between the Chamber of
Mines and NUM when they came to a
stalemate over salary increases.151 Similar to
AMWU’s protests in the 1940s,
mineworkers soon went on strike. This time,
however, approximately 300,000 miners
were involved.152 Workers continued to
strike for 21 days, despite increasing
suppression from both the Chamber of
Mines and the police. By the end, 11
workers were killed and more than 50,000
migrant mine workers were deported.153 The
union eventually settled for the Chamber of
Mines’ wage offer, as well as additional
benefits. Though this outcome was not
entirely successful, it slightly improved
working conditions for some miners.
NUM’s mobilization in the 1987 strike still
created some progress for Black workers.
Though NUM failed to fulfill some of its
larger goals, its organization and resources
still allowed for previously-unseen progress.
1985 saw the creation of the Council
of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
Soon after its founding, COSATU had
approximately 450,000 members from 33
unions—including several former FOSATU-
affiliated unions.154 While anti-apartheid
action was supplementary to many previous
union federations, COSATU was at the
forefront of anti-apartheid action.
Advocating for divestment and sanctions
against the National Party government,
150
Ibid., 274.
151
Raphaël Botiveau, Organise or Die? Democracy
and Leadership in South Africa's National Union of
Mineworkers. (Johannesburg: Wits University Press,
2017). 60.
152
Ibid., 60.
153
Ibid., 60.
154
Lichtenstein, “We do not think that the Bantu is
ready for labour unions.” 235.

working closely with banned organizations
like the South African Communist Party,
and leading the protests against apartheid
were key facets of COSATU’s
organization.155 COSATU’s explicitly anti-
apartheid values led it to become the largest
and most influential labor federation through
the end of apartheid and into the 21st-
century. By 1994, following its close work
with the African National Congress,
COSATU had approximately 1.8 million
members.156 COSATU and other post-1970s
labor federations reflected pro-labor and
anti-apartheid progress.
Though its successes have not been
linear, the Black labor movement in South
Africa was an instrumental force in the
struggle against apartheid in the late 20th
century. From mid-century industrial labor
councils to Congresses to unofficial and
official labor unions, the shape of labor
relations has changed drastically over the
course of several decades. To this day, labor
remains a powerful force in South Africa.
155
Pretorius, History of South Africa, 489.
51
Since the dissolution of apartheid, the
government has been led by the Tripartite
Alliance between COSATU, the African
National Congress, and the South African
Communist Party. By rallying workers
around pro-labor, anti-apartheid policies,
these three organizations have been met with
extraordinary levels of success. Black labor
unions have long played significant roles in
South African history, even if recognition of
those roles is recent.
Selma El-Badawi is a senior at the
University of Washington. She is majoring
in Political Science and History: Religion
and Society and minoring in Labor Studies
and Diversity. This paper was written
HSTRY 494 B: Colloquium in
Historiography: Imagining Africa, taught by
Prof. Stephanie Smallwood.
156
Ibid., 505.
52
Bibliography
“Black African Workers' Union Joins
International Federation.” New York
Times, March 13, 1927,
https://nyti.ms/2QtkKEI, 184.
Botiveau, Raphaël. Organise or Die?
Democracy and Leadership in South
Africa's National Union of
Mineworkers. Wits University Press,
2017.
Freeman, Anthony G., and Diane B.
Bendahmane, editors. Black Labor
Unions in South Africa: Report of a
Symposium. Department of State
Publication, Foreign Service
Institute, Center for the Study of
Foreign Affairs, U.S. Department of
State, 1987.
Kooy, Alide, et al. The Wiehahn
Commission: A Summary. Cape
Town, Southern Africa Labour and
Development Research Unit, 1979.
Leger, Jean. "From Fatalism to Mass
Action: The South African National
Union of Mineworkers' Struggle for
Safety and Health." Labour, Capital
and Society / Travail, Capital Et
Société 21, no. 2 (1988): 270-92.
Accessed March 17, 2021.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4315783
1. 273.
Lichtenstein, Alex. “‘We do not think that
the Bantu is ready for labour unions’:
Remaking South Africa's Apartheid
Workplace in the 1970s.” South
African Historical Journal, vol. 69,
no. 2, 2017, pp. 215-235,
10.1080/02582473.2017.1293718.
Denis MacShane, Martin Plaut, and David
Ward. Power! Black Workers, Their
Unions, and the Struggle for
Freedom in South Africa. South End
Press, 1984.
Pretorius, Fransjohan. A History of South
Africa: From Distant Past to the
Present Day. Pretoria, Protea House
Books, 2014.
“South Africa Reds Dissolve Just Ahead of
Suppression” New York Times, June
21, 1950, https://nyti.ms/3fp2AfB. 1.
United States Department of State. Your
Meeting with Professor Nic Wiehahn
and Ambassador Donald B. Sole of
South Africa (Noon, April 7, 1982)
1982.
https://www.proquest.com/governme
nt-official-publications/your-
meeting-with-professor-nic-
wiehahn/docview/1679057516/se-
2?accountid=14784
Wiehahn, Nic E. “Labor Reforms in South
Africa.” New York Times, April 23,
1982,
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/2
3/opinion/labor-reforms-in-south-
africa-by-nic-e-
wiehahn.html?smid=url-share.
 53

The Pink Scare: The Woman Patriot and the Gendering of Radicalism
Frances Johnson

From 1918 to 1932, the five female directors of the Woman Patriot Publishing Company
published The Woman Patriot in the wake of the Progressive Era and the First Red Scare. The
newspaper emerged as an active voice in the countermovement against women’s suffrage.
Despite the anti-suffragists’ efforts, the 19th Amendment’s enfranchisement of women moved
women from the private to the public sphere. The Woman Patriot adapted and continued their
conspiratorial association of feminism and radicalism. This paper applies resource mobilization
theory and political opportunity theory to the strategies of The Woman Patriot. While the
Woman Patriot Publishing Company ultimately fell out of alignment with its political coalition,
its accomplishments complicate the historical understanding of the waning of maternalist reform
and the Equal Rights Amendment, and the waxing of female conservatism.

