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Babies Without Borders: Rescue, Kidnap,
and the Symbolic Child
Karen Dubinsky
T
orture bequeaths extraordinary knowledge, though rarely that demanded by its perpetrators. Thanks to the U.S. military, we know now
that one of the most grueling forms of modern torture is not interrogation
but what is termed “noise stress.” According to recent reports, detainees at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been subjected to taped loops of various loud,
unpleasant noises. One of the most stressful is the endless sound of human
infants wailing.1 As I make my way through the history of interracial and
international adoption, this knowledge confirms what I have been learning
about the symbolic politics of children. That the sound of unhappy children
provides common cultural ground in the torture chamber illustrates the
symbolic and actual power of babies, in soul-destroying simplicity.
The social category “child” is at once real and metaphorical—powerful as a cultural construct but equally as forceful in flesh and blood. In my
current research I am narrating the story of three sets of iconic children, all
of whom have been fashioned from the experiences of actual children. By
exploring the histories of children with the cultural and political narratives
which were formed around them, I am learning how social fears operate
through youthful bodies and why adoption across racial and national lines
can be profoundly unsettling. An appreciation of symbolic politics of childhood helps understand why adoption politics have been, and remain, so
highly charged. I suggest that if we had a better appreciation of the varied
and powerful cultural meanings of childhood, we could move beyond the
two main narratives of adoption in the West: “rescue” versus “kidnap.”
The three sets of symbolic children I have gathered under one roof are
the Hybrid Baby, the National Baby, and the Missing Baby. I briefly introduce
them and then discuss some of the research questions which are emerging
from this and other explorations in the history and politics of adoption.
The Hybrid Baby is my term for those children produced by the
movement for interracial adoption in post-World War II Canada. Case
files from two Canadian agencies which crossed racial lines (placing black
and native children with white parents) offer remarkable vignettes of the
encounter between birth mothers, children, and adoptive parents, as well
as the social workers who mediated their relationships. The Hybrid Baby
was also a creation of 1950s-era interracial adoption advocacy groups, such
as Montreal’s Open Door Society, which espoused an integrationist, civil
rights philosophy and worked with black communities to find a politic of
© 2007 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 19 No. 1, 142–150.
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Karen Dubinsky
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adoption that was unifying, not colonizing.
The National Baby was an orphan of the cold war, specifically the
CIA-backed “Operation Peter Pan.” This was a clandestine scheme which
brought over fourteen thousand unaccompanied Cuban children to Miami. Parents were motivated to send their children for several reasons,
primarily because of CIA-sponsored rumors that the new revolutionary
government was planning on nationalizing children and sending them to
the Soviet Union for indoctrination, or worse. It is believed in Cuba today
that people thought their children would be eaten. As U.S.–Cuba relations
deteriorated, and parents were unable to rejoin their children, thousands
of youngsters found their way into long-term foster care or orphanages
throughout the United States.2
The Missing Baby is another product of the cold war, in its 1980s
manifestations. Foreign adoptions of children during and immediately
following the civil war in Guatemala have been extremely controversial.
Attempting to refocus the discussion of international adoption, as Tobias
Hübinette suggests in this roundtable, on its effects on sending nations,
my aim here is to examine how foreign adoptions have been discussed in
contemporary Guatemala.
Any one of these stories could be the subject of a lengthy monograph
(indeed, some have been and more will be). My purpose is different: I am
using these diverse stories to raise questions about the history and social
meaning of children and nations, themes which I will elaborate on in the
rest of this article.
Children as Bearers, but not Makers, of Social Meaning
A generation of women’s historians has shown us how, to quote Judith
Walkowitz, “what is socially peripheral is frequently symbolically central.”
