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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Belle La Follette’S Fight For Women’S Suffrage: Losing The Battle For Wisconsin, Winning The War For The Nation, Nancy C. Unger Jul 2019

Belle La Follette’S Fight For Women’S Suffrage: Losing The Battle For Wisconsin, Winning The War For The Nation, Nancy C. Unger

History

A century ago, on May 21, 1919, the US House of Representatives voted difinitively (304 to 89) in support of women’s suffrage. Two weeks later, Wisconsinite Belle La Follette sat in the visitors’ gallery of the US Senate chamber. She “shed a few tears” when it was announced that, by a vote of 56 to 25, the US Senate also approved the Nineteenth Amendment, sending it on to the states for ratification.1 For Belle La Follette, this thrilling victory was the culmination of a decades-long fight. Six days later, her happiness turned to elation when Wisconsin became the first …


Legacies Of Belle La Follette’S Big Tent Campaigns For Women’S Suffrage, Nancy Unger Apr 2019

Legacies Of Belle La Follette’S Big Tent Campaigns For Women’S Suffrage, Nancy Unger

History

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 …


That The Worst Shooting In Us History Took Place In A Gay Bar Is Unsurprising, Nancy Unger Jun 2016

That The Worst Shooting In Us History Took Place In A Gay Bar Is Unsurprising, Nancy Unger

History

The selection of Pulse, a gay Orlando nightclub, as the site for a murderous homophobic rampage makes the killer’s crime a special outrage in view of the role that nightclubs have played in this nation’s LGBTQ history. Like many popular LGTBQ clubs, Pulse serves not only as a welcoming place to party, but also as a community partner, hosting a variety of social and educational events including, for example, Breast Cancer Awareness and HIV/AIDS prevention. According to its website, Pulse Orlando serves as “a driving force within the GLBT community” and strives to “to make strides towards equality awareness, and …


The Unexpected Belle La Follette, Nancy Unger Apr 2016

The Unexpected Belle La Follette, Nancy Unger

History

Although the New York Times eulogized Belle Case La Follette in 1931 as perhaps "the most influential of all American women who have had to do with public affairs in this country," she faded quickly from popular memory.1 And when she is recalled, it's usually in relation to her husband and sons. This minimization of her own accomplishments began with progressive reform giant Robert M. La Follette famously calling her "my wisest and best counselor." He openly deferred to his wife's judgment throughout his storied professional life: as a district attorney, three-term congressman (1885-1891), lawyer (1891—1900), three-term governor of Wisconsin …


Even Judging Woodrow Wilson By The Standards Of His Own Time, He Was Deplorably Racist, Nancy Unger Dec 2015

Even Judging Woodrow Wilson By The Standards Of His Own Time, He Was Deplorably Racist, Nancy Unger

History

The news that Princeton acquiesced to student demands that the university confront the racism of Woodrow Wilson set off a series of responses. Some protest that it is unfair to judge the 28th president by present day standards. These pundits, almost all white, proclaim that Wilson must be understood within the context of his own time. The inference of such an assertion is that in times of pervasive racism it is reasonable for a leader to perpetuate it. Setting aside the assumption that morals are relative rather than absolute, let’s examine Wilson’s actions within his times.


Economic Growth And Recovery In The United States, 1919-1941, Alexander J. Field May 2013

Economic Growth And Recovery In The United States, 1919-1941, Alexander J. Field

Economics

The first part of this chapter provides an overview of what lay behind record productivity growth in the US economy between 1929 and 1941. The second part considers the role of rigidities and other negative supply conditions in worsening the downturn and slowing recovery. While arguing consistently that the overarching explanation of the Great Depression will and should continue to emphasise a collapse and slow revival in the growth of aggregate demand, the chapter spends relatively little time on what drives this. The emphasis of the chapter is on aggregate supply—both the broad array of positive shocks that propelled potential …


Hetch Hetchy Redux: An Effort To Turn Back The Environmental Clock, Nancy Unger Oct 2012

Hetch Hetchy Redux: An Effort To Turn Back The Environmental Clock, Nancy Unger

History

If San Francisco voters pass Measure F on November 6, the city will conduct an $8 million study on the feasibility, costs, and benefits of draining the 300-foot deep reservoir created by the O’Shaughnessy Dam in 1923. The measure’s proponents see it as a first step in restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley, sister valley to Yosemite, to its natural state. That the measure is even on the ballot is a significant indication of the shift in attitudes towards the ongoing conflict between nature preservation and traditional notions of progress.


Introduction: Sex, Sexuality, And Gender As Useful Categories In Environmental History, Nancy Unger Oct 2012

Introduction: Sex, Sexuality, And Gender As Useful Categories In Environmental History, Nancy Unger

History

This book is an effort to explain these kinds of extreme gendered divisions and to offer an enriched understanding of the powerful interplay between environment and sex, sexuality, and gender. The synergy produced by that interplay has been significant throughout American history, but it cannot be adequately understood and appreciated as long as those fields are discussed as discrete entities. The fields of gender and environment are growing, but scholars have seldom joined them together in analysis or heeded historian Carolyn Merchant's call that a gendered perspective be added to conceptual frameworks in environmental history.5 They have not offered a …


Wisconsin's League Against Nuclear Dangers: The Power Of Informed Citizenship, Nancy Unger Jan 2012

Wisconsin's League Against Nuclear Dangers: The Power Of Informed Citizenship, Nancy Unger

History

Wisconsin's League Against Nuclear Dangers (LAND), a loose organization active in the 1970s and 1980s, was predominantly made up of white middle-aged and middle-class homemakers with minimal formal education in the sciences. The story of LAND is a powerful lesson in what people can accomplish when they take their rights as citizens seriously and commit themselves to learning a complex subject in depth in order to be knowledgeable and persuasive.