Figure 2: The Woman Patriot, vol. 4, no. 39 (Washington,

D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., September 25, 1920), 1.
54
On May 24, 1869, the
Massachusetts state legislature formed a
“Joint Special Committee on Woman
Suffrage” in response to a petition to grant
women the right to vote.157 Two hundred
anti-suffrage women successfully lobbied
against the petition with the argument that
the “exercise of elective franchise would
diminish the purity, the dignity and moral
influence of woman, and bring into the
family circle a dangerous element of
discord.”158 Battle lines deepened with the
contemporaneous merger of the National
Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and
the American Woman Suffrage Association
(AWSA) into the National American
Woman Suffrage Association
(NAWSA).159 Much like its opponent, the
countermovement to women’s suffrage
firmly rooted itself in the Northeast. The
crusade for public opinion centered around
the production of anti-suffrage media. The
Remonstrance, the oldest anti-suffrage
publication, began publication in
Massachusetts in 1890.160 The New York
State Association Opposed to Woman
Suffrage (NYSAOWS) first published The
Anti-Suffragist in July 1908. The Anti-
Suffragist, a quarterly newspaper, remained
in circulation until April 1912. The
157
Massachusetts General Court Joint Special
Committee on Woman’s Suffrage, Senate, No. 343,
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in Senate, May 24,
1869 (Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
Massachusetts Senate, 1869),
https://www.loc.gov/item/93838295/.
158
Thomas J. Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and
Mother Party: Female Anti-Suffragists in the United
States, 1868-1920, Scholarship in Women’s History
(Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Pub., 1994), 2.
159
Lee Ann Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or
Fail: Opportunity, Culture, and the Struggle for
Woman Suffrage (Princeton University Press, 1996),
9.
160
Kristy Maddux, “When Patriots Protest: The Anti-
Suffrage Discursive Transformation of 1917,”
Rhetoric and Public Affairs 7, no. 3 (2004): 287.
161
Tiffany K. Wayne and Lois W. Banner, eds.,
Women’s Rights in the United States: A
publication’s dissolution did not mark the
demise of the anti-suffrage movement;
rather, state anti-suffrage organizations
coalesced nationally, creating the National
Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage
(NAOWS) in November 1911.161 A
monthly national anti-suffrage organ named
The Woman’s Protest succeeded The Anti-
Suffragist in May 1912.162 This first issue
claimed the “blood relationship of Woman
Suffrage and Socialism.”163 With the seeds
of anti-radicalism planted, they preserved a
constituency of principally middle-class
women with the support of men in politics
and business.164 The strategic situation
changed on November 6, 1917, when New
York enfranchised women.165 New York’s
constitutional amendment shifted the
NAOWS’s focus from state legislatures to
Congress. After relocating to Washington,
DC in the summer of 1917 and the House
of Representatives’ passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment in January 1918,
The Woman’s Protest published its final
edition in February 1918.166 In its place, the
NAOWS published the first edition of The
Woman Patriot on April 27, 1918. The first
version of the subtitle reads “For Home and
National Defense Against Woman
Suffrage, Feminism, and Socialism.”167
Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Issues, Events, and
People (ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2015), 17.
162
Wayne and Banner, eds., Women’s Rights in the
United States, 18; The Woman’s Protest against
Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, no. 1 (New York: National
Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, 1912), 1.
163
The Woman’s Protest, vol. 1, no. 1, 5.
164
Susan E. Marshall, “Ladies against Women:
Mobilization Dilemmas of Antifeminist Movements,”
Social Problems 32, no. 4 (1985): 349.
165
Tessa Melvin, “1917: When Women Won Right
to Vote,” The New York Times, November 1, 1987,
sec. New York,
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/01/nyregion/1917
-when-women-won-right-to-vote.html.
166
Marshall, “Ladies against Women,” 354–55.
167
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 1 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., April 27,
1918), 1.

With this declaration, The Woman Patriot
solidified its dedication to the gendering of
radicalism.
This paper will analyze how The
Woman Patriot adapted to the rise of
women’s suffrage and changed the course
of women’s organizations. Popular
conception holds that the ratification of the
Nineteenth Amendment invalidated the
anti-suffrage movement; however, The
Woman Patriot remained in publication
until 1932.168 The various iterations of
anti-suffrage organization newsletters
demonstrate the reconfigurations and
renegotiations in response to a protean
sociopolitical context. In addition to the
use of newspaper articles, congressional
records, and scholarly research, this essay
relies on analysis of The Woman Patriot
using social movement theories. Success
and failure will be assessed through
resource mobilization theory and political
opportunity theory. Resource mobilization
theory argues that social movements
employ rational cost-benefit analysis, and
that their growth hinges on the acquisition
and mobilization of resources.169
According to historian Robert A.
Goldberg, resources are “the tools used to
gain influence.”170 Resources can include
capital, members, information, leadership,
and solidarity. The model of sociologist
Charles Tilly divides “contenders for
power”—those mobilizing their resources
for policy change—into the establishment
polity members and outside challengers.171
Contenders attain power by either
convincing or disrupting authorities.
Alliances have the potential to both
compile and demobilize resources. Lastly,
168
Marshall, 355.
169
Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail, 27.
170
Robert Alan Goldberg, Grassroots Resistance:
Social Movements in Twentieth Century America
(Waveland Press, Incorporated, 1996), 8.
171
Goldberg, Grassroots Resistance, 9.
172
Goldberg, 10–11.
55
the government arbitrates through
conciliation, co-optation, and
censorship.172 Government involvement
introduces the influence of political power
into the social movement matrix. Adding
onto the resource component, political
opportunity theory evaluates the political
context. The factors composing these
opportunities include formal institutions,
the political contenders for power, and
informal decision-making.173 Per the work
of political scientist Lee Ann Banaszak,
political opportunity theory includes the
status quo, coalition, and group values it
influences.174 With both theories, the
procurement of power defines success. The
power of The Woman Patriot will be
measured through its resources, political
change, and values. While The Woman
Patriot failed to thwart the Nineteenth
Amendment, its virulent rhetoric against
the “twin cults” of feminism and
radicalism and its period in a political
coalition led to the waning of maternalist
reform and the Equal Rights Amendment,
and the waxing of female conservatism.175
The Groundwork of The Woman’s
Protest (1912–1918) and the NAOWS
(1911–1920)
The National Association
Opposed to Woman Suffrage
experienced the most growth between its
conception in 1912 and 1916.176 At the
end of 1912, the NAOWS counted
173
Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail, 30–
31.
174
Banaszak, 34–39.
175
The Woman Patriot, vol. 2, no. 15 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., April 2, 1919),
5.
176
Marshall, “Ladies against Women,” 349.
56
105,000 members.177 This number
increased to 200,000 members across
twenty-five state organizations in 1915,
the year that the Massachusetts’ suffrage
referendum to the state constitution
failed with only thirty-five percent in
favor.178 Over a year, the NAOWS
membership increased by 150,000,
reaching 350,000 women in 1916.179
Starting in 1912, The Woman’s Protest
gained funding through the distribution
of one-dollar annual subscriptions, ten-
cent copies, books, and pamphlets.180
Suffrage state campaigns resulted in an
average of fifteen states per year
considering women’s suffrage legislation
between 1910 and 1920.181 Although
legislation passed in only six states by
1916 (Oregon, Kansas, Arizona, Illinois,
Nevada, and Montana), the 1917
enfranchisement of women in New York
marked a transformational watershed.182
The NAOWS struggled to mobilize
their members and political success. First,
membership figures may be unreliable due
to inconsistent bookkeeping practices.
Second, the national organization required
donations to offset inadequate funds.183
Third, an ideology of femininity,
domesticity, and respectability defined the
administration of President Josephine
Dodge and Secretary Minnie Bronson.
Namely, the NAOWS limited its resources
through the continued individual isolation
inherent to the domesticity of women, its
emphasis on education over politics, and its
177
Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party,
86.
178
Maddux, “When Patriots Protest,” 287; Jablonsky,
The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party, 13.
179
Maddux, “When Patriots Protest,” 287.
180
The Woman’s Protest, vol. 1, no. 1, 12.
181
Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail, 11.
182
Marshall, “Ladies against Women,” 349.
183
Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party,
86.
184
Marshall, “Ladies against Women,” 353–54.
lack of coordination with local chapters,
state associations, and other
organizations.184 Isolation of its members,
chapters, and organizations stunted the
formation of group values to rally behind.
As a national newspaper, The Woman’s
Protest functioned more as a middle man
between states than leadership to organize
and distribute resources.185 In many ways,
this is by design. The Woman’s Protest did
“not intend to dictate the policy or direct the
details of work to any of the State
associations, believing that the women of
each community can judge best what is
necessary or expedient, but it hopes to co-
operate whenever there is a request for
assistance.”186 While Bronson spoke at the
House of Representatives’ Committee on
Woman Suffrage on December 3, 1913, The
Woman’s Protest called to limit member
attendance in Congress in 1915 and 1916.187
During the 1915 campaign in
Massachusetts, anti-suffragists shared
“silent speeches” of written placards in the
windows of headquarter “shops.”188 Silence
characterized their auto tours, visits to state
legislatures, and distribution of materials to
legislators.189 Apolitical rhetoric cloistered
the NAOWS from polity members and
formal political institutions. While the
NAOWS committed to wartime silence, the
National American Woman Suffrage
Association (NAWSA) amplified its voice.
During her presidency of the NAWSA,
Carrie Chapman Catt formulated her
“Winning Plan” to spearhead state
185
Marshall, 354.
186
The Woman’s Protest, vol. 1, no. 1, 3.
187
U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Woman
Suffrage, Hearing Before the Committee on Rules on
the Resolution Establishing a Committee on Woman
Suffrage, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1913, H. Doc., 45;
Marshall, “Ladies against Women,” 353.
188
Louise L. Stevenson, “Women Anti-Suffragists in
the 1915 Massachusetts Campaign,” The New
England Quarterly 52, no. 1 (1979), 82.
189
Marshall, “Ladies against Women,” 352.