The insight that women acted as “bearers, but rarely makers of social meaning” can be applied even more strongly to children. 3 When, for example, a
liberal, integrationist discourse of interracial adoption developed in Canada
in the late 1950s, which positioned interracially adopted black children as
innocent bearers of racial reconciliation, Canadians looked through the
Hybrid Baby and saw, variously, a hopeful sign of cross racial tolerance, an
unfortunate to be rescued by tender white care, or a measure of the superior
social values of Canadians, who believed themselves to be in those years
at the forefront of domestic interracial adoption. (At the same moment
in Sweden, where some of the first formal mechanisms of international
adoption were created, these also confirmed to their proponents Sweden’s
egalitarian ideology.4) A few saw, in the Hybrid Baby, the political weakness of the black community. Almost everyone believed these children to be
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offspring of doomed interracial romance between white women and black
men; and thus almost no one (proponents or opponents of adoption) saw
the extraordinary struggles of black birthmothers, many of them assisted
immigrant domestics from the West Indies, whose very existence in Canada
complicated a beloved national narrative of anticonquest. Thus the story
of the increase in black children “in foster care was told in the feel-good
terms of integrationist civil rights discourse, rather than, for example, the
more complicated terms of the global labor market and limited immigration
options of Caribbean black women.5
The symbolic power of children is so hegemonic we barely notice it
any longer—until it goes over the top, as it did, for example, with the most
famous National Baby in recent history, Cuba’s Elian Gonzalez, or in the
winter of 2005, in the aftermath of the South Asian tsunami. When we are
saturated with it, or when there is a high-profile scandal or dispute, we occasionally notice the enormous cultural weight children carry on their frail
shoulders. For the past several centuries in the West, this cultural weight
has been synonymous with innocence.
How Social Fears Operate through the Bodies of Children
Historians of childhood have explored how childhood has been constituted as essentially vulnerable in Western discourse, acting as a master
identity for them.6 The more adult society seemed “bleak, urbanized and
alienated,” wrote British historian Hugh Cunningham, the more childhood
appeared as a garden, “enclosing within the safety of its walls a more natural
way of life.”7 Vivian Zelizer calls this the “sacralized” child; excluded from
the cash nexus, children became instead objects of sentiment.8 The psychic
and political space occupied by the sacral child, several centuries later, is
enormous. When children appeared on the international political stage in
the early twentieth century, the discourse of children’s rights moved from
legal reforms (such as education and maintenance) to the broader notion
that all children had a right to a childhood, that is, a period of innocence.9
The sheer ordinariness of these ideas about modern children becomes evident only in times of stress. Thus when anti-Castro forces planted rumors
that the revolutionary government was about to revoke parental custody
rights, nationalizing children along with sugar mills and factories, they
invoked—but did not invent—the vulnerable child. This story of the attack of the communist baby-snatchers joined a long history of unsettled,
postrevolutionary societies, whose national traumas are expressed through
their children.10
Similarly, when rumors began to circulate in 1980s Guatemala that
children leaving the country for adoption were actually being sold into
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prostitution or sex slavery, or killed and their organs harvested, it is certainly
likely that these rumors were fuelled by very real issues such as lax legal and
child welfare systems, and the perception that a handful of professionals
are profiting enormously from the process. As Anne Collinson elaborates
in this roundtable, in the past decade in Guatemala these anxieties have
led to lynchings of foreign tourists suspected of baby theft, as well as two
United Nations inquiries into adoption scandals.
But I think such dramatic actions express much more than concern
about internal adoption regulations. In Guatemala, suspicion about foreign
adoptions has arisen in the aftermath of an intense period of civil war, repression, and terror, alongside extraordinary levels of poverty. The public
presence of thousands of street children in Guatemala, as in other Latin
American nations, heightens the perception that children’s lives are precarious. Guatemalans have actually experienced enormous loss, including
countless children. When one lives in what anthropologist Nancy ScheperHughes calls a “chronic state of panic,” perhaps it becomes reasonable to
assume the worst.11
In times of conflict, war, and social upheaval, children can become bearers of huge social anxieties; this has been true at many historical moments.
