The Thetean 2020

The Thetean The Thetean A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing Volume 49 (2020) Editor-in-Chief Jake Andersen Editorial Staff Ashley Richards Haskell Ryan Hollister Travis Meyer Bethany Morey Karen MacKay Moss Sarah Rounsville Morgan Selander Elyse Slabaugh Emmy Webster Alison Wood Design/Layout Marny K. Parkin Faculty Advisors: Aaron Skabelund and Sarah Loose The Thetean is an annual student journal representing the best of historical writing by current and recent students at Brigham Young University. All papers are written, selected, and edited entirely by students. Articles are welcome from students of all majors, provided they are sufficiently historical in focus. Please email submissions as an attached Microsoft Word document to [email protected]. Manu- scripts must be received by mid-January to be included in that year’s issue. Further details about each year’s submission requirements, desired genres, and deadlines should be clarifed by inquiring of the editors at the same address. Publication of the Thetean is generously sponsored by the Department of History, in association with the Beta Iota Chapter of the Phi Alpha Theta National Honor Society. Material in this issue is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the editors, Phi Alpha Teta, the Department of History, Brigham Young University, or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All copyrights are retained by the individual authors. Phi Alpha Theta, Beta Iota Chapter Brigham Young University Provo, Utah Contents From the Editor Editor’s Preface 1 Papers Natalie Merten 3 “This Dangerous Ascendancy”: Women’s Political Participation in the French Revolution Brandon Smith 17 God Is King, but so Is Louis XVI: Royalist Tendencies among Protestants during the Early Stages of the French Revolution Elyse Slabaugh 29 Immigrant Hospitals: Centers of Charity and Agents of Social Change Bethany Morey 43 The “Science of Motherhood” Jake Andersen 55 “Rebel Girls” Reevaluated: Gender in the Lives of Three Wobbly Women Taylor Tree 75 Isolation, Inferiority, and Illness: The Widespread Effects of the Nineteenth-Century Mormon “Adoption” Program on Native American Children v vi The Thetean Travis Meyer 87 Eternal Victims: The Sufferings of the Twa People from Their First Contact with Other Peoples until the Present Day Rachel Felt 97 Winning Souls unto Christ: The Meanings of Missionary Board Games, 1980–2008 Brooke Sutton 119 Double Mint and Double Standard: American Attitudes toward Women Chewing Gum, 1880–1930 Student Awards Awards for Outstanding Papers Written in 2019 131 From the Editor Editor’s Preface n Albert Camus’ 1947 novel THE PLAGUE, the titular disease sends the French Algerian town of Oran into total quarantine, with no I movement and little communication between Oran and the outside world. In Oran, “a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike,” to use Camus’ words. While the present global health crisis fortunately has not taken as deadly a toll as many plagues historically have, the global “ache of separation” remains acute and profound. In the novel, former activist and freedom fighter Jean Tarrou, an idealistic foil to the absurdist hero Dr. Bernard Rieux, keeps a care- ful journal in which “he set himself to recording the history of what the normal historian passes over.”1 Tarrou’s journal serves as a reminder that history is not only about recording great deeds and heroes, but about seeking, understanding, and documenting the experiences and perspectives of all, from the extraordi- nary, to the ordinary, to the other. As Tarrou recognized the importance of documenting the experiences of ordinary people during the plague, The Thetean recognizes the importance of telling human stories during this pandemic. And human stories these are, indeed. Brandon Smith and Natalie Merten document the reactions and involvement of Protestants and women, respec- tively, in the French Revolution. Three papers explore marginalized groups in early-twentieth-century America. Elyse Slabaugh and Bethany Morey both look at the immigrant experience; Elyse focuses on immigrant healthcare while Bethany explores how immigrants experienced motherhood. A third paper looks at working women’s roles in the world of labor unions. Taylor Tree uncov- ers the difficult reality that many indigenous children faced being “adopted” 1. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 24, 67. 