campaigns for the federal amendment in
1916.190 The anti-suffrage movement failed
to replicate the suffrage movement’s
political campaign of militant protesting,
lobbying, alliances, and prominent leaders.
As the ratification of the Nineteenth
Amendment inched further, the future of the
anti-suffrage movement depended on a
change in leadership and ideology. In
February 1918, a month after the House of
Representatives passed the women’s
suffrage amendment, the final edition of
The Woman’s Protest concluded that they
could no longer be a “women’s club against
a political party.”191
The Woman Patriot and the Rise of
“Wadsworthy” Tactices
On July 1, 1917, The Woman’s
Protest announced that Alice Wadsworth
would succeed Josephine Dodge as the
President of the NAOWS. The resignation
of this old guard came amid the relocation
to Washington, DC, where Wadsworth had
already established residence as the
President of the Capitol’s NAOWS
chapter.192 She came from an elite political
background as the wife of Republican
Senator James W. Wadsworth Jr. and the
daughter of John Hay, “Abraham Lincoln’s
secretary and Secretary of State under
McKinley and Roosevelt.”193 Prior to her
promotion, Wadsworth spoke at the Senate
Committee on Woman Suffrage and the
House Judiciary Committee in May 1917.
Although still upholding traditional values,
Wadsworth drew anti-suffragist women
closer into the political sphere.
The renovation of the NAOWS
190
Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail, 11.
191
Marshall, “Ladies against Women,” 354.
192
Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party,
95.
193
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 14 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., July 27, 1918),
7; The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 1, 2.
57
culminated in the rebranding of The
Woman’s Protest as The Woman Patriot. On
April 27, 1918, the seminal issue of The
Woman Patriot introduced the cause of the
NAOWS and the leadership of Alice
Wadsworth, who proclaimed,
the anti-suffrage movement
henceforth will wage
unceasing war against the
two great enemies of our
civilization—Feminism and
Socialism. We shall enter
every State, whether women
vote or not, and support the
men who, noting the
symptoms of decline and
degeneration, have the
courage and ability to apply a
remedy.194
The Woman Patriot began with a
declaration of political war. Alice
Wadsworth’s ascendancy rejected Josephine
Dodge’s avoidance of “controversy,
notoriety, and sensationalism so far as was
possible in active political campaigns.”195
Dodge and Bronson propagated Progressive
Era reforms and separate-spheres
ideology.196 By contrast, conspiratorial
fervor became characteristic of
Wadsworth’s administration. The
preeminence of anti-radicalism disarmed the
argument that women did not need or want
the vote.197 This change is supported by
analysis of six arguments used by anti-
suffragists: socialism, radicalism,
militarism, traditional values, national
security, and needlessness. Comparing The
Woman’s Protest and The Woman Patriot,
difference of proportion tests conducted by
194
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 1, 2.
195
Marshall, “Ladies against Women,” 352.
196
Maddux, “When Patriots Protest,” 288.
197
Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party,
111.
58
researcher Artour Aslanian show a
statistically significant increase in rhetoric
against socialism, radicalism, and national
security. Appeals to traditional values
remained constant while The Woman’s
Protest contained a greater proportion of
arguments against suffrage’s militarism and
need.198 An increase in the perceived threat
of radicalism is correlated with a decrease in
the nonnecessity of suffrage. It was the
ideological and rhetorical transformation
necessary for the development of political
strategy and collective values.
In the wake of New York’s 1917
enfranchisement of women, The Woman
Patriot galvanized support around a
national cause. Wadsworth attributed losses
to “the increased socialist vote” and wanted
the “question of suffrage re-submitted to
popular vote, with women voting, so that it
may be repealed.”199 Continuing Carrie
Chapman Catt’s 1916 “Winning Plan,” the
suffragists parlayed their victory in New
York into the campaign for a federal
amendment.200 Paradoxically, The Woman
Patriot used the female right to vote in New
York to counter the national
enfranchisement of women. Alice
Wadsworth lobbied in politics and the
media. She corresponded with President
Wilson, intervened in the Republican
National Committee, and challenged the
NAWSA’s Carrie Chapman Catt to a
debate.201 The Woman Patriot under
Wadsworth's leadership embraced the style
198
Artour Aslanian, “The Use of Rhetoric in Anti-
Suffrage and Anti-Feminist Publications,” LUX: A
Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research
from Claremont Graduate University 2, no. 1 (March
25, 2013), https://doi.org/10.5642/lux.201301.02.
199
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 1, 2.
200
Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party,
29.
201
Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party,
100.
202
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 28 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., November 2,
of muckraking journalism. With an
overhauled board of directors and editorial
staff, propaganda bombarded the pages.
Headlines claimed, among many others,
that “BUREAUS OF FREE LOVE
ESTABLISHED BY FEMINISTS AND
SOCIALISTS IN RUSSIA” and “WOMAN
SUFFRAGE RUSSIA INSTITUTING
FEMALE SLAVE MARKET.”202 This
sensationalism demonstrated a broader
claim of not an ideological but an
existential threat to women, children, and
democracy. It equated suffrage with a
nebulous, foreign, and treasonous
radicalism. The weaponization of fear
justified action by any means and
interpretation necessary. With Wadsworth
at the helm, The Woman Patriot became the
mouthpiece of the NAOWS and its reported
450,000 members.203 Wanted advertising
solicited “reliable persons throughout the
country to become correspondents,
organizers, and local representatives.”204
Novelly, Wadsworth involved a male effort
for anti-suffrage.205 Starting in the first
issue, The Woman Patriot advertised the
American Constitution League (ACL).206
The ACL emerged in December 1917 as a
national men’s organization against
suffrage. This mixed-gender alliance was
unsuccessful on two counts. First, men
dominated the structures of power.
Second, this power failed to materialize
achievement in the ratification fight.207 The
Woman Patriot’s revenue relied on single-
copy sales, subscriptions, advertisements,
1918), 2; The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 10
(Washington, D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co.,
June 29, 1918), 7.
203
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 1, 2.
204
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 21 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., September 14,
1918), 3.
205
Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party,
103.
206
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 1, 8.
207
Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party,
77–78.