La Follette’S Autobiography: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, And The Glorious, Nancy Unger Jul 2011

La Follette’S Autobiography: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, And The Glorious, Nancy Unger

History

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.


From Jook Joints To Sisterspace: The Role Of Nature In Lesbian Alternative Environments In The United States, Nancy Unger Jan 2010

From Jook Joints To Sisterspace: The Role Of Nature In Lesbian Alternative Environments In The United States, Nancy Unger

History

Despite the depth and breadth of Catriona Sandilands's groundbreaking "Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature," with its emphasis on communities in southern Oregon, Sandilands does not consider her article, published in 2002, to be "the last one on the topic." Instead she hopes "fervently that other researchers will enter into the ongoing conversation [about queer landscapes)" (136). This essay is an answer to her invitation to draw further "insight from queer cultures to form alternative, even transformative, cultures of nature" (135). It examines the role of place in the history of American lesbians, particularly the role of nonhuman …


Women For A Peaceful Christmas: Wisconsin Homemakers Seek To Remake American Culture, Nancy Unger Jan 2009

Women For A Peaceful Christmas: Wisconsin Homemakers Seek To Remake American Culture, Nancy Unger

History

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 …


The Role Of Gender In Environmental Justice, Nancy Unger Sep 2008

The Role Of Gender In Environmental Justice, Nancy Unger

History

Environmental Justice incorporates an inclusive definition of its subject matter, exploring the environmental burdens impacting all marginalized populations and communities. This expansive definition allows for the possibility that populations conventionally viewed as privileged can nevertheless be marginalized and suffer uniquely from environmental injustices. Employing such a definition can also reveal how an ostensibly powerless group can fight for environmental justice on its own terms—and win. Gender has played an important role in environmental justice (and injustice) throughout the history of the United States. Excerpts from my current book project, Beyond “Nature’s Housekeepers”: Gendered Turning Points for American Women in Environmental …


Gendered Approaches To Environmental Justice: An Historical Sampling, Nancy Unger Mar 2006

Gendered Approaches To Environmental Justice: An Historical Sampling, Nancy Unger

History

While race and class are regularly addressed in environmental justice studies, scant attention has been paid to gender. The environmental justice movement formally recognized in the 1980s in no way, however, marks the beginning of the central role played by women in the long history of its concerns.' Abuses based in gender as well as race and class have subjected women to a variety of environmental injustices. However, women's responses to the ever-shifting responsibilities prescribed to their gender, as well as to their particular race and class, have consistently shaped their abilities to affect the environment in positive ways. Especially …


Reconstructing Early Historical Landscapes In The Northern Santa Clara Valley, Alan K. Brown Jan 2005

Reconstructing Early Historical Landscapes In The Northern Santa Clara Valley, Alan K. Brown

Research Manuscript Series

The following essay, which is not a finished treatise upon any aspect of the early environmental history of the northern Santa Clara Valley, is also not intended to be a manual of procedures for investigating that subject. Although I would hope that elements ofboth purposes can be found here, the intention, more generally and tentatively, is to point out a few possibilities that may be incorporated into more rigorous and, in terms of practical consequences, more important future investigations by others. Because of the variety and incompleteness of the approaches that are followed here, no attempt has been made to …


How Did Belle La Follette Resist Racial Segregation In Washington D.C., 1913-1914?, Nancy Unger Jun 2004

How Did Belle La Follette Resist Racial Segregation In Washington D.C., 1913-1914?, Nancy Unger

History

Beginning in 1913, progressive reformer Belle Case La Follette wrote a series of articles for the "women's page" of her family's magazine, denouncing the sudden racial segregation in several departments of the federal government. Those articles reveal progressive efforts to appeal specifically to women to combat injustice, and also demonstrate the ability of women to voice important political opinions prior to suffrage.


The Case For Cautious Optimism: California Environmental Propositions In The Late Twentieth Century, Marie Bolton, Nancy Unger Jan 2004

The Case For Cautious Optimism: California Environmental Propositions In The Late Twentieth Century, Marie Bolton, Nancy Unger

History

The efficacy of direct democracy throughout California's history continues to be a subject of intense debate, a state-wide phenomenon with an international audience. California boasts the world's fifth largest economy, and plays a leadership role in national, and sometimes even international, politics. British scholar Wyn Grant, studying the politics of air quality management in California, succinctly sums up the burning issue for environmentalists worldwide who are striving to understand the efficacy of California's activists' efforts: in "Direct Democracy in California: Example or Warning?" Grant concludes that although direct democracy has its merits, its history in California ultimately provides more of …


"I Went To Learn," Meanings Of The European Tour Of Senator Robert M. La Follette, 1923, Nancy Unger Jan 2002

"I Went To Learn," Meanings Of The European Tour Of Senator Robert M. La Follette, 1923, Nancy Unger

History

In 1923, progressive Senator Robert M. La Follette, an astute observer of government, economics, and social conditions, toured Europe in preparation for his third-party presidential bid. This article examines that trip and its legacy, particularly in relation to Daniel T. Rodgers' 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age.1