Obviously, sometimes this is because it is true; awful things do happen to
children. But there are dimensions of this anxiety that operate beyond strict
questions of truth or falsehood. Veracity is not always the most revealing
or even possible question. The Missing Baby is real and can be explained
by the past decades of Guatemala’s violent history. As anthropologist Mary
Weismantel says of organ-stealing rumors, “while the specific bodily violations described by poor Latin Americans are mostly imaginary, the economic
stratification of medical care makes their fears eminently reasonable.” What
is it about foreign adoptions that create Missing Babies, understood at different moments as a primary threat to Guatemalan children? In this sense,
the Missing Baby joins the vampire, the sacaojos, the gringo chicken, and
the chupacabra: symbols which reveal the “slippery relationship between
myth and reality,” expressing conditions of life under colonial or military
rule.12
Children as Markers of National and Racial Identity
There is a rich and suggestive literature on the synthesis of childhood and national identities. In the 1950s, for example, Americans were
encouraged to rescue, through donations and adoption, Korean and Chinese children, personalizing U.S.–Asian relations in terms of familial love
and elevating adoption as an effective means to fight the cold war.13 The
campaign to find foster care for the stranded Cuban “Peter Pan” children
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a few years later drew on the same themes, and many of them spent their
childhood in the United States as miniature icons of anticommunism, appearing at American Legions and Catholic church functions, for example,
to narrate their story as an anti-Castro parable. Forty years later, Florida
elected a former Peter Pan child, Republican Mel Martinez, to the U.S.
Senate, who repeatedly used his childhood tale of “escape from communism” to bridge the cold war and the contemporary U.S. war in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Of course the symbolic child takes its power not only when
custody is disputed. The U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s was just
one of many social movements which attempted to melt stony hearts with
the iconography of sentimentalized children.14
Barbara Yngvensson has argued that the modern history of international adoption extends the sentimentalized child around the globe.15 To
receiving countries, the adopted child is reconstituted with Western interpretations of the culture from which they come and inscribed with specific
forms of Western child-life. To sending countries, the departing orphan can
become a cultural resource, a child with rights. Since the 1940s, the offspring
of thousands of unmarried Irish women had quietly and illegally found
adoptive homes in the United States, until a high-profile adoption by U.S.
film star Jane Russell in 1951 reinscribed the story in starkly nationalist and
populist terms: Ireland had become a “hunting ground for foreign millionaires who believe they can acquire children to suit their whims.”16 Karen
Balcom recounts a similar story, showing how Canadian children were embraced by a social welfare system to which the ubiquitous “rich American”
often stood as a menacing presence.17 Also as we see in this roundtable, some
of the most developed research on transnational adoption comes from the
experience of Korean adoptees. In the 1980s, imagining adoption through
nationalist tropes of family, South Korea found in its own adoption history
a painful reminder of its inability to care for all of its citizens. More recently,
however, through sponsoring so-called roots visits of returning adoptees,
who are invited to participate in an essentialized Koreanness, South Korea
has created a new discourse of adoption, embedded in what Eleana Kim
sees as “an economic discourse in which the South Korean nation . . . aspires
to First World status.” In this narrative, the economic success of overseas
Korean adoptees parallels the newfound economic strength of the Korean
nation, now able to incorporate—even celebrate—its abandoned children.18
Yet when the nation becomes the parent, birth parents disappear. The roots
trips favored by the Korean government, for example, discourage adoptee
searches for their birth families. When adoptive parents and/or their children recreate the child’s culture of origin in new circumstances, they are
implicitly substituting the national body for the missing familial body.19
Yet the national culture created at home is not only hybridized—as are all
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immigrant cultures—it is also sanitized. First World adoption culture has
little room for celebrating the political and economic forces which have
shaped contemporary integrated families.
Kidnap and Rescue as Dominant Tropes in Adoption History
Tropes of kidnap and rescue dominate our thinking about adoption.