self-funding, and investments in the Woman
Patriot Publishing Company (WPPC), and
self-funding. Between April 12 and April
19, 1919, the unit price of the newspaper
changed from two cents to five cents, and
the cost doubled to ten cents on May 1,
1921.208 Simultaneously, the newspaper
further cut costs by decreasing the
publishing frequency from weekly to twice
monthly.209 Its pages included subscription
promotions. One implores sending the
newspaper to “your Congressman, your
local officials, your public library, your
organization, your pastor, and your local
editors.”210 Another appeals to joining “the
450,000 Adult American Women, who have
signed Anti-Suffrage Membership Blanks in
the Last Three Years.”211 Unlike The
Woman’s Protest, The Woman Patriot
posted advertisements for businesses like
“The Washington” hotel and the Hayworth
Publishing House.212 At ten dollars per
stock, it promoted investment for “a real,
live anti-suffragist, and would rather invest
$10 now in a patriotic enterprise than have
it taken away from you later in increased
taxes under woman suffrage and
Socialism.”213 Wadsworth drove support
with patriotism and fear. Despite these
fundraising efforts, The Woman Patriot
inherited the financial issues of its
predecessors. Wealthy board members
208
The Woman Patriot, vol. 2, no. 15, 1; The Woman
Patriot, vol. 3, no. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Woman
Patriot Publishing Co., April 19, 1919), 1.
209
The Woman Patriot, vol. 5, no. 16 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., April 16,
1921), 1; The Woman Patriot, vol. 5, no. 17
(Washington, D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co.,
May 1, 1921), 1.
210
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 1, 8.
211
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 1, 7.
212
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 1, 8; The Woman
Patriot, vol. 1, no. 1, 3.
213
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 1, 4.
214
Kirsten Marie Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki:
The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United
States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 75.
59
offset an annual average loss of $6,000.214
Vulnerabilities in mobilization left The
Woman Patriot in a precarious position.
The Nineteenth Amendment
The transitional period between The
Woman’s Protest and The Woman Patriot
proved to be improvident regarding the
national suffrage amendment. On January
10, 1918, the House of Representatives
approved the Susan B. Anthony
Amendment with a margin of 274–136.215
Barely meeting the required two-thirds
majority, the passage in the House
represented turning tides for the support of
women’s suffrage. President Wilson
officially voiced his support for the
amendment the day before the vote, exactly
a year after he declined to support it in a
meeting with the National Woman’s Party
(NWP).216 However, the tides were not
enough to carry the vote through Congress.
President Wilson reiterated his support
through an unprecedented address to the
Senate on September 30, 1918. He argued
that the female vote was a “vitally necessary
war measure.”217 Beyond the war effort,
President Wilson appealed to female
morality. According to President Wilson,
women belong in the public sphere because
“[w]e shall need their moral sense to
215
History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of
Representatives, “Jeannette Rankin and the Women’s
Suffrage Amendment,” Whereas: Stories from the
People’s House, January 1, 2018,
https://history.house.gov/Blog/2018 /January/1-10-
Suffrage-Committee/.
216
Beth Behn, “Woodrow Wilson’s Conversion
Experience: The President, the Woman Suffrage
Movement, and the Extent of Executive Influence”
(M.A., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2004),
69.
217
U.S. Congress, Senate, Senator William Gibbs
McAdoo of California addressing a memorial of the
birth anniversary of Susan B. Anthony at the Capitol
on January 5, 1938, 75th Cong., 3rd sess,
Congressional Record, vol. 83, pt. 9, 626.
60
preserve what is right and fine and worthy
in our system of life as well as to discover
just what it is that ought to be purified and
reformed. Without their counselings we
shall only be half wise.”218 His
politicization and moralization of women
was not successful outright. The Senate
defeated the amendment on October 18,
1918. Repeating the outcome of January 25,
1887 and March 19, 1914, it fell two votes
short with a margin of 53–31. However, this
close defeat markedly improved the pro-
suffrage share of the vote from 35–34 in
1914 and 16–34 in 1887.219
While suffragists protested the loss,
The Woman Patriot deflected the wartime
argument. In the issue from September 28,
1918, the publication apologized for being
deceived by “wicked suffragists when they
insisted that a vote was to be taken on
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
morning and Monday morning.” Holding
their presses meant that the issue was
“dated a week behind.”220 Above a “Roll of
Honor” for the “manly” senators against the
amendment, the banner announced,
“SENATE DEFEATS WOMAN
SUFFRAGE / REFUSES TO JUMP ON
“BAND WAGON” / NEWLY PAINTED
AS CHARIOT OF WAR.” On October 5,
1918, The Woman Patriot published “The
Defeat of Suffrage” by Annie Nathan
Meyer. She rhetorically asked, “is this the
time for each state in the Union—all forty-
eight at once—to be this seriously divided
upon an important local issue?”
Responsibility for the disunification and
218
75th Cong., 3rd sess. Congressional Record, 627.
219
United States Senate, “Timeline: The Senate and
the 19th Amendment,” Woman Suffrage Centennial,
accessed December 13, 2020,
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/People/
Women/Nineteenth_Amendment_
Vertical_Timeline.htm.
220
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 23 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., September 28,
1918), 4.
subversion of the war effort lay in the
shameful suffragists, according to Meyer.
Meyer argued that “nothing would have
been so effective, so liberating of the great
power of American womanhood as to have
accepted the truce the anti-suffragists
offered to them—to withhold all discussion,
politics, and propaganda until after the
war.”221 The anti-suffragists framed
themselves as launching a defensive rather
than an offensive campaign. With the
opportunity provided by the Senate loss,
anti-suffragists directed their attention to
the state level. In South Dakota, The
Woman Patriot reported that the suffrage
campaign “striking out the word ‘male’”
meant that “no voter can register his
opposition to woman suffrage without also
voting against the citizenship
qualification.” The article claimed that the
suffragists “place the ‘Cause’” first at the
cost of “double the alien vote, the pro-
German vote, the socialist vote, and the
underworld vote, as well as increasing the
race menace throughout the South.” The
NAOWS resolved to “place ‘America
First’” and refused to campaign.222 The sum
of their claims against the suffragists
totaled deception, treason, and foreign
allegiance. However, they could not
succeed on the power of their rhetoric
alone. In prioritizing an inactive ideological
protest over an active political protest, the
NAOWS failed to stop the suffrage win in
November 1918.223
After falling one vote short on
February 10, the Senate approved the
221
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 24 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., October 5,
1918), 4.
222
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 23, 4.
223
The Woman Patriot, vol. 1, no. 29 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., November 9,
1918), 1.

