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Reviews of Books
United States. This statistic registers the enormous
expansion of the field since 1970, when only one such
program existed, and at the same time fails short of
acknowledging the thousands of scholars who teach
courses on women and gender within other disciplinary
departments. By 1993, according to figures provided by
the U.S. Department of Education, more than twelve
percent of all students had received credit for courses
in women's studies, which outdistanced all other interdisciplinary fields. Reviewing this data, Marilyn Jacoby
Boxer logically concludes that women's studies, once
considered an academic fad, has become not only
enormous in size but an integral part of higher education.
Boxer, a long-time practitioner of women's studies,
provides the first major historical overview of this
development. Trained in modern European history,
she served for six years as a faculty member and chair
of the first women's studies program at San Diego
State University and moved on to teach women's
history on four other campuses. She therefore came to
this study as an experienced scholar who was deeply
invested in her subject, and she expressen her opinions
quite clearly. This is not to say that the story she
unfolds is narrowly subjective. To the contrary, her
insider's knowledge works to the reader's advantage.
Only someone deeply entrenched in the debateswomen's studies has been a hotly contested areacould pull together such wide-ranging sources to map
in vivid detail a complicated course of develópment
over three decades.
Boxer does not use a linear format to chart the
history of women's studies. She organizes her presentation along the axes of critical issues in the field. For
example, in discussing its origins in the early 1970s, she
states clearly that women's studies has always embraced both advocacy for and inquiry about women.
More than an interdisciplinary endeavor, according to
Boxer, women's studies emerged as a unusual program
within higher education because its early practitioners
pledged themselves to maintain a connection between
political action and scholarship within the academy.
Several chapters later, in discussing the "quest for
theory," Boxer explores a change in commitment:
namely, a slow drift away from a political practice
rooted in experience or daily life. Other chapters cover
equally compelling issues ranging from the impact of
feminist pedagogy on the classroom to the relentless
assault of critics inside and outside the academy.
One of Boxer's most engaging chapters, entitled
"Recognizing Differences," surveys the impact of multiculturalism on women's studies. Here she points out
that, although the pioneering scholars were mainly
white women, questions of "difference" and "diversity" circulated from the beginning. The early collections, such as Robin Morgan's Sisterhood Is Powerful:
An Anthology of Writing from the Women's Liberation
Movement (1970), include essays on and by women of
color or, to use the nomenclature popular the time,
"Third World women." A decade later, though, discus-
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sions of diversity intensified with dramatic results.
Within the National Women's Studies Association,
which had been founded in 1977, race-based controversies prevailed for more than a decade and, by 1990,
brought this organization to the brink of collapse. Less
fragile than the institutional side of women's studies,
feminist scholarship excelled in making multiculturalism a major component of its endeavor. Boxer quotes
a recent survey that indicates that ninety-five percent
of women's studies program have included courses on
cultural diversity. Boxer went so far as to contend that
women's studies has addressed the challenges posed by
diversity more directly and more concertedly than any
other academic field.
Historians may find especially interesting Boxer's
references to the growth of women's studies within
their own profession. The American Historical Association sponsored a panel at its 1970 annual meeting
entitled "Up from the Genitals: Sexism in the Historical Profession," which, as Boxer pointed out, indicated a new direction for the organization. Change
came slowly, but between 1987 and 1997, the membership elected four women to its highest office (whereas
in its 112-year history only one women had previously
served as president—and then during the middle of
World War 11). Graduate students proved especially
eager to affiliate with women's studies. Boxer reports
that the number of doctoral dissertations in history
that the UMI Dissertation Services listed under the
heading "Women's Studies" for a six-month period in
1995 numbered 92. She underscores the significance of
this statistic by adding that the cumulative total for the
previous eighty-seven years was only sixteen.
This book is enormously valuable as a history of the
first twenty-five years of women's studies within the
larger context of higher education in the United
States. The research is strong, the analysis clear and
forceful.
MARI Jo BUHLE
Brown University
CARIBBEAN AND LATIN AMERICA
LAURENT Dusols. Les esclaves de la République:
L'histoire oubliée de la première émancipation 1789-
1794. Translated by JEAN-FRANcoIS CHAIX. Paris:
Calmann-Lévy. 1998. Pp. 239. 120 fr.
Laurent Dubois places slaves and free people of color
at center stage in his analysis of the colonial crucible of
Guadeloupe during the French Revolution. Building
on recent scholarship by Anne Perotin-Dumon, Carolyn Fick, David Geggus, Michel-Rolph Trouillot,
Colin Blackburn, and others, he seeks to integrate the
best insights of cultural anthropology with a class
analysis of republican revolutionary ideology. Laurent's book begins with a "social cartography" of the
island of Guadeloupe, examining the physical geography, demographics, and social systems of power in the
colony. It then turns to the role of rumor not only as a
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Caribbean and Latin America
means of transmitting information from France and
the other colonies but as a means of organizing
resistance among slaves, soldiers, and other subordinates. Many of the slave revolts, culminating in the
Saint Domingue insurrection of 1791, were stimulated
or justified by rumors of impending emancipation by
the king of France.