The rescue narrative barely needs explanation here—for my citation I could
footnote any First World newspaper, almost any day of the week. A few
scholars have begun to write about what Laura Briggs calls the “visual iconography of rescue”; how a particular visual culture of adoptable children
has provided a portal for middle-class whites in the West to imagine the
needs of the poor—domestic and international—and to position themselves
as their champions.20 While there has been far too much assertion and insufficient research on the motives and experiences of adoptive parents, the
history of child welfare in the West suggests that child-saving has always
conferred a kind of nobility; there are vast and blinding pleasures attached
to rescue.21 The kidnap narrative has its own complicated history. Linda
Gordon’s story of the Great Arizona Orphan Abduction of 1911 notwithstanding, the kidnap narrative emerged most famously during the era of
integrationist fervor for interracial adoption, when black social workers in
the United States used the powerful language of pro-natalist nationalism
to oppose the adoption of black children by whites.22 Nationalist politics
of adoption appear less profound among blacks in Canada, however the
kidnap narrative finds strong expression among aboriginal groups in both
countries.23 It’s been revived in the testimonies and political activism of
domestic birth mothers, survivors of the era of redemption through adoption of whom Rickie Solinger has written.24 At this point we know little
about the social history of birth parents across national borders. In the West,
mainstream transnational adoption discourses—the commonplace assertion
that the adopted child is coming home, for example—tend to transform
birthparents into “temporary caretakers.”25 Thus transnational adoption
produces its own kind of commonsense kidnap narrative. Children move
from south to north, east to west, poor to rich, brown to white; 50 percent
of them end up in one country alone, the United States. International
adoption has been called the most privileged form of immigration in the
world today; with the stroke of a pen a “needy object” is transformed into
a “treasured subject,” worthy of economic protection, political rights, and
social recognition.26 How could sending nations not begin to imagine their
babies as bananas: first you destroy our country, and then you rescue our
children.
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My point is not to join the tug-of-war between kidnap and rescue.
Rather, I believe that the truths held in these narratives are partial and
obscure other, more important stories. Both ways of thinking about adoption rely on unreflective thinking about essentialized, sacral children who
remain mute through these accounts—until, of course, they grow up. Babies are not just so many bananas and the intense emotional attachments
between adults and children in our world are too complicated to fit into
simple binaries; certainly almost none of the hundreds of adoption case
files I have examined could be described in these stark terms alone. But
ultimately the real problem with the Hybrid Baby, the National Baby, and
the Missing Baby is that, like all symbolic children, they simply bear too
heavy a cultural burden. Real people, particularly birth parents, disappear
when the story is told too abstractly, and these symbolic children come to
represent an unequal world, with little consideration of the circumstances
which produced them.
Notes
Jane Mayer, “The Experiment,” The New Yorker, 11 and 18 July 2005, 65.
1
2
The best U.S. sources on Operation Peter Pan are Roman de la Campa’s
autobiographical account, Cuba on My Mind: Journeys To a Severed Nation (London:
Verso, 2000), and Maria de los Angeles Torres’s scholarly study, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the U.S., and the Promise of a Better Future (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2003). The Cuban version of the story is told in Ramon Torriera Crespo
and Jose Buajasan Marrawi, Operacion Peter Pan: Un caso de guerra psicologica contra
Cuba (Havana: Editora Politica, 2000).
3
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 21. On the symbolic links between women, gender, and nation, see also
Anne McLintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context
(New York: Routledge, 1995). On the symbolic politics of childhood, see Daniel
Cook, ed., Symbolic Children (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).
4
Barbara Yngvesson, “‘Un Nino de Cualquier Color’: Race and Nation in
Intercountry Adoption,” in Globalizing Institutions: Case Studies in Regulation and Innovation, ed. Jane Jenson and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Aldershot U.K.: Ashgate,
2000), 169–204, quotation on 182.
5
For elaboration on this, see Karen Dubinsky, “We Adopted a Negro: Interracial Adoption and the Hybrid Baby in 1960s Canada,” in Creating Postwar Canada:
Community, Diversity, Dissent, 1945–75, ed. Magda Fahrni and Robert Rutherdale
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, forthcoming 2007).
6
Pia Haudrup Christiansen, “Childhood and the Culture Constitution of
Vulnerable Bodies,” in The Body, Childhood, and Society, ed. Alan Prout (London:
MacMillan, 2000), 41.