Nineteenth Amendment on June 4, 1919.224
In the June 6, 1919 issue of the New York
World, Alice Wadsworth stated, “[i]n view
of the fact that there is no time limit placed
on the ratification of the woman suffrage
amendment, it seems to me that it would be
entirely useless to make any further fight
against suffrage.” The Woman Patriot
defended Wadsworth’s opinion on June 14,
claiming her “long brave fight against the
Federal amendment that has meant constant
sacrifice of time, money, and energy for
others.” She encountered issues ensuring
Southern support despite contributing
thousands of dollars “to save Southern
civilization.” In a retroactive appeal to
World War I, The Woman Patriot claimed
to carry the burden of the “millions” of
people against suffrage who expect
“somebody else to hold the front line
trenches against Feminism.”225 Despite this
militant rhetoric, Wadsworth resigned from
the NAOWS on June 24, citing ill-health.226
She retained her position as President of the
WPPC and earned the title of Honorary
President. Mary Kilbreth, the Vice
President of the NAOWS and chief
organizer of the Woman Voters’ Anti-
Suffrage Party of New York, was
“unanimously elected.”227 The NAOWS
met in New York from June 26 until July 1,
concluding with campaign plans to reject
the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in at
least thirteen states.228 Once again, the
NAOWS made a transfer of power during a
surge of support for women’s suffrage.
224
United States Senate, “Timeline.”
225
The Woman Patriot, vol. 3, no. 9 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., June 14, 1919),
4.
226
The Woman Patriot, vol. 3, no. 24 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., September 27,
1919), 2.
227
The Woman Patriot, vol. 3, no. 13 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., July 12, 1919),
2.
228
The Woman Patriot, vol. 3, no. 9, 5; The Woman
Patriot, vol. 3, no. 13, 2.
61
Mary Kilbreth continued
“Wadsworthy” tactics in The Woman
Patriot. Kilbreth targeted suffragists and
their politician supporters. For example,
Margaret Robinson, the President of the
Massachusetts Public Interest League
(MPIL), contributing editor to The Woman
Patriot, and member of the WPPC board of
directors, published a letter to the Governor
of Vermont on July 10, 1920. She claimed
that Carrie Chapman Catt, “leader of the
suffragists in this country, publicly urged
our Government to ‘catch up with Russia.’”
Robinson offered to pay for Catt’s trip to
Russia, pausing the ratification of the
“Suffrage Force Bill” until Catt experienced
the disastrous impacts of her propaganda
campaign.229 Since this offer was not taken,
the fight for state ratification trudged on.
Crucial campaigns centered around the
South. In June 1919, the NAOWS helped to
establish the Southern Women’s League for
the Rejection of the Susan B. Anthony
Amendment in Montgomery, Alabama. It
appealed to racialized fear-mongering of
states’ rights and a race war.230 The Woman
Patriot replicated this sentiment in its
articles; one article warned of “Votes for
Colored Women” and, in its promotion of
the book The Rising Tide of Color by
Lothrop Stoddard, it claimed radicals
propagandized “colored supremacy.”231
When thirty-five out of thirty-six states
ratified the amendment, Kilbreth and the
NAOWS set up a headquarters in Tennessee
during the summer of 1920.232 The Woman
229
The Woman Patriot, vol. 4, no. 28 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., July 10, 1920),
5.
230
Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party,
108–9.
231
The Woman Patriot, vol. 4, no. 20 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., May 15, 1920),
6; The Woman Patriot, vol. 4, no. 42 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., October 16,
1920), 2.
232
Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party,
109–10.
62
Patriot described the anti-suffragist action
in Tennessee as the “greatest popular state
campaign ever waged against the suffrage
amendment.”233 Regional organizations
lobbied. Mrs. James S. Pinckard, the
President of the Southern Women’s League
for the Rejection of the Susan B. Anthony
Amendment, wrote a letter to James M.
Cox, the Governor of Tennessee, on July 26,
1920. She argued that the “very safety of
Southern civilization, the purity of Anglo-
Saxon blood, is involved in this
Amendment.” Ratification concluded on
August 18, 1920 when Tennessee approved
the Nineteenth Amendment. The Woman
Patriot underwent an identity crisis as it
debated renaming itself The American
Constitutionalist.234 Rejecting the outcome,
The Woman Patriot depended on the
authority of the Supreme Court. On July 7,
1920, Charles S. Fairchild, the President of
the American Constitutional League, filed a
motion in the Supreme Court to prevent the
Secretary of State “from issuing a
proclamation declaring the ratification of
this so-called Amendment.”235 The Woman
Patriot claimed that the NAOWS was “by
no means a ‘one idea’ organization, as its
opposition to woman suffrage it based on
determination to prevent if possible the evil
results of the entire Feminist-Socialist
issue” while awaiting the Supreme Court
decision in October 1921.236 However, the
NAOWS officially disbanded in March
1922 after the Supreme Court unanimously
rejected the standing of the challenge to the
ratification in Fairchild v. Hughes in
February 1922.237
By 1922, anti-suffragism lacked
233
The Woman Patriot, vol. 4, no. 37 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., September 11,
1920), 6.
234
The Woman Patriot, vol. 4, no. 39 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., September 25,
1920), 4.
235
The Woman Patriot, vol. 4, no. 42, 8.
support in the executive, legislative, and
judicial branches. Suffragists succeeded as
a political contender by mobilizing their
resources in the government and shifting
the status quo in favor of female
enfranchisement. In terms of value
development, suffragists came to interpret
corporations as the actors behind the anti-
suffrage movement. Historians have only
recently contested the strength of this
lobby.238 The perception of an opponent’s
threat, regardless of accuracy, is important
for the mobilization of resources (e.g.
coalitions) and the construction of
values.239 The accuracy of an anti-suffrage
alignment with liquor and other industries
is important, however, to understanding its
lack of coalition values. The suffrage
perspective instead supplanted the status
quo belief. While the 1920s began with the
failure of anti-radical tunnel vision, The
Woman Patriot was not yet relegated to
obscurity in the annals of history. More
opportunities remained for power in politics
and coalitions.
Shifting Context
The Nineteenth Amendment
expanded the political power of women,
and with that came a period of social
disruption. Growing out of the Progressive
Era, female political participation
translated into coalitions, federal agencies,
and legislation. Yet, the social welfare
reform movement was not the only reaction
to this seismic shift in democracy. Women
voters had to contend with anti-radicalism
and conservatism. First, anti-radicalism
236
The Woman Patriot, vol. 5, no. 27 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., October 1,
1921), 2.
237
The Woman Patriot, vol. 6, no. 5 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., March 1,
1922), 52–3.
238
Maddux, “When Patriots Protest,” 286.
239
Banaszak, Why Movements Succeed or Fail, 42.