The increasing conflict between royalists and republicans in France also erupted in the colonies. In
Guadeloupe, planters rallied to the more conservative
colonial assemblies, while petits blancs coalesced
around the Jacobin political clubs. In this early phase,
color was not a signficant determinant of loyalty.
Armed slaves and free people of color (gens de
couleur) could be found in both camps. By late 1792,
the royalist faction controlled Guadeloupe, Martinique, and parts of Saint Domingue. The arrival of
Governor Lacrosse shifted power to the island patriots
and many of the "new citizens" (former gens de
couleur) threw their support to the republican cause
and its promise of full political participation.
On April 24, 1793, approximately 200 slaves rose up
and executed twenty-three whites from six of the
largest plantations in the Trois-Rivières region of
Guadeloupe. They marched to town and submitted to
local authorities, claiming that they had put down a
royalist plot to turn the island over to the British.
Republican authorities accepted this justification, and
there were no reprisals against the insurgents, other
than extended imprisonment while officials tried to
determine appropriate actions. The event prompted
the government to confiscate royalist property, incited
a much larger slave revolt in St. Anne, and stimulated
the political assimilation of other "new citizens."
The British invaded Guadeloupe in March 1794 and
held the island for two months. Meanwhile, the Jacobin government in France unilaterally abolished slavery. Governor Victor Hugues arrived in Guadeloupe
in June with the universal emancipation decree and
successfully drove out the British with the help of the
newly freed slaves. Yet emancipation under Hugues,
following gradualist abolitionist theory, tied "new citizens" to their former plantations as agricultural laborers. The new regime imitated the mature slave system
in many aspects. By 1799, Napoleon's reforms were
resubmitting the colonies to metropolitan rule, and in
1802 slavery was reinstituted in Guadeloupe.
This book is at its best when analyzing the circulation of rumor and symbols by slaves and free people
and the ways that power and authority were reconfigured in the colonies. Anyone who has sought to teil the
story of slaves from their own perspective encounters a
substantial obstacle: the scarcity of surviving documentation in the slaves' own voices. Dubois minimizes this
difficulty by examining the indirect ways that power is
enacted and represented by all parties; the book
sparkles with suggestive details and analytical forays
into the representation of power.
At the same time, Dubois has not sufficiently contextualized the events of Guadeloupe in the wider
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257
Atlantic world. He rightfully makel some important
comparisons with the outbreak of revolution in Saint
Domingue, which has been studied more thoroughly
because the colony was larger and more economically
powerful than Guadeloupe and ultimately achieved
independence. Deeper comparisons could be drawn.
For example, what difference does it make that, at the
outbreak of the revolution, only twenty percent of the
90,000 slaves in Guadeloupe were born in Africa,
whereas perhaps sixty-six percent of 450,000 slaves in
Saint Domingue suffered the Middle Passage? With
what political notions might these Africans have been
familiar? (John Thornton has done some interesting
work in this regard.) What proportion of Guadeloupean slaves and free gens de couleur had spent some
time in the United States, France, or other parts of
Europe, either as domestic servants or as students, and
how might these experiences have shaped their discussions of the meanings of citizenship and liberty?
The book is a slightly condensed French translation
of the first half of Dubois's English-language dissertation (1998). It is an original, innovative work by a
promising new scholar. We can all look forward to
more developed future work.
SUE PEABODY
Washington State University,
Vancouver
TERESITA MARTfNEZ-VERGNE. Shaping the Discourse on
Space: Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San
Juan, Puerto Rico. Austin: University of Texas Press.
1999. Pp. xv, 235. Cloth $32.50, paper $17.95.
A fissure is developing between the Puerto Rican
history that is written for Latin Americanists in the
U.S. and published by American university presses and
the bistory that is written and published in Puerto Rico
for university students and the general public. A good
instance of this development is Teresita MartinezVergne's book. Impeccably written, with all the proper
academie twists and turns, it examines the development of nineteenth-century public policy in San Juan
toward the needy. The basic issue is the appropriation
of public spaces by the white liberal establishment in
ways that made manifest the dependence and the
subordination of the colored working classes. All the
contradictions of the staid liberal discourses on property, liberty, health, security, and the free circulation
of goods are duly pointed out with smooth irony and
trenchant quotations; all the proper points are made
and the adequate statistics marshalled; but in the end,
one has to ask oneself, why was this book written and
where are its flesh and blood subjects?
Justifications for this academie exercise are not
lacking. It fits snugly a niche that has been perennially
vacant in Puerto Rican social history. It tries to
connect political discourse with social reality, and it
takes advantage of the available sources. But who are
these "liberals" who are constantly brought up as
witnesses of their own Victorian deviousness? Why is
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