In the last fifty years the LGBTQ+ community has established a remarkable record of major legal, social, economic, medical, religious, and political achievements. While it is true, that absolute equality and acceptance have yet to be achieved, the advances in recent years indicate that those of us who want to see more dramatic and rapid change in the forward movement of various peoples and causes, from civil rights to climate change, should study the LGBTQ+ movements carefully.
In his invitation to participate in this symposium on Russell Nye's Midwestern Progressive Politics: A Historical Study of Its Origins and Development, 1870-1950, Jon Lauck gave us free rein. He did, however, suggest that we comment on how the book has aged and what Nye missed; how the reform era can be seen in regional terms; and whether Midwestern reform was moderate or radical. To address his first possibility: upon re-reading this classic, my overall reaction was decidedly mixed. In many ways, the book is emphatically a product of 1951. In contrast to today's political histories, the lacunas are jarring: the political importance of gender, race (including whiteness as well as the contributions and experiences of people of color), ethnicity, and global context are either barely mentioned or ignored entirely. It would take an essay much longer than this one to show how scholars have worked to expand our horizons over the decades.
The role of Belle Case La Follette in fighting against racially segregated government offices in 1913 and 1914 offers a template, illuminating how white Americans can genuinely assist in the crusade for racial justice. La Follette was keenly aware that while she could not know what it was like to be African American confronting deeply entrenched racist structures, she could dig into the trenches and focus on action, advocacy and activism, not mere expressions of solidarity.
This essay pays tribute to pioneering environmental historian Carolyn Merchant. It traces the impact of Merchant's teaching, scholarship, and mentorship on the life and career of Nancy C. Unger. Unger knew little about environmental history when she started teaching in at Santa Clara University, using a textbook edited by Merchant. This article highlights the careers of both scholars, with special emphasis on how helpful Merchant and her work have been in guiding and inspiring subsequent generations of scholars.
In countless speeches and articles in La Follette's Magazine, Belle Case La Follette urged that women needed the vote to secure "standards of cleanliness and healthfulness in the municipal home," and because "home, society, and government are best when men and women keep together intellectually and spiritually." This range of often mutually exclusive arguments created an inclusive big tent. However, arguing that women were qualified to vote by their roles as wives and mothers while maintaining that gender was superfluous to suffrage also contributed to an uneasy combination that would continue the conflict over women's true nature and hinder their activism for decades to come.
This essay traces the political dynasty of the La Follette family of Wisconsin. The bulk of attention is paid to Robert and Belle La Follette, two key players in Progressive Era politics, but other family members are also detailed, including their children Fola, Robert Jr., and Phillip, and later generations including Bronson and Doug La Follette.
Professor Nancy Unger talked about women's rights activist Belle La Follette, who was politically active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Professor Unger is the author of Belle La Follette: Progressive Era Reformer, in which she tells the story of this journalist, suffragist, and pacifist who campaigned alongside her husband and son in their bids for office.
A party in turmoil. Extreme inner divisions. Name calling. Disastrous speeches. A rogue front-runner. Physical violence. A surprisingly popular socialist opponent. Plots to reclaim party unity at the convention. Although these are all components of the current Republican race for the presidential nomination, they were also integral aspects of GOP campaigns in the past. Dire predictions are on the rise that the party is on the eve of destruction due to unprecedented disunion. History demonstrates, however, that the GOP has weathered a series of cataclysmic campaigns and elections and can pull through once more.
