Babies Without Borders: Rescue, Kidnap, and the Symbolic Child

142 Babies Without Borders: Rescue, Kidnap, and the Symbolic Child

Karen Dubinsky

orture bequeaths extraordinary knowledge, though rarely that de- manded by its perpetrators. Thanks to the U.S. military, we know now thatT 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. 2007 Karen Dubinsky 143 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 Mi- ami. 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 weak- ness of the black community. Almost everyone believed these children to be 144 Journal of Women’s History Spring 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 oc- casionally 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 con- stituted 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 evi- dent 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 at- tack 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 2007 Karen Dubinsky 145 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, re- pression, 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 pre- carious. Guatemalans have actually experienced enormous loss, including countless children. When one lives in what anthropologist Nancy Scheper- Hughes 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 viola- tions 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 Chi- nese 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 146 Journal of Women’s History Spring 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, ap- pearing 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 commu- nism” 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 inter- pretations 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 million- aires who believe they can acquire children to suit their whims.”16 Karen Balcom recounts a similar story, showing how Canadian children were em- braced 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 2007 Karen Dubinsky 147 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 in- sufficient 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 notwith- standing, 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. 148 Journal of Women’s History Spring

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. Ba- bies 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

1Jane Mayer, “The Experiment,” The New Yorker, 11 and 18 July 2005, 65. 2The 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: Opera- tion 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). 3Judith 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). 4Barbara Yngvesson, “‘Un Nino de Cualquier Color’: Race and Nation in Intercountry Adoption,” in Globalizing Institutions: Case Studies in Regulation and In- novation, ed. Jane Jenson and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Aldershot U.K.: Ashgate, 2000), 169–204, quotation on 182. 5For elaboration on this, see Karen Dubinsky, “We Adopted a Negro: Inter- racial 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). 6Pia Haudrup Christiansen, “Childhood and the Culture Constitution of Vulnerable Bodies,” in The Body, Childhood, and Society, ed. Alan Prout (London: MacMillan, 2000), 41. 2007 Karen Dubinsky 149

7Hugh 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). 8Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 11. 9Dominique Marshall, “The Construction of Children as an Object of In- ternational 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. 10See, 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). 11Nancy 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). 12Mary 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). 13Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–61 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 14Rebecca de Schweinitz, “The ‘Shame of America’: African-American Civil Rights and the Politics of Childhood,” in The Politics of Childhood: International Per- spectives, Contemporary Developments, ed. Jim Goddard et al. (Hampshire: MacMillan, 2005), 50–65. 15Yngvesson, “‘Un Nino de Cualquier Color,’” 170. 16Moira 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. 17Karen 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). 18Eleana Kim, “Wedding Citizenship and Culture: Korean Adoptees and the Global Family,” Social Text 21, no. 1 (2003): 57–81. 150 Journal of Women’s History Spring

19Toby Alice Volkman, “Embodying Chinese Culture,” in Cultures of Trans- national Adoption, ed. Toby Alice Volkman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 81–116, quotation on 96. 20Veronica 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. 21Pioneering 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: Se- crecy 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). 22Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Har- vard University Press, 1999). 23See, 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). 24Rickie Solinger, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adop- tion, Abortion and Welfare in the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).

25Signe Howell, “Self Conscious Kinship: Some Contested Values in Nor- wegian Transnational Adoption,” in Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 213. 26David Eng, “Transracial Adoption and Queer Diaspora,” Social Text 21, no. 1 (2003): 1–37. 2007 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: Cross- Border 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,” ex- amines 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 Univer- sity. 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 Rut- gers University Press, 1999), she is currently writing a book entitled “Babies 250 Journal of Women’s History Spring

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 His- tory 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 Antinapo- leonischen 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 Social- Occidente 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 Martí- nez 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 His- tory 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 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.