Karen Dubinsky
2007
149
Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood Since
the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 3. See also Xiaobei Chen, Tending
the Gardens of Citizenship: Child Saving in Toronto, 1880s–1920s (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2005).
7
Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children
(New York: Basic Books, 1985), 11.
8
Dominique Marshall, “The Construction of Children as an Object of International Relations: The Declaration of Children’s Rights and the Child Welfare
Committee of the League of Nations, 1900–1924,” International Journal of Children’s
Rights 7, no. 2 (1999): 103–47, quotation on 137.
9
See, for example, Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children
of Paris—Rumor and Politics Before the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991).
10
11
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday
Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). A fine recent study of
these issues in Guatemala is Beatriz Manz, Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey
of Courage, Terror, and Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
12
Mary Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 210, xxvi. See also Luise White, Speaking
With Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000); Lauren Derby, “Gringo Chicken with Worms: Food and Nationalism in
the Dominican Republic,” in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History
of US–Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo
D. Salvatore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 451–93; and Lauren Derby,
“Imperial Secrets: Vampires and Nationhood in Puerto Rico” (paper presented at
the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Claremont, CA, June 2005).
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination,
1945–61 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
13
Rebecca de Schweinitz, “The ‘Shame of America’: African-American Civil
Rights and the Politics of Childhood,” in The Politics of Childhood: International Perspectives, Contemporary Developments, ed. Jim Goddard et al. (Hampshire: MacMillan,
2005), 50–65.
14
Yngvesson, “‘Un Nino de Cualquier Color,’” 170.
15
16
Moira Maguire, “Foreign Adoptions and the Evolution of Irish Adoption
Policy, 1945–1952,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 2 (2002): 2–32, quotation on 5.
17
Karen Balcom, “The Traffic in Babies: Cross Border Adoption, Baby-Selling
and the Development of Child Welfare Systems in the United States and Canada,
1930–1960” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2002).
Eleana Kim, “Wedding Citizenship and Culture: Korean Adoptees and the
Global Family,” Social Text 21, no. 1 (2003): 57–81.
18
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Toby Alice Volkman, “Embodying Chinese Culture,” in Cultures of Transnational Adoption, ed. Toby Alice Volkman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2005), 81–116, quotation on 96.
19
20
Veronica Strong-Boag, “Today’s Child: Preparing for the ‘Just Society’
One Family at a Time in 1960s Canada,” Canadian Historical Review (forthcoming);
Laura Briggs, “Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue
and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption,” Gender and History 15,
no. 2 (2003): 179–200; Lisa Cartwright, “Photographs of ‘Waiting Children’ on the
Transnational Adoption Market,” Social Text 21, no. 1 (2003): 83–109.
21
Pioneering studies of contemporary adoptive parents are, Sara K. Dorow,
“Narratives of Race and Culture in Transnational Adoption,” in Multiculturalism in
the United States, ed. P. Kivisto and G. Rundblad (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press,
2000), 135–48; and Ann Anagnost, “Maternal Labor in a Transnational Circuit,” in
Consuming Motherhood, ed. Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, and Danielle F. Wozniak
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). The best adoptive parent
memoir is Barbara Katz Rothman, Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption
(New York: Beacon, 2005). The history of adoption has been told primarily, at this
point, from the U.S. perspective. See, for example, Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1988); Julia Beribitsky, Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture
of Motherhood, 1851–1950 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000); and Barbara
Melosh, Strangers and Kin: The American Way of Adoption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003).
22
Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
23
See, for example, Suzanne Fournier, and Ernie Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace:
The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities
(Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1997).
Rickie Solinger, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion and Welfare in the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
24
Signe Howell, “Self Conscious Kinship: Some Contested Values in Norwegian Transnational Adoption,” in Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies,
ed. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2001), 213.
25
David Eng, “Transracial Adoption and Queer Diaspora,” Social Text 21, no.
1 (2003): 1–37.
26
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Contributors
249
Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada. Her articles on
Canadian consumer history have appeared in Labour/Le Travail and The
Canadian Historical Review. She can be contacted at [email protected].