In 1931, the New York Times hailed Belle Case La Follette as "probably the least known yet most influential of all the American women who have had to do with public affairs." A dedicated advocate for women's suffrage, peace, and other causes, she served as a key advisor to her husband, leading Progressive politician Robert La Follette. She also wielded considerable influence through her own speeches and journalism, as when she opposed racism by speaking out against the segregation of the federal government under President Woodrow Wilson. In a concise, lively, and engaging narrative, Nancy C. Unger shows how Belle La Follette uniquely contributed to progressive reform, as well as the ways her work was typical of women--and progressives--of her time. Supported by primary documents and a robust companion website, this book introduces students of American history to an extraordinary woman and the era of Progressive reform. ; https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1048/thumbnail.jpg
In 1990, Carolyn Merchant proposed, in a roundtable discussion published in The Journal of American History, that gender perspective be added to the conceptual frameworks in environmental history. 1 Her proposal was expanded by Melissa Leach and Cathy Green in the British journal Environment and History in 1997. 2 The ongoing need for broader and more thoughtful and analytic investigations into the powerful relationship between gender and the environment throughout history was confirmed in 2001 by Richard White and Vera Norwood in "Environmental History, Retrospect and Prospect," a forum in the Pacific Historical Review. Both Norwood, in her provocative contribution on environmental history for the twenty-first century, and White, in "Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature," addressed the need for further work on gender. "Environmental history," Norwood noted, "is just beginning to integrate gender analyses into mainstream work."3 That assessment was particularly striking coming, as it did, after Norwood described the kind of ongoing and damaging misperceptions concerning the role of diversity, including gender, within environmental history. White concurred with Norwood, observing that environmental history in the previous fifteen years had been "far more explicitly linked to larger trends in the writing of history," but he also issued a clear warning about the current trends in including the role of gender: "The danger . is not that gendering will be ignored in environmental history but that it will become predictable-an endless rediscovery that humans have often made nature female. Gender has more work to do than that."4 Indeed it does. In 1992, the index to Carolyn Merchant's The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History included three subheadings under women. "Women and the egalitarian ideal" and "women and the environment" each had only a few entries. Most entries were listed under the third subheading, "activists and theorists," comprising seventeen names. 5 Nine years later Elizabeth Blum compiled "Linking American Women's History and Environmental History," an online preliminary historiography revealing gaps as well as strengths in the field emerging "at the intersection of these two relatively new fields of study." At that time Blum noted that, with the exception of some scholarly interest being diverted to environmental justice movements and ecofeminism, "most environmental history has centered on elite male concerns; generally, women's involvement tends to be ignored or marginalized."6
From pre-Columbian times to the environmental justice movements of the present, women and men frequently responded to the environment and environmental issues in profoundly different ways. Although both environmental history and women's history are flourishing fields, explorations of the synergy produced by the interplay between environment and sex, sexuality, and gender are just beginning. Offering more than biographies of great women in environmental history, Beyond Nature's Housekeepers examines the intersections that shaped women's unique environmental concerns and activism and that framed the way the larger culture responded. Women featured include Native Americans, colonists, enslaved field workers, pioneers, homemakers, municipal housekeepers, immigrants, hunters, nature writers, soil conservationists, scientists, migrant laborers, nuclear protestors, and environmental justice activists. As women, they fared, thought, and acted in ways complicated by social, political, and economic norms, as well as issues of sexuality and childbearing. Nancy C. Unger reveals how women have played a unique role, for better and sometimes for worse, in the shaping of the American environment. ; https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1189/thumbnail.jpg
Wisconsin doesn't often provide political leadership at the national level, but when it does, it's like that old nursery rhyme about the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead: When it's good it's very, very good, and when it's bad it's horrid. For more than a week, Americans have been following the protests in Madison. Most of the protestors oppose the proposals of their newly elected governor, Scott Walker, especially his effort to curtail the power of public employee unions. They share the view of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who says that Walker and his backers are trying to "make Wisconsin—and eventually, America—less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy."
La Follette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences is a remarkable primary document of the Progressive Era. Originally published in 1913, it remains in print today and has the dubious honor of being one of Richard Nixon's three favorite books. It illuminates the crucial role that La Follette's home state of Wisconsin played in molding La Follette as a man and as a politician, thereby influencing his national progressive agenda; but it also reveals much more.
In the autumn of 1971, sixteen Madison homemakers, including Nan Cheney and Sharon Stein, began "Women for a Peaceful Christmas" (WPC), a unique attempt to do nothing less than remake American culture. Under the slogan "No More Shopping Days 'Til Peace," WPC organized ostensibly powerless homemakers into a "quiet revolt against 'an economy which thrives on war and the destruction of our earth's resources.'' WPC urged the public (especially women, the sex that did the vast bulk of holiday shopping) to take economic, political, and environmental matters into their own hands. "If you don't want your Christmas celebrations to be controlled by the monoliths that corrupt governments and pollute environments . . . Don't buy the pre-packaged, disposable Christmas! Make your own." Rather to the surprise of the group's founders, WPC was immediately inundated with queries and requests for its informational materials. In five months' time, the movement had spread to almost every state, with members ranging in age from teenagers to grandmothers. WPC received national press coverage. The group disbanded in 1975 when the Vietnam War wound to a close, but its effort to highlight how women's spending contributed to the waste of natural resources was taken up by others. The movement raised the national consciousness of the role that everyday Americans could play, for better or for worse, in the deepening environmental crisis.
Why's that? Because the Democratic convention in Denver has the potential to showcase democracy at its best. But if superdelegates choose the candidate without regard to the voters, it will highlight democratic abuses at their worst.Hillary Clinton's wins in Texas and Ohio have revitalized the possibility that in the tight race for the Democratic nomination, the deciding votes could be cast by the party's superdelegates. That's bad for the Democratic party.