reached a fever pitch in the First Red
Scare. A reaction to World War I and the
1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the First Red
Scare lasted from 1917 until 1920. While
President Harding declared that “[t]oo
much has been said about Bolshevism in
America” in 1920, his presidency ushered
in a tide of conservatism.240 Republican
Warren G. Harding and his running mate
Calvin Coolidge successfully ran on a
platform of “heroics but healing; not
nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but
restoration… not surgery but serenity.”241
This ran contrary to the reformist activism
of the Progressive Era.
The Woman Patriot traced its
lineage back to both the Progressive Era
and the First Red Scare. As mentioned
previously, anti-suffrage reformers like
Josephine Dodge and Minnie Bronson
also took a progressive stance while the
“Wadsworthy” tactics continued to
influence the newspaper that originated in
1918. As social disruption made way for
power, The Woman Patriot’s rhetoric
began to expand beyond the group. Here,
the Spider Web Chart marks a crucial
turning point. Lucia Ramsey Maxwell, a
clerical worker for the War Department,
expressly drew inspiration from The
Woman Patriot.242 Some of Maxwell’s
“Miss Bolshevikis” appear in The Woman
Patriot’s 1922 manifesto, “Organizing
Revolution Through Women and
Children,” including the Women’s
International League for Peace and
Freedom, the League of Women Voters,
and Margaret Dreier Robins of the
240
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 5–6.
241
Library of Congress, “From War To Normalcy:
An Introduction to the Nation’s Forum Collection -
Presidential Election of 1920,” American Leaders
Speak: Recordings from World War I, accessed
December 14, 2020,
https://www.loc.gov/collections/world-war-i-and-
1920-election-recordings/articles-and-essays/from-
war-to-normalcy/presidential-election-of-1920/.
63
Women’s Trade Union League and the
International Federation of Working
Women.243 Maxwell compiled her chart
entitled “The Socialist-Pacifist Movement
in America is an Absolutely Fundamental
and Integral Part of International
Socialism” in 1922 and 1923 to link the
pacifism of women’s organizations and
individuals to international socialism.
After it was published and analyzed in
Henry Ford’s The Dearborn Independent
in 1924, the diagram continued to be
republished and inspired different
versions.244 At various points, the WPPC
relied on the allyship of the Daughters of
the American Revolution (DAR), the
Sentinels of the Republic, the MPIL, and
several Catholic interest groups. It is in
this context that the WPPC was able to
create a coalition against welfare reform
like the Child Labor Amendment and the
Sheppard-Towner Act.
Child Labor Amendment
The protection of children was
central to maternalism. Starting with the
Keating-Owen Act of 1916, welfare
reformers sought to legislate against child
labor. However, the Supreme Court ruled
the Keating-Owen Act unconstitutional
due to the restriction of the interstate
commerce of goods produced with child
labor. Activists then diverted their
attention to a child labor amendment.
Until the WPPC interjected, the
amendment enjoyed bipartisan
support.245
242
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 54; Delegard,
75.
243
The Woman Patriot, vol. 6, nos. 17 and 18
(Washington, D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co.,
September 1 and 15, 1922), 4; The Woman Patriot,
vol. 6, nos. 17 and 18, 6; Delegard, Battling Miss
Bolsheviki, 47.
244
Delegard, 47; Delegard, 49–51.
245
Delegard, 116–18.
64
The Child Labor Amendment passed
the House of Representatives by a margin
of 297–69 on April 26, 1924.246 On May 29,
1924, the WPPC wrote a petition against
the amendment while it was debated in the
Senate. Having been denied a hearing
before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee
on Child Labor, the Senator Baynard of
Delaware submitted the document to the
Congressional Record on May 31, 1924.
The petition served as a coordinated attack
on the Children’s Bureau, a federal agency
child welfare agency established in 1912.247
The WPPC claimed the Children’s Bureau
originated in the socialist tutelage of Karl
Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Alexandra
Kollontay (a Soviet revolutionary that led
welfare reforms for women and children
post-1917).248 The petition implicated
Florence Kelley, the leader of the
Children’s Bureau, in creating the
amendment “under direct orders from
Moscow.”249 In somewhat of a condensed
version of the Spider Web Chart, the WPPC
drew connections between individuals and
pacifist organizations like the Women’s
International League for Peace and
Freedom.250 Reformers, despite their claims
of protections, wanted to “nationalize the
children.”251 In other words, government
encroachment on the household would
propagandize women and children. The
WPPC’s conspiracy theory failed to
convince the Senate when, on June 2, 1924,
246
Jessie Kratz, “Unratified Amendments: Regulating
Child Labor,” National Archives: Pieces of History,
March 24, 2020,
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2020/03/24/unrati
fied-amendments-regulating-child-labor/.
247
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 116;
Delegard, 118.
248
U.S. Congress, Senate, Senator Thomas F. Bayard
presenting a petition from the WPPC, Congressional
Record, 68th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 65, pt. 10., daily
ed. (June 4, 1924), 9968; Congressional Record, 68th
Cong., 1st sess., vol. 65, pt. 10., daily ed. (June 4,
1924), 9972; Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 73.
the amendment passed by a margin of 61–
23.252 Yet, the ratification hit a roadblock:
the anti-radicals in Massachusetts.253
The MPIL, the Sentinels of the
Republic, and the Catholic Church
coalesced with the WPPC into a formidable
opponent. The WPPC claimed to distribute
more than 60,000 copies of their petition
with the help of the MPIL.254 The MPIL
was one of the strongest organizations in
the region. It shared a trajectory from anti-
suffrage to anti-radical. Perhaps the most
important factor, however, was its shared
membership. The WPPC board of directors
consisted of Mary Kilbreth, Margaret
Robinson, Katherine Balch, Harriet
Frothingham, and Cornelia Andrews
Gibbs.255 Of these five women, Mary
Kilbreth, Margaret Robinson, Katherine
Balch, and Harriet Frothingham were
members.256 Kilbreth and Balch worked
with the Sentinels of the Republic while
Gibbs worked with the DAR. The Sentinels
of the Republic was a mixed-gender states-
rights organization based in
Massachusetts.257 The Woman Patriot
frequently promoted their simple pledge in
their pages, for which there was no
initiation fee or dues.258 Lastly, in October,
the Catholic Church offered support in
Massachusetts to preserve traditional
gender roles. This solidarity came through
Cardinal O’Connell and his mobilization of
working Catholics and the sizable League
249
Congressional Record, 68th Cong., 1st sess., vol.
65, pt. 10., daily ed. (June 4, 1924), 9963.
250
Congressional Record, 68th Cong., 1st sess., vol.
65, pt. 10., daily ed. (June 4, 1924), 9969.
251
Congressional Record, 68th Cong., 1st sess., vol.
65, pt. 10., daily ed. (June 4, 1924), 9974.
252
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 119; Kratz,
“Unratified Amendments: Regulating Child Labor.”
253
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 120.
254
Delegard, 128.
255
Delegard, 75.
256
Delegard, 121.
257
Delegard, 76.
258
The Woman Patriot, vol. 6, nos. 17 and 18, 2.