1 2 The Thetean by Mormon settlers in nineteenth-century Utah, while Travis Meyer show us another dimension of suffering related to the Rwandan Genocide. Finally, we see the significance of the ordinary in Rachel Felt’s work on missionary board games and Brooke Sutton’s on chewing gum. Of course, all of this remarkable work would not be possible without the wisdom, guidance, and patience of the history faculty. They provide the experience and perspective that allows eager students to turn their interests and ideas into fully realized projects worthy of publication. They deserve our every thanks. I would also like to personally thank this year’s editing staff, a collection of excellent students whose insight and hard work ensured that we could pub- lish the best possible edition of The Thetean, particularly under such difficult circumstances. I distinctly remember sitting in Dr. Karen Carter’s World Civilization as a sophomore, still operating under the misguided assumption that medical school was the right path for me. The first day of class she told us that the true purpose of history is to learn how to have compassion through understanding people of the past, an idea which affected me enough that I changed my major to history soon thereafter. Indeed, the value of history to me has always been the ability to see people of the past not as abstractions, but as individual human beings whose emotions and experiences were as real as mine. I hope this year’s Thetean might help us find and cultivate such a perspective. —Jake Andersen Editor-in-Chief Article “This Dangerous Ascendancy” Women’s Political Participation in the French Revolution Natalie Merten he French Revolution endures in historical memory as one of the “great turning-points in history,” a complete upheaval of society T ending the tyranny and inefficiencies of one of the world’s oldest and most powerful monarchies and championing those oft-mentioned values of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.1 The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, one of the fundamental documents of the Revolution, declared that “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” that “the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits other than those which assure to other members the enjoyment of the same rights,” and that the law “only has the right to prohibit those actions which are injurious to society.”2 The charge that men were equal in rights was, for its day, incredibly radical. However, despite the Revolution’s declaration of such ideals and abolition of old-regime privilege (an astonishing accomplishment), revolutionary leaders fell short of creating a com- pletely egalitarian society even during the most radical points of the Revolution, in part because they applied the rights of man to man, and not to mankind. Despite the efforts of various advocates for women’s rights, and despite the significant role of women in the Revolution (as seen during critical events such as 1. Peter McPhee, The French Revolution, 1789–1799(NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1. 2. “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution. 3 4 The Thetean the October Days or the assault on the Tuileries Palace), women continued to be denied the rights of citizenship. Eventually, even their participation in political societies and clubs was prohibited—under the law, it would seem, women’s involvement in the political public sphere was somehow “injurious to society.” The purpose of this research is to examine different responses of male revo- lutionaries to female participation in the French Revolution from 1789–1793, focusing primarily on views of women’s activism in political societies. During the earlier stages of the Revolution, when the debate on women’s rights focused on the question of citizenship, we find that female participation was typically disallowed on the basis of appeals to nature (arguing in favor of women’s natural place in the domestic sphere) or claims of their inferiority to men. In the later stages of the Revolution, one further element of opposition to women’s rights emerged: fear of politically active women as a threat to public order (therefore, injurious to society). While arguments based on gender roles and supposed female inferiority persisted, the responses analyzed here suggest that this fear ultimately proved to be a more significant factor in the suppression of women’s involvement in revolutionary politics. The Debate Over Women’s Citizenship The debate over women’s rights to democratic citizenship in revolutionary France arose with the National Assembly’s “unshakeable resolution” to create a new national constitution. Women’s right to political participation through citizenship was a novel concept, even for Enlightened thinkers such as the Abbé Sieyès. Sieyès proposed in “Preliminary to the French Constitution” (in 1789, the same year in which he published What Is the Third Estate?) that the National Assembly’s deputies must distinguish between active and passive citizens. Pas- sive citizens, according to Sieyés, included women, children and foreign nation- als: “those who contribute nothing to maintaining the public establishment.” They should be barred the right to exert “active influence on public affairs” by voting, for they were not “true shareholders in the great social enterprise” of the nation.3 The Assembly agreed with Sieyès, for at this point in time the concept 3.

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