KATRINA SRIGLEY is assistant professor of history at Nipissing University
in Ontario, Canada. She recently completed her PhD at the University of
Toronto; her dissertation is titled “Working Lives and Simple Pleasures:
Single, Employed Women in a Depression-Era City, 1929–1939.” She can
be contacted at [email protected].
KAREN BALCOM is assistant professor of history at McMaster University.
She is at work on a book manuscript entitled “The Traffic in Babies: CrossBorder Adoption, Baby-Selling and the Development of Child Welfare
Systems in the United States and Canada, 1930–1970.” She can be contacted
at [email protected].
TOBIAS HÜBINETTE (Korean name Lee Sam-dol) earned a PhD in Korean
studies in the Department of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University,
Sweden in 2005. His PhD thesis, “Comforting an Orphaned Nation,” examines images of international adoption and representations of adopted
Koreans in Korean media and popular culture. He is currently working on
a project dealing with Korean adoptees and the issue of transraciality. He
can be contacted at [email protected].
ANITA M. ANDREW is a specialist in Chinese history at Northern Illinois
University. Her essay is part of a book manuscript, “From China’s Daughters
to All-American Girls: Essays on American Adoptions of Chinese Children.”
She is also completing a study of American humanitarian campaigns to
provide for Chinese children in times of natural disaster, war, and neglect
entitled “Saving China’s Children: Business and Politics in the 20th Century
American Humanitarian Campaigns to Aid China’s Children.” She can be
contacted at [email protected].
ANNE COLLINSON completed a master’s degree in women's history at
The Ohio State University in 2003. She recently returned to Toronto where
she works for the Government of Ontario.
KAREN DUBINSKY teaches in the history department at Queen’s University. The author of Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Crime in Ontario
(University of Chicago Press, 1993) and The Second Greatest Disappointment:
Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls (Between the Lines Press and Rutgers University Press, 1999), she is currently writing a book entitled “Babies
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Without Borders: Adoption and the Symbolic Child in Canada, Cuba, and
Guatemala.” She can be contacted at [email protected].
Karen Hagemann is James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History in the history department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. She has published widely on the history of welfare states, labor culture,
and women’s movements, as well as the history of the nation, the military,
and war. Her most recent books include Gendered Nations: Nationalisms
and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (edited with Ida Blom and
Catherine Hall, 2000); Home/Front: Military and Gender in Twentieth Century
Germany (edited with Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, 2002); “Mannlicher
Mut und Teutsche Ehre”: Nation, Militär und Geschlecht zur Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preussens (2002); Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering
of Modern History (edited with Stefan Dudink and John Tosh, 2004).
María Teresa Fernández-Aceves is professor of history at the
Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología SocialOccidente in Guadalajara, Jalisco, México. Her main fields of research and
publication are cultural and social history and gender studies. Her most
recent publications include “Engendering Caciquismo. Guadalupe Martínez and Heliodoro Hernández Loza and the Politics of Organized Labor in
Jalisco” in Caciquismo in Twentieth-Century Mexico, ed. Alan Knight and Wil
Pansters (London: ILAS, 2005); and Orden social e identidad de género. México,
siglos XIX–XX (edited with Carmen Ramos-Escandón and Susie Porter).
She is currently working on a manuscript about the political mobilization
of Guadalajaran women, 1910–1950.
ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS is R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University where she teaches in the Institute for Research
on Women and Gender. In 2006–2007, she is the William C. and Ida Friday
Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Kessler-Harris
is the author of books and articles about women, work, gender, and social
policy. Her most recent book is Gendering Labor History.
Andrea Pető is associate professor in the Department of Gender Studies
at the Central European University, Budapest and associate professor at the
University of Miskolc, where she directs the Equal Opportunity and Gender
Studies Center, Hungary. Her numerous publications include Nőhistóriák
(1945–1951) [Women in Hungarian Politics 1945–1951] (1998, translated to
English by Columbia University Press, 2003); Rajk Júlia (a biography published 2001) in the series “Feminism and History”; and the edited volume
Napasszonyok és Holdkisasszonyok: A mai magyar konzervativ női politizálás
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