of Catholic Women.259 The failure to ratify
in Massachusetts on November 3, 1924
spread to other states because of the work
of the WPPC’s coalition.260 While this
marked the kiss of death for the Child
Labor Amendment, the WPPC only grew in
prominence and in its role in the larger
conservative movement.261 The Woman
Patriot levied a fatal blow on the national
level for the first time since the start of the
NAOWS in 1911. This came with increased
resource mobilization and the creation of
coalition values, both favorable to lobbying
for legislation.
Sheppard-Towner Act
The Sheppard-Towner Act initiated
the legislation of the post-Nineteenth
Amendment welfare movement. It was the
first piece of legislation supported by the
Women’s Joint Congressional Committee
(WJCC). The Nineteenth Amendment
resulted in a coalition of female reformers,
and the WJCC formed in November 1920 to
lobby for these interests. The Sheppard-
Towner Act, drafted by the Children’s
Bureau, required federal funding for
maternity education and care.262 In addition
to widespread enthusiasm from women, the
Sheppard-Towner Act passed Congress
with strong support. The Senate passed it
with a margin of 63–7 in December 1920,
and the House of Representatives passed it
with a margin of 279–39 in November
1921. Finally, President Harding signed the
act into law on November 23, 1921.
However, this law was not long-term: the
Sheppard-Towner Act’s million-dollar
259
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 125–26.
260
Delegard, 128.
261
Delegard, 114.
262
Delegard, 57; Delegard, 60–61.
263
Delegard, 66.
264
The Woman Patriot, vol. 5, no. 17, 1.
265
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 85–86
65
annual aid only lasted for five years. By
1926, it was either renewal or expiration for
the Sheppard-Towner Act.263
The WPPC was not in favor of the
Sheppard-Towner Act, or what they
occasionally disparaged as the “Baby
Bill.”264 However, the political consensus at
the time silenced its outlying opposition.265
Harriet Frothingham attempted a legal
strategy with the Supreme Court case of
Frothingham v. Mellon in 1923. With the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, she
unsuccessfully argued that the Sheppard-
Towner Act would “take her property,
under the guise of taxation, without due
process of law.”266 Then, in 1924, the
Spider Web Chart promoted factionalism
and confrontation in women’s groups. Anti-
radicals used this divide to assert their
patriotism and win media attention.267 The
Daughters of the American Revolution—
named on the Spider Web Chart—was
maternalist and supportive of the Sheppard-
Towner Act until they established the
National Defense Committee in 1925.268
The DAR used the National Defense
Committee to distribute propaganda,
including that of the WPPC in 1926, to their
approximately 150,000 dues-paying
members.269 This newfound alliance aligned
with the renewed debate over the Sheppard-
Towner Act. On May 26, 1926, the WPPC
wrote a petition against its renewal under
the Phipps-Parker bill. On July 3, 1926,
Senator Bayard added the WPPC petition to
the Congressional Record after they were
neither heard at the Senate Committee on
Education and Labor nor the House
hearings.270 The petition employed the
266
Massachusetts v. Mellon, 262 U.S. 447 (1923),
448; Massachusetts v. Mellon, 262 U.S. 447, 480.
267
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 64–65.
268
Delegard, 47; Delegard, 114; Delegard 10.
269
Delegard, 98; Delegard, 10; Delegard, 79.
270
U.S. Congress, Senate, Senator Thomas F. Bayard
motioning petition against H. 7555 on maternity and
66
sentiment of The Woman Patriot in a
lengthy thirty-four pages of vitriolic
denunciations.271 The WPPC claimed the
legislation was “Bolshevik propaganda” in
disguise, “unconstitutional and unpopular,”
and a part of a conspiracy by the Children’s
Bureau to incite “revolution by legislation”
in tandem with the Child Labor
Amendment. The WPPC implicated the
Children’s Bureau further in a scheme to
“standardize children.”272 Joining the
incendiary dissemination of information
across the country, the DAR shared the
petition with its state leaders in November
1926. The WPPC further motivated the
spread of information by charging twenty-
three dollars and seventy-six cents for one
thousand copies. Finally, in January 1927, a
nine-day filibuster used the WPPC’s
rhetoric against the Children’s Bureau and
resulted in a compromise: the Sheppard-
Towner act would expire on June 30,
1929.273 Joining a coalition afforded
political channels that helped propagate the
movement’s message.
Wadsworth-Garrett Act
On December 1, 1923, The Woman
Patriot claimed that radicalism attacked
the constitution through “Federal
amendments,” “‘Federal Aid’ Legislation,”
“Communistic Interpretation of the
General Welfare Clause,” and
“Reorganization of the Government
Departments into great new aggregations
of power.” It counted “52 Federal
amendments, 3 ‘Federal Aid’ bills, 1
infancy, Congressional Record, 69th Cong., 1st sess,
vol. 67, pt. 11, daily ed. (July 3, 1926), 12918.
271
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 150.
272
Congressional Record, 69th Cong., 1st sess, vol.
67, pt. 11, daily ed. (July 3, 1926), 12919.
273
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 152–54.
274
The Woman Patriot, vol. 8, no. 23 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., December 1,
1924), 4.
Communistic interpretation of the Welfare
Clause, and 1 bill to reorganize the
Government departments.” The Child
Labor Amendment and the Sheppard-
Towner Act represented the “Radical
Legislative Program” it opposed. On the
contrary, the Wadsworth-Garrett Act
(nicknamed by The Woman Patriot as the
“Back-to-the-People” Amendment)
represented its “Active Defense of
Constitution Against Lobbies.” It
accompanied the other goals of a “Public
Opinion Law” (requiring referendums),
“Publicity,” and “Legal Action.”274 The
Wadsworth-Garrett Act sought to amend
Article V of the Constitution to make
ratification more difficult. Specifically, it
prohibited ratification until the members of
one of the state’s houses were elected,
required confirmation by popular vote, and
allowed the changing of votes up until
three-quarters ratified or one quarter
rejected.275 Senator Wadsworth of New
York (the anti-radical husband of the
former NAOWS President Alice
Wadsworth) introduced the amendment
into the Senate in 1921, 1923, and 1925.276
During this time, the prevention of another
Sheppard-Towner Act and the delay of the
Child Labor Amendment motivated
Senator Wadsworth. However, the
amendment never passed, and Wadsworth
lost his Senate seat in 1926 over the issue
of prohibition.277 While he did not lose his
seat over radicalism, the loss of a WPPC-
aligned senator limited access to its polity
members. The Wadsworth-Garrett Act
failed to produce the same coalition as the
275
The Woman Patriot, vol. 5, no. 16, 1.
276
The Woman Patriot, vol. 8, no. 8 (Washington,
D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co., April 15,
1924), 1.
277
Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party,
73.

