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

June 01 - 04, 2017

During the early twentieth century, the rise of the United States' political and economic empire culturally entangled regions near and far from its borders. This panel examines the relationship between empire and constructions of gender, sexuality, feminism, and class. Panelists will examine the years between 1900 and the Cold War to illustrate how people, and specifically women, navigated and responded to cultural and economic imperialism. First, Sarah McNamara will explore the development of Latina feminism through the writings and actions of the Puerto Rican labor organizer Luisa Capetillo from 1900 to 1922. McNamara's paper will follow Capetillo's migration network through the Caribbean as she created a movement of labor equality through gender justice. Next, J. Tiffany Holland turns to the U.S. Virgin Islands to follow the case of Beulah Santos to highlight the imperial ambiguity of blackness from 1917-1931. This paper argues that, despite the naval government’s intended-Jim Crow policy in the territory, these relationships subverted those policies and mainland-U.S. racial ideologies. Finally, Lauren Hirshburg  examines the history of military surveillance and segregation policies on Kwajalein aimed at such domestic containment in the Pacific: a Cold War security mission to protect the national home thousands of miles away, and the local effort to secure a replica of that home on Kwajalein. This study considers how categories of race and colonial subjectivity merged with class to inform policies aimed at policing boundaries of gender and sexuality on the island during the Cold War.