2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel foregrounds the role that women of color have played in shaping the U.S. nation-state and feminist discourses regarding citizenship and equality. Because of the subaltern position of women of color, studies of women’s engagement with the state have tended to privilege the agency and voices of white, middle-class and elite, women. Women of color are more commonly studied as grassroots, community, and labor activists. In contrast to these studies that bifurcate formal and grassroots politics along lines of race and class, the papers in this panel seek to foreground how women of color engaged in and shaped “mainstream” women’s movements as well as the U.S. state.

Cathleen Cahill’s paper expands our understanding of the U.S. suffrage movement by examining two racialized (Chinese American and Indigenous) performances of gendered citizenship in the 1910s. Margie Brown-Coronel rethinks the political activism of Latina women by focusing on the political career of Lucretia del Valley Grady, a descendant of an elite Spanish Mexican family, a suffragist, an electoral political organizer, and international women’s rights activist. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu offers a new understanding of Title IX by examining the efforts by Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color U.S. Congressional Representative, to pass and defend gender equity legislation. Liette Gidlow documents the disfranchisement of substantial numbers of women -- African American, white, Latina, and often poor -- from the polls in the years after the vote had been "won" and invites a re-thinking of the successes and failures of the Nineteenth Amendment.