reaction to the Sheppard-Towner Act and
the Child Labor Amendment had done.
Aftermath
Tracing its history from The
Anti-Suffragist, The Woman Patriot
encountered repeated issues with lack of
support and membership. Its progress in
the mid-1920s demonstrates the
contingency of a social movement’s
success on its political context. The
Woman Patriot survived changes in
leadership and ideology, even through
the demise of its single-issue platform:
anti-suffrage. By 1924, its distribution
reached 3,000.278 After legislative and
organizational achievements, the
political context and the conditions of its
coalition changed once again. In 1927,
the DAR and the American Legion
Auxiliary relaunched the Women’s
Patriotic Conference on National
Defense (WPCND) from two years
prior.279 Female anti-radicals converged
on the issues of patriotism and
militarism. However, the maternalist
American Legion Auxiliary dominated
the conference. The WPPC defended its
stance that welfare reform obscures
insidious forces, even in conservative
groups.280 Falling out of alignment with
coalition values inhibited the
mobilization of shared resources.
Considering that the WPPC’s coalitions
278
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 75.
279
Delegard, 183.
280
Delegard, 192–93.
281
Delegard, 201.
282
Marina Hodgkin and Halle McClain, “The
National Woman’s Party: A Year by Year History
1913-1922 - Chapter 5: Toward Equal Rights,”
Mapping American Social Movements Through the
20th Century, accessed December 14, 2020,
https://depts.washington.edu/moves/NWP_project_ch
5.shtml; The Woman Patriot, vol. 6, no. 6
(Washington, D.C.: Woman Patriot Publishing Co.,
March 15, 1922), 5.
67
decided its two legislative successes, this
sacrifice was fatal. The Woman Patriot
ceased operations in December 1932.281
The legacy of The Woman Patriot is
not limited to itself after atrophy. The
WPPC’s involvement in the WPCND
represented a larger pattern of broad
conservative mobilization. Catalyzed by the
First Red Scare, female conservatism
stunted female progressivism. The Equal
Rights Amendment (ERA), or what The
Woman Patriot branded the “Alice Paul
Amendment,” started a schism between
social and radical feminists after its
introduction in 1923.282 Female
conservatism embedded itself further into
women’s organizations through blacklists
and a coercive fear of allegations of radical
sympathies.283 The disarmament of women
in progressive causes continued throughout
the New Deal.284 Women’s enfranchisement
enabled female involvement in multi-issue
conservatism through the Cold War.285
Despite bipartisan support of the ERA in the
1970s, Phyllis Schlafly found success in a
countermovement just as the WPPC had
with the Child Labor Amendment.286 Her
career grew out of the DAR.287 The 1970s
ERA battle and ratification failure
encouraged critical reflection on the
suffrage movement. From November 24
through 26, 1972, the S.F. Sunday Examiner
& Chronicle interviewed suffragist and
ERA drafter Alice Paul. When Amelia R.
Fry, the interviewer, asked about The
283
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 167;
Delegard, 189.
284
Delegard, 12.
285
Delegard, 8; Delegard, 183.
286
Lila Thulin, “The 97-Year-History of the Equal
Rights Amendment,” Smithsonian Magazine,
accessed December 14, 2020,
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/equal-
rights-amendment-96-years-old-and-still-not-part-
constitution-heres-why-180973548/.
287
Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki, 212.
68
Woman Patriot, Paul described it as “the
leading, the crystallization, of the
opposition by the leaders of this group all
over the country” until the House of
Representatives voted. When Fry
questioned if The Woman Patriot involved
the DAR, Paul responded, “No, not the
DAR. I’m a DAR member and I’ve never
heard of that. It certainly was not put out by
the DAR.”288 After the Nineteenth
Amendment, the war commenced over the
enfranchised woman and precipitated the
political coalition of the WPPC and the
DAR. With both Alice Paul and Phyllis
Schlafly on the side of the DAR, the war—
and the battle over The Woman Patriot’s
legacy—rages on a century later.
288
Alice Paul, Conversations with Alice Paul:
Woman Suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment,
Interview by Amelia R. Fry, November 24–26, 1972,
Frances Johnson is a fourth-year
History major, with Jewish Studies and
Diversity minors, at the University of
Washington. She received the 2021 Library
Research Award for Undergraduates,
Honorable Mention in the Upper Division,
Non-Thesis category from the University of
Washington Libraries. She is a 2021–2022
Sleizer Scholar, as awarded by the Larry Lee
Sleizer Endowed Scholarship Fund for the
Department of History. Her research
interests include social movements,
collective memory, print media, and
Sephardic studies.
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId
=kt6f59n89c&doc.view=entire_text.

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U.S. Congress. Senate. Senator Thomas F. the Capitol on January 5, 1938.

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U.S. Congress. Senate. Senator William

Gibbs McAdoo of California
addressing a memorial of the birth
anniversary of Susan B. Anthony at